April showers bring May flowers. April days also bring NaNo words. (Yeah, I know, that one didn’t rhyme at all.) The first Camp NaNoWriMo session of 2020 is upon us, amidst a truly upended world.
For some that means the focus just isn’t there as the world deals with such a unprecedented stress to be putting words on a page. For others, like myself, that means we suddenly have all the time in the world to write while many of us are furloughed from our evil day jobs.
I’m finding myself pleasantly surprised and overly excited to suddenly have an entire month, plus a little, off work. Especially during a Camp NaNo month! For the first time in my life I get to experience what it’s like to have a full time job as a writer. I can get a taste of my true dream career, and I can make a solid effort to create a writing routine for myself for the first time. No interruptions for work. No being exhausted from crazy hours and draining customers. No outside distractions with the world on hold either now there’s nowhere to go but walking down my street. No trying to juggle work and college in order to still be able to fit in some writing time. (Which, let me just say, was completely failing.)
So what am I working on during the Great Pause?
Well. For what sounds and feels like the thousandth time, I am attempting to finish the rewritten, expanded novel version of Embermyst so that I can finally republish the once short story that was unveiled with Victory Tales Press almost four years ago now. I have made quite the ambitious goal for myself due to the no work situation. The plan is to spend at least two hours a day on weekdays working at the story, and an hour on weekend days. It equals out to a total of fifty-two hours of work for the whole month. (If I’m really honest with myself I would love to wrap up the whole novel through, potentially, first round edits by the end of the month.) I’m attempting, also, to make my work happen at a specific time and place — at least on weekdays — so that I hopefully fall into a standard routine. Part of that plan is just so I don’t fall completely out of whack and screw myself whenever the job situation reopens.
Since I decided I’m working by hours and not exclusively writing either, I’m tracking minutes instead of words this go round, despite the difficulties of the “new and improved” NaNoWriMo site that launched last November.
Yeah…
“New and improved.”
About that… It is definitely new, but I wouldn’t call it improved at all. There’s many features I loved or found motivating now missing or gone or changed in a way I no longer like. The site is not always the easiest to navigate anymore. It also glitches at times. And I am still so pissed half my past Camp NaNo stats in which I tracked pages or minutes are still not correct. Not to mention they don’t even have the normal tracking options for Camp up on the site yet. I have to use some conversion chart they made and count it as “words.”
Seriously, shouldn’t these have been the most important details to address in the last four months since November?? What have they been doing?? I see no other changes or fixes among the site to elicit what I’m deeming as disregard for the NaNo experience. Don’t even get me started on these new “writing groups” either.
No. Just… No. I want my normal cabins back!
Nevertheless, glitches, life, and woes aside, here we are back in the throes of Camp NaNoWriMo. Back down the rabbit hole we writers go where there’s plenty of snacks…and potentially toilet paper. We’ve been self isolating for a living here, people.
To all my fellow authors, are you participating in Camp this April despite the current state of the world? Why or why not? And if you have joined the madness what are you working on this month? Share your Camp adventure! Or misadventure if it so happens to be.
Darkling Dreams 