Word count: 17,000
I recently watched YouTuber Nick Sturgeon’s video Camp NaNoWriMo: Have Fun with Your Writing. One thing he said stuck out to me:
“It’s okay. You had a bad day. Today things didn’t go according to plan. But that’s okay. This is just Camp Nanowrimo. It’s a practice. It’s a first attempt at a project that you think is important and that you would like to make some forward steps with.”
Nick Sturgeon
I’d like to add on to what Nick said. Camp Nanowrimo is not only practice for the main NaNoWriMo event in November, it’s good practice for continual writing practice all year long.
I’m perfecting my scratchpad for July. I’m writing scenes for three different projects on it. I’m also writing my blog entries on it, too, including this one. I’m fleshing out scenes for these three projects that are only in the outline or summary stage. The goal is to write full narratives for as many of these scenes that need it as possible.
And then continue this process until all three of these WIPs have full-fledged drafts that I can start revising.
What are these projects? My novella called Normous. It’s the fifth episode in my Consortium series and it’s all rough draft scenes, outline scenes and summary scenes. It’s the most underdeveloped of the three projects.
Another project I’m working on my novel Oblivion’s Hope. I wrote the rough draft for this about three NaNoWriMos ago. I’m fleshing out the scenes that I didn’t get to complete or that were only summaries or outlines.
And the final project is my novel Legendaries. I wrote a rough draft for the last NaNoWriMo back in November. I’m doing to it what I’m doing for the other two.
Here’s my routine: I go to the coffee shop after work and write a little over 333 words for each one each day. That’s a little over 1000 words a day. My goal is to write 25,000 in July. So that gives me five or six days of cushion.
Even though I’m only writing only 333 words a day for each, I’m making progress. I’m becoming reacquainted with the projects because I’ve been working on them for a while. Then I got busy finishing up my novel Traption.
I’m so excited that I’m making progress on them simultaneously. I didn’t think I could do it, but it’s working. Making progress. And on three at once.
My hope is that this will continue after July. We’ll see.
Andrew M. Friday 