Hello there, friend! You’ve found your way to my third installment of the writing process journals, welcome! This one will be focused on my experience last July working through Camp NaNoWriMo. Although it seems crazy to have waited this long to write/share it, now it also feels like perfect timing for those of you considering taking on NaNoWriMo next month.
For anyone who’s unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and it’s a time in which many people around the world will challenge themselves to write a novel in just one month’s time. The traditional, default goal is to write 50,000 words of an entirely new story, but NaNoWriMoers can choose to set any other goal they prefer for themselves.
I gave NaNoWriMo a go last year (November 2021) but I ended up abandoning my project before the end of the month. This time, in July 2022’s Camp NaNoWriMo, I succeeded in writing the full 50K of a brand-new novel. What’s more, the momentum I created throughout that month allowed me to finish the first draft of my manuscript less than a month later!
I succeeded in meeting the NaNoWriMo traditional goal, but I did NOT follow the traditional 1,6667 words/day formula. To be clear, I did NOT even write every day! Including Camp NaNoWriMo and the three weeks following it, I only had 25 writing days, but I produced a full-length novel, weighing in at 73,106 words in total.
