I won Camp Nanowrimo July! But at what cost? For those who don't know, Nanowrimo is a month where you write a 50,000 word novel. In other words, normally you'd be writing an average of about 1,600 words every day. It's a great way to build resilience and gain a writing habit. I've participated many times and this time I won after 2 weeks. Or did I? It's kind of complicated. This month, I was going to write a whole new project, but truth be told, the subject matter of said novel was a bit dark and really didn't agree with my mental health this month. So, I decided to ease up the workload and to edit an existing project rather than write a whole new one. And while editing is also work, it's easier and faster to edit through a thousand words than to write those, at least in my case. On the NaNoWriMo website, you can put in whether you're writing or editing 50,000 words in the month. However, at the end of the day, it still counts 'edited' words as 'written' words. For example, I ended up having 'written' 10,000 words in one day, according to the website, with writing speeds of up to 75 words per minute, ha. The novel I've been editing was my actual NaNoWriMo project from last year, where I really did write 50,000 words in a month. I really was on a row back in the day! Since then, the novel has grown considerably, and completely changed in some aspects. See, that year I had the brilliant idea of writing in a non-chronological style. Which made the novel impossible to follow or organize. So this year, I've been editing it to make it chronological. This will make it easier to check for consistencies. But this also means that the beginning of the initial novel ends up being towards the middle of the new version. A total mess! Even though I officially won, as I've gone through 50,000 words, that doesn't mean I'm done with editing. Far from it, since the novel is a quite longer than that. As such I'll be working on it well after this month is done! For the time being, however, I am more focused on my main WIP which I'm going to query this August! Very exciting times! Below are my stats for the project. Be sure to add me on nanowrimo! My profile name is J. Dietz! Let me know below what you did for nanowrimo!
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Hey all! So I'm back to talk about NaNoWriMo, an organization very dear to my heart because it's all about writing! The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 'a novel' in the span of one month (officially November, so we're in it right now!). That's probably why it's call National Novel Writing Month. Not sure about the 'national' part though, since people from all over the world participate. I started participating in 2016 with a goal to finish my now main WIP, DREAMING. Lol. And this is about how it went: Clearly, I wasn't able to maintain the about 1,600 words you need per day to arrive at a 'novel' length script at the end (50,000 words). Back then I was in my first year of Uni, and I didn't write as quickly as I do now (as I like to think). Funnily enough, during NaNoWriMo 2017, it went about exactly the same. I only made it half way. Finally, 2018 comes around. A weird year, to be sure. But yeah! I made it! For the first time, I started with a completely new project, having no idea where it would go. It was an experiment. And it worked! I think the thing to have in mind is that NaNo is there to write what you want to write about. Don't get stuck up on novel formalities - those can come later. Right now it's about enjoying the worlds you create. Easier said than done. Fast forward to 2019, and my abysmal 10,000 words total and half a month spent not writing. Then came Corona. Stuck inside all day. Hating my master's degree. Spewing out a will to escape on the page, unconsciously dreaming about returning to Scotland... and voilà. An alternate-history-victorian-revolution novel is born. And here we are, in 2021. The first year I really started exchanging with other writers online during the event. Unfortunately, my job at the moment is extremely demanding (no thanks to me needing to be a perfectionist), so I find little to no time to write during the week, and, as such, have to dump out all my words on the page during the weekend: And even though I hope to win Nano 2021, I've found that even without winning, it's always a win if you write any amount at all. One word added to the doc is more than none. Well, I guess I should probably get back to writing, seeing as I'd be below the goal line by tomorrow... My username on Nanowrimo.org is J.K.Dietz if you'd like to know more about what I write or if you'd like to buddy up! Stay tuned for the next post! |