Are you an old hand at NaNoWriMo? Or someone who always means to join in the festivities during November, only to realize part way through the month that you totally forgot about it (and then exasperatedly tell yourself you’ll just try next year)?
Or perhaps you’re someone who’s never really given it much thought, but you need a fun activity to take your mind off the quarantine blues?
If any of the above apply to you, it’s time to fire up the old word processor and get to work for the month of July; Camp NaNoWriMo is officially here.
For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a challenge held in November to write 50k words of prose in a month. It’s sister event(s), Camp NaNoWriMo, are held in April and July. They encourage you to pick any writing goal you wish. I like sticking to the good old fashioned 50K (it’s a big enough number for me to feel like a challenge, but not so big as to feel insurmountable). More seasoned writers may wish to aim higher, while total newbies might want to start off with something a bit smaller (Or not! Feel free to take the plunge if it sounds fun).
While the original NaNoWriMo was fairly strict about asking participants to start fresh with an original work of fiction, in recent years they’ve been inclined to encourage writers to work on whatever strikes their fancy, especially for Camp NaNo. Start a new book, work on an existing WIP, do some fan fic; it’s up to you.
This year I’ll be splitting my goal of 50k words between two projects: A romance novella and a web serial.
The novella:
25k is pretty much my total word count goal for this project (Though I’m flexible; it could go as low as 20k or as high as 30k), so I’m hoping to have a complete first draft written by the end of July. In the event that I fall short, I have a few short stories on the back burner to make up the last 5k or so. I find that idea more appealing than trying to force myself to pad a story with extra scenes and/or descriptions it doesn’t need.
The web serial:
While serials are traditionally released as they’re written, my stage fright compels me to have a buffer before I begin uploading chapters for public consumption. I think 25k words (about two and a half months’ worth of updates) is a solid amount to find my voice, get the main cast of characters sorted, and tease out any early plot problems I might run into.
The Graveyard Library 