Recently I was listening to the Write Minded podcast, which is a podcast by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of NaNoWriMo. There was an offhand comment during this episode about how ‘NaNoWriMo is on the horizon’ which put the fear of god in me.
For anyone who’s new to the term NaNoWriMo it stands for National Novel Writing Month which takes part every November and the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in a single month. It’s 30 days of chaos and I’ve taken part nearly every year since I first discovered that it was a thing (circa 2007 yes I’m old) and I love it.
I don’t always win, but that’s okay. As long as you come out of the month with more words than you started with.
Right now it’s Camp NaNoWriMo, which runs twice a year in April and July, and I can’t do it. (Or it was Camp NaNo when I started this post)
I have never won camp. Ever.
Which is weird considering that you can set your own goals…
But I think this is the problem. Because you can set your own goals; for anything from writing to drafting to editing, and you can set a word count or you can set an amount of time you want to spend doing said goal across the month. If anything it should be slightly easier, right?
Wrong. For me at least.
Maybe it’s because I discovered NaNo through the November sessions and got hooked that way? It just feels different to me, mentally. I get more hyped up for it, planning reward systems and survival kits and preparing to wake up earlier to write before work.
So what about you? Are you a November only NaNoer, A happy camper or some hybrid of both?
Lisa Stapleton 