CampNaNoWriMo April 2020
This past month I participated in CampNaNoWriMo. I spent the whole time neck deep revising and editing my first fairy tale retelling Stalks of Gold. It’s been a major blur! I’ve made so many changes so far. I’ve changed the beginning at least three times, maybe four, but I’ve got one I’m happy with. Now, the next step for me is get some beta readers and hear some feedback so I can start moving in that direction!
In this post, I just wanted to reflect on the CampNaNo experience, especially since it’s been a few years since I’ve participated in a NaNo event. It was a lot of fun, but it’s sort of hard to measure editing like you can measure drafting. I knew my goal was to have a finished 2nd draft at the end of the month, so I figured I would just set it as a word count goal and measure by how many words I got through a day. The other option is to count it by how many hours you spend editing. While I’m sure that’s a great way to measure it for some people, I knew it wasn’t going to be a good fit for me. I’m really bad at logging when I sit down and when I finish, especially because for the month I was a little random in the times I would work. I also knew that if I was just counting hours, it would be really easy for me to spend a lot of time finagling things and not actually making progress.
I really liked the satisfaction of seeing how many words I had gotten through; it felt like tangible progress. Unfortunately, this encouraged me to fly through edits, and I mean fly. The farther I got, the more I wanted to do, so by April 12th I had done my first round of edits. However, at this point I wasn’t completely satisfied with it.
So, I decided to go ahead and do another round, but this time on paper to help me slow down and narrow in my focus. I also find it really satisfying to mark physically with pencil, not sure why. Working with paper let me break up the scenes and figure out where I wanted my chapter breaks to go.
Originally, I was going to do chapter breaks when I alternated POV. But that wasn’t working, cause I was getting one POV that was consistently shorter than the other. I was also having some time issues where events would happen in one chapter, then I’d have to back up in time at the start of the next one, since the events happened at the same time or in between scene breaks. So, I scrapped having each POV be a separate chapter, and I needed to come up with brand new chapter breaks.
At this point, I didn’t bother putting in word counts on the NaNo site since I had already reached my goal. I did keep doing updates in my Twitter thread, mostly for my own sake to keep track of my progress that way. I checked into the NaNo site every so often to see if there was any discussion going on in my groups, but there wasn’t really much, which didn’t surprise me. It’s hard to chat in their new form, especially the further into NaNo, keeping up conversation is a low priority in my experience.
Despite that, I still really enjoyed participating, and I’ll probably do CampNaNoWriMo in July. I’m also planning on doing NaNoWriMo in November, so we’ll see if my experience is any different then!
Have any of you done CampNaNoWriMo? What was your experience like? Let me know! I’ll see you all next time!