Campfire Songs

So I’m doing Camp Nanowrimo this month. You can find me under the name “dianablue” (oh, and if you do, please invite me into your cabin! I keep getting stuck with strangers).

I’ve never been particularly good at NaNoWriMo, though I love the camaraderie of it all. I start off well enough, but I’m not usually that fast of a writer that I can do 50k in a month.  What I like about the format they are using for camp this year is that you don’t have to start your novel on July 1 (I was already halfway through mine) and you can set whatever goal you want. I still have a pretty lofty goal (to get to 95k by the end of the month), and it does, as a matter of fact, add up to 49k written, but I’m hoping I’ll be okay, anyway. You can see how I’m doing here:

Right now, I’ve got 55800, which is par for “day 18” according to their handy dandy par chart. (I LOVE the par chart. I wish I could make it work on my own tracking software.)

Why, you may ask, if I wanted to write 49k this month, didn’t I just start the clock at zero? And to that I say: laziness. I have word count tracking going already and I didn’t want to do the subtraction every time I entered it into my NaNo count.

As you can see by the neat little stair-stepping, I was doing very well for the first five days. Day 6 was a total bust, due to the whatever stomach-flu/food poisoning/thingy my house came down with over the Fourth of July weekend, but I rallied on the seventh and here I am, on the eighth, with a few hundred words to my credit already this morning. So even though I’m not stair-stepping QUITE as steeply as their par bar, I’m hoping the two of them collide somewhere on Day 31.

(FWIW, their stats say I only have to do 1600 words a day to hit my goal by the end of the month, and that sounds pretty doable.)

I do love playing with stats. I think there’s a lot to be gained from actually holding myself accountable for productivity. I’ve been keeping a steady stream of records about my writing days and non-writing days this year (for instance, if it was a sick day, like Friday, or a day where I was a busy with travel or publicity). Until this summer, I was doing really well this year at trying to keep the weekends non-work days, reserving them for family time. But this summer is a big one, and I know I’m going to be sacrificing fun time for work.

And though 50k (or 49k, as the case may be) in one month is a HUGE amount for me, I’m thinking I might be able to do it, because for once I don’t have any other projects on my plate but writing — I have no edits or copyedits or big publicity events due (I do have a signing on the 13th, and you should all come!), and even my editor and agent are out of town this week. So let’s all hope that Queenie doesn’t come down with the stomach thing and that I manage 8-10 thousand words this week.

Okay, back to writing. Sadly, the 500-odd words in this post totally do not count. 🙁