Camp NaNoWriMo Sandwich Update

Here's an update from Camp Sandwich!  As you may remember, I'm still working on my novel in between Camp NaNoWriMo sessions.  There are always two sessions of Camp NaNo, one in April and one in July, but I didn't want to stop writing during the two months in between.  So here we are at Camp Sandwich!

I love that NaNoWriMo allows you the ability to track a writing project at any time of the year now.  Even better, you can track multiple goals for the same writing project.  

I wish you could carry over the existing wordcount and just count the words written during the goal period, but so far that's not a thing.  However during Camp it's pretty easy just to set my word count goal higher and report the existing word count on the first day, even if it does make it look like I wrote a massive amount of words on day 1.

So far I have written every day this month, which is an improvement on April Camp, when I missed a couple days throughout the month.  There were admittedly a couple of days when I finished writing after midnight, so I reported the words as being for the previous day to get credit for writing that day.  It's not tomorrow until you sleep, right?

(I haven't worked on the novel yet today, so ignore the fact that the word count for this day is zero.)

It feels good to make sure I get a little writing in every day, and I feel like I'm making really good progress with the word count and the story.  I've had several aha moments that have been carrying me through the tougher periods, and I'm currently about two-thirds of the way to my goal word count of 90,000.  I don't know whether the book will really be finished at 90,000, but it's a good length for a novel so that was the goal I decided to shoot for.  I may have some things to cut and revise once I'm finished, though, so I'm actually hoping to get a little over that, all said and done.

I'm still hopeful that I'll get the book finished before July Camp, maybe even before that based on how much I'm writing per day versus the daily required word count to reach my goal (which keeps going down, incidentally).  Once I'm finished, I intend to do a quick revision of a few continuity issues that have come up while I've been writing (since I've been entirely pantsing this novel), and then I'll let it sit for a little while before I go back and do a major round of revisions.  I subscribe to the Steven King/On Writing way of doing revisions, which is to let it sit for a little while first so that it's not as fresh or familiar when you do your revisions.

And of course, I need to get back to working on my Ruby Ransome series soon, and since that series and this book are completely different, I don't particularly want to be working on both at the same time.  So that adds a little urgency to my goal of finishing this novel's first draft soon, maybe even before July Camp starts so that I have some separation between the two.  I'll have to be careful about how I shift back and forth while working on revisions, too.

Right now, though, I'm excited to be where I'm at: writing every day and working on making it a solid habit!