The Nearing Doom of Writingdom

Hey Y’all!!

Doom draweth nigh!!! *Phantom of the Opera overture starts dramatically in the background* APRIL APPROACHESSSSSSSSS.

Now to my non-writer readers, you may be thinking, “Yeah April is coming. I know that. I have a calendar too. What’s the big deal? Why are you guys freaking out?”

Well, lemme tell you, dear reader-non-writer, that April is a special time for all of Writingdom. It’s the month of CAMP NANOWRIMO!!! You may be asking yourself, “Wait. Didn’t this already happen? Wasn’t that the month where like a third of the population didn’t appear for the entire month??” Actually no. Well, in some respects yes. But no.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and is held every year in November. This is a delightful time where us writers completely butcher our social life glue ourselves to our computers/notebooks/other modes of writing for an entire month and scramble to meet the 50k word count goal. Fun, right? (it actually is really fun.)

Now after the month is over, on December 1, we all collapse and sleep for approximately a month or so and celebrate the holidays with our families. After that,  the Now What months start. Basically, these are two months or so where you promise (they do make you promise if you choose to participate in the Now What months) that you won’t write any more on your finished work. The only thing you are allowed to do now is EDIT LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. (note: I did not participate in this stage of the process. I only read heavily into it and then decided not to because I hadn’t finished my WIP. I ended at about 33k. It’s grown since then but I have been slowly returning to writing after that traumatic yet seriously successful month of writing. 😀 )

The Now What season has ended, my friends, and now it is time to prepare and stock up food for the next large writing goal: CAMP NANOWRIMO. For those of you who haven’t participated before (or who aren’t writers. But now that I think of it, you were technically in the first category… oh well.), Camp is slightly different. (see below 🙂 )

1. You can change your goal. In the normal NaNo challenge, you have a set goal that everyone is going for. 50k. If you go over, good for you! If you get under, look at how much more you have than when you started! I didn’t win this past NaNo month, so I am going to try to finish my WIP in April. The nice thing about Camp is that you can literally do anything for your goal. Words, pages, lines, hours… anything that you can measure your writing with. And it doesn’t have to be 50k anything! You can adjust your settings to what you want.
2. You can have cabin buddies! Much like the WIP settings, you have many choices for cabins. There’s an option to not be apart of a cabin, a choice to make your own cabin, or to let someone invite you. This time, I am in a cabin with my Young Writer’s Workshop friends! Super excited ’bout that.

So that’s what I will be doing next month! Don’t worry, I will still be once a week blogging! This was a slightly shorter post, but that is okay! Thank you for all the support, you guys! ❤

Now go forth, mi amigos and amigas, and smile. Your day is just beginning. Make the best of it. Don’t procrastinate. Work hard. Make me proud. 🙂

Love you all,

Madeleine

Are you gonna participate in Camp NaNo? Tell me about it (if you are) in the comments!!