Confessions from Camp NaNo

     Six o'clock was much earlier than I was used to getting up. But I could already feel the morning person inside me gearing up for a writing frenzy. I got some breakfast and hot tea, sat down with my computer and notebooks, and started the journey we writers call National Novel Writing Month.

     November was a busy month for me - or at least, what I used to consider busy. I had dance classes twice a week, church and meetings weekly, and let's not forget one of America's biggest holidays (Thanksgiving) at the end of the month (which is always the hardest time for tired writers). But I was determined! The year before, my friend had beaten me to the 50,000 word count goal by a matter of hours. And this year I was going to beat her. No matter what it took.

    That was 2012. And that, friends, was the last NaNo of any kind in which I successfully completed my entire word count goal.

     Allow me to put this into perspective: during this last month (Camp NaNo), I had a word count goal of 15,000, an extremely modest goal given the 50,000+ I completed only three years before. And...I made it all the way up to 4,040 words. Total. Fantastic, right?

     You can imagine how it felt. I, a once-avid writer, had fallen so short of my own word count goals that I was almost embarrassed to admit it to anyone else. Some writer I've turned out to be. Life throws me a few curves and the first thing I give up is writing!

      .....And yet, on the flip side of that coin, I did write almost 5,000 words. And I did complete two of my smaller goals (completing two chapters I was struggling to make any headway with).

     So does it count as a failure or as a success?

     I guess it helps at this point to consider the value of what I gained versus the gravity of what I lost. Because honestly, I didn't lose anything (except a notch on my belt of writerly pride). I only gained. And five thousand words, as sorry as that sounds compared to fifty thousand, are still that many words written down. Not stored away in my brain for a rainy day. Not procrastinated over for months on end. Not sitting idly filling my head with writer's shame. They're on my computer waiting for some additions.

     And isn't that really the goal of writing? To get words onto paper? (Or in this digital age, onto the computer hard drive.)

     Maybe it's just me trying to sound noble after a failure of such epic proportions. But given the fact that the month of July was very unusually busy for me, I'm actually quite proud of myself for getting any writing done. At least now I have one foot in the door for completing what I started. And who knows? Maybe when National Novel Writing Month comes around, I'll be so geared up by Camp NaNo failure that I'll actually complete the much bigger (and more stressful) goal.
   
     We shall see.

      Until my next post, I remain,

                 Yours Truly