30/4/18 - My Camp NaNoWriMo (April 2018)

For anybody that happens to have liked my Facebook Page or follows my Twitter, you are probably aware that I have been participating in Camp NaNoWriMo April 2018. This event is an informal NaNoWriMo event, meaning you have to write a certain volume of words/pages but you get to choose how many you do. These events run twice a year, once in April and once again in July, with the official NaNoWriMo event taking place in November.

This April, I decided that I would participate in this for the first time since I was in college, and actually managed to make significant strides toward the goal that I had set. To prepare me for the November NaNoWriMo, I always aspire to reach a total of 50K within the space of a month.

The goal for this Camp NaNo event was to create a short novella length story about a male character coming to terms with being asexual and learning that you don't sex to be happy in life and ends up establishing solid platonic relationships with the people around him. I named this story 'Ace Of Hearts'!

I managed to write a total of _ words throughout Camp NaNoWriMo, a graph of my progress through the process can be found below:

As you can probably see from my stats, my word counts were higher at the start of the month. This was because I was still on my Easter Holidays and was, therefore able to apply myself and write a larger volume of content before returning to university for my third term. At the start of my first day of classes, I had eighteen thousand words out of fifty! That was a great head start and allowed me to have a bit of leeway in terms of getting back into the swing of my degree. I was very grateful for my progress at the start of the month, even as the volume of words I was producing per day seemed to lower. But I managed it so I am more than happy!

But how did I find this experience?
I didn't struggle all that much as I am familiar with the idea of juggling a NaNo event with my coursework, as that has been my experience every year I have participated - my first NaNoWriMo was done during my A-Levels, and the subsequent NaNoWriMo events have taken place within my first and second year at university. I was familiar with the volume of work I would need to do in order to accumulate my ideal word count and am satisfied with the way it went!

Do I have any advice?
Always - you need to be aware of whether you feel that you are up to writing, sometimes you have days where it's easy to just dedicate your time to yourself and those days are very important, especially in such a high-pressure writing event. NaNoWriMo and other events under the same brand name can be immensely taxing, even for 'veteran' participants. Self-care and pacing oneself is pivotal to achieving a "win" at a NaNoWriMo event.