A Postcard from Camp NaNoWriMo

When I’m not reading or binding books, I’m writing them. I have always wanted to be an author, ever since writing books about swans who could talk and got into all sorts of laughs – I was six years old, and they were my masterpieces. I even drew the pictures.

Here is a postcard. It’s late. But postcards never arrive on time. A postcard and a bit of an attempt to write about my writing more.

In November I participated in Nation Novel Writing Month, a mad thirty days of novelling. And writing 50,000 words in that space of time meant that I won!

But toward the end of November I was struggling to enjoy writing my novel, and I could tell that the story wasn’t close to being ‘finished.’ I really could not be bothered with it, and for months, I did not touch it again.

Then March came along and the excitement of Camp NaNoWriMo, which this year was being held in April. I looked at my novel again and got excited about my story.

It's a move relaxed version of the November event, with goals you can set yourself and also a chance to write anything other than a novel. 

Camp NaNoWriMo was quite brilliant. I started watching book blogger Katytastic’s fantastic NaNoWriMo daily vlogs from November 2012 and was inspired by her enthusiasm and passion. I finished my story on the boyfriend’s birthday, the 22^nd of April, and it totalled 87,292 words. I spent the rest of the month editing, counting the words I edited toward my word count.

Camp NaNoWriMo was fantastic and made me realise how much I wanted to see my novel in print. Watching all of Katytastic’s videos taught me that I needed to love my story, love it to pieces. And I quite unashamedly do. It really helped as well to have the boyfriend writing right beside me, trying to knock out 2000 words every day. We bounced off each other and we are both really thankful for

such a good event and the opportunities it provides.

I don’t want to go into a tremendous amount of detail of my novel except that it’s loosely based on my favourite ballet, Swan Lake. Its needs a serious amount of re-writes and research but I’m quite confident that what will come out of it will be something I can be proud of. And maybe proud enough to send it away to literary agents!

As I said, I still need to do a heck of a lot of stuff before I’m happy with it. Camp NaNoWriMo is back for a summer session this July and I am planning to do a re-write then.

Thank you, NaNoWriMo, for making me remember what I want to be!