Reflecting on Camp NaNoWriMo (July 2018)

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. You set yourself a word count goal and attempt to write often (ideally daily).

I thought NaNoWriMo was only in November.  November is full of birthdays and we often take a family vacation which means I get very little time to write that month. It turns out there are now more months throughout the year to take the challenge and July is one of those.

Sadly, I did not achieve my goal of 25k. It was rather ambitious considering I’ve had a lot on this month with:

• Noah finishing at both his nurseries (2 x sports day, graduation and leaver parties)
• Taster days at his new school including homework
• Continuing to work up to 39 weeks pregnant was exhausting most evenings I just wanted to sleep
• Hypnobirthing classes were so relaxing, afterwards I was too chilled to write
• Increase in midwife appointments as my due date nears

Things I hadn’t anticipated affecting my goal:

• Noah catching a sick bug
• My husband getting Labyrinths (swelling inside the ear drums)
• Myself catching a cold and I can’t take any meds (a week on and it is almost gone now)
• Referral on my last CIPD assignment so I had to work on resubmitting that
• The opportunity to write for Ginger Parrot!

As I’ve not done this challenge before I had no idea what was a realistic goal. I decided on 25k as I felt that would be achievable and yet also challenging.  Perhaps, ordinarily that would have been true but I hadn’t anticipated the germs about to invade my home or how tired pregnancy and keeping up with work and a 4 year old would make me.

Putting that aside, I am super impressed with what I have achieved *pats myself on the back*.  I’ve also identified from my daily word counts that certain days I am more productive and other days I don’t write at all.  It could be that these are the days that I am working on my blog posts.

At points, I fell back in love with my story and was excited and proud about scenes I created. Other times, it was a struggle and I know I’ll need to return to fix some parts lacking in lustre.  I also discovered I don’t have to write my novel in chapter order, I can skip ahead and return to parts later and this sometimes makes things more clearer.

I also managed to keep up with my blog posts (just about), however, I have drafted a new schedule to reduce posting as I think blogging will be more challenging with a newborn.  I’ve also agreed to keep writing for Ginger Parrot and they’ve added me to their team page – this is a big achievement for me and I don’t want to let them down.

Novel writing is my first love and I’m hoping that in the coming months I will find a way to make more time for this. I don’t quite know how yet but perhaps setting myself monthly word count goals would be a good start.  I think I’ll start low and try to beat it each month…

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Did you do the NaNoWriMo challenge?  How do you manage to juggle life and your writing goals?  I would love to hear how you got on.