Tomorrow sees a quarter of 2017 completed. One of my targets for the year was to get a good way through my second manuscript which would be the first of a planned trilogy called Spirits Saga. As of March 31st my typed word count is 2,439 words. There’s a few hundred more in notebook draft form but at any rate, I should and could have done more.
For many writers or aspiring writers November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWrimo. The target is typically 50,000 words in 30 days. They also have ‘camps’ in the other months that have 30 days, for writers to prepare. I decided that I’m not up for waiting until November to get this idea down and that I’d instead take part in the April Camp NaNoWrimo. My goal is a mighty 60,000 words – 2,000 words a day.
When writing a novel there can be many obstacles or road blocks – sometimes life related, sometimes purely mental. I’ve spent the first three months of this year redrafting my initial three chapters rather than moving forward. Part of this is down to trying to use MS Word rather than write everything in a notepad to be typed up later. When words are written on a page they’re fixed. When you type you can endlessly edit if you’re not careful. The idea of this camp is that I will type up the shell of my story to reach the target and not slow myself down. The quality will not be fantastic upon completion of the first draft – that’s almost a given – but I will then have something to mould and to build on.
My first manuscript took over two years to get to a point ready for submission. This time around I want to halve that. Hopefully Camp NaNoWrimo will be the real kick start I need to get things going. The next 30 days are going to be interesting! I can’t promise I’ll have time to update but if you’re reading this and also signed up, you can follow my progress here: http://campnanowrimo.org/campers/ashley-thorpe
ashleythorpe.com 
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