Camp NaNoWriMo continues. In the past, Week 2 is usually where I’ve fallen off course for Camp. Life might get in the way, or I might just lose the motivation and self discipline to keep going. While my second week started strong, I did lose some steam towards the end. My challenge now is to keep going, despite the fact that I hit a speed bump.

There were two things that threw a bit of a wrench into the works this past week.

1. I didn’t notice until it was too late that I skipped something in my outline, and I’d moved forward a few thousand words. I couldn’t just write a new scene and add it in, because of how I’d written what would have come after. So I either needed to go back, write the scene that I’d skipped, and then also rewrite a significant portion of what I’d written after so that it would fit, or I needed to rework the plot and outline to fit the thing that I’d skipped into the novel in a later place than I’d originally planned. On the other hand, the thing that I’d skipped, while necessary to the plot, had originally felt awkward. Like, say, it was in the wrong place. So I stopped writing and replotted. The thing that I skipped is going to work better now, and I can feel better moving forwards towards it.
2. If you’re keeping track of the numbers at home, you’ll notice that I’m a little behind. Last Friday was a bad brain day. I could barely make myself summon the willpower to get out of bed. I didn’t want to do anything, even things I knew normally made me happy. Saturday wasn’t quite so bad of a brain day, but I wasn’t back to 100% either. No words got written either of those days, which is obviously not ideal. But Camp NaNo isn’t quite the same as NaNoWriMo: while I’m only accountable to myself during both events, Camp NaNo’s flexible goal means that I’m not only accountable to myself, but I can be gentler with myself than November usually is. In this case, that meant giving my brain a rest the same way you give I might give my body a rest.

I also realized that starting my daily writing at 10pm usually means that I’m not going to make my word count, and so I probably need to write earlier in the day. This is a time management issue. I’m not always great at managing my own time wisely, so this will be a challenge as well. On the other hand, figuring out what the problem is can be more challenging than actually fixing the problem, and I’m hoping that will be the case here. I’ll start taking steps towards fixing that issue right away.

Over the next week I’ll be upping my word counts to try and make up the missing days of writing. Despite being behind, I’m still feeling pretty good about this project. I still love this novel, and I’m still excited about telling this story. Maintaining that feeling—the love for the novel and the characters and the story—is just as important to me as getting out the words in a timely manner.

So is writing every day (or as near to it as my brain will allow). Part of the magic of NaNoWriMo—and so of Camp NaNoWriMo too—is that it’s a chance to build a habit of writing. I don’t believe that writing every day is necessary to Being A Writer. There is magic to be found in the down moments: the daydreams and the eureka moments when you’re doing something mundane like cooking. But I do believe that Being A Writer does mean putting words down on the page. The process doesn’t stop with those eureka moments or the daydreams or the brainstorming of the intricacies of your plot. Maybe the process never stops. But it certainly includes putting words on a page.

• Current Word Count: 11,835/30,000

Keep putting those words down on the page, my lovelies. That’s the only way the story gets written.