No, this is not about the time I went to Girl Scout Camp when I was in junior high (I think? Memory is a fuzzy thing) and ended up being put in charge of showing the younger girls how to make bracelets and then later in the week had to show them how to make “fishing poles” out of string and paperclips.

This is about my first time participating in Camp NaNoWriMo.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then the concept of NaNoWriMo is familiar to you. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. I’ve done it 19 years in a row (damn) and by now I’ve won more often than not.

Camp NaNo is a similar concept except it takes place a couple of times a year (I think April and July) and you set the goal. It’s not just for new projects; it can be used to add on to existing projects. Though the input is still words written, there are ways to approximate if your goal for the month is revising a project.

I decided to use Camp NaNo as a way to make significant progress on That’s Punk, which has been my Sunday story for like a year now. As much as I’ve enjoyed the leisurely, no pressure pace I’ve been taking with the story –a real departure from the way I normally write longer manuscripts- I was ready to put some real time and words into it. I felt that setting a reasonable Camp NaNo goal would be the perfect way to make that happen. After all, I’m terribly competitive with myself and I don’t like to lose.

Going into July, I had about 30,000 words in on That’s Punk, so I decided that a good goal was to hit 50,000 words total. After years of writing 50,000-60,000 words in a month, a little over 20,000 would be easy. The daily bar was set at about 655 words. Perfect. This was what I needed.

One thing I wondered about was how this would affect the way I’d been writing That’s Punk, going slowly and revising as I went. I was concerned that I might fall back into old NaNo habits and just try to get my words down as fast as I could and worry about it all later. As it turns out, with the lower daily goal, I gave myself time to look over what I’d written before and revise it before moving on to my new words for the day. I feel like this is a habit that I’d like to try to keep even for NaNo. It might be more of a challenge with a higher word count, but I’m willing to try.

I admit that my schedule also helped me tackle this goal in the way that I wanted to. Because I work ahead on Book ’em, Danno, I’m able to take July off from my podcast. However, this year, after months of working on a video project for work, I ended up taking July off from all of my non-writing projects, putting Here, Watch This on hold for the month. Camp NaNo was the only thing going for the entire month of July and I’ll be honest, after months of juggling multiple projects, it was glorious. But I admit that the singular focus probably aided in my ability to not only achieve my goal, but also exceed it, all while revising as I went along like I wanted, and not stressing myself out to get it done. I won’t have this luxury during NaNo in November. Podcast things will be happening while I’m trying to hit my daily word count goal of easily over 1,000 more words a day.

If anything, Camp NaNo reminded me how much I like writing, a joy I thought I’d lost for a long time before being revived in the last couple of years, and how much I want to spend my time doing just that. It’s not that I don’t enjoy podcasting. I do. But writing is clearly my first love and I need to find a way to spend more time doing that.

Something else I learned at Camp.

A little writing a day keeps the blues away.