I’ll be participating in the April 2019 CampNaNoWriMo challenge again this year.

I don’t have a project – yet. The nice thing about the Camp months of NaNoWriMo is that the rules are relaxed. Want to write 30 days of poetry? Done. Want to aim for 5,000 words for the month? Fine. It’s not the hard and fast rule that you must be writing a novel and it must be 50,000 words. And I plan to use that to my advantage.

The NaNoWriMo model doesn’t exactly suit my writing style these days, as I need to be writing slower, with better focus on quality. NaNoWriMo promotes the write-for-quantity practice, as it’s getting folks to focus on creating a Sss’y rough draft. Please: Don’t take that to mean I don’t support, care about, cheer on, or tell everyone I run into about NaNoWriMo. I still think it’s a fantastic activity for writers. I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo since 2004. I’ll participate again this year. I’m a founding member of CampNaNo as well. I believe in the core message — Instead of saying, “Someday I’ll write a novel…”, why not take a month and do it?

All that being said, I am at a point in my writing where I need to go slow, do the finer writing work, carefully choose words, etc. Writing for quantity isn’t working at this point in my writing life. And that’s ok. So for CampNaNo, I’ll be working with a much smaller word count goal, as I’ll be doing slower work. And hopefully, I’ll be closer to a finished story by the end of Camp.