#writerschat

Happy Easter/April Fools/First Day of Camp!

Festivities aside, April is a hard time of the year. It’s the month of complacency.

Take students for example, the school year is winding down and you’re tired of the spending beautiful spring afternoons in the library and memorizing biology facts instead of the latest [popular artist's] song.

For writers, our New Years Resolutions to write 500 words a day or for two hours a week seem distant and irrelevant. You’ll write when you feel like it. The story exists in your head, it’s not going anywhere. What’s the rush? It’ll be there tomorrow.

Don’t get up. Let me just post that sign for you. Lost: MOTIVATION. IF FOUND, CALL (###) ### - ####. 

Well, I don’t have your number, but I found your motivation—it’s at Camp! Camp NaNoWriMo!

For anyone not familiar with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), it’s an event that occurs every November where writers across the world join together and strive to write 50,000 words in one month. It’s an ordeal to say the least. But it’s a fun ordeal! Writing, a sometimes lonely activity, becomes interactive and communal. You band together with writers in your town and region in local write in’s or with distant friends in online streamed write in’s.

Camp NaNo has the same principles and occurs two other times throughout the year, during the spring and summer. As much as I love November NaNo for the pure tradition of the event and the added romance of coffee shops in autumn, Camp NaNo is a wonderful way to kick a person out of a midyear slump and back into high writing gear.

Don’t wait for November, join Camp today! It’s not too late to set your goal and start!

But, Jackie, I’m too busy to write 50,000 words in April ☹ Hey you know another beautiful thing about camp? There’s no 50K goal like November’s NaNo. Camp is about setting your own goals and working at your own pace. You can set a word count goal as specific as 14,782 words. You can even set an hourly goal like 1 hour a day.

Bonus: If you start today, I think you can even make it in time for the last rounds of cabin assignments. What’s a cabin?

Great question. A cabin is a group of fellow Camp NaNoWriMo participants or Campers. You’ll traverse the entire month of April with your cabinmates. You’ll laugh together, you’ll cry together, you’ll encourage each other— you might even come out the other side with a few new writing pals.

I love the cabin feature that is special to Camp. Your cabin preferences can be set by the genre you write, your age range, your word count goal for the month, or you can even request specific campers. The cabin feature is a great way to connect with new writers.

I don’t mean to sound like an infommerial, but don’t wait! Log on today! Go find campnanowrimo.com, sign up for camp, and find your cabinmates!