Camp NaNo ending thoughts

This year was my first time doing Camp NaNo. I have done the main NaNoWriMo once, two years ago, and wrote most of a sci-fi book that I haven't worked on since. This time, I was using NaNo to try and finish my first draft of book 2. I already had a big chunk written going into NaNo, so reaching my word count goal should not have been a problem, considering that I already had my entire plot outlined chapter by chapter. But, as a pretty picture of a stack of freshly printed paper hasn't popped along my twitter feed, you can probably guess that I did not. 

When I did NaNo the first time, I reached and surpassed my set word count goal, which was about the same as what I set for book 2. The main difference I felt while writing the two stories was that the first time, when I was writing the sci-fi book, I liked the idea of being a published author some day in the future, but I wasn't writing said manuscript for the purpose of publishing it one day. I loved writing, I had a few friends that were doing NaNo, and I went along for the ride. When I began, I didn't have any sort of outline and made it up as I went (which was all fun and games until I realized that I had fifty pages of useless scenes and got my outlining act together). 

The biggest difference was that when I wrote that book two years ago, I was writing for me instead of focusing on writing for an audience. That was both a good and a bad thing. Yes, I was a lot less insecure about how my words would be received and that allowed for me to explore ideas with a lot less restraint. But that also had a flip side. Because I wasn't concerned about presenting that manuscript to a reader, the story got away from me and chunks of it were not well thought out/just plain sloppy. 

While working on book 2, I didn't have the same problems as I had a clear picture in my head of where the plot was going. However, I had EOA already published. I was receiving both positive and negative feedback on it, and not nearly as many reviews as I had hoped for, despite the endless lists of reviewers I had contacted. I found myself wishing that I had either tried harder to traditionally publish or not published at all. All of my frustrations with marketing EOA translated into fear while writing book 2, specifically the fear of my books vanishing into obscurity, and that fear turned into writer's block.

Camp NaNo helped with that fear a lot, and for the first two weeks, I wrote until my hands fell off. I had awesome cabin mates for encouragement and, when needed, friendly competition, and I more than doubled my starting word count. However, the fear got the better of me during the second two weeks and I fell off the wagon, creeping towards my word goal at a snail's pace. I ended NaNo with a handful of chapters left to write, so hopefully the wait for book 2 will only be a few more months, depending on how the writing goes from here on out. 

Anyways, little Smudge doesn't seem stressed. I shouldn't be either :)

He's practically mastered meditation. I could learn a lot from him.

(Of course, right after I type that he runs outside for an endless barking frenzy...)

-Esha