The cynical optimist

I was supposed to write this at the beginning of the month when I was fresh off of the July 2022 edition of Camp NaNoWriMo but life as usual got in the way. So here I am at the end of the month coming to you with my review.

Let me start by explaining what Camp NaNoWriMo is.

Every November is National Novel Writing Month, and there is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel by the end of the month. There are also two other events called Camp NaNoWriMo which take place in April and July. Now with Camp NaNo you are allowed to work on whatever you want, whether it is finishing a draft, making edits, wherever you are in the writing process you can work on it. You also get to choose your own word count, so you can write 5k, 10k, 25k, whatever you feel you can reasonably do in the month.

Now every time there is Camp NaNo event I tend to do 10 or 20,000 words and save the challenge of 50k for November, but this year when July rolled along I was feeling ambitious, things were starting to move in my life again and I was feeling good so I set my goal to 50,000.

For the first week and half or so, I was writing the bare minimum, I was following the path to success, but every day felt like I was on the precipice of a cliff and that one bad day would be enough to send me over the edge and derail any chance of me winning. But I continued to write, spurred on not by the excitement to write, to discover where this story was taking me, but by an overwhelming dread that I was going to fail, if I faltered at all.

But inevitably I did falter and needed to have a big day of writing to catch back up, and over the course of a day I wrote almost 7,000 words and did just that, I was back on pace but only back to the precipice, only back to that sinking feeling, that feeling that it could all slip away if I allowed it too, but that one good day of writing gave me a “brilliant” idea…I would attempt my first ever 10k tuesday.

I had never attempted to write 10,000 words in the course of one day. But I’d written 6,7,8 thousand in a day before so I figured I could do it with a little more focus and a little less doomscrolling through Twitter.  So on a Tuesday towards the end of the month I got up, got some coffee and then doom scrolled twitter until nearly noon and as I felt the chance of successfully completing my 10k tuesday attempt slipping away I forced myself to find the focus and began to write…Things went terribly slow at first but eventually the words started to flow and then a little less than 7 hours later I had written 10,000 words and could celebrate, this put me on pace to reach my 50,000 word count goal and early! All I had to do was keep on writing…

Which is exactly what I didn’t do for the next 5 days, and now not only did I squander the lead I had given myself I had even fallen behind the pace and it was looking like the win was slipping from my fingers again. I could feel the edge of the cliff again and was really starting to believe that I had made a terrible mistake by attempting to write 50,000 words for a Camp NaNo event.

Whether or not I could win came down to the last two days. I had two days to write just under 8,000 words, and I had a formula in mind to do it, the bare minimum I knew I had to write was 3,000 words because in my mind if I had 5,000 words to write on the last day I could do it, I had already done a 6k and a 10k day in the month alone, one more big writing day wouldn’t kill me and luckily by the end of the day on July 31st I was officially declared a Camp NaNoWriMo winner.

This Camp NaNoWriMo was easily the most difficult month I’ve ever had writing and I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo itself for 10 years now…

Between the constant feeling of despair, that constant fear of failure right behind me, between the highs of successfully completing a 10k Tuesday, to the lows of not writing a single word for 5 days. This was a slightly off-kilter, roller coaster of emotions kind of ride through the month and the only thing I could think of doing was writing my way out, there were no other options. If I kept writing I would see my way through to the other side and that’s exactly what happened.

Maybe there’s a lesson about perseverance in there, or maybe there’s not. One thing I know is there is an amazingly supportive community of writers who do NaNoWriMo, and even those who don’t on twitter and I absolutely know that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get through a month like that without their support, I posted quite a few cries for help, for motivation, my fears on twitter and they were always met with kindness and cheers for my success and I am eternally grateful for that, and this blog post will not do, or explain well enough why I am so grateful…but I am grateful, and I look forward to November as I do every year to try to create something new, because the one thing this world needs more than anything else right now is Art, in any form.

So let me end this post with a bit of a challenge, if you are artistically inclined or even if you aren’t and you want to try something new, create some art in whatever medium you feel comfortable maybe it’ll brighten your day, maybe not…but one thing it absolutely will do is make the world just a little bit better. So go out there and create.