When You Don’t Meet Your Camp Nano Wordcount Goal…

(…you cry.)

You make hot cocoa and watch Doctor Who.  You check Facebook.  You waste an hour listening to a really good audiobook read by Andrew Scott.  You spend all afternoon working in the garden.  You waste time trying to find a program to create a map for your fantasy world.  You check Facebook.  And then you pound out a few hundred words and collapse into bed feeling like a failure, because you didn’t meet your goal today.  (Repeat as many times as you like.)

And you stare at your little orange graph, willing it to go up.  You remember the good old days (around Day 8) when you were actually close to your word-count goal.  You replay in your mind that one day you wrote over 2,000 words, wishing it would come back.

Then you cry some more, accepting that those days are over with and done for, forever a thing of the past.  You make excuses.  You’re just too busy, you have a lot of homework, you’ve gotten a good amount done anyways… why bother catching up?  Besides, you wrote 400 words for your history homework, and another 200 in your journal, and that makes up for not working on your novel, right?

And then you sigh, pull out the laptop, and determine not to get up until you’ve written 2,000 words.  Why?

Because writing is delicious.  It’s wonderful.  It’s an opportunity to lose yourself, to create new friends, to conjure up new worlds, to explore the very depths of your imagination.

When I said I was going to write 40,000 words in April, I meant it.  I’m going to hold myself to it.  Because having a better novel will be equally delicious.  Because I call myself a writer.  Because writing is who I am.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 2,000 words to write.