Bonus Friday #1

I hope your week has been well! Mine's been fairly slow work wise and fairly insane otherwise! On this lovely Friday, I'm straying away from my normal posting schedule (Mondays and Wednesdays) to share a little something extra with you.

This Month, I've decided to take on a few different tasks/challenges/activities outside of my normal. One of these is Camp NaNoWriMo! For those who don't know, way back in November 2012 I participated in the National Novel Writing Month (see my write up here). I'm still very proud to say that my first ever NaNoWriMo was a success! But that was almost two years ago now and I've not been able to pen another novel since! So, here we go with another NaNoWriMo Challenge, Camp NaNoWriMo!

Camp NaNoWriMo is quite a bit different than November's challenge. Most noticeable is the ability to set your own word-count goals! Because I managed 50,000 words in a month last time, this time I'm aiming for 52,000 words for my second novel in the series! 2,200 words down, 49,800 left to go!

Secondly, I'm participating in the first month of the NovelTea Book Club, hosted over at My Life as a Teacup. ook for the month of July is Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore. So far so good. I really am loving the facebook group where we have the discussions about the books. There are so many wonderful people participating with so many interesting ideas and things to say that I love getting on the page 100% of the time!

What big things are you wanting to accomplish this month? Are you participating in the NovelTea Book Club or Camp NaNoWriMo?

NaNoWriMo: How I Intend to Keep it Going

As you know from this post, I am taking part in the NaNoWriMo challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. If you didn't realize, this is quite a challenge and to win/succeed is quite a feat. So I thought I'd share a few ideas I have on how I'm going to try to keep myself working hard enough to achieve my goal and win the challenge! 

• Write no less than 1,700 words a day. My daily goal this month is 2,000 but my bare minimum is 1,700 words. If I write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, I will reach 50,000 words on the very last day.
• Forget the formatting. I am obsessive about formatting. I love to make every chapter heading the same, every time jump match, and everything perfect. For this month, I'm not allowing myself to format a single page until I have completed the novel.
• Work every day from 2:30-3:45. I just had to drop a class from my schedule for various reasons, so the time I would have spent in class is my designated times to work every day. Weekend will be a bit difficult for me to keep this, but there is rarely anything going on at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Saturday.
• Keep a regular sleep schedule. If I can force myself to go to bed every week night by 10:30pm then I can get up in time to go to my classes and prepare for the day. Sometimes, when I stay up to late, I roll out of bed and into class then spend the rest of the day trying to prepare myself and making myself take on the day. This simply won't work for November.
• Take at least an hour each day away from writing to read. Every new book I read leaves me with new ideas about style and wording. reading enhances my writing and what could I need more to finish my novel?
• Water. I'm challenging myself to stay hydrated as best I can this (and every) month. I'm horrible about drinking water and it certainly shows in my fatigue.
• Enlist help. My life partner is absolutely wonderful at keeping me on track. He will ask every day if I've done my reading and if I've finished any goals I've set for myself. He really does keep me on track, which is good because I'll be spending about a week of this month at his house and I'm happy to know he'll be helpful rather than a distraction.
• Carry my computer everywhere. I write, as I feel most people now do, on my laptop, or really on a tiny off-brand notebook that barely runs chrome, but it works. It's small and so I intend to carry it everywhere with me this month. 5 minutes of quiet can be that much more towards my goal each day.
• No revision. I'm the worst at reading over my work and revising it before I write anything new. This month that ain't gonna fly. I'm, instead, going to write down in my NaNoWriMo notebook the changes I want to make with a page number and proceed writing as if I've made the changes.

I'm nervous but very excited to continue my work this month. I've had one productive day and am beginning another. Day 2 is on! I hope these ideas help you to keep up at whatever you're doing and if you're doing NaNoWriMo, good luck!

What are your best NaNoWriMo or anti-procrastination tips?