Camp Nano Accountability. Week 1.

I set a goal of two hours a day, no more than 3 hours in one day (or sitting, really). So far, I’m at 17 hours so am surprisingly smashing my Nano goals.

As someone who always puts absurdly-high thresholds on themselves for success, it is a strange feeling. Is this what setting achievable goals feels like? Am I just an extremely awful person to myself most of the time by constantly setting myself up for failure with lofty expectations I could never hope to achieve? Who knows.

I always heard to shoot for the moon so you can land amongst the stars, but I guess constantly missing the moon can take its toll on someone’s mental health and wellbeing, so maybe the time has come to shoot for the stars for a little while.

Anyways, I’ve been using this Camp Nano to build some good writing habits. One issue I always faced was being able to use my lunch at work, because working between a home MacBook and a work Windows used to see me sending umpteen versions of my MS back and forth via email to myself, to the point I couldn’t remember which was the most up-to-date or whether I’d finished copying all the edits I wanted from the last work version.

This time, I’ve tried to keep it simple. I am doing edits for camp, so I’ve taken one scene or chapter that I want to work on, emailed it to myself, then opened it in a fresh word doc on the work computer. Over lunch, I turn on tracked changes and tinker around. When I’m ready to go home, I email that file back to myself and copy what I liked into the master on my home computer.

This had unintended consequences.

Knowing I wanted to focus on X scene in a given day made it a lot easier to focus. I spent my walk to work imagining how that scene might be enhanced in the context of my revision pass goals, and this has brought great results. Edits are slow. I’ve been working on one chapter this entire week (that means those 17 hours have been spent on a handful of scenes), but they’re GOOD edits.

I’m not sure I’ll complete this entire pass over Nano, given I’ve spent so much time on one chapter, but I’ll definitely meet my camp goal. And that’s enough for me.