Friday, August 2, 2013

Goal!

That Camp NaNoWriMo bonfire sure is feeling pretty warm. After the month long struggle to get to the finish line, I made it on the 28th. My final word count was 30,020.

This was such a wonderful experience. Previously, most of my writing was comprised of only a few thousand words. My longest WIP, which was the first part of the novel that I rebelled this camp session with, was only a bit over 25,000 words. That took me years to write. Granted I was in school and lost my writing a few times due to computer crashes and missing USB sticks. But that is beside the point. The point is that I just did something that I have never done before. I pushed myself to my limits and wrote 30,000 words of new work in a month. That is amazing for me to accomplish that.

What really helped me get to my goal was the fact that I really wanted to win. I wanted to be able to say I won and hit the goal that I set for myself. But more importantly than that, I wanted to say to myself that I won, that I did what I had set out to do. That warm feeling of accomplishment means more than anything else.

With that determination, I needed to break down what I had to accomplish into smaller feats. Since I was already quite a bit behind, these goals were a bit higher than I wanted them to be. My daily writing goal ended up being 1,500 words a day for a week to get me finished up by the 28th. I wanted to allow some wiggle room to finish up as well as the 28th was a Sunday with the weekends being my longest stretches of time off usually. I also relocated my computer out of the distracting living room (away from that ever present T.V.). That really seemed to help and I should have done it a lot sooner. I went from taking hours to hit my daily goal to getting it done in about an hour.

So to anyone out there thinking that a high word goals isn’t possible. Think again. If I can do it, so can you. All it takes is some discipline…and a good rewards system. I allowed myself to play video games after or work on blog stuff. I am actually surprised with how well I kept up with Gilded Page Reviews since I totally failed at that last time. If anyone wants to chat about their camp experience or are looking for some insight, let me know in the comments below!

2 comments:

  1. CONGRATS!!! :D I ended up not finishing this month. But I don't find it a complete loss at all. I learned my limits and got a little over 3000 words (in my count of re-writes). :)

    Glad to hear it! Way to go!

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    1. Thank you. Learning limits is great too and at least you got some words down. That is always a good thing.

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