Tag: Writer

Camp NaNo – Word Slayer

How many of you have heard of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month? (Yes, I’m talking to you as if you were sitting right here with me. And I expect you to talk to me too! That’s what the comment section was made for). For those of you who’ve not heard of it, it’s a great way to get a story out of your head and onto paper in one massive brain dump. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write at least 50,000 words during the month of November. That’s the average length of a novel. It happens every year, and is attempted by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. It began in 1999 and has expanded every year. Now there are even a couple “Camp NaNo” events, in April and July, that allow you to set your own word count or editing goal.

I’m in the middle of the July Camp NaNo. Since I’ve been trying to get this site up and running, I decided my goal should be to write at least 20 blog posts, with a total of 15,000 words for the month. I’m not there. In fact, I’m nowhere near.

After having written over 50,000 words a month for the last five or six Novembers, even last year when I had Covid-19 in November, a goal of only 15,000 words seems pretty easy. Well, let me tell you, it’s not! Trying to come up with 500-750 publishable words a day, five days a week, is not nearly as easy as I thought it would be. It should get better as I start wrapping my mind around the concept a bit more, but for right now, my brain is more warped than it is wrapped.

While my eventual goal is to produce a Distractifying! post every day, I’ll be happy with whatever I produce to begin with. Once I get into the swing of things, I’ll set up my own, personal Camp NaNo’s to keep me going each month. I’m determined this time, to do whatever it takes to stay in the flow.

Distractifying.com

Sooooo, what do you do when you’re out of work, low on money, and forget to cancel the automatic payment for webhosting that you haven’t used for three years?

You start WRITING, of course … Again. You pretend you are Dory, (in “Finding Nemo”), and you — “Just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing!” What else can you do?

This blog is called Distractifying! because that’s what I am. I bounce from one thing to another. I may bounce back again, or I may bounce yet again in a completely different direction. One never knows. It can be tedious. It can be an adventure. I pray for more adventure than tedium, for my sake as well as yours. I know this sounds a lot like the About section, but I’m just learning how to make this site work, and the learning curve is so very steep! Bear with me. I’m finally on the right track.

I hope you’ll follow me down this rabbit trail that is my mind as it comes through my pen. Yes, everything I write begins on paper with pen. Even that is Distractifying! as I write with all sorts of pens, including fountain pens, and in all sorts of colors, too! (You should see my journals!) But it’s the only way I can get the words out of my head. They get stuck in some sort of portal of doom that just circulates inside my brain and never find the exit ramp when I try to type.

I’ve been playing at being a writer for several years, now, even publishing a few short stories. People tell me that publishing, even a flash fiction piece, makes me a writer, even when I’m not producing. I tend to think — NOT!! A writer must write, to be a writer, Content must be produced, (even if it’s not terrific), no matter how Distractifying! it may be.

So, once again, I hope you will follow me on this journey. Together we will see just how far it will go. And just how Distractifying! it will get!