Camp Nanowrimo April 2021 (Week 1)

It's been a little while since I've actively taken part in a Nanowrimo like this. In November I did Nanowrimo with my writing prompt journal and before that it had been a year since I took part in any 30 day writing challenge like this. 

But for this month I wanted to kick my own butt a little and finally finish editing City Girl meets Countryside (already partly available on Wattpad: https://www.wattpad.com/story/83342754-city-girl-meets-countryside-english). 
I recently had to realise that I've been working on this novel since June 2017 and while it was always supposed to be a distraction project (I'll write about that in a post soon) this novel has kind of grown on me and I want to share and finish it now. 

So, for Campnanowrimo I'll edit around 50k words (the nano goal is set on a word count goal, otherwise I would've set a time or page goal) and then I'll do one last round of line edits and a read-through and hopefully declare it finished on May 1st 2021. I won't do weekly updates, but I'm going to do one for the first week and then a wrap up at the end where I tell you how it all went down. 

Now, before I show you my progress, please keep in mind that I'm editing and not drafting, all the words I'm adding to my Campnanowrimo goal are chapters that I've edited or rewritten, not every word is new.

I had one very bad day this week (can you guess which one?) where I really struggled with my mental health and didn't feel like editing but still sat down and even wrote 85 words. Yeah!

Other than that it's going stellar. I'm working out a lot of the kinks in my timeline, I rewrote some really bad chapters (makes sense now that I know I wrote them four years ago) and fixed a couple of plot holes that even amazed me (the person who wrote this story...). I'm not sure I can keep this high going because I've changed a lot in the middle of the novel and now the ending doesn't fit at all anymore and basically the entire third of it needs to be rewritten. So, my progress will very likely slow down again. But that's fine. I'm not that concerned with the numbers (one because my draft already has 70k and my original still has 40k more) two because I'm already so proud of myself for sitting down and facing editing this draft. I'd started this process in February and then got really sidetracked, which is also why the first ten chapters are already on Wattpad and the rest is patiently sitting on my hard drive. 

At this point I just want to be done with the story. Don't get me wrong, rediscovering my love for Sasha and her journey is so much fun and I feel like I'm connecting better with her than I did before, but I also feel tired of the same setting, the same characters, the same story line. Especially considering I originally wrote it as a cliché filled story and now it has kind of taken a more serious turn. Also, I find myself rolling my eyes at the stereotypical stuff. But it is supposed to be slightly ridiculous, so I guess I've got to deal with it. 

Are you taking part in Campnanowrimo? How is it going for you? 
If you'd like to chat about your project you can always hit me up on Twitter or Instagram, I'd love to hear about your story and progress. And even if you're not making any progress, you can be proud of yourself for trying and for showing up. 
That's already more than I'd done all of last year.

And on that note I'm going to leave you alone again, thanks so much for reading and following my journey. 
Take care, stay healthy and write on, 
Lena 

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