Writing Update April 2021 (Camp Nanowrimo Wrap Up)

Hello back and welcome to the second post of the week :)

If you read my introduction post to Camp Nanowrimo then you'll know that I had a bit of a different writing goal for April. I wanted to edit the remaining chapters of my upcoming novel "City girl meets Countryside".
To my inconvenience there was no time of page goal setting for this round of Nanowrimo so I had to work with the regular 50k goal, which was okay because I had roughly 50k left to edit. 

How did it go?

Well, to get the most important question out of the way, I did not officially win Nanowrimo. Since I cut my draft by over 10k, I didn't end up with 50k of edited words. HOWEVER, in my book I still won. Because I finished the entire round of editing. The epilogue and everything. 
And that is a win for me. 

I had good days and bad days. Some days I edited nearly 5k (and when I say edited I mean everything from formatting to rewriting entire chapters) and on other days I barely managed one sentence. I don't think I've ever done a Nanowrimo consistently every day, but rather have insane days of hours of work and then days where five minutes seem too much. 

As you can see I started off really strong and ended before the month was over. The day I finished my draft was actually the 26th and then I did one more day where I "counted time" by adding 500 words to the tracker for every hour I worked on my draft. But then I realised, that was a silly system and honestly it doesn't even matter if I officially win, I already finished my edits, so I declared my Camp Nanowrimo time as over and that's what you see in the graph. 

I think for me the most impressive thing about this is that I managed to finish editing my draft. I've been writing and editing that story for nearly 5 years I think and I want to finally be done with it. I've come a huge step closer to that by finishing this round of edits and by rewriting the passages that I hated. I still have one round of editing to do where I go through and check every word and sentence (and then I'll probably still find mistakes in the finished one) but that's something I can do relatively quickly. 

So as far as Writing Updates go, I'd say 44k of edits in a month is quite good. I didn't edit or write every day which was my original goal, but that's okay. I still got a lot done despite uni stress and work and I'm really proud of myself. 
My plan for May now is to finish those pesky line edits and then I can hopefully finally upload the story to Wattpad. With a 4 month delay, sorry about that by the way. 

I think whenever I do these sorts of challenges I forget to celebrate the things I accomplish regardless of winning or losing the challenge. 44k and a finished second draft is a win. It's a great writing month and something to be proud of. Not something to feel bad about because I didn't officially win. 

Did you participate in Camp Nanowrimo? If so, how did you do? What was something you're proud of? 
Let me know, I'd love to hear more experiences :)

As always, take care, stay healthy and write on. 
Lena 

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