Ahhhhh. It feels SO GOOD to be able to post this little banner. Some writing friends and I challenged each other to participate in the spring camp session and we all completed our goal word counts. Go us!

I appreciated the low-key atmosphere of camp. I participated in and won my last full NaNo back in 2012 (with my YA contemporary WIP), but life got a little busier when my son arrived the next year, so a goal of 10,000 words on a current project was much more doable. I put Man Cub down for his nap or bedtime and booked it to my laptop for thirty minutes, or even an hour or two at a time if I was lucky, before clocking out and reporting back for mom duty the rest of the day. I’ve come to appreciate loose outlining and comments to myself in the margins of my writing, because without those two things I would be lost without longer chunks of time in which to write. I still pants the heck out of some individual scenes, but always with character goals and the overall outline in mind.

The little over 10,000 words I added to my current WIP, a near-future YA book (working title: The Echelon Project) has taken me well past the halfway point in projected word count, although I’m not sure if it is past halfway according to the plot or not. The more I spend time in my main character’s world, the more twists and turns have presented themselves and as a result some of my earlier writing will need to be evaluated to see if it still belongs in the story or not.

That being said, I am feeling good about my progress and hope to realize my goal of finishing the first draft and starting revisions by summer.