Lessons Learned From Camp

Well, it’s over. (Well, actually today is the last day so if you’re participating you have until midnight wherever you’re at, but I validated last night.)

I validated, but way under my original goal of 31k. Somehow this month just plain got away from me, and in the interest of having it not happen in November I’m going to be taking a look back at what went wrong.

Or as near as I can figure, anyhow.

Part of it was too much time. I’m not working so I had lots of time. Which meant that I had lots of time to procrastinate and plan to do it “tomorrow.”

Part of it was too low of a goal, which kind of goes hand in hand with too much time. I had set my original goal at 31k, a mere thousand words a day.  Should have been a no brainer considering that I wasn’t working, right?  Right. Er, wrong. An “easy” goal coupled with too much time resulted in no sense of urgency which resulted in nothing getting done.

The third major problem was that I was working on an existing project. Now, I’ve done that for Camp before, but that was to finish something that was in progress, not write scenes to be worked into the (more or less) finished manuscript. That (at least for me) results in a mental block because I want to get it right, not just get it done.

(And then there was the fact that I was having trouble getting the scene to play out in some sort of compromise between what I had planned and the direction it went off in.)

So, I think that sums up July Camp, which leads to…

Now what?

Well, now that camp is over and the pressure (or non pressure) is off, I’m going to finish the scenes I need for Onyx Sun and hopefully get it to a beta reader or two (again).

And then (so that I’m not trying to do too many things at once) I’m going to work on getting changes entered to the remaining books of the Academy of the Accord series.

And I want to organize all of my started stories and start working on outlines for them.

Yeah, I think I have enough to keep me out of trouble for a while.

A long while.