I did it!  I set a goal and delivered on that goal.  If you remember my previous post from July 10, I announced my participation in July’s Camp NaNoWriMo.  I’m not going to rehash what it’s all about, suffice it to say I set a goal to write 20,000 words during the month of July and I met and surpassed that goal.  I actually hit my goal on July 27, four days before the end of the month (today).  I averaged around 725 words per day.  Some days it was easy and I would hit 800+ words, some days it was tough to eke out the 645 words I needed to make the goal.  I only missed two days out of the 31 days of July. I wrote 22,706 words during the month of July.

What was I writing?  I started on a memoir of a time I started my own music related business with a friend.  It was a two year endeavor.  SPOILERS ALERT:  It didn’t end well.  If you want to know more buy the book.  HaHa.  The next step in the writing chain is to expand on those scenes and flesh out about 25K more words.  What I have is a capturing of happenings that have some detail but need more.  I have a few more scenes to add as well.  Now comes the hard part of editing into a comprehensible work worth presenting to a public audience.  So don’t expect a book release anytime soon.

I did prove to myself that I could sit down and knock out about 600-900 words in around 35-40 minutes. I did do some self editing while writing, which is usually a no-no when drafting.  But this Camp has opened my eyes to the fact that I can accomplish the big NaNoWriMo in November.  That’s when you shoot for 50,000 word during the thirty days of November.  That’s an average of 1667 words per day.  That’s a lot of words.  

So what’s next?  To meet one of my other New Years’ Resolutions, during August I am going to be working on a couple of songs with the goal to create, record, mix and release two songs to some online streaming service or at the very least my Soundcloud site.  I will be posting during August my progress towards completing these two songs. Maybe I should film the process for my dead YouTube channel.

For September I haven’t decided what my hobby objective will be for that month.  Perhaps I will focus on Toy Photography or Comic Book Creation. I know during October, or what many NaNoWriMo participants call Prep-tober, I will be cleaning up my outline for my Sci-Fi novel.  I hope to get 50K words of an 80K novel written during the NaNoWriMo month of November.  I’ll share more on what that is when the time comes.  December may be a month of rest.  I am currently on the fence whether to retire on December 31 or not.  I think I have enough money saved to get me going and I’m really sick of driving into work and doing what I’m doing.  If I gotta work, I’d prefer to be my own boss and turn a hobby into a part time gig, or do something that makes a difference (like teaching) instead of working to make money for an investment company and a bunch of board members.

Stay tuned….