Camp NaNoWriMo Diaries: Day Seven – Saved By The Cabin-Mates!

Dear Diary,

Yesterday was Day Seven of Camp.

And things got a little hairy.

The day job duties piled up while the work phone rang off the hook, house-sitting tasks had to be done, extra errands ran, the hound dog wandered off for 24 hours and the sister’s toy Pomeranian, which I’m also dog-sitting for the next two weeks, vanished from the yard. Travel plans for this weekend’s journey to Nebraska for a wedding still had to be made.  There was certainly no time for lunch, much less for working on the novel.

I’ll admit, I was nearly ready to just sit down and cry, give up on it all.

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But soon thereafter, things resumed at least the illusion of order.

The work phones settled down.  The work duties began to get checked off the list.  The hound dog returned.  The sister’s dog also returned.  The errands and house-sitting duties were accomplished.  Travel plans were finalized. The hubby made dinner, the family played outside, and we generally had a lovely evening.

But what about the novel and the daily word quota?

Cabin Mates to the rescue!

We had planned a meet-up for yesterday  evening and I was very much looking forward to it after the day I’d had.  I made the drive to a local coffee shop, where all six members of my writing group, all participating in camp, showed up! (Getting all six of us together is sometimes quite the challenge!)  We had some good discussion, then had a 30 minute writing/editing sprint which turned into 45 solid minutes of working.  Then we had some more discussion, I filled out my hour with a few more minutes of editing, and we all headed home.

So all in all, in the end, I still met my word quota goal for the day.

And I felt so much better.

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And we’re all still kickin’ Camp’s butt!

It made me think, again, how lucky I am to have found this group of people.  I know for a fact that without them, I would not be making such forward progress on my writing, submissions, or novel. The amount of inspiration you can glean from having other people with the same passion and similar goals working around you consistently is amazing.

It’s contagious.

So I made it through page 3 of 5 on my 2500 words.  I’ve now added about 500 words to that 2500, cleaned up a lot and rephrased most of it.  Added a lot more deep POV from Pavel and fleshed out more of the world they live in through Pavel’s thoughts and dialogue with his wife.  I’m anxious to see what people think of it, once it’s all fixed up.

I elected to hold off on the entire rewrite … I’ll wait till I’m completely finished with the novel to make that final decision, I think.  For now, with these new edits, it appears to be working.  So I’ll see how far I get.  🙂

<3 JRF