Writing Goals: March / April

I feel like I'm talking about my writing a lot. I think that's a good thing. I hope.

I picked the background thinking, "Oh, it's spring soon." Which means even more thunderstorms like we had yesterday. Thunderstorms in February are surreal. 

I've been doing really well with my writing goals so far this year, and I really want to keep up the momentum.

My January goal was to write at least 500 words every day. In February I added onto it by making at least 100 of those words be towards Casanova. It was a really good move! I'm starting to learn that challenges like NaNo (or even little self-motivated ones like this) are really good at forcing myself to be accountable.

In March, though, I'm considering dropping the Casanova word count goal in order to gear up to do the story for Camp NaNo in April. I'm afraid I might burn myself out by the time Camp NaNo comes by, and I really want to make it a success this year.

I'm hoping that dropping the pressure to write for Casanova every day will force me to do some behind-the-scenes building. I've collected a lot of sticky notes in my school notebooks of things I know I need to work on, but I've never gotten around to actually doing anything. I've had a list of things to research since NaNo that I've never gotten around to.

Of course, there's no way for me to quantitatively track my backstage work, so this plan might not go as well as I'm hoping. And I haven't thought of a plan B yet.

I'm planning to do another 25,000 word goal for this Camp NaNo, which is definitely going to be a challenge based on this month's progress. It's not going to be as insane as NaNo, which will be good, but it's going to require even more motivation. Which is good! I want to make more progress with Casanova than I'm making now.

I'm also going to use the same game plan I used during NaNo -- I'm going to let myself write for more than just Casanova during April, but the other stories don't get to count towards my Camp NaNo progress. Those are extra. This worked really well for me in November and I'm hoping it'll keep me going if I hit roadblocks. (Which is very likely.)

Hopefully by the end of April I'll have something resembling a readable first draft of Casanova! (Well, second draft, I guess.) Right now I'm working towards having a draft that can be read beginning to end, however rough it is. I might need to make a really comprehensive outline between now and the end of March to get there. I don't know.

I'm hoping to make another post about my May / June writing goals as Camp NaNo ends, which I may tack on to a April reflection post. We'll see. Anyway, these next two months should be an adventure. If anyone else is planning on doing Camp NaNo, let me know! I'd love some competition company ♥