Once again, I have joined Camp NaNoWriMo April. The goal I chose is not a word count, but minutes; 1800 minutes, one hour for every day this month, shall be spent clearing out my notes cache. I intend to reach the bottom! If I finish with time left over, I will move on to fixing the smaller messes I made in cleaning up.

Nestled in this event is another, OHHOW, or One Hundred Hours Of Writing. It is a series of back-to-back live streams, hosted by volunteer writers who encourage their viewers to write with them. We all track and report our progress, for the fun of trying to beat our score last time. The OHHOW events during NaNoWriMo camp months are 50 hours long, not the full 100 they do in November’s main event, but 50 are plenty. For some reason, I found it extra fun this year.

I’m so excited now! So many ideas have run past my eyes, ones I had forgotten, ones I have already expanded – I can hardly wait to finish, to explore each of them, to see which ones can become whole, to find out how they end. That is one annoying thing about being a writer I have encountered; every now and I want to finish reading a story and cannot, because I have not written the rest yet.

One of my friends asked how my work was going recently. In thinking through my answer, I reignited my interest in my most complete work. I have not looked at it in so long! Maybe that is helpful to me; maybe I need to change projects now and then to stay productive. The next step in that one, in that science fiction novel I have mentioned before, is to get a draft ready to send to a beta reader. I hope the feedback from a fresh pair of eyes helps. When I read it, it seems shallow, somehow. Something is missing, and I can’t tell what.

So, my current tasks are as follows: finish Camp, do the yearly in-depth checks and maintenance on my website, prepare a draft for beta readers, and plan for the writing event in July.

Until next month!