 Hello my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. I'm an aspiring writer and Camp Nanorimo is coming up so I thought I'd do a quick video with what my plans are this year. If you're not familiar with Nanorimo and Camp Nanorimo, basically Nanorimo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It is in November of every year and a bunch of crazy people from all around the world attempt to write a book in a month and by a book I mean 50,000 words. So depending on like the genre of book you're writing that's probably not going to be a complete book but it's a really good writing goal and the community's awesome and they always have a whole lot of like special offers for writers and it's a lot of fun to be part of. Camp Nanorimo is the same community in the same organization but it's less formalized than Nanorimo. Nanorimo is very strict 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. With Camp Nanorimo you can choose your own goal and choose your own project so for your own goal it could be a lower or higher word count goal, it could be a revision goal or an editing goal rather than a writing goal, it could be a brainstorming goal, it could be a time goal so how many minutes or hours you want to spend on your project rather than how many words you want to write. The other thing is that you can choose your own project so National Novel Writing Month is supposed to be around writing a novel. For Camp you could do a screenplay or a poetry collection or a short story collection or a non-fiction book. Basically whatever your heart desires you can set up your own Camp Nanorimo goal. Now Camp Nanorimo starts in April and for me that timing is a little bit awkward this year because as I mentioned in my last video I think I'm actually going to be working with a book coach soon on my YA Superheroes Meet the Russian Mafia book Powerless and I need to get that done in time to send it to her so I need to send it to her in the first week of April so that makes it a little bit awkward for starting a new project just because I'm going to lose some time to this old project so I thought what would be a better goal for me would be a time one that specifically time spent on writing and writing related things so my goal is going to be 45 minutes a day six days a week the reason it's six days a week is because I think it's good to have a day off the reason it's 45 minutes is because every time I've tried to do an hour a day I've failed and that's become particularly true in my current job which is a little bit more demanding than my last one so we're going for 45 minutes six days a week and we'll see how it goes I don't actually know how many minutes that is for the month so bear with me so according to my calculator that is 1170 minutes for the month and I'm not I'm not sure if that's going to be achievable to be completely honest just because this year unless I've committed to doing some sort of like challenge for a week I have really just been writing on the weekends however the past couple of weekends that since I've been working on powerless again I have been putting in quite a lot of hours like two or three hours a day almost so yeah it might not be it might not end up being spread over six days a week I don't know I don't know how it's going to go to be completely honest I don't know how realistic it is for me to get time done during the week with this job just because it hasn't really worked for me since I started this job but there is still the potential of reaching that target we're just focused work on the weekends so we'll see how it goes when it comes to what I'm going to be working on there are a couple of things on my to-do list the first one is obviously preparing powerless for my book coach now the deadline for her is the 5th of April I believe I'll probably have it done a little bit earlier than that because I do work on the weekends in fact I might even have it done before April just because at the time of filming this I'm already 40 of the way through and I've got another weekend before April starts so we'll see but if I haven't finished it before April the first thing will be preparing powerless when I say preparing powerless that is rereading addressing beta reader feedback trying to make some character motivations more explicit and build up some relationships so they don't feel so insta-lovy and there's also one scene that I've never been happy with and none of my beta readers actually commented on it I realized as I was going through it but I've never really liked this scene and I would like to crack it but it's proving difficult so the first project is the chunk of time that will be spent on getting powerless ready the second chunk is I actually want to start querying powerless and I didn't know if it was going to be ready but as I've been rereading it over the past couple of weeks I've just really enjoyed it like I've been going through it going oh my god I love this story so much it's so much fun so even though yes it's not perfect yet there is room for improvement part of the publishing process is working with an editor and getting feedback and getting it improved so I thought you know if I still like it this much why not just have a try so another goal for April is going to be doing my query letter and I've already got a spreadsheet of agents but maybe doing a little bit more research my list is very US centric at the moment and I'd like to be querying in the UK as well so building out my agent list especially for this book because it's a tighter niche than the general fantasy project I was working on as well as doing the dreaded query letter which I'm not looking forward to so that's another benefit of having a time goal instead of a word count goal if my goal was word counts and I spent the whole month just trying to get my query letter right I would definitely fail however it is possible I could spend over a thousand minutes on my query letter if I do I hope it ends up being a good one after that I have two options one is to go back to my fantasy hot mess which has been the major saga of 2020 basically a lot of writing and rewriting and getting nowhere I'm thinking that maybe in the second half of the month because by then I probably would have had about a month's break maybe then I'll feel fresher I'll be ready to go back to it with a new perspective maybe not we'll see if not then I'll be looking at starting a new project and I have no idea what it is yet so stay tuned so those are my plans for Camp Nanarimo 45 minutes a day six days a week or 1,170 minutes over the length of the month and that's going to be spent on writing related things so preparing powerless my powerless query letter and either fantasy hot mess or maybe a new project now I'd love to hear from you are you going to do Camp Nanarimo this April and if so what are you going to be working on actually one what are you going to be working on and two what's your goal for the month please let me know in the comments below if you want to be friends on the Nanarimo website also let me know what your Nanarimo username is and we can connect there and I will see you next time bye