 Hmm. You know you haven't ridden in too long when the NaNoWriMo website locks you out. Okay the NaNoWriMo website is back up to date so my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. It is currently the 27th of April which means there are four days including today until the end of Camp NaNoWriMo. My goal for Camp NaNoWriMo was to do 30 hours or 1,800 minutes and I'm currently sitting at 1,222 minutes. So if I want to catch up that means in the next four days I need to do 578 minutes which is that can't be right. That's nine hours. Holy crap. So I have nine hours and 18 minutes to do in the next four days which is two hours and what 25 minutes a day between 20 and 25 minutes a day. I think we can safely say that is not going to happen. However I do want to write for the next four days. I do want to get back on track. It has now been five days since I last wrote which means my NaNoWriMo stats chart is not looking very healthy. My hours are also not looking very healthy. In both cases you see progress progress progress progress then nothing for five days. So let's do something about that. So I've done my hour and four minutes five minutes of writing and I've done 1,220 words. So if I add that to the Camp NaNoWriMo website that brings my word count to 21,553 words in the Camp website and in my spreadsheet. God I've got to skip all these days in my spreadsheet because I didn't do anything last week but oh well and that brings me to 22,557 words. So about 2,000 words over and in terms of timing that brings me to 1,287 words when I should be at 1,620 today. So obviously I only did an hour today. I haven't caught up but I haven't fallen behind today either. All in all today's session was interesting like I had an idea yesterday about what I wanted to write about. I had an idea for how I could transition out of the first meeting scene and also make her boyfriend get in the way so Cecily can start seriously thinking about how she's going to handle him and I got a little bit stuck when I first started because I was trying to write it from Kara's point of view and it just wasn't working so I got maybe two-thirds of the way through that session and just went okay why don't I try it from Cecily's point of view and suddenly it worked so of that 1,200 words like 200 were the first two-thirds of that session when I was trying to do it in one point of view and then as soon as I switched it became so much easier. So it's really interesting how those little switches can make things work. From here the next scene I need to write is one of Cecily spying on Kara and deciding that the boyfriend is too big a problem and she needs to get rid of him. In order to write that scene I need to think about his backstory though and one of the things I've been trying to crack is how do I make him so unlikable we don't care like that she kills him but I think that is a problem for tomorrow. It is now Friday the 1st of May so Camp Nanarima was over and I failed this week. I wrote on Monday and Tuesday and didn't actually write for the rest of the week. So the final numbers are my goal was 1,800 minutes or 30 hours in 30 days and I actually wrote for 1,319 minutes so I was exactly eight hours and one minute behind my target. So not a great performance however I have actually made progress in the last month. I did work on the book for 1,319 minutes and I have 22,307 words 23,207 words in my story so there is actually something there which there wasn't a month ago and that's worth acknowledging. However it is less than I wanted to do and it's significantly less than what I managed to get done in normal Nanarima last year which was I think 54,000 by the end of the 30 days and on one hand part of me compares this last month to that month and I think like I really didn't do what I was capable of but then another part of me looks back on last November and goes actually maybe that was a much bigger achievement than I realized at the time and it's worth acknowledging myself for that project. So what went wrong in my camp? There are a few different things. One is that this project is far more challenging than anything I've worked on in the past. It's also very different to anything I've worked on in the past and I think that meant it was quite slow moving even when I was actively working on it unlike the last few days. On a related note is the fact that there was so much backstory and character work I had to incorporate into the scenes I was writing so a lot of the scenes I had listed from the plotting work I did last month were things like Cecily is sitting on the fire escape spying on Kara through her windows and the thing is even though I knew Cecily would be spying on Kara I hadn't thought about what she would be seeing so it was almost like I had to think of two scenes at once and the same thing Cecily's eavesdropping on a phone call well what's the phone call about and why is it important for the readers to be listening in so there was a lot more thinking that needed to be done that I hadn't realized back when I was at the outlining stage. Aside from the project itself obviously the coronavirus pandemic I think has had an impact now fortunately I'm healthy everyone I love and know is healthy but it has significantly changed the world at the moment so I've been working from home for six weeks now the last day in the office was the 13th of March and even though I've worked from home in the past I was surprised that it was a significant adjustment and I think part of it is that I have been less than motivated at my day job lately but another part of it is that when you lose that routine of wake up go to the office I feel like there's a lot more willpower involved in getting your job done every day and a lot more decision making as well and we do have limited decision making abilities each day and we do have limited willpower to draw on so rather than just getting up and going to work and going through my usual routine I would wake up and I'd have the choice do I get up now or do I lounge for a bit do I read or watch Netflix do I work on my book so there were a lot of decisions to make even from the start of the day and every and even though it sounds like small things every single one of those decisions does take mental energy and I think just being in that space where there were a lot of decisions to make and a lot of my activity was just being pushed via willpower rather than via routine it meant it was sapping some of the mental resources I could have been spending on this book so that made things a little bit harder as well the third thing is actually something that's happening in my personal life at the moment which the third thing is actually something that's happening in my personal life at the moment and it's a good thing but it's a very time-consuming thing and it's a very mentally taxing thing over the past two weeks I've actually put a lot of time and energy and thought into this thing that's happening and I can't actually say what it is just yet so I know that's vague and not very helpful but there was this spanner thrown into my project that I wasn't expecting at the beginning of the month and it actually affected the last two weeks of my project which meant I wasn't actually able to catch up with those 30 hours having said that I think that if this hadn't happened I would have been able to make up the deficit because I had gotten on track by that stage I did have a much better idea of how to tackle the book I was experimenting with writing in the morning as well and potentially trying multiple writing sessions a day so if this thing hadn't gone thrown at me then I would have had the time and capacity to catch up but oh well life doesn't always wait for Camp Nanarimo so all in all it wasn't the experience I was expecting I didn't make as much progress as I was expecting but I did make progress I am over 20,000 words into a new book I am going to continue chipping away at it I was originally hoping it would be a two-month drafting process but I'm thinking three is probably more realistic so at the end of June hopefully I will have a finished draft and it will be something that I've learned from and that I'm really proud of when it comes to my writing routine over the coming weeks as I mentioned there is this personal thing happening that's probably going to continue being a thing for at least the next week so for the next week I'm expecting it'll be like the last two in that if I have the time and the energy I will continue pushing to chip away at this book but if I don't then this thing that's happening it is something that's happening now it's going to be taking my time and energy for a limited amount of time and that's going to be my focus until it's all wrapped up so we'll see what happens and hopefully that works out and I'll have another update for you in the next couple of weeks other than that let me know how your camp went did you achieve your writing goal if you did congratulations that's amazing I'm so proud of you if you didn't what did you learn from the experience and how do you think you'll take that into the next camp nanorhymo or your next writing challenge please let me know in the comments if you like this video give me a thumbs up and hit the notification bell and I will see you next time bye