Camp Nano July 2019

Camp Nano is here again. In case you didn't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's an online writing competition that happens every year in November. It's how I got started. (Well, it's how I got re-started... It's a long story.)

And Camp Nano happens every year in April and July. The major differences are that in Camp Nano you join a virtual cabin with other writer pals, and you can set your own goals, whereas in November everyone is trying to reach 50,000 words.

I joined the April session but I failed miserably because I was too busy at my new job. But now the July session is here and I'm ready for action.

Okay so I'm one day behind already, because today is July 2nd, and I only realized it was time for Camp when I opened my email this morning. I'm not really worried about that though, because I decided to set an extremely modest goal for myself of only 200 words per day. Just enough to keep me writing every day without too much strain on my other responsibilities. Also I just finished writing my first novel, which took SIX YEARS to write, so I want to take a short break before getting back to serious work on my next book. During this break I plan to catch up on a lot of video games. So that's why I set an easy goal.

Anyway, I'm only trying to generate some content to put up on my author website as a blog. Here are my possible topic areas:

Dinosaurs, time travel, robots, space, ghosts, diseases, murder, graveyard poetry, gothic fiction, cancer medicine, writing craft, publishing, the horror stories of HP Lovecraft.

I definitely feel like I ought to write something about all the cancer research I did for Programmed Cell Death, but I feel like it would have been better to write those blog posts as I was doing the research, not now a year later, when I already poured all of it into the book. Plus, now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that would make for interesting reading on my blog. So scratch that, after all.

But one thing I can do pretty quickly is to finally start revising and publishing all the essays I wrote on Graveyard Poetry, American Gothic Literature, Creative Non-fiction, and fiction craft. But I just decided I don’t want to count those toward my July Camp Nano goal, because that would be cheating. I want to new content. I also want freedom from the constraints of reality, and from what I did in the past. So new content it is. Starting tomorrow.

-Jon