For the Love of Words: June and July

If you write books or have friends that do, you’ve probably heard of NaNoWriMo and its sister competition, Camp NaNoWriMo. The idea is to write 50,000 words a month, so about 1,667 words a day. Sounds easy on paper to someone who has pulled of 10,000 words in a day a few times, however the older I get the harder it is to do this.

June started with me almost finishing the first draft of Justice and Lies, but I’ve spent some hard cycles of burnout over the last two months and I kind of just stopped with less than 5,000 words to write. I’ll write eventually.

June also provided a glitch in my plan – for my day job, I work in a chat platform so I type 40 hours a week for my job even before I write books. We’ve been super busy and I’ve been typing a lot and I developed this tenderness in my middle finger. The doctor suggested I rest it for a few weeks and knowing I wanted to do Camp NaNoWriMo I decided it was a good idea.

When Camp finally showed up, I hit the ground running and then got behind. It was a system of catching up on the weekends and not writing on the week days until I hit 9k in a weekend and burned out.

I ended up at about 30K out of 50k which isn’t bad, however I haven’t written anything since then. Almost a month ago. Then my finger started hurting again and I hit the end of the outline I had, so it was a perfect storm.

The truth is, with the finger injury coming back again, it’s clear I probably need to take more than a few weeks off. I’ll probably take the rest of the year to finish this draft, and maybe one other surprise but I know I need to take the time to rest my finger. Just means more time to read!