The atmosphere and buzz around NaNoWriMo is infectious and a delight to experience. I get charged up, my cup refilled at the prospect of experiencing a good challenge with fellow writers for an entire month.
Oftentimes, we want more of the same, but too much of anything is never good. So the folks who run the popular writing challenge created a means to give us just enough to keep the creativity and productivity flowing till next November.
Camp NaNo(WriMo).
Camp NaNo is a small version of National Novel Writing Month, with a few tweaks and changes to appeal to writerly needs. These Camps Occur twice a year: once in April, and the other in July.
Instead of the challenge of writing 50k words in a month, you can set your own challenge or goals. A lot of novelists will take April to clean up their first draft they wrote in November, finding critique partners and reviewing what they had stored away for the winter.
Some writers will opt for outlining a new novel, or start brewing ideas for a collection of short stories or poems.
Whatever goal you have in mind, you can strive for it with fellow writers during this time. My personal goal for last Camp NaNo was to complete draft 2 of my novel, and I failed horribly.
And that’s okay! It’s not all about badges and success. No matter if you are doing NaNoWriMo or joining their camp, it’s all about making progress at your own pace.
Participating in Camp NaNo is as easy as signing up or logging in to $ NaNoWriMo.org$ and setting up your goals. There will be a button on your dashboard that says "create a new project". Once you click it, you are prompted to give just a little information about the project at hand. This is similar to the regular NaNoWriMo creation, and is not exclusive to NaNoWriMo or Camp NaNo. You can use this feature throughout the year to help keep your goals in check.
To earn badges, just hover over them to see what they require. Usually they feed off one another to motivate you to update your goal every day, and some will not be accessible if you skip a day.
This does not affect your ability to "win" Camp Nano. It’s just another fun feature.
You win Camp Nano when you have achieved the goal you have set for yourself in the month of April or July. Camp Nano, and NaNoWriMo as a whole, run on an honor system, but to cheat the system would only be cheating yourself. There’s no point in winning unless you’ve hit your goal.
Sure, there are ‘prizes’ if you reach the finish line, but Camp Nano has a very loose definition of "goals", so winning isn’t as much of an uphill climb as it is in November.
You win by doing. You win by setting realistic expectations for your personal needs and seeing them through to the end. This isn’t NaNoWriMo. There is no big challenge with preparation and specific mindsets needed, unless you want it to be!
And that’s it! Camp NaNo is just a fun way to group up with other writers and get some extra words in. NovelPad would love to help you out this Camp Nano, so $ try us for free$ , then use the code CAMPNANO23 for 20% off your first year! (Redeem by August 31, 2023). Happy camping!