“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don’t know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you’d mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.”
– Roger Zelazny (via writersrelief)
Last year, after doing both Camp NaNos back to back followed by NaNo prime, I suffered from NaNo burn out. I decided I would stop participating in the camps, to avoid that this year.
Then they went and not only moved it to April, but introduced flexible word counts.
So… I’m signed up.
I’m still trying to finish the project I started in August last year. Over the past months, I’ve gone through the existing content and cut out anything I can no longer use. (Even when I plot, I change my mind about things part way through a draft, which can lead to a lot of lost content.)
It was an interesting experience, and my total word count went from 102,575 to 69,642. I didn’t lose enough to count for an entire NaNo session, but it was still a significant chunk. I’m hoping to avoid losing quite as much this time, though I’ve set a conservative word count to make this camp lower stress.
It will be interesting to see if that makes a difference, or if I’ll just have the same lose spread out over a longer period of time 
I didn’t do my W1S1 update at the end of November, because I’d spent most of my time on NaNo. Then in December, I spent it on other things (holidays are inherently distracting), or on trying to sort through the manuscript as it sat after Camp NaNo and NaNo. There doesn’t seem to be much point in putting up a pretty graphic, given how little progress I made on the short story revisions.
I’d made up my mind not to do W1S1 this year, but then I got an invite to the new Google+ community and accepted, so on that I’m easy to sway, apparently. I expect to follow along quietly, though, as I’m not exactly going to be following the rules. I want to get through my revisions at this point more than I want to be adding to the to-do list. We’ll see how that goes for the next few months
Other than that, I will continue to sort through the NaNo draft, and figure out which parts of this story I’m keeping. I’ve been telling people it will be interesting to see what the word count is once I’m done hacking out all the things I changed my mind on.
While I don’t talk about it much here, I have a novel draft that I keep going back to, yet never finishing. It’s been rewritten at least four times; characters have been added, deleted, renamed, merged, split; the setting has been changed; and the world revised and sharpened.
And it’s still not right.
I expect this will be the story that sits at the back of my mind until I figure out how I really want to tell it, but for now I’ve decided to let it rest. I’ve learned a lot from working on it, but I think it’s time it earned me my Drawer Novel merit badge.
I’ve made this decision before, and then pulled it out only a few months later. This time I’m putting at least a year ban on it. We’ll see if I can stick to that for a change
“I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”
– On Writing, Stephen King (via expositively)
RT @Duotrope: Major Announcement: Duotrope is going paid on January 1st. Read the full announcement at https://t.co/eR8aKL9v
It’s still @NaNoWriMo Donation Day through to midnight PST! The new goal for the day is $60,000! — http://t.co/0lQr5UyX
I was able to get some revision time in last month, though I also had another project that then took over. Still, progress is good.
Now I just have to get those revised stories submitted 
One thing about doing Camp NaNowriMo in August: it means November creeps up and surprises me!
But I am set to go again this November. I’ll be rebelling, working on getting 50,000 more words at least on my August project. With luck, I’ll finish it this time, but I won’t really know that until the end.
So, here we go again!
What I don’t need right before #NaNoWriMo: a new idea nowhere near ready to start that will consume my thoughts anyway. #mybrainhatesme