On the eve of lunacy

Wow, the title of this blog post is cooler than I meant it to be.

Anyway, tomorrow begins April, and with it a wide array of writing challenges. Thousands of people around the world will write their hearts out for Camp NaNoWriMo, a more flexible variation on the novel writing challenge I complete each November. Thousands of other people will write a poem a day for the whole month for NaPoWriMo. Because I’m a sucker for punishment, I’m going to be doing both.

I’ve set my goal for Camp NaNoWriMo at 30 000 words, focusing on writing satire/comical short stories so that I can work on my humorous and short story writing styles at the same time. So each day will require me to write 1000 words of short story and a poem – I suspect the poem will take longer, but we’ll see.

Camp NaNoWriMo has a cabin based system, where you are put into a cabin with 11 other writers who you can work with and support and who will hopefully make the month more fun and exciting. You can elect to have some writers you know in your cabin, but it’s still down to chance and there’s no real guarantees – I have ended up somewhere with nobody I know (at least I think I don’t know them). Luckily, they all seem to be very friendly, so hopefully it should be a great 30 days working with these new people.

As for the planning…well, it looks a little something like this:

Planning is going well, 7 hours out from the starting time.

Good luck to anybody out there trying their hand at either of these events! And wish me luck…I don’t know if there is enough caffeine in the world to get me through this but I’m about to find out. I’ll post about my progress in a few days.