Day 16 at Camp NaNoWriMo – A 30,000 Word Celebration

How many of you folks out there have watched FINDING NEMO?

Hands down, all of you steampunkish Jules Verne fans.

That isn’t the NEMO that I am talking about.

I’m talking about that Rosie O’Donnell voiced fish with the Aphasiatic tendencies.

“Just keep swimming,” that fish would say.

That is deep.

That is at least twenty thousand leagues deep.

All right. So maybe I am reaching by about nineteen thousand nine hundred ninety nine and nine-tenth of a league – but you try to brilliant this early in the morning.

Sometimes the words aren’t going to be wonderful.

Sometimes you’ll think that your words are absolute crap.

Sometimes your inner muse is going to sit there on that fence and just thumb her nose and maybe spit on you and kick you a few times if you are lucky.

Never mind the muse.

Never mind awaiting upon the spark of inspiration.

You don’t go to work and tell your boss that you have got “WORKER’S BLOCK” no matter how badly you feel about going to that day job. You just get up off of your ass and you go do it – on account of you are inordinantly fond of that whole concept of keeping a roof over your head.

Treat your writing with that same sort of matter-of-fact intensity.

JUST KEEP WRITING!

Just keep writing.

Just keep swimming.

You get this deep and nothing will look clear – so don’t trust your judgement. Don’t over-think. Get this first draft done.

Just keep writing.

Just keep swimming.

****************

I added another 800 words on Day 16. That brought my average daily word count down to 1612 – which is about the original quota I started at.

It also put me over the 30000 word mark – which is why I want to celebrate.

I’ve still got another 20,000 words to go – but so long as I just keep on writing I expect to get there by the end of the month.

But I want to celebrate.

Just a couple of weeks ago I released my short story collection DO-OVERS AND DETOURS in e-book format. The book was originally released in trade paperback and hardcover format by Dark Regions Press. I have hung onto the e-book rights because I prefer to handle those myself and I set the price at $2.99 a copy.

I didn’t do any promotion – which is always a mistake but I knew I did not have the time to give to any promotion if I wanted to hit my July Camp NaNoWriMo deadline. So the e-book sold a few copies but it mostly sank – about 20,000 leagues beneath the Amazon.

You like that?

I thought about that line for ten whole seconds before writing it.

🙂

For the rest of the month DO-OVERS AND DETOURS is available on Amazon for a mere 99 cents.

I apologize for the punky cover but I did not have much of a budget to run with this month.

There are eighteen stories and over two hundred pages of some of the wildest storytelling you could ever imagine. There’s a couple of my favorite stories in there and it is sure to give some of you writer-folks some inspiration for your own work.

If you would like to help me celebrate my 30,000 word mark PLEASE pick up a copy of DO-OVERS AND DETOURS. At 99 cents it is cheaper than a cup of lousy cold coffee. How can you pass up sweet words like that?

🙂

Available at Amazon.com

Available at Amazon.co.uk

Available at Amazon.ca

yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon