Every time I try to do Camp NaNoWriMo or start a long form project, I get bogged down in my own expectations. I become convinced that the project isn’t good enough, and that leads to anxiety, and that in turn leads to me not writing. And this year has so far not been any different. I haven’t been able to get any work done on my story, and new ideas keep popping up in the meantime which leads me to comparison, and more stalling. So I have to set the project down for the time being and try and find a way to get myself to write on a regular basis without getting bogged down in the “is this good enough” and “god that writing goal seems impossible to hit.”
With that in mind, I’m thinking of doing a “found fiction” experiment on this blog. Tentatively titled My Nightmare Journal, the idea is that the narrator of each story is writing down a cavalcade of nightmares in which they take the role of different people. Meanwhile strange stuff is happening in their waking life which blurs the line between what is real and what isn’t. There would be no set word count or minimum lenght for any of the entries. There would, however, be a goal of one story per week, posted Wednesdays so that people would know when to come back to the blog for a new story. I’ve already gotten some work done on a “prologue,” so the first entry should be up by tomorrow.
I think this will be a fun experiment in online serialization, and a great way to write without the “it must be good enough for publication” thing drgging me down.