Stepping Outside the Comfort Zone! It's Bootcamp Time!

The countdown is on. If you are a member of Savvy Authors, you probably know that Liz Pelletier and Dawn McClure and running another one of their Author Bootcamps and this one couldn’t come at a better time in my life.

With my three-month old son absorbing 99.9% of my time; writing, reading and reading for my craft have taken a back seat other than the half an hour spent at bed. I’ve been tinkering with my plots and writing when I put him to bed at nights, but its not enough. The word counts aren’t anything to brag about and I’ve been reading the same craft books since Christmas.

And originally, I hadn’t thought that I would do Bootcamp this time around because I have my little pumpkin and I've almost finished a draft of one of my work-in-progresses. I’ve done Bootcamp three times before and its similar to NaNo, which I’ve also done for the past three years and won, but I’m not one of those people that can lose - I have to win - it’s in my DNA.

Bootcamp gets a little more out of you because you are part of a team. There’s no ‘reach 50,000 words like in NaNo’, instead it challenges you to write the absolute most you can everyday and you are accountable to your teammates if you decide to be lazy for the day and watch television instead of touching the keyboard.

I’m one of the procrastinator writers - I’ve been working on the same darn three stories since I started seriously writing. Each time I think I get the plot setup, I discover something different and go right back to the beginning, or I’d write the ending and not know how to fill in the middle. Pro-cras-tin-ator.

Last month I took a wonderful workshop called “Rose’s Plotting Bootcamp” with sisters Elle James and Delilah Devlin. In this workshop I learned how to setup my skeleton outline for the story with a logline, a projected theme, and all the “necessary” tidbits that I need without it taking six months to construct.  We did it in a month and I was excited to apply it to my writing last month. I learned that it actually works. I’m five scenes away from finishing an actual “full” first draft of my paranormal romance Dark Healing.

So when the advertisement for Bootcamp came around, I thought that I’d just take a month off before I start my heavy duty revision on Dark Healing, afterall I did finish a first draft, which is a Resolution of mine. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I need that push out of my comfort zone and Bootcamp is that push for me.

I think that we all need that “push” in our lives to get us over that hump (I especially need it when it comes to laundry). It’s that little push (or big heaving push) that pushes us out of our comfort zones that makes life interesting. With my group, the Warrior Writers behind me, I am ready to take on the month of April. Is there anything in your life that you need a little or big push for you to do? Maybe April is that month.

Good luck to everyone that has enlisted in Bootcamp!

R.J.