Once upon a time, a girl with a podcast about finding and/or creating the writing community that best fits your own writing needs, decided to take her own advice. Five years ago, I decided to ask the listeners of the Stop Writing Alone podcast if they’d like to join me for a one month writing intensive live on Zoom.
How It All Began
It was late February when I first put out the call for a “Happy Campers Club” created to support writers taking on the writing/creativity challenge of their choice in the overly inspirational month of April. In 2020, the choices of online writing/creative challenges that I knew of were:
Camp NaNoWriMo
NaPoWriMo
#100DayProject
Blogging from A to Z
Over the years I had participated in each one of these challenges at different times and while each of them had their own communities, I really wanted a place where the cool peeps I met in each could meet all together. I figured there was no reason to keep these communities separated when, at the end of the day, we all wanted support in reaching our own personal goals. I put all of this thought into one of those shouts out into the Internet to see if anyone else was interested, and a brave group of creative experimenters, known to me forever as the “OG” Stop Writing Alone Happy Campers, said, “Sign me up!”
I would like to thank all the OG Stop Writing Alone Happy Campers for taking a leap with me into tiny Zoom boxes in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, without them putting their faith in an untested online writing community event like the Happy Campers Club of April 2020, none of this that we enjoy in the Stop Writing Alone Substack community would be here today! A super special thank you to Heather L Huffman and Jamie Angevine for being the two early sign ups for the month-long writing intensive event. Those two sign ups held my hand from cancelling the Stop Writing Alone Happy Campers Club entirely when it became clear the world was scheduling a “temporary” lock down that looked like it *might* overlap with our April 1st launch. Who knows if I ever would have had the confidence to try again before the lock down was through with us? The start of the Stop Writing Alone events definitely saved my sanity, giving me something to do in between playing background sock-puppet-person to two different forms of online school (one screen student-facing, the other one teacher-facing!). The continuation of our meetings beyond that first month, and the bond built between us since, inspired the growth of the Stop Writing Alone community as it stands today.
What Did Happy Campers Club Look Like?
It was a simple enough idea — I wanted to create time to chat and learn together, to write together, and to have fun with fiction together, everything I still strive for here every month. Want to know what it all looked like back then? Here’s a copy of our April 2020 calendar. This is how we showed up every single week in April 2020. Just at the exact moment that the world asked us all to stay inside, stare at our screens and stay socially distant, a group of us found a brand new way to connect and escape into our joy of writing.
I thought it would, at best, be a once per year, month-long intensive. That launch year really demanded more. After April ended the world continued its lock down and we missed the writing companionship we found, so I launched another month-long intensive, then another one, then a two-month long support system for the NaNoWriMo writers, and… well… it started to feel like something that didn’t need to be a special moment in our writing year, but a necessary support to maintain throughout! It took me a long time to find the right space and way to bring that all to fruition, but thanks to another OG Happy Camper, Jackie Dana, Substack was put on my radar and the Stop Writing Alone monthly events found a place to call home!
The number of writers that have “come back” to writing, have completed passion projects, have braved the world of submitting their work juggling the rejections and acceptance emails as a result, and just found joy in their own and each other’s creation process as a result of this group continues to astound me. The human to human support I witness month after month between the people who have connected here, whether in their writing life or beyond, warms every inch of my soul. The laughs, the tears, the pages read and written, it all humbles me.
I am extremely grateful for that moment in time I trusted one of my crazy ideas, but, even more than that, I am forever indebted to those who joined me on the journey. It wasn’t lost on me then, and remains my full understanding, that absolutely none of this can be accomplished alone.
And to hear a littl ebit of what it was all like from a small group of the original participants, I give to you…
A Time-Capsule Of Sorts
Here’s a special podcast episode we did in the month after that first Happy Campers Club:
When We Stopped Writing Alone | The Happy Campers Club
In April 2020, Nicole launched a new one month long writing community experiment. She called it The Stop Writing Alone Happy Campers Club. She made a plan, and a number of people showed up. She didn’t know the country would go into quarantine. She didn’t know how important community would be. She wasn’t sure it would be valuable. It was. This week’s epi…
Happy Anniversary, Happy Campers! Thank you, always, for so much…