Camp NaNoWriMo August - Dead Sense

Ever since I finished my zombie story The Fast and the Dead back in February, I’ve been thinking that not only is the title no longer really appropriate but that I’d have to completely rewrite the story. This is doubly true since Camp NaNoWriMo in June, an experience that has taught me a huge amount about longer-form fiction.

So with less than two weeks remaining until Camp NaNoWriMo August, I’ve decided that my August project is going to be that rewrite. I’ll be using the first draft of TFatD as reference material, but I probably won’t have to refer to it all that much. I’ll be taking the core concepts of the story, and the characters, and fleshing both out into something much better. (At least I hope so!)

Gone will be a lot of the empty filler that I ended up writing when I didn’t know what else to write. Probably the most important thing I learned during June’s Camp NaNoWriMo was how to keep all that filler separate from the contents of the book, so with some luck, I should be able to keep it pretty tight.

For the Win

Yes, my 50,000 words are complete and my first successful Camp NaNoWriMo is behind me. My next is coming up soon though, I think I’m going to be crazy enough to do August as well.

Just because the challenge is over doesn’t mean the book is though. In the end, I had a LOT of writing to do really quickly. I wrote more than 11,000 words on the last day alone, and more than 6,000 the day before. In order to do all that writing that quickly, I worked on chunks of the book that I could spit out really fast, and wrote a lot of free-form brainstorms to keep the plot straight and make sure things made sense.

What I ended up with are lots of individual chapters that jump around crazily through time, which I need to put in their proper chronological order and then read over for flow and consistency, as well as write any gap-filler which may be needed (and it will be needed) to stitch the different pieces together as one.

Basically this means that for tonight, I’m a little bit brain dead and will not be posting a new chunk of the book. That can wait for tomorrow. For now, hooray! I’m done. Until August.

The Home Stretch

Two days left, and still thousands of words left to go.

I’m confident I can do it easily enough; I have the next two days completely free and clear to focus on it and just get it done, so I’m not worried about the raw word count at all. In order to write really quickly though, I’m writing out of chronological order, tackling sections of the story as they filter through my mind and feel ready to write.

Because of that, I’m going to hold off on posting them here until I’ve finished, or at least until I have a long continuous stretch of story that begins where I last left off.

Wish me luck!

Camp NaNoWriMo/JuNoWriMo Begins. Ack.

It’s that time again… National Novel Writing Month. If you’re thinking that’s normally November, you’re right, but it turns out this is an awfully popular passtime, and some people want to do it at other times during the year too.

I’m going to go along with them. I’m signed up at Camp NaNoWriMo, the two-time summer branch of the organization, and will also be flying the JuNoWriMo banner.

It’s been June 1st for a little over an hour now, and I’m not real sure exactly what I’m going to write, but I’ll figure it out.

One big change from November is that this time I’m going to avoid the whole series of short stories thing. I found it difficult to maintain momentum when I had to stop and think up a whole new story at least once a week. So this time it’ll be a longer story I can just plow through.

Camp NaNoWriMo in June is only part one. They also apparently have Camp NaNoWriMo August, which is interesting since it’s a 31 day month, not 30. I’m not sure if I’m crazy enough to do that with only one month in between, but right now, before the madness, it’s kind of tempting.

Wish me luck!