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.

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!

Camp NaNoWriMo

I’ve been thinking for a while that I was at my most productive in this whole writing thing back in November for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and that it’d be really nice to get some of that high intensity output back. Thankfully I’m not the only one that feels that way. There are many initiatives throughout the year to do a novel in a month, since not everyone wants to do it in November, or like me, they want to do it more than just once a year. 

So this year I’m going to give Camp NaNoWriMo a try. It is pretty much what it sounds like; NaNoWriMo in the summer, a mental summer camp where you escape into your writing. Sounds pretty good to me. Just as a side note, NaNoWriMo isn’t the only group doing the novel-in-30-days thing in June; see also JuNoWriMo.com.

This won’t change anything for my writing; I’ll still hold myself to everything I’m currently doing. (Even WIP500, which I haven’t updated here in a month, but I do still have all my blog posts I can use to update my word count as soon as I have time to do it.) The one change I’ll have to institute is a division between editing work and writing work. I’ll have a Camp NaNoWriMo project and I’ll be continuing to edit things on the side. Those editing things will count towards WIP500 but not towards CNaNoWriMo.

Anyone else feeling crazy enough to jump into this? Or is summer too busy a time for you? What about this coming November? Any NaNoWriMo 2012 people reading this? Let me know in the comments.