Camp NaNoWriMo - April 2017

[Valka D'Ur]

The countdown is on!

I just received this email from NaNoWriMo:

How to explain Camp NaNoWriMo… it’s a virtual writer’s retreat and its boundaries are limited only by your imagination. This April, take four weeks to embrace your creativity and dive into your next great writing project.

Declare your Camp project for April today!
At Camp, you can:

• Tackle any writing project, novel or not. Are you revising your next draft? Preparing to write the next great musical, a la Lin Manuel Miranda? Penning a collection of poems? Camp is fertile ground.
  
• Set your own writing goal. Warm up for 50K by setting a word-count goal of 25,000. Or, for the first time, you can track hours, lines, or pages... whatever works for you.
  
• Find your own, personal writing group. At Camp NaNoWriMo, you can be sorted into a public cabin with writers according to your preferences, or create a private cabin for you and your already-established writing buddies.

And hopefully, you'll catch a glimpse of the Storysquatch, clutching inspiration in its paw. Are you ready to discover the undiscovered?

Hmm. It looks like they're being much more flexible about setting goals. And I have absolutely no idea what a "Storysquatch" is.

But I'm in. Who else is? Shall we have our own virtual cabin this time?

 

[JohannaK]

Definitely not joining this time. I'm getting to the final stage of my degree and I'll need to focus.

 

[Zkribbler]

I'm not ignoring you...I just don't know yet.

Last night I was working on creating an evil race of aliens: hive-minded insectoids who implanted mind-control devices in humans. I stopped patting myself on the back when I realized I'd merely re-skinned the Borg.

 

[Zkribbler]

Shall we have our own virtual cabin this time?

I'm still unable to focus on what I want to do. Most likely I'll go back to work on my 3-novella trilogy.

BTW: What is a virtual cabin?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's like a small group of writing buddies who encourage one another, bounce ideas off one another... imagine a RL summer camp, with a group of people in a cabin, but instead of canoeing, swimming, and whatever else people do at those places, the NaNoWriMo virtual cabins have to do with writing.


This said, at this point I'm not sure if I'm going to be participating in the April event. RL has thrown me several issues: having to move (packing has stolen the time I would have been using for prep work), some bureaucratic crap about my dad, and I had to have my older cat euthanized three days ago.

My mind is just not in the right headspace to continue Ranok kindroth Orum's adventures in Darkwood Forest right now.

 

[Glassfan]

...and I had to have my older cat euthanized three days ago.

I'm so sad to hear that. I had to put down our cat recently and I just stood there and cried. They're almost like our children. My sympathy to you.

 

[Mouthwash]

I'm going for it. Doing 25k words (daily goal 833) and it starts in 23 hours. Anyone have advice?

I feel like a little kid entering the mall by himself!

 

[JohannaK]

Outline, outline, outline.

 

[Mouthwash]

I'm winging it. Can you elaborate a bit more on why outline is so important?

 

[JohannaK]

Unless you have a wondrous talent or unprecedented stroke of creative diarrhoea (as in you cant hold back the flood of words, not as in all you spew is manure), having a good outline is going to tell you the broad strokes of what to write about and where to go.

 

[Mouthwash]

I don't even know what I want it to to be about (although I do have a pretty good setting). I'll go with the wondrous talent/creative diarrhea thing.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm going for it. Doing 25k words (daily goal 833) and it starts in 23 hours. Anyone have advice?

I feel like a little kid entering the mall by himself!

My best advice is to pace yourself. You know if you do best writing in one whole bloc of time or breaking it up in two or three sessions. Since you've opted for a "half-November" total, it's like doing an Iron Pen story every day, as far as length goes. The upside is that you only need one beginning, middle, and end.

JohannaK is correct to advise making an outline. Otherwise your story has a good chance of either meandering all over the place and going nowhere, or you'll get writer's block early on... and go nowhere.

This happened to me a couple of years ago. I had what I thought was a great idea, and figured there was no need for an outline.

A mere few hundred words later, I realized I was wrong. The idea wasn't bad, but it was an ambitious one that needed a lot more structure than I gave it.

But the point of NaNoWriMo is not so much the finished story as it is encouraging people to write, period. I'm glad you decided to go for this, and I wish you and everyone else here who is taking part this time the very best.

My move won't be completed until April 4, which means I've lost a month of prep, half my outlined material and maps are packed away, and I'm in the wrong headspace for this right now.

But I'll stick around to offer congratulations, encouragement, and advice, and take part in the July Camp event.

 

[Mouthwash]

Okay. How do you feel about making a cabin for CFC posters (not exclusively, just to draw familiar people in)?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've never actually been part of a cabin, so I'm not sure how to set one up.

How are things going? It's the 5th day (maybe the 6th for your time zone).

 

[Mouthwash]

I give up. I got a basic story going but I have no plan, and things are happening IRL. Going to continue it in July.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

That's how it goes sometimes. At least you got some words, which is better than zero. I ended up with a word count of zero far too many times.

This will give you time to do more research and come up with an outline (as well as alternatives in case your characters decide they want the story to go in a direction you hadn't anticipated).