Camp NaNoWriMo: July 2016

[Valka D'Ur]

Hi, all:

The July 2016 Camp NaNoWriMo event is just around the corner, and registration is open now.

For anyone who isn't familiar with this writing contest, "NaNoWriMo" is short for "National Novel Writing Month." However... it's actually international, doesn't have to be a novel, and it runs 3 times a year.

The November NaNoWriMo is the main event, where the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. The Camp events, in April and July, are more flexible. They still happens over 30 days, but contestants are allowed to choose their own writing goals, as long as they're a minimum of 10,000 words. According to the website, short story anthologies are acceptable as well, so it doesn't have to be all one novel.

That's the approach I took back in April, when I met and exceeded my Camp NaNoWriMo goal. I plan to do the same next month.

The website and registration are here: http://campnanowrimo.org/ .

There are some nice prizes for winners (downloadable freebies, as well as generous discounts on some excellent writing software and other resources).

It would be nice to see some more CFC folks come out for this. I know it's summer, but the nice thing about summer is you can sit under a tree and write. It's the best of both worlds.


(And for those who are interested in Iron Pen, I've decided to run a July challenge as well; there is still room for people to sign up for that... in fact, why not participate in Iron Pen and use your story as part of your NaNoWriMo entry? Everything written in July is eligible! )

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Wow. 109 views and not one comment. Am I going to be talking to myself all month?

Yesterday was Day 1, and I'm off to a good start with 822 words. The genre is science fiction, and the project is another part of the one I was doing in April.

 

[Mouthwash]

Is NaNoWriMo really a good way to get noticed? Or is it just a motivation to practice for people who like set goals and timetables?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Pretty much the latter, I gather.

...I can't stop my hindbrain from always wanting to spell it Camp WriNoMo...

 

[dusters]

The material from this year's NaNoWriMo events can't be posted on CFC, because of the autocensor rules (yes, some of the characters swear - quite a bit, in a couple of cases; it's necessary, to be true to the source material).

My Fighting Fantasy fanfic could be posted here, if it were anywhere close to being finished and properly edited. I know I'm going to need help with writing some of the fight scenes, as even during my 12 years in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I didn't have a lot to do with the fighters.


Could we please take this conversation to the NaNoWriMo thread in A&E? I'd like to discuss this further, but not in a thread that's going to disappear in a relatively short time.

It is surprising to me that you are about to include fighting in a story of yours. I find dialogue and even more fighting hard to display properly. I may exaggerate about dialogue, I have written some and critics have told me it's not bad, but I really prefer 3rd person narration.

It is actually a bit amazing - I have studied literature, been in many writers' gatherings, but since latvians are so introverted and they don't like to talk about serious stuff like working itself, I'm here discussing nuances of writing which I haven't really done in a while.

How is it Canada, do society/media pay more attention to writers? Do writers interact with readers or just stay deep in woods writing marvelous stories? (Sorry, if it's a naive question)

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It is surprising to me that you are about to include fighting in a story of yours. I find dialogue and even more fighting hard to display properly. I may exaggerate about dialogue, I have written some and critics have told me it's not bad, but I really prefer 3rd person narration.

It's surprising to me, too... but since the project I've taken on is novelizing the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (similar to Dungeons & Dragons, except the gamebooks are designed for one person to play, instead of a group), learning to write fight scenes is necessary. It's mostly swordfighting, of course, but that's something I've never done. When I play RPGs with a group, I play mage characters - not much fighting knowledge is needed to cast spells, unless it's applying a strategic use of spellcasting.

It is actually a bit amazing - I have studied literature, been in many writers' gatherings, but since latvians are so introverted and they don't like to talk about serious stuff like working itself, I'm here discussing nuances of writing which I haven't really done in a while.

How is it Canada, do society/media pay more attention to writers? Do writers interact with readers or just stay deep in woods writing marvelous stories? (Sorry, if it's a naive question)

There are writing groups in most cities, and most schools have some creative writing going on, whether in the English curriculum or contests. My high school had both a poetry club and a school newspaper, and I ended up doing a lot of editing for both of them. The poetry club put out an annual book of poems and very short stories written by students, and the actual club members were engaged in choosing the material to be included and those of us who could type and do layout (this was pre-computer and even pre-photocopier times) would spend time after school doing this.

I haven't joined any of the local writing groups, because I've noticed that they really don't understand science fiction. Even Margaret Atwood - one of the premiere Canadian authors, who has written a lot of science fiction in the past 20 years - doesn't understand it. So I tend to keep my writing among SF/F people who realize that science fiction isn't only about spaceships, rayguns, and monsters, and who understand that it's every bit as much legitimate literature as mainstream stuff.

Some writers do like to interact with their readers. For professional writers, it's considered part of the marketing strategy to do this anyway, whether the writer enjoys it or not. So there are times when a writer will have a table at a bookstore, and people can buy a copy and get it autographed and maybe have a brief conversation with the writer.

All the times when I've met writers in person, it's been at a science fiction convention. In most cases they were friendly people who enjoyed meeting their fans and chatting for a minute or two. I can think of a couple of cases where meeting them was actually an annoying experience and as a result of their rudeness, I stopped buying their books. An author doesn't get to be a jerk to me and still expect me to contribute to his or her royalty cheques. That's applicable online as well, btw. I belong to a Star Trek forum where several professional Star Trek novelists post. A couple of them were rude to the point where I decided, "Okay, David Mack and Christopher L. Bennett, you have just trolled your way right off my bookshelf." OTOH, Greg Cox is an author who is friendly, interesting, happy to discuss his writing either on the open forum or via PM, and his books will always have a place on my shelf (as long as they're not about the AbramsTrek movies).

As far as media paying much attention to writers, it depends on the writer and the subject matter. In Canada, the way for fiction writers to get noticed seems to be by either writing a bestseller, or being shortlisted for some prestigious writing award.

 

[dusters]

Interesting, never knew there are one person RPG game books.

Definitely another thing to be jealous of - poetry club and school newspaper requires people to run them and where I live, language/literature teachers are too busy preparing and correcting tests for them to have any spare time.

Then, on the other hand, I have to ask, how big was that school? I went to school of approx thousand pupils, ranging from 6th to 12th grade, so that may be a very small school when put in Canada.

I don't get it, why there is such misconcepton of Sci-fi? Is it carried over from 1960s movies?


I consider myself a fan of genre, and I think sci-fi has more to do with anthropology, society, psychology than action. A good sci-fi book/movie should motivate one to think, not to mindlessly consume. Imho, the technology is there to change the environment, but the focus should always be on how a human or groups of humans react to the new tech.

Science fiction conventions sound very cool to me. We have medieval reconstruction festivals, comic-con festivals, but not sci-fi. Not yet.

Overall, it would be logical that for a country with approx 35 million people there are more professional writers who don't have to work side jobs to make a living and therefore the whole industry is bigger and more advanced, but since news in Latvia don't care about what's going on in Canada at all, and as far as I know, Canada has both British and French roots, it is really hard to conclude anything without actually asking how the life is there.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sorry to take so long to answer these questions...

Is NaNoWriMo really a good way to get noticed? Or is it just a motivation to practice for people who like set goals and timetables?

Some people do manage to turn their NaNoWriMo books into salable novels or short story anthologies. Back when Script Frenzy was one of the yearly events, it's possible that a few scripts might eventually have become professionally-published/produced plays. I tried Script Frenzy once, for the heck of it. I discovered that adapting God Emperor of Dune was not what a novice should try for a first effort! Still, it was a learning experience, and I'd like to try scriptwriting again some time.

NaNoWriMo was originally conceived as a great way to encourage people to write. Lots of people have said they'd love to write a story or book - if they had the time. Well, NaNoWriMo breaks it down quite nicely to help people find the time. Five minutes here, 20 minutes there... before you know it, you've got your daily minimum and more besides.

April and July events are "Camp" events - like an online summer camp where you can get feedback from other people or, if you prefer, go it alone. Some people actually do have RL meetups - a "meet at Starbucks on this day at this time, and bring your laptop" sort of thing. The criteria for winning the Camp events are more flexible. Participants can choose their word-count goal (has to be a minimum of 10,000 words) and take it from there.

November is the main event and has a more challenging goal: 50,000 words in 30 days. The best I ever did was something over 22,000, adapting the Fighting Fantasy gamebook The Shamutanti Hills. I left off right after the protagonist survived snooping around a mine run by Goblins, and there's a lot more to go.

These totals sound like a lot, right? 10,000 words in 30 days equates to 334 words/day (50,000 = 1667 words/day). For me that's about 20 minutes' worth of writing, but then I usually have my stories planned out well before the contest starts. Outlines are allowed, by the way. The rules allow people to make notes and plan out their stories. The only thing that's not allowed is to start the stories before 12:01 am on the first day of the contest. Of course this is on the honor system; they won't know if people take a whole year to write the story and just dole it out over the contest period. But there's really no point in that - the participants aren't actually competing against anyone but themselves, so cheating is pointless.

Interesting, never knew there are one person RPG game books.

There are quite a lot of them now - Tunnels & Trolls, Lone Wolf, Cretan Chronicles, Grail Quest, Blood Sword, Fabled Lands... and there are more online, in a number of different languages. My favorite will always be Fighting Fantasy. I got hooked on those in my first year of college. I should have been doing my homework, but instead I was lost in the Maze of Zagor, trying to find and kill the evil Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

Definitely another thing to be jealous of - poetry club and school newspaper requires people to run them and where I live, language/literature teachers are too busy preparing and correcting tests for them to have any spare time.

For the most part, the teachers were just there to supervise. Once the kids knew what was expected of us, we just dug in and did the work. One year the poetry club had two teachers supervising it, and I remember a meeting when one of them was marking essays his students had written for their "Crucible" assignment. For the newspaper, we actually had a field trip to one of the local papers, where we were shown how to do layouts and make sure things were readable and not all mixed up. I ended up doing most of the typing for each issue (back in the days of stencils and carbon paper... ).

Then, on the other hand, I have to ask, how big was that school? I went to school of approx thousand pupils, ranging from 6th to 12th grade, so that may be a very small school when put in Canada.

I'm not sure how many students they have now, but in the late '70s/early '80s, there were approximately 1200 kids, spread over Grades 10, 11, and 12. That was when there was just the one public high school. The Catholic high school was across the street; not sure how many kids they had. The county school was nearby, but at that time it was just Grades 1-9. They eventually added kindergarten and high school.

I don't get it, why there is such misconcepton of Sci-fi? Is it carried over from 1960s movies?

I think that may be the problem for Margaret Atwood, but for everyone else who isn't into it, they tend to judge it by some of the most stereotypical movies or TV shows. Every attempt to establish a science fiction/gaming store in my city has failed. There just aren't enough fans here to make them profitable. There used to be lots of second-hand bookstores, but now there are only two - and one of them is more for comics than books.

Fun fact: Back in the '90s, one of those attempts at a gaming store was called "The Cosmic Blunder" and had posters advertising Dungeons & Dragons, comics, games, posters, armor (the local SCA group did our best to do some favor-exchanges there; we'd do a fighting demo to draw people into the place, and in turn they let us advertise our feasts, demos, and other events in the store). I wish I'd had a camera with me whenever I went to that part of downtown. The place next to the Cosmic Blunder had a prim and proper sign proclaiming itself as The Society for Sober Living.

I consider myself a fan of genre, and I think sci-fi has more to do with anthropology, society, psychology than action. A good sci-fi book/movie should motivate one to think, not to mindlessly consume. Imho, the technology is there to change the environment, but the focus should always be on how a human or groups of humans react to the new tech.

It can have all that, plus action, but it's got to be in balance. I think the book that does this admirably is Dune, by Frank Herbert.

Science fiction conventions sound very cool to me. We have medieval reconstruction festivals, comic-con festivals, but not sci-fi. Not yet.

Around here, most of the people I knew who were into medieval re-creation were also into roleplaying games (D&D), and also science fiction. It wasn't unusual to have a group of people from the local Star Trek club getting together for a game of D&D or Civilization (the board game that preceded the computer game), and one of the players would sit and knit or crochet some costume item when it wasn't her turn.

Overall, it would be logical that for a country with approx 35 million people there are more professional writers who don't have to work side jobs to make a living and therefore the whole industry is bigger and more advanced, but since news in Latvia don't care about what's going on in Canada at all, and as far as I know, Canada has both British and French roots, it is really hard to conclude anything without actually asking how the life is there.

I'm not sure how many professional writers there are here who don't have to work other jobs to supplement their writing income. Of course there have been some who spent their entire career as writers, but that doesn't mean they just wrote fiction. Some got their start as journalists, and their books are in a variety of genres.

 

[dusters]

Thanks for the answer. I kept looking here for few weeks and then forgot. So, did you meet NanoWrimo goal of July, afterall?

I sure did. Only one story in English though, deleted it in mid August, because again I didn't feel it was good enough. However, I wrote a lot of text in Latvian. It seems that if I don't have a solid editor always at my hand, I keep deleting too much stuff, when some of it (maybe 10%) could actually be worthy to get published somewhere.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Thanks for the answer. I kept looking here for few weeks and then forgot. So, did you meet NanoWrimo goal of July, afterall?

I sure did. Only one story in English though, deleted it in mid August, because again I didn't feel it was good enough. However, I wrote a lot of text in Latvian. It seems that if I don't have a solid editor always at my hand, I keep deleting too much stuff, when some of it (maybe 10%) could actually be worthy to get published somewhere.

Yes, I met and exceeded my July goal. I'm pleased that you did, too.

Last spring I decided that this year's writing goal would be a hat trick - meeting my goals for all three NaNoWriMo contests. So I've done the first two, with the hardest one to go. I'll have to decide really soon if my project is going to be a continuation of my Hulzein fanfic project or another gamebook adaptation.

Neither project can be considered for professional publication, as both are based on other people's copyrighted work. I do consider them to be worth doing, though, because they fill niches for readers who want more of the story but didn't get it either because the original authors didn't choose to provide more, or because the original author died and nobody else stepped up to write more.

 

[dusters]

I share your view on fanfics, I guess. I would like to expand ideas in "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Little prince", both authors are long dead, of course.

I have always wanted to write fairytales for adults in such way that kids can read them too, but I have lacked the skill to do so, so I have postponed trying that till I have helped to raise/educate enough children to understand more, what is it that makes them tick.

Which month holds the hardest NanoWriMo?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I share your view on fanfics, I guess. I would like to expand ideas in "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Little prince", both authors are long dead, of course.

I have always wanted to write fairytales for adults in such way that kids can read them too, but I have lacked the skill to do so, so I have postponed trying that till I have helped to raise/educate enough children to understand more, what is it that makes them tick.

Which month holds the hardest NanoWriMo?

The November NaNoWriMo is the hardest, in my opinion. It's the only one that requires a minimum of 50,000 words in 30 days. The others allow you to set your own word count goal, as long as it's at least 10,000 words in 30 days.

Broken down, the November NaNo requires at least 1667 words per day, and I strongly advise people to do more than this minimum because of the weird way they count words. I regularly get cheated out of around 100 words or so because I use Open Office and they use something else. So I make sure to do well over the minimum before submitting my story for validation on Day 30.


Adult fairy tales? A friend of mine used to do those in webcomic form. One of his Fuzzy Knights projects was called "Little Bear Awakens" and it's a beautiful tale about a small stuffed bear who becomes self-aware... and discovers a whole community of other self-aware stuffed animals (the aforementioned Fuzzy Knights, who enjoy sitting on a tabletop, playing Dungeons & Dragons). Those of us who have read this keep trying to convince our friend to have this published as a children's story - because it's written so both kids and adults can relate to it.

 

[dusters]

Argh. That sounds a lot. I'm yet to finish my this year's biggest work - a story about two dying women who are post WW2 generation survivors, a jew and a german one, who find a close friendship and happiness before death. Maybe the plot sounds cliche, but the time is now and seeing how these 85+ years old ladies still find fun things to do while Millenials complain, that's a fun thing to write about.

Webcomics sound like a great way to get your point across. I could draw my own illustrations to my stories, I guess.

And the tale about the stuffed bear sounds as right as it can get to be worthy of being published.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Argh. That sounds a lot. I'm yet to finish my this year's biggest work - a story about two dying women who are post WW2 generation survivors, a jew and a german one, who find a close friendship and happiness before death. Maybe the plot sounds cliche, but the time is now and seeing how these 85+ years old ladies still find fun things to do while Millenials complain, that's a fun thing to write about.

Webcomics sound like a great way to get your point across. I could draw my own illustrations to my stories, I guess.

And the tale about the stuffed bear sounds as right as it can get to be worthy of being published.

Webcomics can be a great way to communicate. I used to read one called "Mows" (pronounced "mouse"), and of course it was about cats. As for the Fuzzy Knights, that one is done with real stuffed animals and miniature props, and the only part of it that isn't photographed is the dialogue balloons.

Have you checked out the DYOS threads here in A&E?