Camp NaNoWriMo (July 2019)

[Valka D'Ur]

The month is nearly 5 hours old here and I haven't even registered my novel yet (will attend to that later today).

Once again it's time to write x number of thousands of words in 30 days. I'm probably going to aim for 15,000 but will hopefully get closer to 20,000.

Murphy's Law has thrown a wrench into things: The computer that has my previous work on Kingmaker: Rise to the Throne is in the repair shop and won't even be looked at until Tuesday, let alone fixed by Tuesday (thanks, Canada Day).

So I'm going to have to start off with isolated vignettes or scenes as I can't directly continue from where I left off (where the Duke is about to learn that he has most unfairly accused his eldest son of an improper relationship with a farmer's daughter, when in fact it was something completely different that happened and wasn't at all improper).

Anyway, hopefully I'm not alone in this. @Mouthwash, @Synsensa, are you doing anything this time around?

To everyone: Feel free to ask questions, discuss NaNoWriMo (other writing discussions should go in the Watcha Writin'? thread), register and start your own story...

Remember, Camp NaNoWriMo allows you to set your own word count goal, so it doesn't need to be as ambitious as 50,000. The object is to encourage people to write every day or set up some other regular writing schedule that works for you. And since winning is based on word count rather than quality (nobody reads what you write unless you choose to share it), the only person you're competing against is yourself.

 

[Mouthwash]

Haven't decided. I've got some IRL stuff to deal with.

 

[Synobun]

I joined last week but I haven't touched it since. My WIP is aptly titled "I Have No Idea" and I had set a word count goal of 20,000.

No idea what that will end up being. I don't know if I can even start anytime soon, as I still have two books to finish over the coming week.

Good luck to your writing efforts, though. Although I'm not sure you need luck, even with the laptop setback.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I joined last week but I haven't touched it since. My WIP is aptly titled "I Have No Idea" and I had set a word count goal of 20,000.

No idea what that will end up being. I don't know if I can even start anytime soon, as I still have two books to finish over the coming week.

Good luck to your writing efforts, though. Although I'm not sure you need luck, even with the laptop setback.

I always need luck. The repair bill is going to come to approximately $175 (no, that's not enough even for a refurbished replacement, and I need stuff that's on there).

Synsensa, what I'm going to suggest is this: Since you don't actually have to make it a novel (can be a play, a very long poem, or anthology)... why not use your forum posts that are timestamped in July? One thing I've been pointing out to everyone here who says they could never write thousands of words or hundreds per day, is that they probably already do, but just don't realize it.

After all, these will be words you wrote during the contest period. Granted, they won't make a coherent story, but there are lots of stories that consist of diary entries, or even emails (there are some Star Trek: Voyager fanfics that consist entirely of private messages between Captain Janeway and Tom Paris).

I don't know if you'd make it to 20,000, but you probably would make it to 10,000.

As for me, I'm up to 2337 words at the moment. I haven't posted a daily breakdown, since I'm still learning new stuff about this computer (it's a bit different from the one I bought just two years ago).

 

[Zkribbler]

I gave some thought to joining this time, but it won't work. As with my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, I was was taken by surprise...with no outline.

I've been trying to resurrect an old character of mine [an irascible captain of a tramp star freighter], but I can find none of my old writing, so he must be from my days in the US. Being that it's set in far future, I need to do world creation. And as I played with the story line, I realized I'm working on a "cozy" detective story, which mandates an intricate plot. This is not something I can just pants.

After four days of writing, I have 1700 words to set the stage. Now I need to intro a secondary character and a subplot.

Spoiler Def. of Cozy :

A cozy is the opposite of a hard-boiled detective story. There is little-to-no sex and violence. The "detective" is an amateur and often elderly. The geography is compact. There is little action; rather the story is played out like a chess game, with false leads, red herrings, and puzzles.

 

[Zkribbler]

After four days of writing, I have 1700 words to set the stage. Now I need to intro a secondary character and a subplot.

Four days later, I'm up to a whopping 2,100 words.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Ohgosh. I really didn't mean to abandon my own thread. I just got really busy with various things, including writing. And writing. And more writing. And writing on top of writing. When I wasn't writing my story, I was on various YT sites, writing about The Handmaid's Tale (and got an idea for a fanfic that's actually meant to be funny - an anomaly, given how that series is so grim and depressing; it will involve muffins).

It's July 31 now in my time zone (still 5 minutes to validate in the Pacific time zone). I validated about an hour ago, and am happy to report that I met and exceeded my word count goal by over 3000 words. The goal was 15,000 words, and the NaNoWriMo site credited me with 18,364 words (the real total according to Open Office was 18,458 words).

This time around I thought about the idea of starting a cabin, but since last time it was just Mouthwash and me, I opted to check off the "join a random cabin" box. I ended up in a cabin with a bunch of total strangers, most of whom either didn't even start their stories, or who got a few hundred words in and then stopped (not sure why, but I've been in that situation where life gets in the way or the muse just isn't there). A few others met and exceeded their target word counts a few days ago (so did I - on July 27), but decided to keep going. We had some nice chats about writing and various other things.

Anyway, my daily running totals for the month (the numbers in parentheses are the daily totals):

Day 1: 600 (600)
Day 2: 1179 (579)
Day 3: 1723 (544)
Day 4: 2337 (614)
Day 5: 2961 (624)
Day 6: 3515 (554)
Day 7: 4140 (625)

Day 8: 4765 (625)
Day 9: 5314 (549)
Day 10: 5884 (570)
Day 11: 6481 (597)
Day 12: 7049 (568)
Day 13: 7552 (503)
Day 14: 8078 (526)

Day 15: 8643 (565)
Day 16: 9201 (558)
Day 17: 9733 (532)
Day 18: 10,249 (516)
Day 19: 10,774 (525)
Day 20: 11,358 (584)
Day 21: 11,889 (531)

Day 22: 12,424 (535)
Day 23: 12,960 (536)
Day 24: 13,478 (518)
Day 25: 14,065 (587)
Day 26: 14,588 (523)
Day 27: 15,123 (535)
Day 28: 15,648 (525)

Day 29: 16,207 (559)
Day 30: 18,458 (2251) (my total according to Open Office)
Day 30: 18,364 (2157) (NaNoWriMo site's total)


According to my stats page, my daily average was 612 words (this would be a bit less without that last-day push to over 2000 words). But still, it's respectable for what I was aiming to accomplish this time around. It would have been nice to get to 20,000 words (since I try for 5000 more than the official goal), but I'll gladly take this 18,000+ result.

My word count goal was 15,000, which meant that my daily goal was 500. I met and exceeded it every day. As you can see, I pushed ahead on Day 30 and managed a lot more than the other days. This is because I wanted to set some things up for future writing - continuing the sections I'm already working on and setting the stage for what I intend to write about for the rest of the year (I'll still be working on this project for the main November event, which means a daily minimum of 1667 words, for a minimum total of 50,000 words).

As this list shows, I was fairly consistent throughout the month. I've discovered that one of the secrets to making it through a whole month of NaNoWriMo is to pace yourself. Some people may be comfortable with doing a lot one day and much less another day, but I've found that for me, this can lead to the "I'll catch up later/on the weekend" syndrome... which almost never works, because it's too easy to get distracted. So even though there may be more to the scene I'm working on at the point where I stop for the day, I want to have a place to continue from. As someone in my cabin mentioned, it helps to "jump start" the writing the next day if you don't completely finish a scene in one session.

And that 2000+ words yesterday? That was a good reminder to myself of what I should be aiming for in November (it was also a reminder of how much that many words hurts to type in a short time; I did it in less than 2 hours).


So, Camp NaNoWriMo is over for 2019; the next event is the main 50,000-word one in November. Am I going to take a break?

Nope. Tomorrow will see more added to the story, and so on every day. One of the purposes of NaNoWriMo is to encourage participants to develop the habit of writing every day, and it finally - after over a decade - worked for me. I've got the habit, and it's not one I want to break. I've got a story I love working on, I'm constantly thinking about it, and can't imagine just dropping it.

One benefit I've discovered in having the habit of writing every day is that this time around I managed to avoid the Week 3 burnout point where most participants are getting completely frazzled, not a little brain-fried, and wondering if/when this is ever going to end, and just wanting it to be over. That didn't happen for me, and it really helped not to have to deal with it.

This story is also providing lots of incentive to do more research on a wide variety of topics. I've found a decent series of YT videos about knights. It's pretty general and doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it's giving me ideas of things I need to research and concepts I need to think about introducing into the story (@MaryKB suggested jousting; I'm still thinking about that - maybe in the alternative storyline where I can be more creative since it takes place over a much longer period of time, but the main storyline is busy enough without adding it in).

 

[Synobun]

Congrats on reaching your goal, Valka.

 

[Zkribbler]

Congrats on reaching your goal, Valka.

I'm impressed to see the unbroken string of 500-plus-word days.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I set a goal of 15,000 words and ended up writing 15,007 words.

Day 30: 18,458 (2251) (my total according to Open Office)
Day 30: 18,364 (2157) (NaNoWriMo site's total)

Open Office counts quotation marks as words.

 

[Zkribbler]

I set a goal of 15,000 words and ended up writing 15,007 words.