Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Update on Camp NaNo

Wait a minute...ok, so I know I haven't updated/posted in a while...but I swear that I wrote an entire post on the outcome of August Camp NaNo.

I quite distinctly remember announcing to the world (i.e. everyone I could get to listen) what had happened, and that included writing a very excited blog post.  I don't know where that post went, as it is not published or in drafts that I can see...

Hmph.

Well, this will not be nearly as exuberant as the original, since the excitement has worn off after a month.

But I won!  Just barely!  I reached 50k with approximately 30 seconds to spare, on August 31st, after writing for all available hours between 5:30 AM and 4 AM of September 1st.  Ashamedly, I moved my time zone back to give me the extra 4 hours - however, 4 hours is a small amount compared to the two weeks during which I wrote nothing.

On that single waking day (I've given up on defining days as midnight to midnight - a day is from when I get up to when I go to bed), I wrote a grand total of 37924 words.  I believe.  The camp stats are a little wonky right now so I can't check that exactly.  But it was a lot.

Granted, approximately 30k in, the quality of the story started going downhill, due to my severe lack of enough brainpower to work that fast.  I reached the limit of plot that I had thought about and gone beyond a few times already, so I was just picking something to happen, even if it wasn't something that I liked or wanted to happen.  By the end, the story was a disaster.  So if/when I do go back to finish it, I'll be scrapping the last 10k or so.  Majorly scrapping the last 1k (it was a hodgepodge of scene-y stuff just for word count, because I had less than an hour to finish and I didn't know what was happening next because I'd written myself into a corner). 

Still, I liked the story until I made the wrong choice and led myself into a corner.  Parts of it were even really good I thought.  Obviously not great, since it's a first draft, but they had the potential to be great.  So I wouldn't mind revisiting that.

Of course, the day after that I was exhausted, both physically and mentally (besides writing 38k words, I'd stayed up for over 24 hours).  So I didn't write after that.  And then school was in full swing, and I was immediately swamped in hw.  How fun.  Hopefully I'll have a chance to post and write more, even though it seems like my classes all collaborated to make sure I have an exam every week.  So now I'm off to study for the statistics exam!  :)

What's the largest number of words you've ever written in one day?