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? 

Camp Woes

So as you may know, it is August 29th.  The August session of Camp NaNoWriMo is ending in two days.  I am at a grand total of almost 16k.  Or I will be in a few minutes.


.....yeah.  Besides that, school has started for me, and while it's been interesting so far (although we haven't covered much yet and not a ton has happened) I can tell that this semester is going to require a bit more time in terms of homework and such.  However, I am still going to attempt to finish 50k!

That's a far cry lower than what I had originally planned.  June Camp went really well, with me finishing off 50k in the first 11 days, so I figured I would shoot for 75k this August.  Obviously, that's unlikely to happen at this point.  I'm already well over 10k per day left to finish just the 50k.  This is a short post, but I felt like I should put something on here, since I've been neglecting my blog.  I'll write a proper post sometime soon-ish.  Probably after August is over and I've either won or failed miserably, since in the mean time, I will probably be writing in every spare minute.  TTFN, ta ta for now!

Road Block

So...it's been a long time since I posted.  I know.  I'm lazy and procrastinating and generally not very productive.  For instance, today I was supposed to mail a package, write some of my Camp NaNo, watch a history lecture, and probably a couple other things that I'm forgetting at the moment.  I succeeded in *drumroll please* mailing the package.

Yeah.

School starts in two weeks, and I'm kind of freaking out about it.  Not because of the school part, which I'm not fussed about either, but it's really not a big deal.  More because school starting up again means that the summer is gone, and I'm that much closer to graduating and all the other things that are seeming to happen ridiculously fast.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to pick out colleges.  Shoot.

I'm also not feeling particularly good about the things that I'm spending my day doing (marathon Pretty Little Liars?  Who, me?  My friend loaned the first season to me.).  That's not completely true.  I love watching Pretty Little Liars doing *cough* other things.  But I wish that I had enough time in the day to do other *cough-Pretty-Little-Liars-cough* things AND all the other things that I not only need to do, but also the things that I want to do.

Like write a novel.  Camp NaNo has been somewhat of a struggle for me this time.  I'm sort of consistently-ish writing most days, or at least thinking about it, but I haven't been able to really just dig down and write.  I think it's partly because my mind is drawing a blank on this story.  There's a road block telling me I need to figure out some technical things before I can really write.  So I'm probably going to go on to the other novel that was actually going to be for Camp (the current one was one that I wanted to finish from last month), and hopefully take a detour around the road block, so that when I do eventually come back to it, I will know what to do with the story.

Pshew.  There's a lot more stuff going on in my life right now, and while it is definitely fun, there's that impending sense of doom looming over me which takes away from the experience and is trying to get me to do all the things that I need to do that I don't really want to do and all the things that I do want to do, but somehow just don't have the drive to do.  Where's my drive?  Normally I'm so intense people can't stop me from doing things.  It's weird without it.  Is this how normal people feel?

Well, we all know normal is boring.  Maybe I should make my life more exciting.  Anyway, that's it for me for now.  Hopefully I'll have a better post for you sometime soon.  TTFN, ta ta for now. :)

Motivation

Unfortunately, I'm not providing motivation today.  I'm looking for some myself.  With my novel done, I really need to edit.  I let it sit for a few days while I worked on finishing up my 50k for Camp (oh, did I mention I won?  Still so excited), but now I need to get back in and start editing.  I already know that's going to entail some more writing, because I kind of forgot half my characters from the beginning, then realized it and stuck them in again at the end, so there's a big chunk in the middle where they really are in desperate need of character development to get them to the point where they can act the way I made them act at the end and have it make sense after the way they acted in the beginning.

(I'm not entirely sure that last sentence made sense itself.  I mean behavior at first is inconsistent with behavior at end, and I need to add character development in the middle so that it flows.  There we go.)

Problem is I tend to be rather social when I write.  When actually writing (by that I mean putting the words down), I do word wars and sprints and Write or Die by Dr. Wicked to get the words down.  But I haven't had very much experience editing, so even though I know exactly what I need to do, I just can't seem to make myself actually DO it.

So, what do you do when you don't want to do something?  Any tips are appreciated.  :)

A novel? Finished? I must be dreaming.

Yes, you read that right.  And since it's been almost twenty four hours now, I'm fairly sure that I'm not dreaming.  Or at least, if I am, I'm perfectly happy to stay dreaming.  Allow me this fantasy!  Stop the voices!  They're following me!

Ok, perhaps I haven't had quite enough sleep.

But maybe I should back up now.  Yesterday I finished my novel - yeah, the one I've been doing for Camp.  I can't remember if I already posted this part or not, but I'm, or I was, rebelling for Camp and finishing a novel I'd already started.  30k added, and I'm done.  Which is great!


Except that now I have to edit.  If you did NaNoWriMo last November and won, you also got a CreateSpace code - it's for 5 free copies of your book.  That code expires at the end of June (that's this month, for people like me who lose track of entire months and maybe even years at a time).  I would really like to have this novel that I just finished, A) get a title, B) get edited, and C) become physical.  A whole five copies!  So awesome.

I still am planning on doing a short story to get me over 50k for the month, but I'm going to be editing and rewriting and revising and everything to frantically get this novel ready for my public humiliation.  I.e. showing the novel to my family and/maybe friends.  Scary.

Oh yeah, and I still need a cover...hmm.  Maybe I should look around and see if I can figure out how to use GIMP - or maybe I can edit a picture I have because it might be kind of perfect...we'll see.

Where do you get covers?  And how do you go about editing?  I'm pretty new to the whole "actually have something to edit" thing.  Tips for me?  As I go along I'll post what works for me to edit as well under the label Writing Tips.

Hoping I don't go mad from hard core writing...oh wait, I already am.