Today is the first day of Camp NaNo. For those of you that don't know, NaNo (or NaNoWriMo) is short for National Novel Writing Month, a writing challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Camp NaNo is similar in that it's a writing challenge to write a novel in a month, but you can set your own word goal and it's camp themed. It was originally made for kids to do NaNo over the summer, so it's more lax, the forums are less extensive, and people get less dramatically enthusiastic about it.
I'm keeping my word goal at 50,000 and giving the Firebird story a re-write. I'm giving it one more shot and if I don't like where it's heading at the end of the month, I give myself permission to let it go and move on to something else. That said, I have some ideas for how to fix it--ideas where the clouds parted and the sun shone down on me and my eyes widened as I said, "Yessss. That will solve that problem. And that problem. And that problem!" I'm condensing the time frame a great deal, and piling the complications on top of one another, overlapping and never letting up. I'm giving it less room to breathe to keep the main character's anxiety high, and so his revelations come out in explosive spurts instead of ruminations while cooking. I think this piling on will also allow for the many different strands happening in this story to feel more like this guy has a lot going on at once and it's wearing on him, instead of that I have too many ideas. That said, I'm also giving myself permission to drop unnecessary threads. If they don't fit in this re-write, I'm not married to them and they can get lost. This has dropped some of the themes that I was leaning on heavily in earlier attempts, and dropping them has been shockingly freeing.
I managed to have good timing, because I have Modern Monsters in good shape, and I'm ready to turn to something different and ready to write.
Yesterday, I spent a few hours getting a sketchy outline together. Scene will set up the emotion for scene Y, so scene Y makes sense. And since scene X is part of story thread 1 and scene Y is part of story thread 2, their interactions will connect the two threads. That kind of thing. In a few places I have blank boxes where I need an event to set wheels in motion and get everyone where they need to be in their character arcs, but I'm not too concerned right this second that I don't have those pinned down yet. They'll come to me when I get closer, and the important part is that I have a sense that something needs to be there.
Today, I cleaned up the first chapter and a half of what I wrote for the last iteration, which is all still usable as long as I shift the emphasis. It's sort of cheating, because I didn't write a lot of new words today, but 1. the next scene that I write will be all new and 2. it's Camp NaNo and cheating is relative. I'm getting work done.
On day 1, I'm at 4,486 words
On day 8, I should be at 13,333 words as a low-level goal
and 16,153 words as a mid-level goal
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