It isn’t a summer camp full of bugs but writers camp from the confines of my own home. Camp NaNoWriMo begins Friday and I’m so ready to begin.
Today I did an edit of all my notes up to this point, to remove old plot lines from when my story still wasn’t quite sure what it would be. It brought me to just over 30,000 words and I made sure to print a hard copy.
Time for a story:
Once upon a time, a teenager who loved writing more than anything else was concurrently writing 2 novels. One she finished, one that was lost to time as that teenager became an adult.
For the novel that was finished was backed up on a single disk. A hard square of plastic that contained the entirety of the as yet unedited novel.
One day, that disk was corrupted and the entire work was lost. Despite having extensive notes, the novel existed nowhere else in full.
Broken hearted, the teen turned adult never attempted another novel. That same adult also almost lost a good chunk of her master’s thesis to a laptop that decided to have a fit near the end. Needless to say, she’s learned her lesson.
End of story.
So, my current novel is on hard copy, backed up to the cloud, and backed up on an app. It’s also in the process of being plotted using the Save the Cat! method of Acts and Beats on index cards. Since I’m plotting this out as a trilogy or possibly a quartet, I’m going to need a lot of index cards.
In March, I’ve doubled my projected monthly word count to over 6,000 words. I’m projecting 5,000 for camp so as not to stress myself out. Having a smaller goal means I won’t just write slop and I stay inspired with every new character and connection I create.
Any of my readers joining Camp NaNoWriMo or in the midst of a larger writing project?