Is anyone else planning to do April’s Camp NaNoWriMo? I’m deciding between a short story and another Jerric’s Story chapter, leaning heavily toward the new chapter. My goal is 25k, which I think is pretty reasonable.

I might give this a stab. I'm going to go for 10,000 words for this, simply due to time contraints and lack of willpower and energy, but I'm giving it a shot. Going to try and take another go at Riven, the story I started for NaNoWriMo and see if I can actually get anywhere with it.

If you're stuck for what to do, I'd say go for the new Jerric chapter, though I may be biased on this subject as I just really enjoy Jerric's story

I may be thinking of doing this too, since I have to restart writing Cardonaccum. Lady Cora is getting quite impatient with my battle with Oblivion!

I'll be jumping in on it, continuing what I restarted. Provided I can just get my obsessive side to chill a little(or at least bully my creative side into organising its notes so I can find things).

I always say that I'm in and then I promptly contract a convenient case of writer's block. This year I plan to not participate to see if the reverse is true.

Yay, more campers, maybe campers, and one not-a-camper! I like the relaxed approach to the camps. This is my first one, and I am more excited about my new chapter than I have been about either of my November projects. (Thanks Colonel, after about two seconds of deliberation I’m going with Jerric's Story. )

haute, I hope you get a chance to bring us some more Lady Cora!!

I got connected with a local group, and I’m meeting some of them tonight. Woo!

I just had a mysterious urge to organize all of my apples by variety and ripeness. Then it hit me. It’s the first day of camp!! ReadysetGO!

Whee!

Late entry, but I think I'll give this a shot - am going to try for 20k words of Sleeper in the Cave. It's beginning to frighten me how little progress I'm making on Adryn's overarching plot. I really would like to finish her story one day... at least finish book one!

Happy writing, everyone!

Yay, Kaz! Go Adryn! That’s great to hear.

I got the draft of my next Jerric update done yesterday. The ROUGH draft, lol. I need a couple more drafted before I can go back and rewrite, but day 1 was what I hoped it would be.

Now for day 2… Coffee pot! Candy snacks! Nope. Er… grapes! Go!!

I'm gonna have to leave it until monday to get started on this. Right now my head's kinda fuzzy owing to a sleep deficit.

I never got around this. Mostly because of lack of time and ideas. But I've always wanted to try.

DE, a camp is a good place to give it a try. It's a much more relaxed event than the November novel marathon. There's another camp event coming in July if you don't want to jump into this one. There are people in my cabin writing screenplays, short stories, re-writing things, continuing projects like I am doing, one person is writing a poem every day, and of course there are a handful of new novels as well. Oh, and one lady is writing a series of daily devotionals. Anyway there's a lot of fun energy because folks love their projects.

My NaNo name is Denelle if anyone wants me as a buddy. (Named after my Breton archer Denelle Jeline. Jensa was taken.) I'm relentlessly cheerful. You have been warned.

Callidus, I hope you get some sleep! I tried to go off antihistamines to improve my brain for a month, but April in the south is a bad time to try that. I lasted about 30 minutes.

Well, still suffering from a shortage of sleep, though I've no idea why. Managed to get a couple of hundred words down today, at least it's something.

Woo! That’s a couple hundred more than you had yesterday.

Well, halfway through April and 5.5k words... it seems I may have overreached myself a little with 20k. To be fair, I've ended up sort of unexpectedly super-busy (my schedule for the rest of this week makes me want to cry) but still. I may just decide to shoot for 10k instead of 20k.

Also, I am getting suddenly sidetracked by a character who's suddenly popping up in my head demanding I write about him. I'm really tempted to go for a short story featuring him but a) I really do want to focus on SitC and b ) knowing my ability to estimate story lengths the "short story" will end up a novel. I am not even joking here. (My ability to estimate how long a given piece will be is consistently off by a factor of five to ten. If I think I can manage something in 100 words, I'll probably need close to a thousand. If I think something will be 1k words, it's more likely to be in the 8-10k length. Since my gut feeling about this piece is "oh, maybe 10k words"... well.)

I love the flexibility of camp. Changing gears or exploring something unexpected is part of the fun, and every word is progress.

I need to spend tomorrow editing my next Jerric update and then give it a cooling-off period. I’m a little behind on my wordcount goal, but I’m happy with how it’s going so far.

Added: I forgot to say that with my November NaNo novel the 50,000 word goal got me maaaybe a quarter of the way through the plot outline and not even to the very first action scene. I know how it goes when everything takes longer to say than you planned!

Urgh. Battling mental inertia all the way. We're having a sort of heatwave here in the UK, so it's already warmer than I'd like. Managed to get about 500 words down in about half an hour though, so that's something.

Problem is, that it's a scene I didn't actually plan, with a character who just turned up and stepped into the story, so it's somewhat vague in my head as to how it's supposed to go. At this point it just sort of goes a little bit, then grinds to a halt. And it's kind of an important scene, that sets up for others, so it's starting to piss me off a little.

I'm also wondering if I should count the scenes I've done in november but plan to rewrite in my running total. I'm going to rewrite them at some point, but there are bits of them I plan to use.

How’s this week going, Callidus? I’d say arrange and count your words whatever way works best for you. I know a handful of people who are doing rewrites and edits. Their goals are the number of words they get through, not just the number of new words they add. That’s what I like best about camp. Flexibility over rules. That and some of the people in my cabin are awesome. I lucked out with some folks who have great attitudes.

Kind of mixed so far. Sal and Tarvyn Dralor are demanding some written attention, but at least that means I'm in the mood for writing a lot more.

I think I'll count those scenes. I'm probably going to end up rewriting just about everything anyway, so if nothing else they'll serve as placeholders and guides for the rewrite, and near enough doubles my word count. My cabin's kind of meh though, not much going on with it. Only a few say anything, one's not even writing at all, and the only thing being discussed is favourite books. But I'm not all that sociable anyway *shrugs*

My cabin is in a competition with another cabin of locals, and it’s getting pretty heated (in a friendly way). My cabin has a slight lead if I’m interpreting comments made by the other cabin correctly, or perhaps they’re messing with us. At stake is a cake party at one of our write-ins. Although everyone will get cake, it will surely taste sweeter to the victors.

There’s one person in my cabin who set a goal of 80,000 words and hasn’t been heard from since. She’s writing a screenplay. My guess is drama queen will swoop in and update her wordcount at the last minute, giving us a giant spike on April 30. Or maybe she forgot about us. Time will tell.

I got ahead in the last couple of days knowing that free time would be limited this weekend. It just really takes me a long time to write things. Sigh.

Since NaNoWriMo have started sending out the emails about July's camp NaNoWriMo, I figured I'd kick this back into touch.

I'll be jumping in on it, trying to get more of my story done. I'll probably spend most of this month trying to get as much of it as possible straightened out in my head before then, and hopefully avoid tripping over myself in July.

Camp is here! July and August calendars are full in Grits world, so I made a modest goal. I’ll be doing most of my writing on a handful of tiny notebooks that still have some blank pages in the back. It was fun to find the one I wrote some of Jerric’s story in while I was in Disneyworld a couple of years ago.

Happy camping to all!

Hey, has anyone signed up for the November writing spasm?

I have. I am trying again. Last year I never got off the ground since I had the car accident end of October. November was all dealing with the auto insurance, finding a new car, aaaaand refinancing the mortgage. So not a good time to be writing.

But I still have that story idea just begging to be written, so I am trying again this year. Starting to prep for it by researching the history and culture that will be used in the story. Fun, fun, fun.

Anyone else going for the 50K goal this year?

I'll be taking another stab at it.

Still got the one I started last year that needs to get done, hopefully I'll have a better run this time.

Which means this month I'm going to be neck deep in worldbuilding. Who knows, I might find another story to write in the process.

Today is the day! I’m doing a rebellion project this year. Hopefully I will be able to salvage more of it than I could of last year’s novel, or first part of a novel, really. I ended up cutting half in the edit.

Yay for November!

Well, I think I'm done for the first day. 2,194 words in an hour and a half sounds like a pretty good start to me. I'd have kept on going, but after the last little bit I wrote I really need to take a break from it for the rest of the day. Well, evening.

Good luck!

Well done, Callidus! That's great first day!

I'm going to be up late tonight. I have an idea that needs to be spilled out in one session, and I don't want to wait for tomorrow. That means waiting for everyone else to go to bed!

Today I've burned my breakfast, run out of tea, burned my second attempt at breakfast, and seriously considered burying my phone in the back yard. Must be November!

Heh, I see you're days going about as well as mine started.

Three attempts at writing today all ended in abject failure, only a few hundred words in total. The problem was that I simply wasn't feeling what I was writing. So I scrapped it and restarted.

I've been writing in thirty minute sessions, and the last couple of days have been averaging about 700 words per session. I've been using this app I saw recommended on the NaNoWriMo forums, Writeometer, which really seems to be helping. I restarted this evening, with a clear image of what I was writing, and managed 1050 in that session! Spelling errors everywhere of course, but that's a problem for later

But I really think I need to call it quits for the night on the writing front. I've not got the best setup for it, unfortunately.

So, how are you two doing?

I'm at about 19.5k, so I'm behind, but I put in over 4000 words today, so I'm catching up.

Slow but steady. I need a couple of solid days to catch up. You had a huge day today, that’s great!

edit: I just checked, I'm at 17.4. Plenty of pages left to fill!

I just pushed past 25k, so I'm now only a week behind! I think I might actually be able to reach the target at this rate

Yay, that's awesome! Great job, Callidus!

Since we're getting close to my birthday, I decided to set myself a little challenge:

To hit 50K before my birthday, the 28th. Which of course means racking up 25,000 words in five days.

Today I typed 6,222 words, so I'm off to a good start.

I’ll say it is, wow! Way to go!

Made it!

50,222 words, before my birthday!

But I'm not even a third of the way through my story

Oh my gosh, that’s awesome! Well done, congratulations!

I know what you mean about 50k and not even halfway through the story. I think instead of a finished first draft in that many words mine would have to be more of a finished first outline.