Somehow or other, here we are at the midpoint of April’s Camp NaNoWriMo, and as nearly as I can guess I’m somewhere near the middle of The Mountain of the Wolf‘s first draft. My very rough little outline had thirteen numbered scenes and I’m currently working on number 7, but I have squeezed in a 7B and 9B since I first wrote it out.
This is my second time doing a Camp challenge, and once again I’m finding I really love it. I love the comparatively lower pressure of being able to choose your own goal, and with a smaller goal, being able to allow yourself a little more time to get there (e.g. I haven’t been officially working weekends, which I’d almost certainly have to do to reach a 50,000-word goal in a month). I also really enjoy the social aspect of cabins—this year I’m in a filled-to-capacity cabin with a lot of wonderful writers, including Schuyler, Suzannah and Annie, and it makes for a great, fun atmosphere to chat and share progress and encouragement and snippets. Much more comfortable than the enormous NaNo forums where you hardly ever run into the same people more than once, let alone have time to get acquainted!
And the story itself? Well, aside from a few patches that I’m very pleased with, I feel like I’m drafting a framework more than anything. As often happens with me, I didn’t have a lot of the early and middle scenes planned in detail, so I’m muddling my way through discovering exactly what happens there. I’m okay with that. There’s always the chance, of course, that all this will look surprisingly better when I type it (a lot of my handwritten pages look like a combination of a crossword and a spiderweb), but even if it doesn’t, I’ll have plenty of leisure to build on my framework then. The important things right now are that I love my characters, I’m very hopeful about the story, and thanks to Camp NaNo I’m getting it all out in the open on paper. Maybe I’ll do a snippets post here sometime next week, when I’ve got a little more material to draw on!
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