Camp NaNoWriMo

So, I had heard of Camp NaNoWriMo some months back when the initiators of the event posted it on www.nanowrimo.org. I was intrigued that they were finally doing something official for this time of year, as I had heard many groups of friends creating a summer event just between a small group of people or region.  But I was not sure I was going to do it.

Last year was the first year I won NaNoWriMo, and this summer was going to be hectic enough with trying to find a job (a to do still not accomplished), as well as the reading list my friends gave me. I could do it, after all, I write 2000 words a day any way, but recently my writing has not been focused. Today though, one of my friends on Facebook mentioned camp, and I asked, "What camp?" And she replied, "Camp NaNoWriMo!"

It took all of about two seconds for me to say, what the heck? Why not do this crazy adventure in July? Because I remembered a fine point of NaNoWriMo and their affiliates--no excuses. Excuses are the reasons why we don't get things done in life. The reason NaNoWriMo was created was because Chris Baty had heard every excuse in the book from himself and his friends, and decided to change what he was doing. In that, he simply started doing something. After all, one of the biggest excuse of not writing is not having the time. As my pastor once said, "If it's important, make time."

So for the next month, not only will I be making time, but I will be focusing on a singular plot. This means I should probably do more planning and finish the anon meme prompt I've been working on. It will mean a lot of focus and concentration, and not giving up (like a certain project...a certain many I should say). No word will be wasted, and goals accomplished.

My strategy will probably be something like  what I did for NaNoWriMo this past November, in that I made sure to have five thousand words in by the end of the first day (I may try to make it a straight shot from midnight on), and then write two-thousand words (well, I have to right now, but let's say I didn't).  Which really helps because it is a NaNo phenomena that something always happens in the second week going into the third to make you quit writing. I did not write almost anything for three or four days and then wrote paltry amounts everyday until I went home with my friend Emily for Thanksgiving. When she began to surpass my word count, I pretended we were racing. That night I wrote five thousand words, and in the next, seven thousand. It felt pretty amazing to have the major parts of my book done, and all I had to do was wrap it up.

I think one of the big things that helped me was the giant support group of people all around me, who were going through the same thing. Which may not help me this time (we'll have to see about Facebook, and I can drive myself to write-ins now...so it might be different).  But as a bonus, you guys get a preview for November.

I'll update the Smithy later this week or next week with my thoughts on world building. 

Shiny New Blog

I've wanted to start a new blog for a while, mostly because I wanted to switch my livejournal over to being a story text only journal. This is the first of three I think I will begin: the other two are likely to be a review journal and then a personal events journal, which I might just put on Penzu...I'm not sure yet. But I wanted to start this one on writing.

This blog will probably not make me famous. At least, I hope that I might be able to make the blog famous, instead of the other way around. But why I wanted to start this blog, because yesterday I got hit with a great idea. I was trying to expand a novelette I wrote and was hoping to enter in the writers of the future contest, but wondered how I could do that, when I killed the main antagonist(s) in the novelette. Obviously, I needed a bigger antagonist. Something clicked inside my head, and I realized that another short story I had written, as well as an idea I had been sitting on would fit perfectly within this universe.

After that, I decided to do a little world building, since the combined story would be set in a sort of traditional fantasy setting. When I began world building, I wondered, hey, maybe that's what I could talk about, because I had been trying to find a concentrated subject to blog about (aside from books and myself, which can be anything but concentrated at times). Writing, which is something I do every day and believe myself to be called by God to do, is a very large topic. Not to mention, several great authors have already written several great books about writing (Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is a good one. I'm told On Writing by Stephen King also lands on top). But I figured, this can be a sort of self discovery thing too, and I can limit myself to prose, and specifically the science fiction, fantasy, and things in between kind of things.

Of course, some things are universal to writing, and will end up in any book or blog about the topic. I'll make a post about it in a little while. But primarily, I write science fiction, fantasy and the things in between. This does not make me a favorite in my work shop group, and you can believe that if I ever land myself in a creative writing class with certain professors, I will not be writing on these subjects for fear of my grade. And it's not the only thing I write. I'm sporadically working on a memoir, and I do get ideas for realistic fiction. Honestly, I do try to write things that don't involve dragons, or flying cats, or magic, or machine, but somehow they work their ways in between the cracks and the crevices before I create my tight, shiny story.

So, mostly, this blog is for me. I'll be smearing it all over facebook, but it really is for me. I want this to detail my journey and discoveries as a writer, as well as any advice any other writer has never heard before, because, hey it might help. I want it to help me, because I'm not going to be in a creative writing class next semester, but I would like to continue my own study of things. Also, in keeping this blog (along with the other ones mentioned), it means that my livejournal will have to be solely text, which means that I will have to write fiction every single day (I was journaling on some days when I felt inspiration would not come to me).

This also means that I might be giving myself a little bit of extra homework, because I pledge the following:

1. Faithfully update this blog at least twice a week (expect a lot of Sunday and Saturday posts when I'm stressed). 
2. Read the aforementioned books on writing, and see what I can apply, argue and discuss against the authors. 
3. Create reports about my own writing. 
4. Try not to get too out there, so that the realistic fiction writers can still read my blog without cringing. 

I think this is a good goal list for now, and I will see what I can do about upholding it. 

As for the title of this blog, which I am sure someone will wonder about at some point, it comes from the word, wordsmith, as it one who crafts words. As I am a wordsmith, this is my writer's smithy. And I hope you'll enjoy it here.