Camp NaNo 2015 Post-Mortem

The blog was a little quiet in April, being filled mainly by Unruly.  The reason?  Camp NaNoWriMo.  To try to keep my mind busy, I gave Camp NaNo a try.

Camp NaNo can be treated like a full-fledged NaNoWriMo, 50 000 words in 30 days, but it doesn't have to be.  Goals can be set at any number.  I chose 10 000 words; I wanted a leisurely pace where I didn't have to type furiously day after day to meet my target.  I wanted something achievable, so that I could focus on the other goal I set for myself, finishing the unfinished /Unruly/ episode.

For those following The Great Jennifer Round-Up, that was finished during NaNoWriMo proper last year.  It's the following episode that I wrote myself into a corner on, through not planning far enough ahead to figure out who was behind the plot.  Before April 1th, I did figure out who was responsible for the events, but that meant some reworking of prior chapters to make sure that I had the Unrulies on the right path.  The girls did follow the leads I gave them, and they reached a point where the immediate problem was solved.

The numbers:  With a 10 000 word goal, I wrote 15 100, including a start on the following episode.  That works out to an average of 500 words per day, to one significant figure*.  Given that I had a few days where I didn't work on the story at all, which was planned for with the goal I gave myself, I had a few days where I doubled and almost tripled that average.  There were days when I made the minumum, 333 words, without trying.  Words flowed.  Compared to my first NaNo project, Lethal Ladies, the entire process was effortless.  Writing regularly over the past ten years has helped.  What was once a major exertion taking several hours is now a walk in the park.  I'm noticing this in other areas, such as Lost in Translation, where I can sit down, write a review of or an essay on adaptations and then be amazed at how long it became.

The end result, I got what I wanted done, expanding the Unruly-verse a bit more and setting up some longer plotlines to be resolved over the course of the series.  Each girl got some spotlight time, and I discovered that Verity's people are more dysfunctional than Caitlin's.  The episode, Basketball Night in Canada, should start appearing in May, running through to August..

* I rounded to one digit for the sake of simplifying the math.