What I Did at Camp
Good morning, dear friends! It is the first day of August and that means that NaNoWriMo camp is over and I didn’t post about my writing more than once that whole time! I’m pretty proud of that, actually. But now that the camp is over, I feel it’s only fair that I get to talk about my experience with it.
My goal was 20,000 words, and I started with a 2,000 word buffer. My end word goal was 17,077 words, so just shy of 3,000 words short. I’ve had worse months. Still, I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t make it to my goal. Part of the issue was that the last two days, when I might have done a crazy sprint to the finish, were a Saturday and a Sunday, and as we know, I don’t generally write on those days. Never on Sunday and rarely on Saturday due to intense busy-ness. The other thing is, I’m not actually at all prepared for where I am in the story.
So the idea, again, is a girl finds a watch after her grandfather dies that takes her to an alternate reality set in the 1920s/30s. I’m thinking more 20s at this point. She meets people who were friends with her grandfather and has to break the news to them that he’s died. Meanwhile the watch gets broken and she can’t get home and the reality she’s in is currently in the middle of a revolution so she’s kind of dragged into helping them out while trying to get home and dealing with the recent loss of her grandfather.
Here’s the thing, I kind of shot head long into this whole story without having the time to research properly and develop the characters, who didn’t really exist until they just sort of happened to appear conveniently on the page. So they don’t really have a lot of personality or background or anything right now. None of them. Not even my main character who is terribly bland right now. I also don’t really know anything about the War for Irish Independence which is kind of important as this is supposed to be sort of an other-world version of that. There were a lot of religious overtones to basically everything the Irish did and I have to decide what to do with that, because if it’s set in Ireland, that’s how it’s gotta be. Of course I could change it all together, rename the island and change the history so that they remained independent until recently when they were invaded and taken over and such. Which probably makes more sense. Regardless, I need to study a lot more Irish history in order to know how I can bend it in a way that makes sense.
The other thing is, I don’t really know what’s going on in the revolution. I don’t know what they’ve been through thus far, what they’ve been doing to rebel, if there have been major battles or just skirmishes and gorilla warfare. I also don’t really know what kind of technology they have. It’s all steam, whatever it is, steam and electricity. I just have to figure out how things run on steam and how the design and naming of things is different. Tanks are a pretty new thing. I haven’t decided if there was a Great War yet or not. I want there to kind of be a monster empire instead of just the British kind of being butts. I’m thinking a conglomerate of European powers, which maybe that’s the result of the Great War? Who can say!
So basically I still have all the research to do, and a lot of side writing before I’m ready to give it another whirl in November. I’m a little embarrassed at this point to send it out to people like I had planned, but I might do it anyway, just because the feedback would be good and they might have some ideas about things to throw at me. I realize that right now it’s all really bad and random and probably doesn’t make any sense at all, but friends are safe people and they probably won’t mind too much. Hopefully I can actually buckle down and do the research I need to do. It’s always the scary part of writing. I never feel like I know enough and I’m super bad at researching in general. But I’m going to give it my best shot. Wish me luck, and have a lovely day, my friends.
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