Day 2: Camp NaNoWriMo

Camp NaNoWriMo is not an actual summer camp, in the sense that it is only a virtual camp. It is also not a more fabulous version of NaNoWriMo; essentially, it is just NaNo but in June and August instead of November. The only real differences are that you aren't grouped into communities by where you live -- instead, there are "cabins" made up of six random people from across the world and you offer each other emotional support (writing 1667 words a day is stressful) and writing tips -- and that in August, when I completed Camp NaNo, you have thirty-one days to reach 50,000 words instead of thirty.

I wrote 50,000 words, but not of just one novel. I could have finished off one of the two novels I've been writing recently, but I decided to fulfil my promises and co-author two novels. The first, which took me twenty of the thirty-one days to complete my half of, was written with a friend and is about a man with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). The second, written with my Grandad, is a sequel to a pair of books (the first a novella, the second a novel) that he wrote and I proof-read about some soldiers who start up a business.

The challenging thing about co-authoring a novel as opposed to writing it alone is that, whenever you have a sudden burst of inspiration and want to change something, you have to go through it with the other author and change their chapters as well as yours. I found that it forced me to keep quite rigidly to the plot we'd come up with, which was interesting -- at least until the last chapter, where I pretty much just made it up as I went.

Another difficulty with the way I did NaNo this time around was the sudden change halfway through: a different novel, a different writing style, a different plot, a whole new cast of characters. The hardest part of NaNoWriMo is to get into the flow of it -- the first  few days of perseverance set you up for the rest of the month, as your momentum carries you forward. With a break in the middle to swap novels, I lost that momentum and had to build up speed all over again.

Bad physics metaphors aside, I enjoyed the month of writing. Most notably, I wrote 50,000 words without there being a single death (at least, not that I remember) in either novel. That must be some sort of record for me, as my two areas of writing expertise are character-based stories and stories about death.

No doubt I'll talk about these novels again when I run out of things to say later this month, but for now that's it. Tomorrow I'm going on a university open day so I'll be in London until pretty late, and I might end up having to write two posts on Tuesday if I don't have the time tomorrow.