A.J. Maguire

Tag: Camp NaNoWriMo

  • The End of Camp NaNoWriMo

    Alright … so … it’s after 9PM on the final night of Camp NaNoWriMo and I am quite exhausted.  My end word count is 32,764.  I was hoping to get to at least 40k before the end, but the stars just did not align.

    But that’s fine!  Because I knew when I started this that I couldn’t win with all my obligations at school and everything.  (There was a solid week and a half where I couldn’t write due to finals and what have you.)  And to be honest, it was just plain fun to work on something new and different.

    So!  As promised I will be setting Tapped aside to be finished after I have completed Dead Magic and Usurper.  For those of you who follow my books, Dead Magic is the sequel to Witch-Born and Usurper is the third book in the Sedition series.  My Alpha Readers will be extremely pleased to hear that Dead Magic should be finished by November.  And I suppose if I put that in writing I should be prepared to suffer the consequences should I fail to meet the deadline this time.

    (In my defense, deadlines have been given quite a bit of leeway due to school.  And honestly, I broke a character in Dead Magic and she was driving me nuts, so I needed time away from the work to figure her out.)

    I’ve taken down the Camp NaNoWriMo page given the fact that … well … it’s done.  But come November — if Dead Magic is finished and I’m feeling particularly feisty — I might put a new one up to follow the regular National Novel Writing Month for the year.

    To those of you who participated in Camp NaNoWriMo … congratulations!  Even if you didn’t reach the goal, you still got words down on paper, and a story plotted out in your mind, and you deserve a cookie just for that.  Writing a book is hard.  It takes guts to even try.  So, well done!

  • Camp NaNoWriMo Week 4

    Alright!  So I’m sitting at 28043 words.  After a small amount of calculation, I’m pretty sure I won’t be winning this year.  But, I did have finals for school and all of that earlier this month so I knew I probably wouldn’t be.  We’ll see what my end count is a week from today, but I can say that I love the story.  There are a lot of holes I know I need to fix, a lot more character building and world building I need to do for the setting, but I enjoy the story-line immensely.

    For this particular story I decided to challenge myself and stick to only two Points of View.  The result has been a beautiful story about a mother and her son.  We get to see both of them in action, hear their thoughts and their misunderstandings, and watch the strife that comes about when a harsh truth imposes itself in their relationship.  I admit that it is strangely difficult to write only these two POV’s since my very Third Person Limited writing style keeps begging me to go into someone else’s brain for a minute, but I believe this story will be better for the limitation.

    That said, at the end of this month I will be setting Tapped aside (regardless of where I am in the plot) in order to pick up and finish Dead Magic and Usurper.  (Dead Magic first.)  These two are on contract and do require my attention.

    But it has been great fun writing something at break-neck speed, heedless of every caution my internal editor’s voice kept trying to shove in my way.  While I admit that this leaves me with a lot more editing to do later, there is something to say about being able to put the shell of the work down.

    Seven days left.  Let’s see how many words I can slam onto paper before September.

     

  • End of Week 3

    Is it really week 3?  Well, I suppose the first week was only two or three days long, so I won’t feel bad that I’m only sitting at 19762 words.  And I really, really won’t feel bad about that number since it is finals week and I have 1.5 projects left to do and a lovely multiple choice test waiting for me.  (The .5 project is mostly just gathering some pictures and the other one is an essay, so I should be able to finish relatively quickly.)

    I am seriously excited for the next two weeks, though.  Because after TODAY my summer classes will be done and I can play with my Camp NaNoWriMo project with more intensity.  And I do mean intensity because I just found out that one of the passengers currently on board Jorry’s ship the Zephyr was actually hired by Devon’s real mother to track him down.

    Sweet holy conflict, batman!

    In Jo’s defense, she sorta thought Devon’s real mother was dead.  And the lady did leave her three month old baby behind when she got arrested, so … yeah … Jorry feels fairly justified in her choice to keep him.  (Fairly justified.  She does have the moral capacity to see how murky the situation really is.)

    But, let me tell you, the scene where she gets confronted with this information was super fun to write.  Here, I’ll cheat and leave a snippet on this board as well:

    “That boy’s name is Devon Barlow and he is my son,” she said very quietly. “He is more a part of me than my own skin.  If I ever hear you even whisper such a story on this ship again I will disembowel you.  Are we clear?”

    Well, alright, so that’s more of a quote than a snippet.  If you want the actual snippet you have to go over to the Camp NaNoWriMo page.  At any rate, I need to run off and finish my finals so that I can breathe again.

     

  • Day 3 of Camp NaNoWriMo

    Alright, so it’ll get a little crowded up here if I post all of my word counts every day.  I’ll be putting that up over on the Camp NaNoWriMo page anyway, so there’s no need to be redundant.  However, I also want to spend most of my time trying to … you know … write the novel I’m trying to write for this thing … So I’ve decided that on Friday’s I will post a quick recap on what I’ve done for the week.

    This will be taking the place of my regularly scheduled blog posts.  But I figure the title of my blog is “Writing Mayhem” and what is more chaotic and resembling mayhem than the idea of trying to write 50k words in one month?

    Pfft!  Nothing!  Nothing at all, I tell you.  It’s craziness personified.

    So!  Here is my recap for the first (half)week of Camp NaNoWriMo ::

    I have been introduced to Ms. Johanna Rorry, otherwise known as Jorry or Jo, to her compatriots.  She is, as she has told me, a deserter from the military.  She and her best buddy Seach Barlow (don’t ask me, that’s what he said his name was) both ran away from the military after receiving a distressing call from Jo’s husband — Relo Bomani (I recognize that the names are weird, but in the spirit of NaNoWriMo anything goes) — that they needed to run for their lives.

    I don’t know what was threatening their lives just yet, but I imagine I’ll find out later.  Whatever it was has kept them in hiding for 80 years or so … and I explain the science behind their freakishly long lives within the book.  They are the futuristic equivalent of truckers, meaning they haul food, provisions, and fuel to each of the space stations peppering the galaxy (also explained in the book). This keeps them mobile and anonymous, which is exactly what two deserters from the military would want.

    But .. uh-oh … I have to upset their balance in Chapter One to keep the plot interesting.  So I threw a baby at them.  (Not their baby, they’re not romantically inclined, and I didn’t have it fly through the air, so calm down.)

    In any case, I am ending this week with a word count of 5,076.  Which is super-fabulous.