The Writing Diaries - #2!
It felt like time to update the writing diaries (it's been a while, after all!), and seeing as we are on the final stretch heading towards the summer, the time seemed right to refocus on my writing. I've talked before about juggling writing with adulting, and the last month or so has been pretty terrible for me in managing that balance. Work and life has taken over, and even with carving out a few days of writing with friends to encourage me, it's been hard to get many words down. And when I have got the words down, they've been the wrong words, not expressing the feeling I'm going for, or getting a couple of hundred words into a scene and realising it's fallen flat on its face.
So I've decided to try and throw myself into Camp NaNoWriMo!
I'm currently on about 38k (and the last 4k have been like pulling teeth), so it seems like a great opportunity to get some words down. I've got misgivings about NaNo - last time I did NaNo, I wrote possibly the most hideous thing of my life that I didn't ever want to go back to it was so cataclysmic, and I'm terrified I'll destroy my story if I do it again - but also, I know it's a great way to churn out words. So I'm taking the plunge.
Between now and Camp NaNo getting under way, it's time for some overhaul. Identifying plot holes (rather than blithely falling into them), planning what happens in what order... there's a lot of structural work to be done!
I'm feeling pretty apprehensive, to be honest. It feels like this story is ballooning and getting away from me; like it's trying to take me with it but I've not figured out how to follow it.
Equally, I've been writing this incarnation of this WIP for the last 12-18 months and it's driving me slowly crazy that I'm not getting the words on the page fast enough. And this novel is my baby - these characters have been in several different incarnations, time periods, stories, since I was about fourteen. I want the best for them and for them to be able to be their amazing wonderful selves - after, of course, I've finished turning their world into a dystopia so realistic, you could almost call it 2017...
So Camp NaNoWriMo it will be. Let me know in the comments or on twitter if you're doing Camp NaNo too! It would be great to get involved in some group writing sprints and compare the progress we're making.
Happy writing!
K x
