Camp NaNo Update: End of Day 7

Yeah… so I forgot to update you all the past few days… but that’s really because NOTHING HAS HAPPENED. Seriously. I’ve hardly written at all.

Target Word Count: 11666

My Word Count: 9426

Chapters Written: Two and a bit.

Favourite Sentence(s) of the day: ‘You’ll learn to translate everything he says into newie speak eventually. Took me a few years, but I got there in the end’.

Feelings: Oh my life, why is catching up so hard???? I feel so far behind and I hate it, I just want to be caught up and not stressed, but giving up isn’t an option because I want this novel to be finished and written as soon as possible! This is the most difficult bit because I’m introducing characters. I can’t wait to get into the nitty-gritty of letting these characters interact and allowing the plot to progress!

On Making Very Little Writing Progress.

Once again, life gets in the way of writing. In some ways, I really don’t mind – as much as I love writing, I would much rather spend a weekend with my boyfriend, as I have just done, because he means a lot to me and I want him to know how much I love him 🙂 on the other hand, some things which are either not so good, or not things I really want to think about, are also getting in the way. 

In terms of the not so good, I’ve had a lovely weekend and managed to stop myself from thinking about it for much of the time, but problems with college keep cropping up, and the most recent one is definitely the biggest I’ve encountered so far (and hopefully the biggest I actually WILL encounter considering I’ve got about 7 weeks of actual lessons left, and I don’t want anything else to happen). I’m not going to go into details about it because I don’t particularly want to think about it in too much detail, but the stress of it is not only making me ill, it’s also disrupting the writing, which isn’t a good thing. 

As for the things I’d rather not think about, it’s actually quite exciting and I’m looking forwards to it, but I’m also really nervous! Well, more anxious than nervous… I want to get it over and done with, but I really want to enjoy it and do well. It’s my drama A Level performance exam on Wednesday, and while I’m really pleased with how we’re doing – the text piece is going really well and I think I’ve got my lines sorted, and the devised piece sounds great but I’m struggling with lines a bit – I’m also really nervous, because my parents and boyfriend are coming to see it, and I really hope they enjoy it! It is distracting me from my writing, but because I’m determined to get at least a B, if not an A if I can manage it, I really want to do well, so it’s worth it! Plus, it is really fun – we’ve been doing quite a lot of rehearsals and it’s been great and really helpful.

Progressssss!

I’m itching to get on with Chapter Seven! Chapter six is done, slightly more enjoyable to write than chapter five but not a great deal, and I don’t even know why I’m so desperate to start on chapter seven. Nothing particularly exciting is supposed to happen in it (although my characters do have this funny way of surprising me sometimes, and taking the story in a completely different direction to how it was meant to go), but it’s like – I’m really enjoying actually making progress on it. Too many times I’ve got so far through something and then given up, and I’m determined not to do that this time.

The fact that it’s half term is helping a lot – and the fact that I only had a teensy bit of homework (as far as I know, I wasn’t even in English the last two days so I could have a mountain of it and not even know about it), and I’ve done all that, so I can just focus on writing and having a social life, which is nice. I can’t wait for the summer holidays – no homework to do and no college to go back to afterwards – just the terrifying prospect of *gulp* results day and *bigger gulp* (possibly) university!

I suppose I’ll have more to talk about on the writing side of this blog when I start university, considering it’s now English and Creative Writing or Journalism I’m going for. Why I didn’t pick them in the first place, I don’t know – I’ve always loved writing and journalism, and I’m pretty good at English – but I got caught up in “ooh I like acting and singing, LET’S DO DRAMA!”, before realizing I wanted to be a midwife, and then it took me getting ill to realize that at the moment, I really should just stick to what I know I can do, and do writing. Where it’ll take me, I don’t know, but I’m hoping to enjoy the adventure.

I only just realized today that I haven’t actually finished chapter one yet, so that’s my mission before I’m allowed to start on this strangely alluring chapter seven, which I really have no obvious plan for, so it could end up spiraling madly out of control. Maybe that’s why I’m so excited about writing it – I’m eager to see where my mind takes me when it doesn’t have a plan to stick to. Of course, it could go horribly wrong… but fingers crossed it won’t!

As for writing…

There’s still not much to report on the writing front. I hadn’t done anything much until last night, when being poorly meant I couldn’t sleep, so I ended up sitting up for a while and forcing out a few more words on the story. I don’t really like writing at night – it tires me out, but I’m always sitting there thinking, “Maybe I could be asleep right now if I’d tried a little bit harder” – and I wonder if maybe the quality of my writing would be a bit better. Last night, however, I felt so ill that there was no way I could’ve slept unless I wrote until the point of sheer exhaustion, so I managed to finish chapters one and two (I started them both at the same time and was writing them concurrently – never again! It was such an effort to get them finished!). Not going to start chapter three until I’ve got a bit more editing done – I really don’t want to get any more done until I’ve made progress on the editing front, and so far, I’ve got very little done on that front.

One update is how I write them – I still use a computer, but I now save everything to the cloud, using Google Docs – I love how it’s easy to edit documents, it saves them as it goes along and you can download them as a word file to your computer too. It means that, should your computer crash and your hard drive gets wiped, you’ve got a copy of it – kept securely, so there’s no need to worry about plagiarism – on the cloud, which you can access from any computer anywhere if you sign in by email.

Will probably update the writing section of the blog next when I actually HAVE made progress with anything of note, which is why the blog’s been so heavy on the non-writing-related stuff recently. Keep reading, folks, I really appreciate the reads/likes/comments/follows!

Progress – or the lack of it!

Sorry, it’s been a few days since I last gave you an update, but that’s really because there’s been very little progress. I’ve got new ideas for new projects niggling at my mind, so I’m trying to push on with it and get on with editing book one and writing book two, but it’s hard – especially when I’ve got coursework and homework and projects coming out of my ears at the moment. I’ve not done very much editing at all – I’ve deleted a couple of sentences and that’s it, which really isn’t good. As for writing – I’ve written half of chapter one and nearly all of chapter two (I should NEVER write two chapters concurrently – I get so distracted and forget what I’m writing in one or the other) of book two, and I’m quite excited. I’ve got plans, I know where the series is going and where it will end, and I’ve got an idea of what I’m going to do afterwards, but that won’t be for quite a while to be honest. Got a lot still to do before I get to that point!

As for life… it’s going well 🙂 I seem to be up to date and doing quite well at college, even if I don’t enjoy it much, and even though it’s freezing cold outside, it’s actually relatively warm in my bedroom. I do wish I could shift this cough and cold, but it seems to be on its way out – I actually sang this evening! – and that these symptoms I’ve been having would go away, but I’ve had a lot of them since last year so I’m not expecting any miracles, especially as it seems to be getting worse 😦

Oh well – the show must go on, and I certainly intend to!