Prepping For Camp

I never went to summer camp as a child. We had a big swimming pool in our backyard and the rest of the neighborhood used us as camp. We used to jokingly call our house "The Vaiana Cabana" for all of its summer frivolity. When I was in college mom had the pool taken out in favor of a more practical two car driveway. I didn't argue as I knew I'd moving on in life soon enough and would have to find a home with a pool of my own.

Fast forward more than a decade later and here I am, in the same house with no pool to speak of and summer looming over me. I finally need camp!

Perhaps that's why I find myself so excited that Camp NaNoWriMo is back again this July! Next week I'll be packing up all of my idle time and shipping it off to writing land. Of course, this will probably slow up my reading a bit and, in turn, my reviewing, but hopefully not detrimentally because I have been enjoying it immensely!

Right now I am in the prepping stages. I'm gathering support in my virtual cabin with cabin mates from my online writing group as well as my "in real life" writing group. I am deciding what project I am going to work on for the month (I think I came to a conclusion on that front last night) and I am reminding my husband that the binge writing is on its way again.

Twenty four hours ago I had no idea what I was going to work on in July. Last night I pulled out my writer's notebook and began to free write. I'm excited by what it gave me. I came out of last night's work with two projects I want to work on! So now I'll just have to work out which comes first and hope I am up to the task.

I have participated in two other NaNoWriMos. I have two completed first drafts as a result. I was tempted to take this time to rework one of them. There are good stories buried under all the crappy writing, I just know it. However, through each process I have learned so much about how to approach this and I want to walk in to this project with those educated eyes. We'll see where it takes me. 

If you, too, are planning on taking the plunge into NaNoWriMo binge writing, let me know - the more the merrier in terms of support staff.

For now, I am going to do some more laundry and bake some writing brownies so I am free from distraction in July and full of sugary energy.

What do you think of these writing challenges?

Have you taken one on yourself? If so, what was the result of your commitment?

Fighting to Finish

Neil Gaiman

In November 2011 I participated in NaNoWriMo and "finished" a novel. It's an interesting way to put it because all I did was write a first draft. The novel itself was far from finished.

When I sat down to edit in 2012 I signed up for a critique workshop online and joined a writing group that met locally to help me along my path.

Mark each as a fail.

The online workshop was a bust (some confusion with the workshop leader) and the local writing group was inconsistent at best. I was floundering and, without a support system, I filled my days with other distractions. I needed eyes other than my own to read my words, and loved ones just wouldn't do in this situation.

This Fall I went into a deep writing hibernation that extended even into my blogging (as is evident with a quick glance at the sidebar). I wrote in my journal and other notebooks, started a bunch of new stories and came up with ideas for new novels (two that I am really excited about), but I typed nothing. I also read a lot. I read novels and graphic novels, for sure, but I also read about writing. I was searching for... something.

In the interim, Nail Gaiman seemed to be popping up all over. And over and over again his one bit of advice would tear out among the rest: FINISH. Every time I'd hear (or read) him say it I'd feel a fire shoot up my spine: What am I doing? I'd feel guilty about my abandoned love,  Why can't I finish? Then, last week, when I was watching John and Hank Green's "An Evening Of Awesome At Carnegie Hall" event on YouTube while reorganizing my entire living room and dining room, he showed up again.

There, on my giant TV Mr. Gaiman, was doling out writing advice to an audience of Nerdfighters. Of course, I knew he wasn't really talking to them, he was telling me that I should FINISH things. He said that I would learn so much more from a finished project that's a failure than a whole bunch of unfinished fantastic ones.

Repetition works. I know this. As a teacher I employed this daily - repeat, repeat, repeat - no one gets it the first time. So there I was, a student of Mr. Gaiman's, and after being pummeled in the head countless times, the lesson was finally seeping in... I stood there, covered in a flock of dust bunnies and realized I owed it to myself to see Dear 302, my first draft from NaNoWriMo 2011, all the way through to its end. I had to take action.

Strange things happen when you have moments like those; it's like the universe is waiting for them in order to pour opportunities over your head. That Thursday the good people at NaNoWriMo hosted a "What Now?" twitter chat where the topic of beta readers came up. As a first step, I volunteered as a beta reader for who ever would have me, just to get myself reconnected to my online writing community.

It worked.

I am a beta reader for two NaNoPals. While reading, I continued my own rewriting and editing, and, in turn, felt confident enough to throw some of my pages out into the ether. The comments came back this morning. They're awesome! I feel like I'm "in it" again and ready to go all the way this time.

To add to the excitement, I just found out this week that the online critique workshop I was in last year was such a flop I have been offered a refund and free admission to a new workshop hosted by the site. The timing is perfect. I was not ready for this any earlier.

So here I go again, back into the deep end. The newbie novelist learning as she goes. Wish me luck!

Writing A Novel - Now I Understand

Until recently, the thought of seeing the deleted scenes from a finished movie meant only one thing to me: lots of laughs! I would look to these clips for the bloopers, the pranks, the sneak peeks of the actors I admired behaving out of character and maybe, just maybe, a little more like themselves. It was with this expectation that I entered into viewing the deleted scenes of The Muppets about a month ago. I was not ready for the incredible writer's "A-Ha! Moment" I would receive from watching all that did not make it into one of my favorite movies of 2011.

It goes without saying that many of the scenes were funny and that some were bloopers (human and muppet alike!), however, having sat through every single scene on the "Play All" feature right after watching the full length film, I was surprised by how many of the scenes had nothing to do with the movie at all! Let me rephrase that, they could have had something to do with the movie, but not the way it turned out. These scenes were not just cut from the film, their omission either resulted in, or from, a major rewrite of the script.

O-M-G!

I know, I know, you're reading this and saying, "Duh, Nicole! What's the big deal?!"

The big deal is that it was that Muppet moment, for some reason, that my rose-tinted glasses were finally smashed. Slowly some thoughts crept into the corners of my mind,  

When Jason Segel and Nick Stoller wrote "The Muppets," they didn't think it was perfect, was the first thought...

Then slowly (sometimes I'm a bit dense...), They must've looked at it and thought that the only way it could be fixed was if they rewrote pieces...

And then here's where the BIG connect comes in, I bet if I rewrite pieces of my novel I can fix it!

Having read Stephen King, Anne Lamott and Marion Roach Smith's books on writing since finishing my first draft, as well as being a part of writing communities and chatting it up with numerous new writing friends, this is a fact I knew, but (I can now see) did not understand. There is an enormous gap between knowing something and understanding something; I am incredibly grateful that I have finally bridged it.

Here is what I understand: 

• I understand that it is not my weakness as a writer or my amateur status in this role that accounts for the state my novel is in; it is the fact that it has not been cared for since first being splashed on the page.
• I understand that getting the story out is only part of the work and that the other part, the editing part, is much more than correcting typos, spelling, grammar and fluidity of sentences.
• I understand that I will have to "kill my darlings" even though there is no death scene in my novel, nor shall there be cause for one.
• I understand that writing is an art, in the same way my teaching was: a beautiful, fun effortless-looking output from countless unspoken sleepless nights spent researching, creating, rewriting, perfecting but filled with giddy excitement every step of the way.
• I understand that I am new to this, that I am learning, but I can do this.

I'm looking forward to the weeks ahead. While I've been extra sick as of late (thank you very much stealthy kidney stone no one asked for!), I am hoping the worst of it is behind me and that I can bumble back to my sloth-like existence of pseudo-healthy (two chronic diseases I can handle!) and truly hit the books. I'm taking part in a Savvy Authors online workshop on constructive criticism that I hope will help me in my own writing as well as my participation in the StoryDam community. It should be fun (read: *absolutely terrifying*) to share some of my chapters with people in my class to get constructive criticism on them: WISH ME LUCK!

Hoping everyone else in ROW80 is doing well with their writing goals this round.