Camp NaNo Days 24 to 29: Winner!

Wow. It was long, it was hot, it was an absolute struggle to concentrate, but I got to my goal of 20,000 words! My official stats say 20,097, which I will take any month of the year (except November, when you need 50,000). I put in 2,865 words today, which is the highest number on any of my Camp NaNo july days, but I just wanted to get the thing over with.
My stats are completely wonky this month, as I mentioned earlier, all leaps and bounds:

But I got there in the end, writing through an official heat wave of 13 days. I do see the advantages of writing in November.
Quality wise, some parts are pretty good, some parts I know I will never want to read again if I can help it. My aim was to provide back story for my seven main characters, and I wrote back stories for six of them, which is secretly better than I'd hoped, although the aim is to get 4,000-5,000 words for each of them, and I think I only made that for one. But it made things easier NaNo wise, because if I didn't like the character I was working on, I could switch to another chapter and be in another world all together.
My next thing will be to combine this Camp NaNo with my April Camp NaNo, giving me about 41,000 words, and then smoothing things out and filling in the blanks. I know there are going to be a lot of inconsistencies, duplications, and weird changes in tone or plot, so it will need work. But for now, I'm done with writing!

Camp NaNo Days 10 to 23: still writing!

I'm still writing! Not so much at/for/on this blog, I have to admit, but the Camp NaNo is still going strong. I just finished my writing session at 16,161 words today, not because I didn't know what to write anymore, but because it was just such a beautiful number to finish on.
My NaNo writing has been going in leaps and bounds, with me being 3,000 words ahead of par on Day 11, and then staying on that number for five consecutive days, thus eating up all of the buffer I'd written. But this was all planned; my July weekends are filled with festivals, birthdays, and other social events, so on the days I do write, I aim to put in at least 1,000 words to stay ahead (my suggested daily goal is 646).
The weather is still very beautiful, sunny and warm, so I spend those writing evenings outside, writing in the cooling air and under a darkening sky. My stats page tells me that 'at this rate I will finish by July 29th', let's see if that will be come true!

Camp NaNo Days 3 to 9: 1,500 does the trick

So I started this Camp NaNo by writing nothing, then I wrote a lot in one day, and then I wrote nothing for quite some time. Summer, it seems, holds so much more diversions than November. However, I am able to write outside, and when the weekend came I put in four days of around 1,500 words each, which brought me back up to par and then some way ahead; I am now at about 7,950 words where I should be at 5,806 to break even. A 2,000 word margin is not bad.
I started by writing the character whose personal story lay closest to my own in recent times, as that somehow seemed like a good starting point (she has a completely different personality from mine, and I hadn't really thought about her at all, I was sure I was going to start with someone completely different, but then I sat down and her story just came pouring out). Then yesterday I started on the character whose personality and personal story could not be further from my own, because I felt like a change, and today I started on the character who reminded me of one of my colleagues (I never 'copy' real people into my stories, but I tend to be inspired by people who share certain characteristics with the people who populate my novel). So it's been nowhere near chronological, but I think the different angles and stories keep me entertained. In the meantime I also added a bit to the 'general' story, because I came up with a bit of dialogue that I wanted to make sure I did not forget, so it hasn't all been 'personal backgrounds'. But that doesn't matter; as long as there are words on the page.

All Change

Today I finished the Cazalet Chronicles, by Elizabeth Jane Howard. All Change is the fifth book in the series, and the one she wrote almost twenty years after the other four. The story is set nine years after Casting Off ends, and it took me a while to get into it. Somehow, this book felt disconnected from the other four in time, space, characters, but also in writing style. In the first four novels, chapters consisted of one character's view of the world, the way they spent their time. In this last novel, characters are grouped together in chapters, with one chapter towards the end including short snippets of almost all the characters in the novel. I say 'almost', because some of the main characters of this (and previous) stories somehow disappear mid-novel, never to appear again.
There were other inconsistencies as well; some personalities seem to have changed between novels (I read one review saying 'the characters act out of character'), some needless repetition, especially concerning food (how many oysters can one book hold?) and a focus on actions rather than thoughts. It feels like this novel could have done with some more editing. She wrote the story shortly before she died, and sadly, it really isn't her best work.
The plot concerned mainly the younger children, whereas we didn't really see the main characters from the earlier novels, some of them appeared just as backdrops. Somehow, this made me sad, as the stories about Polly, Clary and Louise showed them breaking free from the patriarchal constraints; now they were reduced to mere mothers, mothers with relationship troubles.
I would almost wish she hadn't written the novel, although I do love knowing how all the characters ended up. They are back to normal life, the war being over, but somehow normal life is harder for them than the war period. Still, that somehow reduces their lives to petty disputes about petty things, whereas if earlier novels taught us anything, it was that this family will get through whatever the world throws at them. In the end, that does turn out to be true, although again the plot focuses on action rather than thought or feeling. The ending is quite nice, if only because it is an open ending, leaving the reader to dream up a better future for all of these beloved characters. If I were to reread the series again, I would leave out this last novel.
The title says it all, ironically; the story, the writing, even the characters, all have changed. And not for the better.

300th post

Also, just because I love pretty numbers and pretty facts, this is the 300th post on this blog! The amount of posts has been steadily declining over the years, with 105 posts in my first year (2012, a third of the total) to an absolute low of 21 posts last year, but including this post I am already up to 24 for this year! Let's see if I can pour out 300 more posts in another six years time!
And to make the numbers even prettier; in page views I am around 29,585, so in just a little while the 300th blogpost will get the 30,000th view!

Camp NaNo Days 1 & 2: Full steam ahead!

So, the July Camp NaNo started yesterday. I did not write yesterday, I was too busy doing other things and basically did not feel like it. I started writing today, around a quarter past eight in the evening, and I just finished at a quarter to eleven on 2,722 words. In NaNo stats, that puts me somewhere between days 4 and 5, if I were going to write this in a proper linear fashion (as if that would ever happen). You could say it was a productive evening (yes, I am in ironic understatement mode, I just wrote 2,700 words in 2.3 hours and I am almost three days ahead of schedule).
As I mentioned, this Camp I will be writing the background stories for some of my characters in my main story. I thought about doing them chronologically, and had actually only mentally prepared for the first character, but then this afternoon I started wondering about the penultimate character, one of the three that has a big reveal/plot twist in her background story, and I decided to just go for it and write her chapter first. It isn't done yet, but so far it contains about 2,700 words of description/exposition and 22 words of dialogue. And that feels fine, this is a character you don't really get to know in the main story, so there has to be a lot of information to make up for that and put her on the same level with the others.
But more amazingly, somehow those 2,722 words were waiting somewhere in the back of my mind just bursting to get out. I hadn't thought about them before, I didn't know which way this story was going to go, I just sat down and wrote. I've experience that before, when I was in the middle of a story and found my flow, but never with a character I knew so little about. Usually I write lots of dialogue on my first days, because dialogue is the easy bit (for me). And then this happened.
I won't have that much writing time in the coming days, so it's good to have built up a bit of a buffer. I wonder whether I will go on to finish this character's story first, or whether I will have another one of these creative outbursts on the other characters. There are eight in total, so I will easily get to 20,000 words just writing those. And then ending up with eight short unfinished bits to tack on to my already written storyline, sounds like a very NaNo way to go about things!