July WIP Challenge: Day 3 Check In

[lexicalcrow]

Day three is over, at least where I am. Were the muses kind to you today?

What did you do today?:
- Write
- Edit
- Send to beta
- Post
- Plan/daydream/research/write scenes in your head
- Procrastinate
- Something else I will describe in comments.
Today's question: Since Camp NaNoWriMo's just launched, I'm curious whether any of you have done NaNoWriMo before, or have signed up for Camp NaNo? If you've done it before, did you write fanfic? Did it ever end up posted somewhere? Or is it still sitting on your hard drive, never to see the light of day? If you haven't done NaNo, would you ever consider trying it, or is 50k words in a month too daunting, even for fanfic?

(For those unfamiliar with National Novel Writing Month - NaNoWriMo - it's a writing challenge that runs in November and the goal is to write a 50k word novel in a month. Camp NaNo just launched this year and plans to run July and August. They also have Script Frenzy in April for script writing.)

Comments

[msmcknittington]

Yesterday I signed up for 750 words (at like 11 PM), and I wrote 190 words before midnight and then 655 after midnight, for a total of 845 words. Which is AMAZING for me. I doubt that I'll be able to keep it up for the entire month, but it's a really promising beginning.

I've done NaNoWriMo a couple times, but I've always been really disappointed with what I come up with. It's fun if you fly by the seat of your pants and are good at it, but if you're a slow writer then it doesn't work out so well. (I prefer "methodical" to "slow", though. :P) I find that with the stuff I produce for NaNo, I have to do so much editing at the end to make it even readable enough to send to a beta reader that it's just not worth it. It's too disappointing and frustrating to look at what I've written and know that I can do better than that. I also don't always have the time to write gobs on a daily basis -- that "REAL writers find time to write EVERY DAY" thing is ever so much beautiful bullshit -- so NaNo is a poor choice for me.

My previous years' NaNo novels are sitting on my hard drive, waiting to be finished and edited into submission. I have shared sections with my friends after I've edited them a bit. I got good feedback, at least!

Since I also did not answer the last two days' questions, this month I'm working on the same novel-length thing I worked on last month, which I am pecking away at approximately at the speed of glacier. But every word is a word closer to the end, right? It will not write itself!

As for canon, I usually end up getting pretty speculative and writing off the beaten path, so I kind of just make up what I need in a reasonable fashion. I try to stick to the nature of the characters and the tone/nature of the original work, but if there's something missing or the world isn't kind of sparsely constructed, then I work with what it's the canon and construct what's missing for my needs.