{"id":595,"date":"2018-05-03T22:16:28","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T02:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=595"},"modified":"2018-05-03T22:16:28","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T02:16:28","slug":"camp-nanowrimo-a-very-happy-camper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/camp-nanowrimo-a-very-happy-camper\/","title":{"rendered":"Camp NaNoWriMo: A Very Happy Camper"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I really wanted to notch my seventh NaNoWriMo win last November. I had a novel all mapped out and everything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, my health had other plans. In early November, I got the worst case of the flu I have probably had in decades. I was spiking high fevers every night and barely had the energy to sit upright, much less park myself at my laptop and hammer out a novel night after night. I missed two weeks of work and really should have taken off the whole month. The flu eventually turned into bronchitis, giving me a cough so severe that I bruised ribs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah, I didn\u2019t get a novel written that month. Not even close. And I was way too sick to care that my six-year streak broke. Ever since then I\u2019ve been laser-focused on querying TIDEPOOL, the Lovecraftian horror novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2016 (the novel formerly known as BLOOD TIDE).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But it really bothered me that I didn\u2019t have a new idea that was grabbing me. For NaNo 2017 I came up with a soapy vampire novel based on a rather elaborate Sims 4 vampire legacy I was playing, but I just kind of left it hanging after NaNoWriMo ended.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But in early 2018 I started chewing over a new idea, and before long it took root and I started to envision characters and plot developments, and I knew I\u2019d fallen into that hole in the paper Stephen King described so well in Misery<\/i>. (Not that I use actual paper these days. But you know what I mean.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I didn\u2019t want to wait until November 2018 to get a draft down, so I treated April\u2019s Camp NaNoWriMo as if it were the main event. And I did it. I fell way behind the daily word count at one point, but forced myself to sit down one weekend and write myself out of the hole I\u2019d dug. That was a new and not fun experience, but I\u2019m happy to know I can actually do it.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I have a new Draft Zero. It\u2019s not good, of course. They never are when they\u2019re brand new. It\u2019s too short, and I already have a whole file of issues I\u2019ll need to hammer out when it\u2019s revision time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s out of my head and in a computer file, and I\u2019m hoping I\u2019ll be able to revisit it in a month and make it into something good. It\u2019s called THE KEEPER OF THE KEY, and it\u2019s basically The Haunting of Hill House<\/i> meets Bluebeard<\/i> in a modern young adult setting. I\u2019ve been studying a lot about novel-writing craft in the past year, and I learned a lot from my Pitch Wars 2017 mentor. So I\u2019ve got high hopes for this one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As for that soapy vampire novel? I might revisit it in November if nothing else is going on. I figured I\u2019d be writing that one just for fun, because no agents anywhere wanted anything to do with vampires post-Twilight<\/i>. But a few weeks ago, something weird happened: every agent on Twitter started saying \u201cYES! Send me vampires! Please!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This business, I swear\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I really wanted to notch my seventh NaNoWriMo win last November. I had a novel all mapped out and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":596,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}