Camp NaNoWriMo: Week Two

Week two of Camp NaNo! How did I do? I actually accomplished a lot despite the crippling amount of self-doubt I was experiencing all week.

DAY EIGHT

My set-up at the library.

I love working on the weekends. It’s when I get the most of my work done since I work full-time. On Saturday I decided to get the bulk of my work done at the library because I just wanted a change of scenery. I love working at my desk in my office, but since I mostly work there during weeknights, I wanted to change it up completely. So, I sat down at the library and continued my read through. This was my most successful reading of the week. I went from page 30 (where I was on day seven) to page 110!

DAY NINE

I was a little slower on Sunday but still averaged over my fifty page daily goal. It was also around this day I was really hating everything I was reading. Don’t get me wrong, I love my story, my characters, everything. But I was wondering why the hell everything I was reading seemed so bad, writing-wise.

When I wrote these scenes back in November (for NaNo) I genuinely liked what I was writing. I tend to overthink a lot when I’m writing. The concept of “letting go and just write” is foreign to me. I don’t like it and I can never do something like that during NaNo. Like, it took me over ten minutes to write my opening paragraph because I needed it to sound right in my head before I typed it out.

Next is the obvious answer that: hey Lainey, this is a first draft. It’s supposed to be awful.

And I get that as well, I do. So here is where I explain why I kind of hate reading my first drafts. When I was in college, I tended to write my first drafts for my academic papers as my last drafts. I rarely changed anything about them aside from spelling and phrasing and still did very well when it came to grading. I just know my brain has a hard time reading creative first drafts because it just can’t figure out why my writing sucks so bad in the first draft. Oops. My bad.

DAY TEN

I’m still hating everything I’m reading and I’m honestly getting super discouraged.

DAY ELEVEN

I have to psych myself up to start reading after I finished dinner, reminding myself that it’s ok if I think this MS sucks. So I start reading and this amazing thing happens.

I read the first scene I wrote after NaNo finished and I don’t understand it but I genuinely like it. I read the next scene – I laugh and chuckle at the dialogue from my favorite side character, (Finis, the sisters’ youngest brother.)

The next scene, which features my f/f pairing sharing their first kiss makes me smile and I touch my heart at how well it turned out.

Then I thought, ‘Wow, could what I wrote during NaNo be absolute crap?’ I guess that would be another post all on it’s own, wouldn’t it?

DAY TWELVE

I actually watched Eclipse with two of my friends and that was a long-ass movie. Then I was kind of tired? I read for less than an hour only getting in about ten pages before I decided to call it quits.

A chapter I realized needs cutting. Yes, my handwriting is terrible.

But I will mention here what I have been doing with my read through. After I finish every chapter, I turn over the last page and write out all the important things that happened in that chapter. On the left, you can see I found a chapter that I will probably cut, because it doesn’t do anything for the plot even if I did like the dialogue spoken between the characters. When I’m editing in-document, I’ll be pulling the dialogue into a scrap-doc and try and fit it in in other chapters. Writing everything that happens in each chapters also helps me come up with a better outline of what I actually wrote. I can better see the story this way.

DAY THIRTEEN

This was the first day so far in Camp I didn’t do anything. I was actually driving to my parents’ house after work and hung out with them like a loser all night.

DAY FOURTEEN

With some lost time the past two days, I still had over eighty pages to read as I sat down to start reading for the night. My step dad and I continued with our tradition and went to The Fate of the Furious, my favorite franchise of all time, early that afternoon. As a die-hard fan it’s hard to take my word, but dang, I’m trying to be as unbias as possible when I say the storyline was so great. There’s so much more than what they revealed in the trailers.

But watching or reading things I really enjoy really inspires me so I was just waiting to get back into my MS to edit with renewed excitement.

I didn’t completely finish my read through, I have less that fifty pages to read until I’m done, but that will go fairly quickly because these pages are the climax + intense craziness and I’ll finish before I know it. Next week, I hope that I get at least one hundred pages into my second draft! We shall see!