Hey, friends! Just a swift little writing update for you.
This month is Camp NaNoWriMo, and that means I've been busy typing furiously for the past several weeks. While Camp isn't quite over yet, I have already passed the goal I set prior to the start. February and March were slower creative months for me, so I wasn't sure what to expect for April. Well, I blasted right past the 35,000-word goal I set and am staring down the barrel of 65k. It's looking like I'll be hitting 70,000 words or more.
Woot woot!
Yep, I'm pretty excited. Not only about the word count but about the story itself. Since it's a work in progress, I can't share a ton of details. However, I can tell you that my research has included a few very interesting things. I've had to Google wingsuits, baseball statistics, types of climbing equipment, special needs saddles, and various types of wheelchairs. It's always fun to see the wide variety of things I have to research for any given story I'm working on, and I always learn a lot of information that broadens my horizons. The trick then is to avoid huge information dumps -- or at least make sure to edit them out before the final draft.
The story is taking shape, though it's a pretty rough draft. It's feeling like the early chapters will require some pretty heavy edits, but I often feel like that at this stage of the first draft. Sometimes I'm right and other times I'm wrong and the scenes ended up coming out better than I thought. The scene I was working on yesterday (which was really earlier today for me, because I'm writing this on Sunday night, not Monday morning), came together so well that I might not need to do much more than a quick proofread on it. We'll see if I still feel that same level of confidence once I print out the full draft and pull out my colorful pens and settle in for some color-coded editing.
Not sure what that type of editing is? I'll be having an article up about it in a few weeks, compliment of my writing buddy Victoria Minks. Look for that article sometime in June.
The next few days will have me busy writing in between regular work and cleaning house and finding time to study my memory verses. (Check out this article for more information on the Focus on Jesus Scripture Memory event still going on now.) This last week of April will not -- I repeat, will not -- see this draft finished. I know the goal is to write an entire draft in a month for Camp, but that's just not possible with this story. With very many of my stories, actually. I tend to write long, despite the brevity I've learned for the short stories I post on occasion here on the blog. (Even this article is getting longer than I anticipated.) The good news is, long stories just mean you have even more to enjoy once I finally get one published.
That's a beast I haven't yet mastered.
But I'm learning. Slowly.
One of these days, a draft will be finished and edited and sent off to beta readers and then edited again. After that, who knows? It might even find its way to the world of published books.
Won't that be terrifyingly amazing?
For the rest of this month, I'm not looking that far ahead. I'm looking just far enough to finish the next chapter and then the next and so on until I reach May... and then I'll continue writing until this draft is officially declared completed.
What projects are you trying to make progress on in the waning days of April?
Are you ready to set up your next goals for May?
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Remember to practice your memory verses! Next week, we'll be choosing our fourth Scripture verse to learn. Happy studying!
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