Summer Camp Plans

Time for a new challenge! 31 world building prompts spread out across the month of July. Should be interesting.

World Anvil has an annual challenge where they release 7-8 world building prompts a week, for a total of 31. I have a plan for it written out here, to be filled out further as the month goes on. It’s a little difficult to plan out exactly, since I don’t know what the prompts will be, but that makes it fun.

You can see some of my goals here, if you would like.

I got a bit waylaid by mental exhaustion, so I’m not entirely up to date on the homework assigned to prepare for this project, but I should be able to pull myself together and get it done before the end of June, and that’s the deadline anyway.

I also want to complete another 20,000 words in my current WIP. Should be doable, I think. I hope. It’s been a while since I’ve actually sat down and written it, and honestly there’s other projects I should be working on to edit, and….I will get these things done, eventually. For now, 20,000 words should make a nice addition.

Hopefully I’ll manage to rest my brain through the summer as well. Anyone else with summer writing goals? Or is it just vacation time? Or is it business as usual with life and all its fun surprises?

A Short Story In May

I went through a quick short story writing process done by Story-A-Day, and I have a few thoughts about it. I also have a short story to share, if you care to read it!

The Butler Did It

I don’t know about other households, but this phrase was a common one in mine growing up. Any kind of murder mystery, my parents (and eventually their offspring) would make some kind of comment about how the butler did it. To me it’s one of the ultimate cliches. The solution you always see coming.

I Have Goals

Now Camp NaNoWriMo is finished, how did I do?

I won, so I guess I did okay. Did it on the last day, but quite easily. So that’s 30,000 words of a first draft complete (and barely through Act 1, dang it).

Over the last three months I also

Camp NaNoWriMo Has Ups and Downs

I’m now about halfway through my Camp NaNoWriMo goal of 30,000 words, which is actually rather unfortunate since we’re now well over halfway through the month. As such, I’m a tad behind.

There was a spring break from my work last week, but that ended up being more “catch up on energy and sleep” than “catch up on writing.” Which was a bit disappointing but apparently I really needed it. The other struggle, beyond my work schedule being generally insane, has been a lot of missing ideas. I have a perfectly good outline to work from, but whenever I go to work on the more fun action scenes, my ideas flow to a crawl and I end up summarizing what should be an interesting encounter.

The final problem is that I want to run a brief game for the tabletop role playing game Star Trek Adventures, so I’ve been taking advantage of some resources this month and working on my story for that. Since it’s all fresh and new to me, it’s a bit more tantalizing than the novel I’m meant to be writing.

So, yeah. That’s what I’ve been working on for the most part this month. I’m going to get back to it. Leave your writing goals in the comments so I can cheer you on!

Inherent Sympathy

I watched a show recently where a particular complaint someone raised about the main character in a review really caught my eye. Mostly that I thought they were dead wrong and missing the point. There’s a reason I’m writing this here, and why I’m not going to specify the show nor the reviews because who wants that kind of drama?

Prompt #23: Lose the Cavalry

Quick explanation: A few Christmases back I was given a “Writer Emergency Pack” deck of cards. This included a set of prompts. So I’m going to go through and follow them, to the best of my ability. Some of these will end up being parts of my works in progress, others will be standalone stories, depending entirely on my mood.

Let me know what you think of it!

This is Prompt #23: Take away the allies and support. Leave your hero to fend for themselves.

Character Arcs Anew

My writing group has been going through the book “Creating Character Arcs” by K.M. Weiland, and it’s been a good exercise. I’ve been through the book a few times before, but this time it was nice to discuss it with others and also have a specific plot and character of my own in mind, as opposed to reading it in a general sense.

The Creation of New Baldrick

I’ve been doing a fair amount of worldbuilding lately, due to some World Anvil contests and flash challenges. It’s fun stuff. One of the latest is a settlement building exercise centered around using the Nerdbuilding settlement generator.

Meylany Bellgar Is Not Like Me

I enjoy writing con artist characters, apparently. I’ve done quite a few now, people with deep secrets as to their real identity. It’s probably the secrets that appeal to me, the multiple layers that it allows for. It’s also a lot of fun to write someone who’s smart enough to fool a room full of people. It’s also rather hard.