Winding Down Camp Nano for April

5780 words.

Sort of. It's not the actual number of new words I wrote, because I wrote one scene three times. But it's not the net total of new words either, because I saved a bunch of fodder from previous versions of that scene, plus made a discard pile, but only saved some of it. I guess overall it doesn't matter. I made a lot of progress on the story, and that was all I was really aiming for.

There's a few more days of April left, but I'm not likely to get back to it again until Friday, which will be May 1, so that's going to be my official final score.

The entire thing is now at 18,470. 6964 of those are about them bumbling around in the warehouses, starting with being ambushed in the first one, then getting sidetracked into a second decoy, before finally getting to the door of the correct warehouse. The latter two parts were nearly all written this month, for 3910 words (not counting discards). That's a lot more than I originally envisioned, but it makes sense that it would've been that complicated, and there was a fair bit of character development along the way. So much so, that I'm going to have to go back and make sure everyone is still consistent with themselves from before all that...

Then I finally got to the ritual scene that I'd been waiting to write for years. It's the scene I've written three times now, and probably the next time I look, I'll find more things I'll want to change about it. That's how this story has been going though. One scene at a time, edit it to perfection, before moving on to the next part.

Which, now that I think about it, I don't actually have any plans after this scene ends. This could be a problem if nothing suggests itself by the time I'm done. Hopefully the characters will figure something out by then.

Camp Nano April 2015 - and we're off!

1434 words so far. The goal this month is 15,000, or 500 words per day, which I figure should be doable for something like Vengeance that has to be written slowly. I'm figuring on two scheduled timeblocks per week for writing that include sitting next to other people - Friday evening and Sunday evening. That probably won't be enough to cover quota, and the only other time I can reliably fit a big block of writing would be Wednesday morning. Three times a week of 2-3 hours each, with lots of downtime in between (because this story needs lots of downtime in between). Maybe bits and pieces on Saturdays also. Should work.

So last night (a Friday) I'd intended to rough out the ritual scene with Aaron and Thorme, but instead I got there and hit the ground running on the rest of the warehouse scene. 1434 words in about two hours is a lot faster than I was expecting all that to come out. The excuse to keep them delayed for another three hours is kind of flimsy, but it worked well enough to get things going. Basically I made it extremely difficult to repair the control panel to the hydraulic lift that would let them get back to the surface.

Now I'm kind of stuck at a bit of a plot hole - namely, how could Alice have been backtracked through the underground tunnel after being in the second warehouse, and our heroes didn't pick up on her scent the first time? So I might move her (and the ritual) to a whole different block of warehouses instead. That kind of screws up the entrance I'd intended though - they're supposed to go in from the back, not the front. It also means I have to renumber all of the warehouses again...