Camp NaNoWriMo – Day Four

Well, I’m still to learn from the last few days. Over the Easter weekend, it has been difficult to carve out an exact time to write. I know that I can get a thousand words done in half an hour if I really set my mind to it and there isn’t much outside research that needs to be done. At the absolute maximum, the three thousand words I want to set down each day should take me three hours. A thousand words an hour seems reasonable. That being said, there’s a lot of outside research and consideration in this one.
Today was a fortunate break where the whole chapter I was writing was a study of a particular character in a particular situation so there was very little outside influence involved there. I got a thousand words done this morning when I got back from my kayak trip and then I left it until 10pm to start writing again. That was after half a bottle of wine. I got two thousand words written in forty minutes. A lot of that won’t make the first edit but at this stage it’s just a case of getting everything down and worrying about the order later.

If anyone is reading these in order, I suppose it can seem flippant the way I talk about the form that it has taken. I will tell you that I have spent months planning this, mostly in my head, and have the general arc down. I like to give some mystery to myself as I work on each chapter but there’s a definite guideline for each of them. I tend to put a bulletpoint down for each thousand words I want to put into a chapter.
No spoilers but today’s three were escape, run, hide. It sounds simple enough but from there I could fill in enough to make the word count. Everything else is a consideration for a couple of months down the line when I can dare to look at this manuscript.
For now, I just need to get it done!