Camp Wordsmith is a weekly venture in which Angel of Mermaid Vision Books, Christa of Hooked on Books, and I post about our work in writing over the past week. We’ll also discuss various issues to do with craft. The goals here are simple. We want to write, so we’re making a public effort before all of our followers and readers to do so. And by the end? We hope to make it a little closer to our dreams of being published.

Week 8
Stage: First draft and planning
Week’s Word Count: 5400
Total Word Count: 20200
Posts that I found encouraging this week:
YA Highway on not tearing yourself down
QueryTracker.net on it being all right to fly by the seat of your pants

You might have noticed that this post title has a butt-load of exclamation points. There’s a very good reason for that. The reason is in the bolded text up there.

Go ahead, look it it. I’ll wait.

…

You looked?

20,000 words, you guys! I passed the 20,000 word mark!!!!! Exclamations foreverrrrrr and ALL THE HAPPY SINGING (I just don’t do dancing)!!!!!

This week has been my most productive week yet in Camp Wordsmith, owed largely to the fact that I’ve had a terrible cold this week and have begged out of social engagements because of it.

Something I knew about myself but had forgotten is when I am most productive in writing. I mean, of course, the time of day. I’m either most productive in the very early morning, or very late at night (which often stretches into the very early morning). I am always reluctant to drag myself out of bed early, so my productive hours have been late at night this week. This is probably because there is little else happening to distract me.

I reached a really pivotal scene this week that catapulted me into the next leg of my story. I’m getting to the meat of it, so to speak. I should mention here that it is again, very late at night as I write this. I used any decent metaphors on my WiP. At least I hope they were decent… gah! Back to the point.

Anyway the trouble this week came after those scenes. As a pantser, I had a lot of frustrated moments where I only kind of knew what I wanted to happen next. I threw out the “what is right?” question and just wrote the next scenes that popped into my head. I know that I’ll have to work out that transition later, but that’s the beauty of a first draft!

Answers will come later and I’ll work accordingly to fix them.

And I know that they’ll come as soon as I stop obsessing over them.

I’ve worked out a few major issues that I intend to fix during revisions as I’ve drifted off to sleep this week. Which of course made me bolt upright and roll over, scrabbling for my bedside notebook and pen– and then of course trying to convince myself to get back to that sleepytime place.  I’m not letting myself see to those issue resolutions right now because I know how I am. If I fix one problem, I’ll want to fix the next and basically this story will stall out completely at 20,000 words because I’ll become so obsessed with “fixing” it.

Still, I’m excited about the progress I’ve made and that I see some of these fixes.

I also think that I’ve finally got a title, but I’m not going to jump the gun on that. I’m still mulling it over to see if I like how it feels.

This week’s goal: 3000. Getting another 5000 would be nice, but  honestly, I hope that I’m not still sick.

Don’t forget to check in with Christa and Angel!

Have you made any progress this week? Boast about it in the comments, I love to root other writers on!