April: camp nanowrimo completed and the progress of my next book!

Hello, hello!

I hope everyone is staying safe out there when everything has gone crazy. I'm in Washington, so things have been crazy here for a while but I feel like it might actually be starting to level off. Everything has been shut for so long that they think we've flattened the curve, so we're really hoping that the stay at home order will be lifted soon. I'm personally doing okay because I'm an essential worker, even though my hours were cut, but I'm worried about the tiny businesses I like, especially the bookstores. Ready for all this to be over and stuff to kind of go back to normal. Whatever that means anymore. 

The good news is that since my hours were cut, this was the best Camp Nanowrimo I've ever done! I wrote over 70k this month instead of 50k. It's incredible to realize how productive I can be when I actually get sick of Netflix lol.

My draft last month was Runeless- the first book of a fantasy series set in a tundra world with magic where all the people have runes that tell them their destiny, until a group of kids descended from the gods and a boy with no runes are sent to find a way to save their lands from a coming darkness. It's my passion project and has been for over a year now, and I LOVE IT. It's getting away from me in length, though. I have written 35/45 chapters (that was a trip to write, HOLY SMOKES) and my word count is at 235k. I bought the biggest size of binder I could find and I'm not sure it's going to be big enough. But it's so much fun I don't even care. The only thing is that there is going to be so much editing, and I need to finish the first draft before I can edit it, so I need to finish it.

Numbers:

Words Written: 83,200

Days Worked: 30/30

Progress:

The House on the Rocks- I'm on my fifth draft, now, and am going to finish this edit and then give it to beta readers to give me final feedback and work on submitting! It's growing near as good as I can make it, and it's my book that's most suited for traditional publishing, so I'm almost finished with it. Hopefully soon I'll have some exciting news on it!

Runeless- I finished Act II last month, and finished up through Chapter Five of Act III. I have fifteen chapters planned for each act, so I'm ten chapters from finishing the first draft at last. My goal for May is to write the next five chapters, so that I can finish it this summer. I'm guessing it'll be around 70k more words, but as long as I work every day that's doable. And then EDITING.

Resources:

For people in the Seattle area like me, I definitely recommend that you check out Hugo House. It's a writing group in downtown Seattle that offers tons of classes, support groups, coaching, readings, and more. Right now, since everything is closed due to Covid, they've moved all of their classes online and are offering them through Zoom, which means they're accessible even to people who can't get to Seattle right now. I definitely recommend you check it out, they're not that expensive and the topics are super interesting.

Stay safe, and talk to you soon, hopefully with a finished draft or two!! :)