Who's ready to go camping?

How many of you are going camping this summer? How many of you are going to a writing camp this year? I am. Sitting at my desk, relaxing under my blanket fort, I will be pounding out a 50,000-word novel with my friend, Alicia. Expect daily updates during the month of June as I camp away! Hopefully, my co-author will start a blog as well so I can link it here. This way, you get both author's views about our novel! There will be snippets of the story, updates about camp, and perhaps even some updates about our cabin mates!

Oh, right. One of the awesome things about Camp NaNoWriMo is that they put you in a cabin with 5 other writers. Alicia and I were lucky to get into a cabin together, and our group mates and the two of us have called our cabin Charlemagne!

Here's our summary for our novel, written by said friend:

Sarina, your average high school student, never expected to have so many college applications denied. She'd never had anything less than a C in any of her classes (and she hated that class anyway).
One morning, her parents surprised her with an acceptance letter from some place known only as SU. She didn't remember applying there, but she was so happy to finally have a place to go, that she didn't really look into it.Whatever type of experience she was expecting from college, she was sure this wasn't it. Sure, she would have classes, homework, and a dorm room, but who would have thought all of her classmates would be superheroes? And she's the only normal human in the bunch?This can't be good at all.

Figuring out my Writing Life

You know what I have discovered? I have way too many story ideas and too few ideas on how to go about them. Lately, I've been reading this book called The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel. It's pretty fascinating and has helped me discover what genre might be best for me. Right now, I have three that really call to me--romance, fantasy, and erotica. Romance and erotica are pretty easy to mix together, and I've always loved books that create their own world like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Hell, I even enjoyed Twilight, but she didn't really create her own world in that one. She just took fantasy creatures and tossed them into reality, which is also fun.

I have also come to discover that I focus too much on vampires. Any story I write, I feel like it has to have a vampire in it. I think I'm just obsessing with them. Right now, however, I'm obsessing over something else. Obviously we all know about super heroes, and we all enjoy them in our own way. Because I'm in college myself, I'm thinking of writing something called Tales of SU, SU standing for Superhuman University. I know, so original, right? I sort of got the idea from this show my husband watches about a human who ends up in Monster High. No, not THAT Monster High with the dolls and everything.

Anyway, my idea is to take a normal human with no superhuman powers. He's tried applying for colleges and can't get accepted anywhere. Through a fluke, he applies for SU and is accepted! It's on the bus ride over that he realizes the school he's at isn't a normal university because people are flying, some look like rock people, and there's a girl who can duplicate herself, among other people. Anyway, on his first day he runs into this girl who can turn invisible (hence the reason he runs into her). At first, she thinks he's a super too, but as the story progresses, she realizes he's a human and tries to help him stay hidden at the school.

Well, that's all I've got on this idea right now. I'm off to brainstorm and outline. This is my idea for Camp NaNoWriMo, which starts in less than 4 days (3 days, 13 hours, and counting...). My hope is to write Book One during June camp, write another in August camp, and a third in November. Wish me luck!

New Project: Fictional Memoir

All right, I have--again--begun a new project. This one, however, is not a joint endeavor with my dear friend, Alicia (also known as The Worm or The Hermit). Rather, this one is a slightly-joint endeavor with my four closest friends--my sister, my cousins Kirsty and Kaity, and my cousin Ana. You see, while on vacation from school, the five of us would basically all grow up together in this big, yellow house in Cerritos. So, I am going to write about our adventures. However, it is going to be a fictional retelling because I'm going to make it seem like our adventures came to life, of sorts. So, it'll be a bit like Peter Pan meets Alice in Wonderland meets The Five Cousins (which is what we call ourselves). However, because I absolutely loathe beginnings right now, I think I'll just dive right in...

3 Pages Down, X to Go...

Lately, as I'm sure you all remember from my last post, I've been doing a lot of journaling and very little novel writing. Well, just recently, I've started reading Walking in this World by Julia Cameron as well as We are all Writers: How to Use Your Journal to Cure Writer's Block Now by Mari L. McCarthy. The first focuses a lot on how important creativity is for our inner artist and encourages us to practice that creativity daily. The second focuses on lifting writer's block mainly from your journal, but it can be applied to any writing project, I think. At least, that's how I use it.

Anyway, so what I wanted to let the blogosphere know is that I have begun work on my novel once more. I wasn't liking the beginning so I started over with a couple of chapters from the MC's life before being a vampire, during her early days as a vampire, and during her early days as a Krusnik. I'm hoping these will eat up some of the timeline so that I can reintroduce Leonard in the story, though she won't know it's that Leonard until much later.

I know, and some of you are going, "Who's Leonard???" Just read my novel when I release it, and you'll know! Novel excerpts will likely be posted on my website that I'm creating for my novel. Link will come soon.

Journaling Instead of Noveling...

So, lately I've been doing much more journal-writing than I do noveling. In fact, I haven't done anything on my novel in several weeks, I'm sure. If not longer. While, I wish I could say I'm disappointed in myself, I'm actually pretty excited that I'm writing anything at all. In fact, I've gone two solid weeks with journaling every day! Yes, I am quite pleased with this, and I am hoping to one day include daily novel-writing with the journaling. Anyway, so this was just a quick update to let everyone know what was going on.

A Book for Writer's Block

I'm sure you all remember my entry regarding writer's block and how much it sucks. Well, here's a book that I have found helpful. You can click on the image to download the ebook from Mari's website for free. This is a helpful book from my friend at Create Write Now. I also have a blog about her other book with 85 journaling tips in it. I have several of her books, and I really enjoy each one. But this one was specifically about writing and curing writer's block so I felt it was appropriate for this blog.

My Novel is Taking Off!!!

So, recently my mother was asking me some questions about my characters to help me figure out how to make my character's respond. Well, her questions brought to mind some questions of my own so then I sat down and wrote out some character sketches. This took my novel in a new direction, but it's also taken off in that new direction. I am very happy that my novel is now taking off, but now I need to stop blogging so I can keep writing!