During April this year I took part in Camp NaNoWriMo. This is a month-long challenge to encourage budding authors to get started on their literary masterpieces. My target for the month was 50,000 words, which is considered by many to the the minimum length for a modern novel. To hit the target one has to write an average of 1.667 words a day. If you hit the target then you are considered a “winner” and get a badge for your blog (mine is down on the bottom right), plus special offers on various sponsor’s products. Technically one could easily cheat… but as the idea is to encourage you to get on with your writing, that would be a bit defeating the object.
For April’s Camp NaNoWriMo I wrote the first 55,000 words of a historical novel that I have been thinking about for a very long time. I will be finishing if off and publishing it, but am shelving it for now for various reasons.
There will be another Camp NaNoWriMo for the month of July, so I am now planning what I will write for this one.
I am going to be writing the first book in a series of fantasy/crime novels. I have been thinking about this for many years and have many elements of my fantasy world planned already.
I will be writing using the excellent software, Scrivener, which I used for both my historical novel and my soon-to-be published non-fiction book, Make It, Blog It, Profit!.
Scrivener is a writing environment, created by an author for authors. As well as a conventional world processor, it also can handle research, plotting and formatting tasks. I was able to buy it for 50% of its usual (very reasonable!) price, as one of the prizes from April’s NaNoWriMo. There is a free month’s trial version available. I will write a more in-depth review at a later date.
Throughout June I will be planning the plot of the new novel, and building the world in which it will be set. This will be a lot of work, but something I will also enjoy.
I intend to work through this Magical World Builder- 30 Days of World Buildingby Stephanie Cottrell Bryant.
I have just started creating some maps for the world, using Campaign Cartographer 3+ software from Profantasy. As I am very new to this software, I have a lot to learn and so am experimenting and learning as I go along. I will use it to map out the main world, towns and villages and to create floor plans of buildings. Some of these maps will end up in the books (I will redraw them nicely!)… others will be purely for my own reference.
Here is a snippet of one of my first mapping attempts.