Camp NaNoWriMo April 2023

Camp NaNoWriMo Prep Week Day One

Today is the first day of actual work on the novel. I haven’t started writing yet of course, but I really put in some good hours yesterday in getting my system set up and ready. This evening I need to start plotting. I am chafing against the idea that romantic books need to follow the very formulaic pattern established by what is hot on TikTok. Maybe at the end of this, it isn’t really a romance novel, it is fiction that has sex and love in it. We’ll see. I just want there to be more than boy meets girl> boy and girl flounder until they fall in love happy ending. Escapism? yes. Overblown dramatic overture of love? Absolutely. Steamy Spicy scenes you’ll be embarrassed to tell your best friend about. 1000% but these characters as I have come to know them deserve more than that. There is longing and pining that I think a lot of friends to lover books use for comedy, that deserves an examination.

My Goals For This Evening.

  1. Get all the lingering bits and pieces from Notion to Storyist.
  2. Start looking at the first act plot structure
  3. Get my writers notebook TN insert numbered and get my NaNoWriMo spread made

I’ll check in with you all tomorrow to see how far I got.

Are you plotting or pantsing your novel? Let me know in the comments

❤ Spencer

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Camp NaNoWriMo April 2023, Personal, Writing

Hi, It’s Been Awhile: April Camp NaNoWriMo 2023 Book Announcement

Hello,

I am so excited to announce that I am doing Camp NaNoWriMo this April. I dabbled in the main event in November, but I could not find the love I had for it once.

Writing has been the third rail of my creativity for several years. After the heartbreak of getting close to a agent deal, and losing it because of the pandemic. I deleted all my writing apps off my computer, boxed up my writing journals, and disappeared from this blog.

I didn’t know how to handle being so close to what I wanted and being so far from it. I spent 18 months on that manuscript. The loss of the chance to share it with the world was a gaping wound I’ve carried around with me for several years.

Life has a funny way of teaching me the same lesson in different ways. I came to writing while recovering from radiation for brain and spinal cord tumors. I couldn’t knit, I couldn’t sew, and anything that required a lot of hand-eye coordination was a struggle. As someone who at the time had an entirely handmade wardrobe, the loss was devastating. The writing was something I could do from home. That I could dictate and something that I found allowed me to harness my brain’s overactive imagination into something productive, as opposed to destructive catastrophizing and overanalyzing.

I’ve come back to writing in the wake of my mother being pretty sick. Watching her struggle and worry and have so many regrets about what she did and didn’t do with her youth has been a wake-up call to stop allowing the past to rule my present.

Today I’m announcing my Contemporary Romance Novel Cornelia Street. I will be working on this through April, intending to hit 50,000 words, but I would like to be done with the whole novel’s first draft. It is a friends-to-lovers story set in NYC, Paris, and Seattle over 5 years.

I won’t share much of the plot or the characters, but I plan on blogging about the process, from drafting to query.
If you are also doing Camp NaNoWriMo and contemporary romance reach out, always looking for writer friends.

❤ Spencer

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