Back to Camp NaNoWriMo

Thursday sees the start of Camp NaNoWriMo again, and this year is the first time I’ve done two months of targeted writing, both the April and the July camps.  November is not a writing time for me – it’s editing or getting books out or promoting them for the Christmas market, or getting the blog ready for Christmas, etc.

The task for July is to write 60,000 words of Princelings of the East series books.  I’m remaining vague about precisely what, since (as I may have already told you) I have written part of book 7 and realised I can’t write the rest until I’ve at least outlined book 8, which is intended to be the last in the series.   I hope to complete the month with a first draft of The Chronicles of Willoughby the Narrator, and an outlined book 8, probably with some chapter summaries, provisionally entitled Princelings Revolution. I can even describe the cover for that!

Are you surprised I know the titles – book 2 in the Viridian System Series still hasn’t got one!  For the Princelings, though, I have been working towards the end of the series for a long time; I didn’t feel able to write it earlier simply because the passing of time is involved.  Physically we’re still five years ahead of the end of the series.  I wrote the first three in ‘present time’, books 4 and 5 in the relative past, and book 6 just two years ahead.  Book 7 is intended to take us from early in the series to the start of book 8 from Willoughby’s perspective.  In theory it would be a stand-alone, although it won’t be a completely closed story, since Willoughby will be heavily involved in book 8, which stars our old friends Fred and George. I have mixed feelings about writing them again, since as you know, they were based on my first two guinea pigs, and it’s now five years since they died.  There are a lot of dear friends who have followed them over the Rainbow Bridge, some of whom were expected to be major characters in this final story, and I expected to be reading the final draft to them, so it’s a bitter-sweet experience.

The more I write things like this, the more it sounds like I know what I’m doing.  In some ways I do… I’m just not sure where the journey is going to take me. 

Frankly, that is exactly why I write the stories – to find out.  I just wonder whether I’ll be able to snap out of my post-referendum depression to tackle it.  Although… turbulent times in the Realms as well as here…