#camp nanorimo

[the960writers]

The WIP project 2023 - getting started

Hello writerly friends! How is it going with Camp NaNoWriMo? I saw your posts about setting a goal, like  @quilleth and @annaofthenorthernlights, who both set their goals to 5k, which I think is a great goal to aim for. How are we doing? For me, it’s difficult getting into the right mood, currently. Distractions just keep coming at me, scattering my focus. And then the doubts keep creeping in,…

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[the960writers]

The WIP project - beach impressions

Hello writerly friends! I don’t have a pretty graphic for you today because I’m writing this on my phone with my trusty bluetooth keyboard at the beach. But I can give you some beach impressions instead. It’s beautiful, even if it’s not quite warm enough to go barefoot, yet. I neglected you all these last few days because I had to work a lot. I snuck in some writing here and there, but I mostly…

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[the960writers]

The WIP project 2023 - onwards

Hello writerly friends! How is it going? How is Camp NaNoWriMo working out for you so far? I had one good writing day. One. I’m counting that as a win. I’m also experimenting with changes in my writing setup and the program I use, which is turning out to be more difficult than I thought. Apparently “cross-platform and easy like google docs” are hard marks to hit.  Another thing that may or may…

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[the960writers]

The WIP project 2023 - three days to Camp NaNoWriMo

Hello writerly friends! What time is it? It’s time to get ready for Camp NaNoWriMo!  Three more days! Camp NaNoWriMo is hosted on the regular NaNoWriMo site, https://nanowrimo.org. The difference to the November event is that you can set a goal that isn’t 50k. Camp is for smaller goals, for more leisurely writing.  And that is what you should do, if you want to join Camp NaNoWriMo. Set a…

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[chatting-leaves]

It Was A Person On The Internet: April 2020 Camp NaNoWriMo Project Introduction

The year of 1994 was a year of transition for myself, then a boy firmly planted in the awkward state of life better known nowadays as the "Tweens", growing up in a pair of small towns along the New York/Connecticut border. My Dad finally found someone to settle with, conveniently the daughter of his then-landlord and the sister of his neighbor/best friend while at the same time my Mom had broken up with her boyfriend of several years. Mom's breakup came for good reason, she was dumped while she spent a month in rehab for a drinking problem. A quarter century later, I can safely say that Dad is still in the same relationship - married in all but legality because why mess with a good thing - and Mom is still sober. On the heels of this, on a cold, snowy Sunday morning, I flew off a sled while on a camping trip with my Boy Scout troop and crashed into a tree stump with a set of gruesome injuries: a broken nose, a chipped orbital bone, a blood clot in my cheek, and as years have passed by I'm sure a traumatic brain injury that was under the radar.

In the missed month of school that followed after surgery to set the nose, fix the orbital, and remove the blood clot, I became a bit of a loner. While I got plenty of attention at school, getting to meet with anyone outside of school was a task given my odd living situation: Mom and Dad swapped me a week at a time, Mom lived on the fringe of one town, Dad in a tiny apartment in the other. I craved attention and companionship the time I was not at school but good luck for me trying to get it. Even my altruistic want to be friends with the token special needs kid in our district, the child of a teacher who had Down Syndrome and also dealt with incontinence, fell flat as my oddly formal proposal got a dismissive "I'll think about it" by said teacher.

As the year went on, I ended up on the emotional back burner between Dad's newfound relationship (aided once she relocated from an Atlanta suburb to New York) and Mom's newfound sober lifestyle which had me spending many a night in assorted dining rooms or church basements reading or doing homework. At one point during this, I realized that a computer might be a great learning aid especially that my own handwriting was a bit of a mess. Getting Mom to bite was a bit problematic, it didn't help that she spent much of the year on half-pay due to her rehab trip and a later month in an outpatient program, but Dad seemed open to purchasing a computer. Between the lack of friends out of school, my inability to return to Scouting, that the fallout from the accident led the troop to fold, and the general lack of things outside of forty channels of cable television plus some more on antenna, a computer would have the net benefit of getting me to tap into my creativity and my passion to learn.

There wasn't much else I wanted for Christmas so outside of a couple small things and some books, the computer was THE gift. An old Best Buy ad from Christmas 1994 that has made the rounds details largely what Dad sprung for: A Packard Bell "Multimedia Package" with a 486 processor, a 720MB hard drive, 4MB RAM, 16 bit stereo speakers, a CD-ROM drive, an internal fax modem (at a blazing 2400 kbps), a printer, and $800 worth of software. Total price Dad paid for this setup: $1800, a considerable amount less than the $1999.99 in said Best Buy ad. Everything was gingerly set up while I had been sent to Christmas Eve Mass with my future stepmother and assorted other future family members, Dad having made a stealth exit early in the service to set things up. To say I was enthralled was an understatement. Once the initial joy wore off and 1994 turned into 1995, we spent time testing out the early walled gardens of the Internet - remember Prodigy and early AOL? -  with only one bit of advice from Dad: "don't look at porn." An easy request for my tweenage prudish self.

Twenty five years later, I have met countless people on the Internet, in venues going from the system of newsgroups that predated the World Wide Web to message boards to chat rooms to the ever changing world of social media. Some people I've met, fallen apart from, and met again, sometimes more than once. Many of these people are near and dear to my heart, be it people I see as the additional family I wish I had or people whose time on the Internet was a springboard to real life. Whether connecting to them came via a pay-by-the-hour ISP on dialup or instantaneously via a phone more powerful than that 1994 setup Dad spent over $3000 in 2020 money on, some of these people have left indelible marks on my life, usually for good but sometimes not. These are thirty, or so, of their stories, told mostly as I remember them with some details and most names changed for good measure. Stay Tuned!

[raptor-redd]

I've got four days until Camp NaNoWriMo and I still can't settle on which novel to write, nevermind sitting down and planning the fucking thing. There's two fighting for my attention, but neither one of them will actually give me a cohesive plot to work with, and about six others that could potentially brainjack me at any moment. Blarg. I've been sitting on this Jersey Devil story for like fifteen years and never been able to write it, so I really want to give it another shot, but I kind of want to work on the dimension-hopping unwilling cyborg and elf prince duo thing, too.

[writingismyheaven]

1082 so far and it’s still 10:23 am! I still have about 2 hours to write so I’m going to sprint my way to my goal.

15 mins word sprint at :30 anyone? (message me if yes)

[steamythings-blog]

Let’s go camping!

Well I’ve signed up for Camp Nano 2016. I’ve joined a cabin and I’m still totally unprepared.

I’m actually really excited about it. I’ve been working on my plot and so far its gone completely left but it seems more manageable now so that’s exciting. I also now have an evernote and hiveword so I’m getting all of my planning done.

Good Luck everyone!