Camp NaNo Update Week One

My brain is shot because I've been doing NaNo all week, and I have nothing philosophical left in me. Therefore, I'm posting a NaNo update instead.

I'm working again on Awakened, hoping to get the second quarter of the book done. Things are going a bit slower than I hoped, but it's still going pretty well notwithstanding.

I've written 13/14 pages so far. As you can see, I'm right on my goal. And surprisingly, the cabin is ahead! This is the first time this has happened to me. Hopefully it lasts.

This week has actually been pretty laid back. We haven't been going much of anywhere, so I've been able to get a lot of things done at home, including having my first driving lesson, preparing a glass candle holder for staining, baking a coconut cream pie (in honor of Gilligan's Island), knitting my yarn remnants into a scarf, practicing piano, and, of course, writing. I'm not writing as many pages as I would like, but I'm happy with what I have so far, so the good outweighs the bad.

Le snippet:

   Peter's heart leaped. A presidential pardon. A free ride. He could stay out of jail.

   But it wasn't worth the lives of Katie and her family.

   "I...think I'd rather not."

   "Well," the man said. "I needn't waste my time with you any further. I've got a bit of a time crunch, and there are reams of doctors waiting to study your body to find out more about your genetic disease. I hope it won't inconvenience you if I just speed the process along a little."

   The nausea climbed up towards Peter's throat. Not only was he going to die by a needle, his body was going to go to the very doctors he had dreaded and fought all these years. In the end, they'd win.

   A strong hand gripped Peter's left arm. A pinch of pain spread through the crook of his elbow. The pinch of a needle.

   Bile rose in Peter's throat. He swallowed the burn down. The needle slid out.

   "Normally we'd offer you a last meal, but..." Another needle pinched Peter's skin. "I guess this is goodbye."

I'm off to write some more.

Introducing Peter Oglethorpe

Name: Peter James Oglethorpe, Jr. (He was named after his paternal grandfather.)

Physical appearance: Golden brown hair which he wears longish-short (think Luke Skywalker), brown eyes, medium build, 6’ tall.
Personality type: INFP.

This picture isn't exact (his hair needs to be more golden and his eyes need to be brown), but it's close enough.

Via Pinterest

Peter's had to fight pain all his life, from his condition as well as from constant fights, so he has a super-high pain tolerance, however, he often has trouble walking and speaking, with occasional muscle convulsions and asthma attacks. Sometimes his neurons are overwhelmed and he passes out for no reason.

He is shy but snarky, and disdainful of all government officials, especially federal ones. He has somewhat mastered his terror of strangers when at or near his hometown, but can have trouble taming it in new or stressful situations. However, he is a people watcher.
He's a strong Christian, but he suffers from depression and chronic nightmares and sometimes can find it hard to keep his mind together. He deals with his emotional attacks and depression by playing the violin and reading the Scriptures they saved from when they lost their last Bible.
His best friends are Jen, his twin sister, and Katie, one of his neighbors. He really loves Katie and has always planned on marrying her. He was also really close to two of his brothers who he lost in tragic accidents. He blames himself for the death of one of his brothers.  He feels an almost painful need to protect his family, and can overextend himself trying to meet their emotional needs. Losing the rest of his family terrifies him and he does his best not to think about it.
He doesn't like needles or doctors or scientists or science experiments. He abhors them, but is not afraid of them beyond getting trapped.  He doesn't like NYC, but can handle it. He can't, however, handle parades usually. He often passes out and doesn't like to sleep, as nightmares and restlessness usually plague him. He usually writes or reads instead, when not in severe pain.
His sense of humor keeps him from breaking and growing crazy under the pressure and emotional and physical instability. His sense of humor can be super morbid, but Jonathan, his brother, and Jen and sometimes Katie play along, because the only alternative is to scream.
He really loves America and is very independence-minded. Saving his country is one of his biggest goals.

So, what do you think of Peter?

Camp NaNo Overview

In the last week of March, I decided to participate in Camp NaNo to give myself motivation to sit down and write, despite the fact that we were leaving for a vacation that very first week. Brilliant, that was. Somehow, I managed to stay mostly on top of my goal of 60 pages in a month until we got home. Then I fell behind and lowered my goal to 45 pages. I fell behind several times, but then managed to meet my goal a few days early. And I'm building up to the First Major Plot Point in my story. Success!

Week One: We left for a spring break vacation on one of the very first days, but I managed to stay on top of my goals and turn out scenes I was fairly pleased with. However, after we came back on Thursday, I took a break from writing on that day and Friday.

Week Two: I wrote six pages on Saturday, and then took a break that lasted almost the entire week. I read several books and gathered up my motivation to write two pages on Friday.

Week Three: I wrote five more pages on Saturday, wrote a couple more pages in the next few days, then lowered my goal from 60 pages to 45. All in all, I didn't write much this week.

Week Four: True to my pattern, I gained a lot of motivation with the end in sight and wrote 15 pages in the last few days. I hit 45 pages and validated my win on Thursday night while watching the NFL Draft.

And here's a snippet just for fun:

   Peter stilled. He stared up at the officer, barely breathing. The officer's face was hard, his eyes unreadable.

   The officer placed the barrel against Peter's forehead. Peter's muscles froze. Slowly, he forced his shaking hands into plain sight to lie flat on his desk. He stared at the top of his test paper.

   "Let me repeat my command." The officer's voice filled with steel. "Give me all the papers in your desk and reveal to us where your illegal terrorist textbooks are, or I shoot the boy with the service dog."

   Mutt! Possibly there was one way Peter could keep this from ending really badly. If he could get some command to him...

   "I'm sorry, I-" Mr. Larak started.

   "No, please!" Katie exclaimed at the same time.

   "Don't..." Mr. Larak continued.

   Peter's heart sank. This was it, then. Either he figured out what to command Mutt, or he got shot and killed. But what- "Sic him, Mutt!"

   Mutt dashed forward and latched onto the officer's leg with his teeth. The officer fell backward and fired.

Introducing the Condemned Patriot Series

Four years ago, my family and I were on vacation on St. George Island in Florida. We had rented a house and brought our Wii so we could watch Netflix. While we were there, we watched a popular movie Glenn Beck had talked about on the radio. This movie was The Hunger Games. We really liked it, and when we got home, my sister checked out the books from the library and we read all of them.

Before I read Mockingjay, my sister told me about Peeta's hijacking. Even though I was prepared for it, I didn't like how he was treating Katniss, so I quickly set up a fanfic in my head to yell at him. (It was a weird habit I had at the time. I'd set up my own characters and situations to provoke characters in books and movies that were annoying me.) In order to provoke Peeta (as the true writer I was) I gave the girl yelling at Peeta a brainwashed friend that she had grown up with (because I really liked childhood friends that wound up falling in love). I named her friend Peter since it was close to Peeta, and I named her Katherine since it was close to Katniss (but decided to call her Katie since I didn't like the name Katherine).

I quickly took my new characters away from their task of yelling at Peeta Mellark and threw them into my own story. I had been wanting some childhood best friends that fell in love that had actual conflict around them, and jumped on them as my chance. In order to escape cliches, I made brainwashed Peter an idiot, not evil. Partially because I had just read The Hunger Games and partially because I just liked the concept, I made Peter and Katie young teenagers fighting to free a declining America. Then I started making up stories about them in my head. (The first one involved Peter getting un-brainwashed and then getting injured in a plane crash.)

I never intended to write about Peter and Katie. I just made up stories about them to amuse myself. But as I developed their story and their world more and more, I just couldn't keep it in anymore and had to write it down so I could share them with my family. The very first time I tried to write about them, I quickly realized Peter had replaced Katie as the protagonist, a realization that was made easier by the fact that my sister had just written an entire draft following the wrong protagonist. So I erased the paragraph I had written and started anew.

I wrote the beginning of their story several times and gave up. Then I wrote some short stories about later in Peter's life and the war which tricked me into first being longer than I thought, and then turning into a series. Through the process of the several drafts I half-finished, I expanded Peter's family from two siblings to ten (all of whom I ended up killing), developed many side characters (only a few of which have lasted), took Peter on many adventures which revealed a lot of his personality, developed his romance with Katie, gave him a future, and learned a lot about writing. I also named the potential book series: Condemned Patriot. Then I got involved in other things and let the Condemned Patriot series simmer in my mind for a while. I removed many of the Hunger Games elements, scrapped childish and cliche plot lines, and decided I needed to rewrite the series from the beginning so it would make sense.

I started the first book on January 1, 2016, fresh with a new name and everything: Awakened. I got to the First Major Plot Point (after Peter's dad revealed that he wasn't as great a guy as I thought he was) and...got stuck. Majorly stuck. I had no idea where I needed to go with the story. So I put the draft away for a while and shoved the story into the back of my mind.

In June, I read this post on K. M. Weiland's blog about plotting your book by starting with the antagonist. I realized that my protagonist was driving the plot instead of my antagonist, who should have been the catalyst. So one day I sat down at the piano and brainstormed the plot (and had many, many characters refuse to die on me). Elated, I sat down again and started a new draft of Awakened, this time starting with the First Major Plot Point. I liked how it went until I hit halfway, where I...had no plan. I wound up taking rabbit trails, some of which I liked, but most of which I hated. Then I got stuck in the climax. I tried filling in the beginning, but that also failed to help. I scrapped the second half of the story and rethought what I did and didn't like about my second draft. I drew on the feedback my mom and sister had given me when they had read my unfinished draft. I took my mom's suggestion to make Peter fifteen instead of twelve, and then aged him even more to eighteen when I realized I didn't like writing about him as a kid. I also took my sister's suggestion of giving Peter's twin sister, a very new addition, her own subplot. I scrapped the elements I didn't like (the trial, the mental hospital, Peter's extraneous little sister, and the absence of Katie for most of the story) and sat down and rethought the entire plot...again. This time it took me two months to rethink what had taken me the second half of 2016 to accomplish.

Finally, in February, I had a breakthrough. I plotted the entire story and realized I would have to rewrite it...again. So, in February/March I started draft three of Awakened. So far, I really like the way this draft is going. It bears almost no resemblance to the story it was in 2013, and hardly any resemblance to even the second draft. I've had to scrap the outlines I had for the future books and have changed the number of books in the series from 6 to "we'll see." It's been a long journey with these characters which I will be on for a while, but I'm excited to share Awakened with the world when it's ready.

I'm currently participating in Camp NaNo in an effort to make myself sit down and actually write. Hopefully soon I'll be done with this draft and start with editing. Until then, here's a short description:

In an America torn by revolution, a desperate freedom-fighter is forced to choose between keeping his family safe and struggling to lift the oppression of his people.

And if you want to learn more, you can browse my Pinterest boards for the series and the first book.