It's now July, so you might have guessed that Camp NaNoWriMo has finished, and needless to say, I didn't complete it. In fact, I didn't even make it to the half-way point, with Yarny.me informing me that I managed a grand total of 24,304 words. I really thought that this would disappoint me, but to be fair, I think I got in a little over my head doing it in June, purely because it was such a busy month for me and I lost a good week or so of opportunity to write. I then hit a brick wall with one of my characters.
Basically, the story centres around two leads: one that I absolutely love, and the other...yeah, not so much. I'd started to find him boring, and a little two-dimensional, and as a result I'd begun to grow tired of writing about him. Ultimately, I've decided to completely overhaul that character, give him a personality transplant and basically create a new male lead who is much more interesting.
Inevitably, this shake up has pretty much changed the whole dynamic of the story, with a lot of what I'd written - having involved the boring male being well, boring - having to be thrown at the window, at great speed.
To be perfectly honest, I feel a lot happier with my story for doing this. And yeah, I know that the whole point of the NaNoWriMo is to not scrap anything until the second draft, but the way things were going, in which I kept hitting them consistently irritating brick walls, I was never going to make it to the second draft...not without wanting to kill people off anyway. So, I think that I did the right thing, for my story.
So, what now?
I'm certainly not giving up, and I'm not going to let my failure to complete Camp NaNoWriMo get me down, because as I already said, I took too much on, and was never going to be able to complete it without going slowly insane. So, I'm focusing on taking the next one, in August, a lot more seriously, and I fully intend to keep the same story at the forefront.
I know it sort of feels like cheating by going back to the previous story, but I should point out that those over 24,000 words have diminished to just over 2,500 and it's taking a totally different path to before, so it really does feel like I'm starting fresh, just with the overall basic roots of the story still there.
Positivity saves the day, yet again :)