Hello!

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a non-profit international organization to encourage and support all writers, and which you will read about on here fairly often) will host a virtual Summer Camp event in July, and I know what my project will be.

Over the years, I have accumulated many story ideas. Some were individual scenes, some were people, some were places or magic systems. Some may be full stories. I did not worry about what is was back then, only if it was fun to think about. Some I wrote down on paper, some I typed on computer. The earliest ones I typed on a computer running Windows 98, I believe. During one of my computer upgrades, somewhere between Windows 8 and 10, I went through all my old copies of my personal folders and USB sticks and school stuff and everything, and created the Stockpile File.

The Stockpile File is a spreadsheet. One idea is one line. Each line has the basic world, the main character’s names, a medium to long description, the basis of that idea’s inspiration, and a space for additional comments if there are any. Not all of the spaces are filled; some do not have characters, other characters do not have names, some were imagined so long ago I have no idea what inspired them – you get the picture. I have full beginning-middle-end stories, a slight ‘what-if’ quirk to make an interesting setting, and everything in between.

For July, I will declare my camp goal to be the full 50,000 words of the original challenge. However, instead of applying all those words to one story, I plan to expand on every single line in that stockpile.

OK, maybe “all the lines I can get to” is more reasonable. My intention is that, after July, I will be able to see what I have. Maybe this way I can begin to get an idea for what genres I gravitate to, if there are certain themes I use too often, what type of things inspire me, what my strengths and weaknesses are. Mainly, I hope it will help me decide which one to use for my project come November, and NaNoWriMo’s main challenge. I still do not want to declare myself a rebel in November yet. I may need to, though, to finish the project I started last November.

That is something I wish to hold myself to; that I will not have too many projects in progress at once. Mark down ideas, certainly, but actual dedicated focus towards finishing something? Best keep that narrow. I have never finished one before. The Nov’21 project is the closest I have ever been to a completed story. I want to finish one.

Then another one.

~Victoria