July is Camp NaNoWriMo Month. (NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month.) I have a small project going, nothing too daunting. So why would I want to do NaNoWriMo twice in one year?
First of all, camp is relaxed, not an ordeal. You are only tied to the loose goals you set for yourself. You can choose any kind of project, whatever word count goal you feel comfortable with, and there is no pressure.
This year, I declared I would write 30,000 words, and my project began as a series of short stories, but now I don’t really know what it is. But you could declare your intention to write as few as 100 words.
Camp NaNoWriMo is a training camp that happens every year in July. If you plan to write a 50,000-word novel next November, you may find it harder to make time for writing than you planned. Participating in a Camp helps you develop time management skills before November’s big deal.
Family Camping with tent and campfire Clipart
The website, https://nanowrimo.org, offers Camp Counselors to help you through the difficulties of developing a writing routine. They have a terrific team of published authors to act as your guides, cheerleaders, and mentors during each Camp NaNoWriMo session. This year, they share advice via Camp Care Packages and live events. They’re doing Instagram takeovers, Zoom meetups, and more throughout July.
We know that daily writing is more manageable once it becomes a habit. Making the best use of your time requires a little self-discipline, which is something we all could use a bit more of.
If you are interested in participating, the link for that is https://nanowrimo.org/what-is-camp-nanowrimo. To participate in Camp, just announce a project, then make sure to check “Associate with a NaNoWriMo Event” and select the current year’s Camp NaNoWriMo event.
It’s the middle of July, but you could choose to write 10,000 (or fewer) words. Once you’ve done that, you should be ready to start your project. You’ll be able to start tracking your writing on their website.
The site will automatically confirm your win when you reach your writing goal. You will receive a certificate celebrating your achievement, along with other winner goodies.
Do you want to connect with other authors? If so, you could become part of the broader NaNoWriMo writing community by participating in their forums. Check out the Camp NaNoWriMo forums.
Also, you have the option to start or join an existing writing group. Check out the “Writing Groups, Assemble” forum for open groups and much more.
Whenever we begin talking about NaNoWriMo, I always feel the need to mention saving your files. If you are a new author or are unfamiliar with using a computer or electronic notepad, saving your files is an important habit to develop.
Participating in camp is a great way to develop the good habits that will save your sanity farther down the road:
Even if you don’t have a title, name your manuscript with a good, descriptive working title, such as The_Vampire_Story. You can call it something else later.- Never deletea manuscript. If you suddenly decide to make such radical changes that you need to start over, save it in the same master file but with a new descriptive name:
Save each new version separately so that you don’t lose the work you might need later if you change your mind.
Losing your files is a traumatic experience. Some authors lose several years of work in a surprise computer crash, which is an unimaginable tragedy. Entire manuscripts can go missing when a thumb drive is lost, or a hard drive is corrupted.
You must save regularly. This won’t be a problem if you are using a Chromebook or working out of Microsoft’s OneDrive. But if you’re using an ordinary word-processing program such as Word or Open Office, you should hit that ‘save’ button regularly.
I use a file hosting service. I have a lot of images on file, so I pay for an expanded version, but file hosting services have free versions that offer you as much storage as a thumb drive. I like using a file hosting service because my work can’t be lost or misplaced and is always accessible.
November’s Goal
I work out of those files, so they are automatically saved and are where I want them when I close my programs. But you can use any storage system that is free to you–Google Drive, OneDrive, or a standard portable USB flash drive.
The important thing is to save regularly.
The story I am currently working on is set in the Tower of Bones world. It began as a short story but edged into novella length (go figure). It’s nearly done and currently sits at just under 20,000 words.
In previous years I repurposed outtakes from existing projects. These were chapters, about 1500 words in length, that I cut because they had taken my novel in the wrong direction. With character name changes, two of my outtakes grew into novellas set in that world.
The option to repurpose work that no longer fits is why I never discard any manuscript.
A great deal of what I discuss here on Life in the Realm of Fantasy is how I devise a plot, build a world, and create characters. I like to do these things in advance of November, spending a few days on that part of the project.
But maybe you prefer to write by the seat of your pants. That is how I write poetry, so I understand “the joy of pantsing.” My favorite characters came into existence in 2010 for my first NaNoWriMo. Writing what became the Billy’s Revenge series was an exhilarating experience. I began with no plot, no characters, and no idea of where that story was going.
But that first book was a nightmare to edit and straighten out. It became three books, Huw the Bard, Billy Ninefingers, and Julian Lackland.
The experience I gained in 2010 taught me that a bit of advanced preparation means I won’t lose sight of my story arc when I sit down to write it in November. Participating in Camp NaNoWriMo helps writers get organized and also gives you the confidence that you can finish a project.
There are 20 days left in July:
- Perhaps you will add 10,000 words to that unfinished novel.
- Or maybe you will write a haiku each day.
Whatever you choose, set a reasonable goal and have fun with it. Camp is a writing free-for-all, something I do that takes me out of the ordinary grind.
Unfortunately, maps have fallen out of favor thanks to satellite technology and the GPS in our cell phones. Many people don’t know how to read a map.
If you are designing a fantasy world, you only need a pencil-drawn map. Place north at the top, east to the right, south to the bottom, and west to the left. Those are called 
Use a pencil, so you can easily note whatever changes during revisions. Your map doesn’t have to be fancy. Lay it out like a standard map with north at the top, east on the right, south at the bottom, and west on the left.
Many towns are situated on rivers. Water rarely flows uphill. While it may do so if pushed by the force of wave action or siphoning, water is a slave to gravity and chooses to flow downhill. When making your map, locate rivers between mountains and hills.
Maybe you aren’t artistic but will want a nice map later. In that case, a little scribbled map will enable a map artist to provide you with a beautiful and accurate product. An artist can give you a map containing the information readers need to enjoy your book.
In my part of the world, the native forest trees I see in the world around me are mostly Douglas firs, western red cedars, hemlocks, big-leaf maples, alders, cottonwood, and ash. Because I am familiar with them, these are the trees I visualize when I set a story in a forest.
Every fantasy world has a setting, and that environment has a climate. Certain climates limit the variety of foods available.
We know from bitter experience that weather affects the food we produce and influences what is available in grocery stores. Abnormal heat waves across temperate states, category 4 hurricanes along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico, and category 4 tornadoes down the center of the US and Canada, and even deep freezes in Texas and the deep south have been our lot in the last five years.
Once you have decided your historical era, terrain, and overall climate, research similar areas of the real world to see how weather affects their approach to agriculture and animal husbandry. Look into the past to discover ancient agricultural methods to see how low-tech cultures fed their large populations:
Also, if your story is set in a particular era, how plentiful was food at that time? Famines occurring all across Europe and Asia over the last two-thousand years are well documented. Egyptian, Incan, and Mayan history is also fairly well documented so do the research.
We have witnessed monumental changes since the turn of the millennium. We know California teeters on the edge of disaster, that a water shortage threatens the lives of millions, as well as one of the largest agriculture industries in the US.
Escape from Spiderhead is a science fiction story set in a prison. It is built around several themes. The central theme is crime and punishment, and Saunders grabs hold of this theme and runs with it.
Saunders takes a deep dive into the theme of redemption in this tale. He didn’t take the expected path with his plot arc and didn’t opt for revenge by giving Abnesti the drug, which was the obvious choice.
I will say now – the story and the movie are two different things. The film bears some resemblance to the story it is based on but – it is not that story. All writers should be aware that you no longer control the direction of your story when you sell the movie rights.
The main character, 
The summer I turned ten, I was scavenging the house for something to read and discovered my father’s personal library. He had the entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica’s 
Knightly virtues
Quixote’s insanity is gentle and easy to sympathize with—he can’t understand the harshness of the people around him. He is a man of action and a champion of the oppressed.
Here are a few sayings you might hear every day in one form or another that were coined by Cervantes:
The events set in this world are linked by family, warped by lies and secrets kept across three generations. Themes of hubris, truth vs. falsehood, heroism, and coming of age power this truly epic fantasy series.
, demons, magic or sorcery, and multilayered quests. They often have constructed languages, coming-of-age themes, and multivolume narratives.
Binabik‘s people, the Qanuc, are called trolls by the humans and Sithi. They are a cross between Tolkien’s dwarves and hobbits, made wiser and less concerned about gold. The Hunën are brutish giants who serve the Norns and are often at war with the Qanuc.
In that case, it’s time to widen your reading horizons and try reading something in a different subgenre. Maybe you’d like a space opera or a portal fantasy. You’ll never know what you are missing if you don’t read outside your favorite genre.
Now, we probably wouldn’t have plumped for such a fancy getaway, but my husband has a conference there, and what with him not driving right now, I am along as chauffeur.
It’s a fjord, not a canal, so why they named it that, I don’t know. But there it is, one more thing our pioneering ancestors have to answer for.
The man and the baby: We arrived on Sunday afternoon. We sat at a romantic table for two for our first dinner, overlooking the beach. It’s the Pacific Northwest, so people come dressed for January in June (or June-uary as June is known here). The lawn chairs were full of guests lounging in their summer finery of Gore-Tex and wool, ignoring the intermittent misty rain and drinking steaming coffees. Off to one side was a young man sitting alone. Beside him was the fanciest baby pram I’ve ever seen.
On Monday, I decided to be adventurous. I thought I would try the spring salad with fresh peas, pea vines, fennel, watermelon radishes, and a champagne vinaigrette. I had never thought of eating pea vines, but I’m not afraid to try new things.
Today we are on our way home, where we will indulge in budget-friendly home-cooked meals and other economies for a few weeks to make up for this splurge.
We who write because we love words spend a great deal of time framing what our words say. We choose some words above others because they say what we mean more precisely, or they color our prose with the right emotion.
Two: Placement of verbs in the sentence can strengthen or weaken it.
Four: Contrast—In literature, we use contrast to describe the difference(s) between two or more things in one sentence. The blue sun burned like fire, but the ever-present wind chilled me.
Seven: Alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter (or sound) at the beginning of successive words, such as the familiar tongue-twister: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Alliteration lends a poetic feeling to passages and enhances the atmosphere of a given scene without creating wordiness.
Active phrasing generates emotion. Sometimes, using similes, repetition, and alliteration in subtle applications enhances the worldbuilding without beating your reader over the head.
Readers connect with these stories across generations and across the centuries because the fundamental concerns of human life aren’t unique to one society, one technological era, or one point in time.
Acquiring food becomes their first priority. Having a surplus of food becomes a reason to celebrate. To go without adequate food for any length of time changes a person and makes one determined to never go hungry again.
Love and loss, safety and danger, loyalty and betrayal—the eternal themes of tragedy and resolution. Hardship contrasted against ease provides the story with texture, turning a wall of “bland” into something worth reading.
We writers must make our words count. We have to show the comfort zone in the moments leading up to the disaster, not too much, but just enough to show what will soon be lost.
Scenes of conflict are crucial to the advancement of the story. They should be inserted into the novel as if one were staging a pivotal scene in a film.
If you have no experience with combat or fighting, you don’t understand the limits of a normal athlete’s physical abilities. So, you must do the research. Think of how the human body works in reality. If your character knees a foe in the jaw, how is it possible?
If you don’t show how such a strange hit could happen, the reader will say, “That’s impossible.” It’s a risky choice though, because going into that kind of detail bores the heck out of our readers. Our readers mind will fill in the details and if it’s confusing, they may stop reading.
Don’t do this for every incident. After they are armed and armored as much as they are going to be the first time, just have them meet the enemy, skirmish, and continue on. The reader already knows what armor and weapons they had.
In real life, conflict happens on a sliding scale. It begins with a disagreement and escalates to an all-out war. While my outline will have a note alerting me to the level of conflict that must happen, I choreograph my fights to reflect that sliding level of intensity.
Person-to-person combat doesn’t stretch for hours because no matter how well trained a fighter is, no one has that kind of strength.
A typical 
I try to show this discreetly by sitting back and visualizing the scene after the choreography is laid on paper. I replay it in my mind as if I were a witness to the events and look for each combatant’s facial expressions and reactions.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
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