Off to a Decent Start

The first season of Camp NaNo officially began yesterday.

And I totally forgot to sleep in my "camp site" in the spare bathroom. Fail.

I did, however, manage to write 1,759 words. This only required 2 phases, which may prove problematic. Those phases were meant to be ~500 words apiece. They're nearly double that. Granted, I'll likely cut out the majority of the conversation with Ineroh in the first scene, but it still leaves me over my projected length. Going to have to fiddle with that at some point.

I officially hate Finn. He has said all of four lines so far, and I can't wait to kill him. (Wait, that wasn't part of the outline? You mean Finn is the only character who gets a relatively happy ending? This is not okay). Fortunately, he's only on-camera for the first quarter of the plot. Unfortunately, I have to write two huge scenes with just him and Yosseval.

What happened to my introspective first person? It DIED, that's what. The journals and character interviews from last month were so deliciously human and real and solid. This, on the other hand, reads like a script treatment or an expanded synopsis -- all tell, no show. Doesn't matter now. I'll beat it into submission during the rewrite.

I need to work on the ages of the characters. It's becoming problematic. I know Yosseval is the youngest of the cousins. I know he's somewhere between 18 and 24. I know Ineroh and Finn are approximately the same age as Yosseval. But that means that unless the second-generation royalty all got knocked up very rapidly in the same 5-year period, most of the cousins ought to be married off and living their own lives by now. I had planned to have them piling up in the capital city, but that doesn't make sense. I know Ineroh is getting old for marriage (for a woman), which means Finn and Yosseval should be approaching the average age. Since all the other cousins are older than F/I/Y, the girls at the very least should all be married. Which contradicts what I said about Palle in the second scene. More to fix later.

In completely unrelated news: BEES.

I'm getting my first hive of bees tonight, courtesy of my friend's father. I know I'm going to name the hive after one of the canon Weyrs ([/nerd]), but I'm not sure which one. It makes the most sense to name it Fort, since Fort Weyr was established first, but the name sounds so boring. "Have to go check the honey storage in Fort." No. That sounds boring. Benden would be my next inclination -- it's the most popular one from the books, and I do like the name. But I hate virtually all of the characters in Benden (except F'nor, but F'nor is the exception to all rules). Part of me wants to name it Telgar (my favorite of the names on an aesthetic level) and part wants me to name it Igen as a nod toward StarStones. I need to decide before this evening.

Less nerdy people don't have this problem.

Since a nuc of bees costs approximately $60-$100 and Chris is giving it to me for free, I wanted to repay him with something. I can't stand it when people give me gifts that I can't repay. So I'm going to bring him four of the baby butterfly koi from the pond. I wonder how difficult it will be to catch them?

Hah. Perspective: I'm going to be driving home with a car full of bees in six hours, and I'm worried about the difficulty of catching fish in a pond.

I should be writing. Instead, I'm fantasizing about bees.

I think there may be something wrong with me.

For Camp, I think I'm going to try to do this the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race way. I've never done that before. I usually write a HUGE chunk on the first day or two, then splutter to a stop, then slam down another 10k, then stop, then 5k, then stop, etc. I'm trying to teach myself moderation, though. So let's see how long I can continue writing 1,667+ words per day. I'm guessing less than a week, knowing myself.