The 2018 July Camp NaNoWriMo is over. So is the first draft of Book 2 of the Joel Brent series, titled Lake Ramsey. It came at a little under 60,000 words. However, unlike other second drafts, this one will have more added to it.
As a pantser, I take pride in improvising scenes. I have a saying about it: When writing, when things go sideways, embrace the sideways. It will make your story better. In some cases, things did go sideways and I went with it.
However, in Lake Ramsey, I got stuck too many times and had to write a timeline as well as a character sheet to keep events and character descriptions straight. It made the process easier. Does this mean I'm turning into a planner? Maybe.
In this story, in order to effectively tell the story and not have to do more drafts and overhauls than necessary, I had to take scenes I wanted to write and put them in certain predetermined places before I wrote them. Because of that, I'm already thinking about how to set up and plan Book 3.
So congrats to the Camp NaNoWriMo winners and those who made a valiant effort. As they say, the worst story is the one untold.
