I'm doing something I really shouldn't be doing. April's going to be a busy month in school and I already have two novels from previous November National Novel Writing Months that I have yet to edit. But screw it. I'm going to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo next month! A little!
For camp, you can set your own word count goal, which takes the pressure off a bit. I still have my goal at 50,000 words, but I've decided to continue working on something that already has 25,000 words. It's the novel I started during last year's camp. I know I should really be working on the novels I already have finished, but I am just so attached to this story and really want to see it through. It's a lot of fun to write, even though I have no idea how it's going to end.
As of right now, the book is called A Blotted Isle. It's about an island that used to be on maps and suddenly was taken off of them with no explanation. The island sort of falls into legend until one day an expedition is made to find it. Because this is sort of a writing blog too (or it is now, at least), here's the first page of it:
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When staring out a window, it’s almost like one has captured a piece of the world just for
When staring out a window, it’s almost like one has captured a piece of the world just for
themselves. Although incredibly severed from it when staying inside, the viewer tends to feel a
sense of ownership toward the scene framed by the window. Small snippets of day to day life
could be seen from Liadan’s seaside room. Very often, the landscape was grey and dreary in the
lowlands of her small country. The sky looked wet and morose, and a damp hush fell on the
rolling hills on these days. The grass was always a lush green, however, and soft pink flowers by
her home’s crumbling rock fence hinted a hopeful happiness in the land.
A road of pale grey and brown stones wound from behind the house and continued to
twist along the shoreline. Overgrown with weeds and too twisted to be traveled upon by large
carriages, the most activity Liadan saw on this road was generally a stray sheep moseying along
the countryside.
Gloomy blue green waves crashed and shattered against the rocky crags a stone’s throw
away from the small rickety home. However inspiring the scene may be from this window,
Liadan’s gaze always fell further across the deep and stormy sea. Off in the distance where the
sky and water meet, she searched each day. All she could ever see was perhaps the
shape of a jutting rock or just a sun blot upon her vision that would vanish immediately after an
eye wink. Most of each day, however, she saw nothing. The horizontal line of ocean was never
nicked or interrupted by any flaw, save for the occasional ship passing through. But on and on
she stared, due to a sight she once saw as a young child in the same cramped room of the same
house.
With a sigh, Liadan looked away from the window and dipped her coarse paint brush into
her small ceramic bowl of water. A crack danced across the bowl’s side, but didn’t drip often
enough for her to make an effort to make a change. She tapped the brush lightly against the bowl
to shed the brush of some water, then continued to dip it into a rich, creamy teal blob of paint. A
swift brush across her scrap of fabric created the edge of the ocean outside. It started to bleed
and soften across the fibers, and she watched contently.
After creating a wash of tumultuous sea beneath her line, she wetted the sky grey. Liadan
then dipped a smaller brush with coarse bristles into a deep brown black. On the middle of the
horizon line, Liadan blotted a jutting rock out of the painted water. She continued with a few
more vague shapes. Atop this, she pulled thin, pale brown trunks high out of the constrained
terrain. A tiny dense forest grew, Liadan dipped a low flying black bird near the edge of the
trees, and then she placed the brush gently next to the row of other brushes. Once the paint was
dry, Líadan picked up the small square and pinned it on the nearly covered wall next to identical
paintings of the same scene out of her window of the same island that was not there.
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Any thoughts or critique are welcome!
For some reason I have a weird fear of rereading things that I write, so it's going to take a lot of effort to make myself get through what I have so far by tomorrow. If anybody else is participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this coming month, let me know! I'd love to talk to fellow campers. And I talk to, I mean cry and complain with. My two favorite activities.
