Camp NaNo Update: S.King, R.R.Martin and Fantasy Cabins

I spent some time today listening to Stephen King and George R.R. Martin talk about their books, their failures, successes, how rats have played an important part of the writing lives and a whole other goodies. I spent some time listening to two major authors in two of my favourite genres (horror and fantasy) and one of them is my favourite author. I have yet to read any of R.R. Martin’s books nor have I watched any Game of Thrones but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate his insights nor the fact that even Stephen King is smitten by the series.

I will admit that I have to fend off the obvious amalgamative (yes this is a word!) conclusion to write a horror/fantasy novel for Camp NaNo. Which, as I write this, seems like such a fantastic idea and I’m trying to write myself out of doing it. I think by the end of this update I will have completely failed at this.

Update on my Camp NaNo Preps:

Graphic Novels and things

First things first, I’m really excited to announce that my graphic novel has a tentative artist. In fact she has a published book on Amazon and works as an illustrator as her job. We’ve talked story, I gave her some comics to get a feel of what it would all entail and yes I know it’s not that simple and the whole process is different to just draw this here, write this there blah blah… but that’s the beauty of camp, isn’t it? It’s not about getting it perfect, it’s about doing it. And right now, I’m doing a fantasy/graphic novel for July. Even if she doesn’t do it,  I can probably scrape together enough scenes on my own to bring to a capable artist and bring my dream to life. *stares longingly into the stars*

Story things

So my story is based in Africa, up North this time along the Sahara desert. The premise is as follows:

The Galaxy (an entity of many) saw the destruction that humanity had wreaked upon the single living planet. Overcome with intense emotion, the Galaxy let a tear fall to Earth. It splashed across the Sahara desert and transformed the arid landscape into forestry. Within this tear drop was a star, a source of light that fed into the forest and gave it it’s life. This star was our Earth’s first “mage”, a boy who controls the elements by mental ability alone. But Earth is not unaware of this rare phenomenon, and the people flock to the great desert to see this miracle for themselves. Religion, science, superstition and everyone of the sort gather in hope of drawing some conclusion from the celestial forest to fuel their beliefs.

Of course the most obvious thing here would be to create some sort of mythical being who is jealous of the boy’s power and hopes to control it for world domination. Or a Dark Lord born from the anger of the Galaxy comes to eradicate humanity and it’s up to our lone star to prevent darkness from destroying nature and humans along with it etc etc. But I think I’m going to add a different sort of human element in this, as George R.R. Martin states:

“You don’t just have people who wake up in the morning and say, “What evil things can I do today, because I’m Mr. Evil?” People do things for what they think are justified reasons. Everybody is the hero of their own story, and you have to keep that in mind. If you read a lot of history, as I do, even the worst and most monstrous people thought they were the good guys. We’re all very tangled knots.”

Which is one of the things I love about Stephen King as well, is that most times his villains are the people themselves and not the outside evil that has put those people in those positions. The chat thing between King/Martin validates this too, so of course I’m not the only one who noticed this trait in King’s books. *-1000 ego points*

Camp things

I’ve updated the word count for my Camp to 40 000 words, which is 10 000 shy of NaNoWriMo and rather audacious for me. However, my Natural Man: Comic (name to be revised) will be a collection of stories rather than a novel so it’s word count won’t be very high. So I’ll be working on my Steampunk Horror (name to be revised…I’m terrible at names) and adding that to the word count. I’ve had some great insight from the Dragon Writers writing group I’m part of, with a lot of positive comments on the story. I’m exceedingly excited!

Writing things

Which brings me at last to my writing goals for the future. Listening to Brandon Sanderson and Stephen King and George R.R. Martin has been incredibly inspirational, and if I really want to be a writer, I will have to actually do some writing. And I have to stop this flitting about between books and stories on a whim because this new idea is great, let me write it or this idea is boring now let me work on this one and and and. So I’ll be focusing on getting both of these works done by this year, complete and ready for editing. A novel a year outside of NaNoWrimo, which will effectively mean two novels a year. I won’t say they’ll be amazing and become best sellers, but they will be complete and submission worthy.

Inspirational things

Right, so I’ve been mentioning this chat between Stephen King and George R.R. Martin, and here’s the video. Enjoy.

P.S. They do swear quite a bit so be warned:

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