This Hasn't Exactly Gone According To Plan

On the 1st July I started Camp NaNoWriMo.  Well, technically I started it.  Just like the title says, it's... not exactly gone according to plan.  Being a naturally seat-of-the-pants writer who carries plotlines in their head rather than in any kind of physical form (incredibly awkward when you forget things), I decided to to take a different approach, and use one of my many notebooks in the process.

I think I'm missing a few here, and yes some are still in their wrapping.

Which was a great idea in theory.  In practice--or at least, in my hands--it was somewhat less so...  It started out well enough, just a short paragraph per section for what was intended to be a novella.

There was a system, honest. Writing in purple seemed like a good idea at the time too.

But the one thing I'm not is brief.  Or tidy.  I've posted about my handwriting a few times on Twitter--mostly that I can't even read it myself on occasions--and it's prone to getting taller and spikier the more tired (or drunk) I am, although the sad irony is that it's when I'm sober that I typo all over the place.  Either way, it somehow got away from me and now I'm left with 17 sides of crabby handwriting that I've got to decipher.

Too many pages... and this is only the last few, where I was mostly making an effort to be legible.

And I'm now also left with the weirdest set of conflicted feelings.

On one hand, this is the first time I've ever finished anything, even if it's badly handwritten and in rambling note form.  That includes ten years' worth of NaNoWriMo projects (I know how some of them end, sure.  I've just never gotten there) and a few side projects.  It's probably the reason why I've been happiest writing a continuing universe in short story form.  So I feel strangely proud, if that makes any sense?

On the other... I've just already written this, and now I have to write it again.  But longer.  With actual dialogue.  And not in purple.

It's the strangest sense of anticlimax.  I wonder if authors who plot everything out in minute detail feel the same way?  The lovely Danni at KenRenStationary/Four Words, Four Worlds did sensibly point out that at least now, even if I don't work on it immediately, I have a complete plot ready to go for when I do, but I'd like to get at least a little done for Camp NaNo even if I don't entirely feel like it...

I've got just over half a month to go, that's got to be good for at least half of it, right?

Right?