Twelve’s Design and Camp NaNoWriMo
Twelve’s Design was going great. I was almost done with Chapter 2, and then… At the start of April, I decided on a whim to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. In 2014-15, I hand wrote 75% of “Book 5,” an untitled loose sequel to Twelve’s Design. Ideas for how to finish it and modify it had haunted me for years, so I decided to set a goal to digitize and revise 60,000 words of it for Camp NaNo. I was able to implement many of the changes I wanted to make, and by the end of today, I’ll have met my goal.
Camp NaNo was fun and great for typing up a bunch of words in a short time. Toward the end, however, I missed my thoughtful approach to writing/revising. Many of the words I wrote for Camp NaNo already existed. Many of those are also filler that desperately need cutting, but I didn’t have time to think about how to shorten the book’s painfully slow and wordy sections. To give you an idea, I’m 60,000 words in and I still have two full notebooks left to transcribe! That’s even after I skipped at least 10,000 words from the two notebooks I finished typing. I suppose digitizing those shitty words so that I can delete them easier when I return to this story later was a step in the right direction though.
The bad news is I’m still near the end of finishing Chapter 2 of Twelve’s Design. I thought I would be able to keep up with it, but a bunch of other things happened this month that necessitated setting some things aside. I miss working on it a lot more than I thought I would. For now, Book 5 is out of my system though, and I’ll be able to return to Twelve’s Design tomorrow!
NuCamp and The Writer’s Net
Also last month, I learned the basics of React as part of NuCamp’s Full Stack Web Development course. For my portfolio project, I’m building The Writer’s Net, a website for writing, reading, and sharing non-linear fiction, using React. I had planned to finish building at least the framework for it before the React portion of the course ended last week, but because I participated in Camp NaNo and SakuraCon (convention season has begun!), I probably haven’t even implemented half of it. React is awesome though. I love it! It’s actually fun to use, and that’s probably the first web technology I’ve given that praise! …Why didn’t college tell me this existed!?
FirstStudent and OokiiSoraCon
Another thing I almost finished before I decided to throw Camp Nano into my life was OokiiSoraCon’s web application. I made a little progress on it, but I still have yet to fix a couple things, comment the code, test hosting it on a sub-domain, and build the Unity 3D side of the application. I suppose Camp NaNo isn’t entirely to blame. FirstStudent America hired me again, this time to test the capabilities of a web API the company is considering integrating into their business. Despite everything else I was doing last month, I couldn’t refuse the experience, and it might lead to another project in the near future if all goes well.