Hey there, it's Diane the nursing geek. Welcome back to my channel. Welcome to the end of week one of Camp Nano Rhymo. I actually attempted a couple of daily vlogs during the week, but I was so rushed and they were just no, though those are hitting the outtake bin and I don't know how to do the outtake thing so they're just going to be gone. It's been about what I should expect the first week of April to be like in academia because April is the almost end of the semester. Like we go a little bit into May. So it's not just the end of the semester, it's the end of the academic year. So it's busy, really busy. So here's lesson number one. I should have done exactly what I did last year right from the get go and set my Camp Nano Rhymo goal at 30 hours instead of 50,000 words. That was ridiculous. That was never going to happen. And it took a conversation with a fellow author and occasional author, tuber, who actually has a few series of books out. So she actually knows how to author. Who was saying that, you know, her goal was really much smaller in terms of it was still a word goal, but it was much smaller. And she's like, yeah, why don't you rethink that. And I'm like, okay, why don't I try listening to somebody who clearly knows what she's doing. And I decided that really having a word goal doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a number of reasons. And just trying to get an hour a day of writing done is much more reasonable. So I switched over to 30 hours as a goal, which also was kind of better for my cabin, because I was dragging the stats down a bit. On the whole, the cabins do a great, but me being at 50,000 words and, you know, not even making 3000 by day, whatever it was for. Yeah, that wasn't working. So what am I writing? Since I didn't do any March prep anything. I'm sort of doing what I had said as my goal at the beginning of the year to do. Sort of, but it's not the sequel to what I wrote in November. It's if anything, a prequel or possibly a bunch of stuff that will turn into flashbacks. I'm still not sure. Because when I was trying to edit my November nano-rimo draft, I found that I, there were a lot of things that were not working. Part of which was because I didn't know some of these really important answers about the characters motivation, about the magic system. So I needed to kind of go back to square one. I also decided I was probably pushing too hard at making the story do certain things instead of letting it happen. Up until November of 2017, I was a hardcore panzer. I did not outline anything. I mean, other than in my head having a vague free text, trying to go beginning middle end, that was it. And I think I need to get back to that, at least for this. Because it just, it felt really forced. So I'm trying to enforce it. The. Convenient thing that happened in the meantime is ready excuses, which I will link below, had a couple of podcasts on magic systems. So I am now acquainted with Sanderson's laws of magic. And some of the variations on how people look at magic systems. Most importantly, what a magic system needs to do in a story and how that impacts. What type of magic system it is. And that's what I realized it needed to be a soft magic system. I'm used to writing things where the magic is the solution. There's, you know, questing and finding pieces and eventually putting together the McGuffin spell that fixes everything. That can't be this story. This story is about somebody who's trying to find her way out of magic. So and find balance in life. So magic cannot be the answer to everything. And so that means probably a softer magic system is what's going to work better. Which is good news because that means I don't need to know all the rules right away. There, I will eventually know the rules, but the characters probably won't know the rules. And that was very liberating to realize. I don't know if this is a common issue for people making the jump from fan fiction to original fiction. It might be it might not be. But I think part of my problem is I was so used, I am so used to having established world and is and really established characters. That that I didn't lay the groundwork the way it needed to be done. So now I'm going back and laying that groundwork. Usually the mistake is people start stories too early. And I think my problem was I started too late. Again, all of this might end up being flashback to give the backstory. But I definitely needed to go back. And I'm getting little notifications that say I maybe running out of disk space here. So I'm going to stop here and say I hope you are doing well with camp. Let me know in comments how you're doing what you're writing, whether you're writing something new or editing or whatever. And until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye.