Woah, we're half way there...

Halfway through April already... that means that I am half way through Camp NaNoWriMo too!! How time flies when you're actually measuring it against something.

Anyone who read my starting line post knows that I was working on what will be the sixth Hidden World Novel, Slayer. I had my planning, my character notes and a general gist of what was going to happen and off I went. I set off to a decent start, the scenes I had in my head went down on paper really well, but it wasn't long before I started to get a few issues, mainly, the plot line to the whole story wasn't really going anywhere. I've had this happen before, with the last novel I wrote for Camp. When I first started writing Nel's story, The Original Sin, I really struggled to find a storyline that kept pace with her punchy character.
In the end, I benched her story and wrote what is now Inner Magick and published that first. I may have a similar situation this time around too... I have had to put Slayer on the back burner as I was struggling to get anything down for a few days and I didn't want my efforts for Camp to go to waste. You can see where I started to struggle around day twelve, my counts slowed down, one day I barely managed a couple of hundred words before calling it a day. It was killing me.

So, Sunday night I gave myself a good talking to and went old-school. I ran myself a nice, hot, bubbly bath and took a notebook and pencil and a bag of mini eggs up with me and just started writing what was in my head.

Earlier in the day I had been horse riding and on the way home, I pass a small church and the graveyard backs up against the road. There is an old gravestone in the corner of the grounds that have ivy growing up the back of it and it always catches my attention. It was waiting to be written about. I have several other characters waiting for their place in the Hidden World and on Sunday, one of them took shape on the page and I have written several scenes for her story since then. (You can see my word count pick up on the graph!)

So, there might not be a draft of Slayer at the end of April, but I am now confident that I will achieve my 30,000-word goal and maybe even fight my way to the 50k target I had in mind!! We'll see :)

Wish me luck!