The solitude of writing
I've been having a lot of fun writing on the 4thewords.com site which is lucky as the official Camp NaNoWriMo site seems to have been less engaging. One of the things I was looking forward to on the Camp NaNo site was the cabins. These are little writing groups of twenty people in a virtual cabin. You could choose to be randomly allocated a cabin or placed with people who were writing in the same genre, the same word count or who were around the same age. Or you could make up a private cabin for your friends or just not be in a cabin at all. The cabin I was put in had lots of introductions in the first few days so it seemed to be a nicely busy and international group. I thought it would be a good one with lots of interaction and support for each other. Then someone said that it would be much better to be on Facebook, so they set up a private group and they all buggered off there instead. I was really quite disappointed. It's been completely dead.
Thankfully 4thewords has been keeping me entertained instead. It's a writing site where you have quests and battle monsters. The monsters are all made of different word targets, such as 250 words in 30 minutes. When you beat one, they drop items which you may need for a quest, to craft into different items or just to sell. They had a month long event in November for NaNoWriMo with special monsters and they've got another one going on for Camp NaNo. It's been a bit different though, because it started off with everyone on the site writing together to break down a wall :) Any writing done on any part of the site contributed to the overall total and when it reached 2 million words, the wall came down. There was a running progress header so you could see it updating which was pretty cool. Once that was done, the NaNo specific monsters were available.
A few days ago it was announced that on the 25th, there would be a major boss battle, a Golem, for everyone on the site to battle together. The word total to beat the Golem is 1.5 million! It's quite a difficult one as it requires a specific target to be beaten in order to count, which is 500 words in ten minutes. That's pretty fast typing! I can type fast but my main problem seems to be that I can't quite think at that speed! It's slow progress as it's only being chipped away in 500 word instalments, but it's still pretty cool to see the progress bar slowly moving. Someone else did the maths and worked out that it will take 3000 Golem battles to defeat it! That is a lot of battling! But it's so good to see people working together and supporting each other to do it. Considering writing is such a solitary activity, it's definitely a nice way of creating a community.
Thankfully 4thewords has been keeping me entertained instead. It's a writing site where you have quests and battle monsters. The monsters are all made of different word targets, such as 250 words in 30 minutes. When you beat one, they drop items which you may need for a quest, to craft into different items or just to sell. They had a month long event in November for NaNoWriMo with special monsters and they've got another one going on for Camp NaNo. It's been a bit different though, because it started off with everyone on the site writing together to break down a wall :) Any writing done on any part of the site contributed to the overall total and when it reached 2 million words, the wall came down. There was a running progress header so you could see it updating which was pretty cool. Once that was done, the NaNo specific monsters were available.
A few days ago it was announced that on the 25th, there would be a major boss battle, a Golem, for everyone on the site to battle together. The word total to beat the Golem is 1.5 million! It's quite a difficult one as it requires a specific target to be beaten in order to count, which is 500 words in ten minutes. That's pretty fast typing! I can type fast but my main problem seems to be that I can't quite think at that speed! It's slow progress as it's only being chipped away in 500 word instalments, but it's still pretty cool to see the progress bar slowly moving. Someone else did the maths and worked out that it will take 3000 Golem battles to defeat it! That is a lot of battling! But it's so good to see people working together and supporting each other to do it. Considering writing is such a solitary activity, it's definitely a nice way of creating a community.