Adventures in Camp Nano Land
The clock is tick tocking. Only five days now to get to the summit of Mount Nano situated some 50,000 words above the white blank pages at the base camp. If things had been normal, if the Izzie had a half decent map, by now would already be staking the emerald and silver serpent flag at the summit. Would not only have that big fat stash of words but also at least twenty stories with beginnings, middles and most importantly ends. Yesss. The Izzie is not good at endings. Lack of practice mainly.
It all seemed so promising at the start. Already by Friday 13th July had a little brown A-Z index book with at least 400 possible story titles and reasonable outlines and ideas for at least forty stories. But only 26 would be needed. One completed story each day and by the end of the alphabet the word count would be well in the bag along with room for another ten thousand words as extras with little effort at all. Such a nice little map that was. There was only one minor problem. What could best be described as a major earthquake took place on the last day of July. It took a good five days to assess the damage and become rather suspicious about the usefulness of that very precious map. It took until the second Saturday to realize that progress would be impossible unless we tossed the infernal thing on the campfire or at least locked it away for another time and place when it might regain its usefulness
Procrastinating on telling toadish tales until the daily word quota of proper story words was reached simply resulted in the story muses stalling and sulking and refusing to return until the toxic toad had been let loose and out and about. Those words were very easy to write. They were like genies screaming to be let out of their bottle lest it explode with the pressure. Since the whole purpose of camp squiggling is to provide a source of ideas for the main event in November, it was obvious that we would have to let the toad have her wicked way rampaging all over the page. She could run riot and then the other critters would feel free to come out of the woodwork. Such a pity that hardly any of them came from the original maps.
The psycho toad from hell had set her horrid Dementors on them and sent them all scurrying off into the recesses of the serpent’s green cells. Maybe they will return some time when it is finally safe to do so.
She is probably plotting and planning another howler if she has not popped it in the post box already. Did not see her toadish face today at the mad house and her Hummer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was off invading Poland or something.
In the meantime, Izzie has found new distractions from the day job with the start of an online course in Cryptography. Lucky we got three weeks to get the homework in because the rest of this week will be devoted to the last 4,000 words and hopefully a few last minute sprints of inspiration.
It’s exactly eleven years ago since last having anything to do with discrete probability and statistics so got some serious catching up to do. It will be good to get the old green cells occupied on something totally untoadish
It all seemed so promising at the start. Already by Friday 13th July had a little brown A-Z index book with at least 400 possible story titles and reasonable outlines and ideas for at least forty stories. But only 26 would be needed. One completed story each day and by the end of the alphabet the word count would be well in the bag along with room for another ten thousand words as extras with little effort at all. Such a nice little map that was. There was only one minor problem. What could best be described as a major earthquake took place on the last day of July. It took a good five days to assess the damage and become rather suspicious about the usefulness of that very precious map. It took until the second Saturday to realize that progress would be impossible unless we tossed the infernal thing on the campfire or at least locked it away for another time and place when it might regain its usefulness
Procrastinating on telling toadish tales until the daily word quota of proper story words was reached simply resulted in the story muses stalling and sulking and refusing to return until the toxic toad had been let loose and out and about. Those words were very easy to write. They were like genies screaming to be let out of their bottle lest it explode with the pressure. Since the whole purpose of camp squiggling is to provide a source of ideas for the main event in November, it was obvious that we would have to let the toad have her wicked way rampaging all over the page. She could run riot and then the other critters would feel free to come out of the woodwork. Such a pity that hardly any of them came from the original maps.
The psycho toad from hell had set her horrid Dementors on them and sent them all scurrying off into the recesses of the serpent’s green cells. Maybe they will return some time when it is finally safe to do so.
She is probably plotting and planning another howler if she has not popped it in the post box already. Did not see her toadish face today at the mad house and her Hummer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was off invading Poland or something.
In the meantime, Izzie has found new distractions from the day job with the start of an online course in Cryptography. Lucky we got three weeks to get the homework in because the rest of this week will be devoted to the last 4,000 words and hopefully a few last minute sprints of inspiration.
It’s exactly eleven years ago since last having anything to do with discrete probability and statistics so got some serious catching up to do. It will be good to get the old green cells occupied on something totally untoadish