We’ve got about a week before the June session starts. (I’m doing both - I think). Anyone else doing it? What are you going to work on?
I’ve got a porn story that I started in November to finish and I’d like to get up to issue 10 or 15 of my comic scripts (I have four done and one started, and some specials). One the plus side, I know the plots, more or less. On the minus side, the comics are scripts which don’t fulfill word count very well. And we don’t have the long holiday like in November.
bump
Hey there! I’m excited about camp this summer.
For June, I’m setting my goal to write eight new short story first drafts - aiming for 2000-3000 words each, science fiction and fantasy. I’m trying to prepare story ideas this week before June 1st arrives.
I just signed up for the June session. I’ve just started the sequel to my 2011 NaNo novel (which I finished! Hooray!) so I’ll have some words down before the official start, but I figure I can easily do 50K just in June. This’ll work out great for me because it’ll give me a chance to get a good solid start on it before The Secret World (an MMO) is released at the end of the month and will eat my brain for the foreseeable future thereafter. 
I didn’t do the cabin thing, though. I’m not really a very social or collaborative writer, so I’m going it alone (except for the inevitable “assistance” from my cats and the occasional plot powwow with the spouse.)
Good luck for all who decide to take the plunge!
It starts tomorrow! Everybody ready?
Ready as I’ll ever be.
I’m actually using it to work on two projects: a book chapter (for a scholarly-type volume) and my dissertation. Glad to see I’m not the only one bucking the rules, such as they are, and not doing a novel.
My husband is gone for the month, so I have a lot of time on my hands, as well as having a crap ton of stuff to do.
Ready to go! I just hit 10,000 words on my novel today so I’ll have to start the count over tomorrow, but that’s okay. I don’t really consider that cheating, since I fully intend to do at least 50K in the month of June.
Hangs “Open” sign outside the Bad Plotz tent
Not participating directly, but I’ll be following the thread when I can and offering nudges as requested.
Okay, I’m on my way! Only 383 words into my first Camp story, but it’s a start.
Profile here if you want to keep track of my progress - http://campnanowrimo.org/campers/chrisk0
I’ve got 575 words typed, although more written (I’m fleshing it out as I type it up). A nice find - their word counter counts numbers as words, so all my instances of ‘page 4, panel 1’ are good as is and I don’t have to type out the numbers like I thought I did (yes, it’s shameless padding, but I’m writing comic scripts and they have less words any way!)
Balance, I’ll be calling on your talents sooner or later, even if I ask about something that I’m not using for this month. (My vampire story is begging for a plot… and my fantasy with elves and pirates is going ‘me too! me too!.. huzzah’ …it’s a little odd.)
Rolling right along! My “official” count is 11,489; actual count (including stuff I wrote before June 1): 22,484.
Getting much more of a feeling of “I’m writing way more than I should” than I did in the last novel; this one, I think, is going to run long and need a lot of paring back during the editing process. But for now I’m just letting it do its thing.
Ooh, vampires. I can do things with vampires.
Er, that didn’t come out quite right. 
Well in that case, let me see if I can explain the set up.
This is long, so I’ll dump it in a spoiler box:
So, you’ve got this vampire society that’s older than dirt. And you’ve got this human sub-species call the banrie that the vampires basically bred from humans WAAAAY back when. The banrie produce more blood than they need and they don’t change when they’re bitten. (Humans change into ghouls when bitten. This is very very forbidden and the ghoul and the vampire will both be killed). So they had this mutually beneficial relationship for a long time until the vampires started treating the banrie more like food than friends. So the banrie fought them and disappeared into the normal human population.
So now it’s a few hundred years later. The vampire population has shrunk - although I’m not entirely sure why, since they can basically hibernate for a long time. The vampires are trying to bring back the banrie - anyone with a significant amount of banrie ancestry have all the benefits.
The story so far focuses on one young lady, whose name I can’t recall so we’ll call her Jenny. Jenny is a banrie and gets convinced to let them do the whole blood sucky thingy with her as needed. It should be noted she gets paid very well for this, it’s only about once a week or less, and it’s not only not painful, but sensual. I’ve got a whole setup made up in my head, but it’s up to change.
Basically the vampires have a schedule of when they get to drink and from who - there are more vampires than banrie at this point, so it’s important that nobody is a glutton. The society is traditionally aristocratic, but they’re working on becoming more egalitarian and nobody gets more than anyone else.
At some point later, when there are enough banrie, they’ll set up the old system where worthy vampires can have their own banrie - kind of like having a valet, kind of like having a spouse - but the banrie still has to let other vampires drink in an emergency (which won’t come up often.)
Two other quick notes that might be useful. There’s no banrie and vampire sex. The drinking thing is sensual, but not sexual. I think the vampires go into heat or something like that. Two, the vampires can ‘walk between’ into some very dark dimension. It’s like a shortcut. But it’s dangerous, because there are things that like there - that I’m calling grues for now - that like to eat things that ‘shine’. Vampires don’t shine much.
As you can see, this isn’t Twilight ptooie! or even Dracula. But I’m trying to make it so you can see how they got to Dracula from there. Sort of.
Well, I’m almost up to 5000 words, which is only half as much I should have. I can totally do this. facepalm
bump.
How are people doing?
Still rolling. I can’t remember my exact count offhand but it’s somewhere around 17,500 words. I feel like things are moving too slowly (too much talk, not enough action) but I’ll fix that in the edit. I have a tendency to think things are too slow and then when I read them over later they’re fine. So we’ll see.
Yeah, my word count is awful. The problem is I have a hard time writing at work, and at home I’m distracted by the fact that I have to get the place presentable by next week’s party. I’ve written 280 words so far today, mostly instructions to the artist and a little bit of padding descriptions.
Bumping this now that I actually have time to post a little again, and can tackle Tyger’s vampires.
The banrie “producing more blood than they need” seems a bit problematic to me. What do they do with it when they’re not being drained? Do they all suffer from high blood pressure if not fed upon regularly? (If so, maybe they actually benefit from being drained.) Alternatively, they could just be unusually robust–healing and replacing lost blood much more quickly than a normal human, and resistant to whatever causes ghoulification. (Would that be an infection? A toxin? The result of failed vampiric reproduction?)
So, if I understand correctly, if one of your vampires feeds on a human without the banrie resistance trait without killing them, the human will ghoulify. (I’m picturing your ghouls as something like the wendigo at this point, and a threat to other humans and vampires alike, given the severity of the ban on producing them.) So, if vampires feed on normal humans, they either have to kill them, or deal with the resulting ghouls–either of which carries serious risks. With the advances in technology and police work, vampires are finding it harder and harder to get away with killing their victims, and more are being forced into no-win scenarios, either being killed by their own kind or dying while trying to keep away from the cops. Some have gone into long-term hibernation, but that only puts off the problem, and the rapid advancement of human society makes it that much more difficult for them to get by when they come back out. Attrition is taking its toll. The banrie are the vampires’ only hope for survival in the long term.
And someone is killing them.
It looks like random violence and unrelated accidents, if you don’t know about the banrie. The victims have nothing else in common. There have been too many sudden deaths of people on the vampires’ contact list for it to be coincidence, however. Someone who either has access to the list or another way of finding the banrie is systematically eliminating them. One of the vampires who has an arrangement with Jenny recognizes the pattern, and realizes that she is a target.
From there, the plot can develop in a number of ways. Arthur could intervene just in time to save Jenny from the first attempt on her life, he could warn her in time for her to defend herself successfully, or he could try to use her as bait in a trap. Regardless, the clever vampire and the tough-as-nails banrie team up to find the killer. Whichever way you go, I like the fact that the nature of your vampires makes the relationship between the protagonists non-sexual; there’s no need for a forced romantic subplot. Instead, you could have a formerly businesslike relationship growing into mutual respect and friendship.
Now, who–or what–is the killer? Several possibilities present themselves.
This option is a detective thriller, with a nice hero/villain role reversal. I picture a climactic confrontation on a rooftop in its future.
This is more of a parlor mystery, with lies and political maneuvering.
This is a horror story, pitting the two protagonists against a vicious man-eating monster that is possessed by a cunning eldritch horror.
Nice. I’ll probably go with option two, because option one fits the Van Hellsing pattern a little too well. Although option three is appealing. Maybe I’ll flip a coin. In any case I’ll be working outside my usual genre (fantasy / superheroes) which is not a bad thing.
To answer the questions, there’s an actual condition (which I’m too lazy to try to find right now) where people produce too much blood. It’s easily solved by donating blood (I’ve heard varying accounts of whether it ends up being used or not). That’s the main way the vamps find banrie; look for people who donate blood way too often.
The ghoulification is some sort of toxin. I’ll probably handwave it some way, rather than explain it.
The vamps are really really not supposed to feed on humans, but some go mad with starvation and do. (The others get by on stolen / illegally acquired medical blood, animals, and hibernating). I’d imagine the average vamp is slowly going mad with starvation while the nobles are in slightly better shape (more connections, more money).
Hm. If they’re able to get by on stored blood, that kind of undermines the need for the banrie, doesn’t it? They could build the same kind of network from normal humans, as long as they extract the blood with medical equipment, rather than feeding on them directly. They’d need more humans than banrie, of course, but it could be done.
Also, if they’re feeding on donated blood, they’d either have to intercept it before it got processed (whole blood gets separated into red blood cells, platelets, and plasma very soon after donation) or blend it back together themselves. If the latter approach is workable, they might be even able to avoid a lot of this fuss by going into the medical waste disposal business and angling for contracts to handle expired blood (red blood cells have a shelf life of only about a month and a half).
If you want the vamps to be in any real crisis, I think you need them to need to feed directly, at least some of the time. Maybe they can get by for a while on indirect feeding or animal blood (are all animals immune to ghoulification?), but it doesn’t provide everything they need, and the resulting deficiencies eventually get to them. Maybe the deficiencies trigger cravings strong enough to make them attack humans, or maybe they just fail to wake up from hibernation and slowly wither away.