Camp season begins early in the writing world.
      That’s right, the first of two annual writing challenges called “Camp NaNoWriMo” began on April Fool’s Day and Mark & I are participating. Well, we’re intending to participate. As of this writing, he has added precisely zero words to our collaborative document – but yesterday was game day and to be fair… DM’ing requires focus and I’d rather he was prepped for the session than writing. Our goal for the month is 25,000 words each (less than 850 per day), so missing a day or two doesn’t need to spell failure for the overall goal.
      Even missing entire weeks could be caught up easily with a few good, solid hours of writing.
      We decided to write together this month for sundry reasons.
      (yay! Another list!)

• Writing together gives us time to bond over shared thoughts/ideas.
• We get to discuss plot & characterization on our now-daily walks.
• Using said walking time for story-talk motivates us to walk so we can talk it out.
• All the pressure of completing a piece is not on just one person. Shared burden. Yay!
• I get to inject more diversity into Mark’s writing.
• Mark gets to inject more wickedness into my writing. (I tend toward the carebear, apparently)
• Getting Mark writing daily is key to his future goals.
• Keeping me writing daily is key to my future goals.
• Writing rocks!

      This session, we’ve chosen to go modern day (less world-building/prep-work than with one of our many fantasy collaborations) and a supernatural/horror bent. The general idea was Mark’s. There’s a house, haunted by a young guy. The whys and hows he came to haunt this particular property are kind cool and I don’t want to spoil them here. In any case, the story opens on a witchy, some-what troubled chick around 20 or so, who recently inherited this house (or, more specifically, is allowed to live rent-free by her step-mother so long as she “gets help” for her “problems” and “doesn’t cause trouble” and of course, doesn’t wreck the place).
      Perhaps it is unfair to say this, but I imagine that Mark had envisioned our protagonist as a petite, fair, busty blonde. Instead, since I began the tale, I envisioned her as tallish, chubby, bi-racial, and rocking some outstanding natural hair. I sort of love her already and we’re only 3 pages in, but that’s typical Josie-ness.
      I call her witchy, but she’s not necessarily a witch or wiccan or anything. What she has – and has dealt with for her entire life – is preternatural senses. Her hearing is extraordinary, she can see minute detail at a glance, her sense of smell rivals the finest hunting hounds. Taste and touch too, are heightened. What she experiences (until she learned to control it, or block out unwanted information, so to speak) is akin to torture in its natural state. Everyone in her life has really always just thought she was sick, crazy, starved for attention, or a liar. It took her eighteen years of practice to learn to exist in this world without letting the constant influx of sensation drive her nuts.
      But more than the main physical senses, our protagonist is also terribly sensitive to things that go bump in the night. And when you couple her innate abilities with the tormented spirit of a horny 18-year-old boy… well…
      Hopefully, a fun story is made! Haha!
      Alrighty – enough blogging for today. I’m off to add my 850-ish words and see where Zers lands. Wish me luck!

Note: Image is “2016 Camp NaNoWriMo Badge” by the Camp NaNoWriMo staff