Camp NaNo Outlining: Characters

I am going to start doing these 'Camp NaNo Outlining' series blogs where I show you how I outline by outlining my April Camp NaNoWriMo novel.

Now, this time I am using a method I have never used before, but it's for character outlining. It's where you ask your characters questions and you answer as him or her.

I will start out as the main character, Charles Jeremiah Issac Lee.

How old are you?
I am twenty-six years old. I will be turning twenty-seven in May.

What do you like to be called?



My slaves address me as Master Charles, but my friends and family call me Issac.

Do you fall in love? If so, who do you have a crush on, if anybody?


I wouldn't be one to fall in love. I don't speak to anyone much besides Jamie, but I feel that there's something there between us. Something I don't know if I should like or not.

Would you call yourself a nice guy?

I would. I treat my slaves with mild respect. I mean, they do my work after all.

Do you have a religion?

Yes, I am a devout Catholic.

And now it's time to meet Jamie Elizabeth Monroe, Issac's best friend and lover-to-be. :D

How old are you?

I am twenty-one. I'll be turning twenty-two in July.

What do you like to be called?

Jamie. I don't talk to my father's slaves (besides Dolly) and everyone calls me Jamie. No one really knows my full name.

Do you fall in love? If so, who do you have a crush on, if anybody?

I would probably be the last one to say that I fall in love rather quickly--but a lot of people wouldn't agree. But, to answer your question, I do fall in love. And I'd had a big crush on Issac for some time now.

Would you call yourself a nice girl?

I don't like to label myself anything. I let others decide what kind of person I am.

Do you have a religion?

I am a loose Catholic. The idea of 'God' doesn't appeal to me much, but I would one day like to see all of my dead relatives.

And that's how I am going to be analyzing my character's personalities. I will may have a few screen shots up later on of my outlining process.

Book Covers: Mine and My Thoughts

Book covers can either make or break a reading relationship. I am one who will only read a book if I like the cover, and I normally only read hardcover books.

I, personally, only like covers that don't give away too much of the main character's appearance. I don't enjoy illustrated covers, and I mainly enjoy covers that actually relate to the book.

Here are two of my book covers:

























This one is the cover for Perfect World, and it's one of my favorites. It was made by someone on this creative writing site I get on called Mibba. As far as I know, I gave her the base image and then she went to work in Adobe Photoshop and made it.

This is one I made myself.. I used gimp to add the text (I used the color picker to get the colors) and I softened it up a bit to let the text blend in. I then turned to a photo editing software like picnic, called picmonkey. There I used an effect to make it look like a painting (which I thought made it look like the sky) and I did this after messing with some of the visual changed. I can't quite remember what I did.

Well, that's my thoughts and some of my covers. Have a nice day.

Praise for Perfect World

Praise for Perfect World.

I cried tears of joy because of how much people are loving my story. ♥

Editing: How To & Process

I am going to edit the first 2 chapters of Perfect World tonight and I  figure that I might as well just go ahead and make a blog post about it.

I start of editing by going through the chapter with spell check and grammar check. If you use Microsoft Word then all you have to do is click the book that wither has an x or a check-mark and it takes you to your mistakes. I go through and correct everything with that as I write, which helps a lot because I can find if I accidentally used singular instead of plural or something along those lines.

After that, I read through and correct everything I want. If I find a sentence that doesn't quite make sense, or something else like so: "Yeah," he said. "we need to be careful." that the Grammar Checker doesn't get then I will correct those too.

After that, I read through again and revise/rewrite all of the parts that I think I can write better and then I edit what I revised/rewrote.

Then I read through again and make sure everything is in working order, no plot-holes or anything and I have all of my world-building facts right and character names and such.

And then I'm done!

Writing Tips from Me

Here I shall just list some writing tips you can have from me and then talk a little about each tip.

1. Write a lot. I don't know how much I've heard someone say, "Ooh, I don't have time to write." Well, that's simple, make time. I  started writing when I was 7, but I didn't get good at it until the summer of 2012, where I wrote a story called Feed which got a lot of positive reviews on a creative writing site I got on at the time, but now, since I've written about 18 stories and I've finished one book since then, I can say that I am publishing worthy.

2. Finish your work. I am a bit of a hypocrite here because I NEVER finish anything I write. I  have only finished the first draft of one book, which is The Risen and I wrote it for NaNoWriMo 2012. Here's a list of stories I've just stopped writing to write something else:

I wrote a book called Blackout about zombies in the 7th grade, last year, and I planned to write a sequel but I sucked at writing at the moment, though I finished it at 15,000 words and about 18 chapters. I stopped writing the sequel to Blackout, which I had named Whiteout to start a lousy series called The Seven Sanctums, which was seven books in one series. I wrote 9,000 words and 8 chapters of the first book and then quit for another zombie trilogy called The Quarantine Trilogy. I finished the first book of that at 20,000 words and about 20 chapters but I never edited or anything. Then I quit that to write another trilogy which I called The Exile Trilogy. I wrote the first chapter of the first book and then stopped, waiting a few weeks before starting up on Feed, which was a vampire story. I got to 17,000 words and chapter 20-something and then I just stopped. Then I started up on a story about aliens called Banshee, which I got to 7,000-8,000 words and then deleted it. I then started a story called Survive, which I wrote to about 9,000 words and then quit for a while (I will come back to that later). Then I wrote 9,000 words and 7 chapters of a story I was told to write called From the Ashes We have Risen. I then stopped writing that for some mystical reason and then wrote a short 10,000 word story called Ancient World, I finished the first draft of that and never edited. I wrote a Hunger Games fan fiction that was called The Runner  at first, but I later changed the title to Surviving the Games  and then I wrote 6,000-10,000 words and just stopped. Then about a month later I started a two-part thriller called Righteous and Vicious. I wrote the first chapter of each, which they kind of counter each other. Vicious is about a murderer and Righteous is about a cop trying to solve the crime. Then I just stopped that to pick up Survive where I left off and didn't really go anywhere, while I wrote a story called The Fall of Troy about a kid named Troy who is bullied to death. I think I wrote about the first 1,000 words and decided against it because I couldn't connect because I have never been bullied much. After that I opened a story called Kidnapped and I wrote the first 2,000 words to it and stopped. After that I picked back up on Feed for a moment then I turned to The Risen which I finished at barley over 50,000 words then I shut it away (the manuscript is right beside me). Then I started back up on The Seven Sanctums, which I actually got to the fourth chapter at 9,000 words and clever thorough outlining and then I stopped to open The Exile Trilogy again and write The Ice Queen, which is the first book in that series. I stopped The Ice Queen for a couple weeks to work on Survive, which I restarted and got to 11,000 and put on halt again recently to write The Ice Queen again, which is in progress.

As you can see by that long-winded explanation, I absolutely cannot finish a book at all.

3. Read. I don't read a lot of books, because I'm really slow, but I read more than the average person (which nowadays is just more than a book your teacher tells you to read). I've read a couple books this year, mostly Adult, some are The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, Dreamcatcher and Full Dark, No Stars and I am reading 11/22/63 by Stephen King, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and White Horse by Alex Adams. There's only one thing to be said about this;

"If you want to be like the greats, you gotta read the greats."

4. Enjoy your writing. If you write and you're like me, while you're in the process of typing out those words your mind is like, "Oh my god this is so amazing I can't even fanboy/fangirl enough about this." BUT (yes, there is a but), once you read over it, even if you're not done writing, you're mind is suddenly like, "How could I have written this atrocity?! START AGAIN." You have to fight those urges to start all over on a clean slate, you get nowhere by erasing all of your progress. Just remember that instead of erasing you can just edit your work.

5.Lastly, let others enjoy your writing. You can't know what you're doing wrong if people don't tell you. This is a big issue in my life because I let people read my work and they don't give serious feedback. They say, "Oh it's amazing I really like it..." but they never go into detail about what they like about it and they never have anything relatively 'negative' to say about it. If there's one thing I know about getting better at writing, it's that (purely as a way to get better and improve) a writer wants negative reviews on their books or stories. Now, I'm not talking a review like, "Omg this sucked plz write a new version of the book it was horrible and i am disgusted." I'm talking something like, "This was a novel I wasn't very pleased to read. It didn't come to my expectations because I thought that [insert critique of story element here] and that you could just [insert suggestion here] but overall I think that the story needed a bit more [description/back-story/explanation/character development,etc]

That's all I have for today!