Camp Nano Spotlight: White Lily

Okay, after a slight side track yesterday, we now return you to your regularly scheduled A-Z challenge theme of Camp Nanowrimo interviews with White Lily:

How did you find out about Camp Nanowrimo?
I’ve been a member of the original NaNoWriMo-site for a few years, and discovered it via that.

Have you participated in Camp Nano before? If so, would you call it a success?
Yes I have, July and August 2011 and June and August 2012. I only “won” one of them, so I don’t think I would call it a success. On the other hand, I would probably have written even less during those months if I had not participated, so it was certainly not a waste of time.

Do you know what you’re going to write this year?
Yes, it will be a “prequel” to the Fantasy trilogy I’m still (= forever) writing on, taking place about 20 years before. The antagonist in the Trilogy will be the Main Character in this one, showing that he is not really the bad guy from the start.

What’s your favorite part of your Camp project?
I’m an obsessive plotter and outliner, but this time I’m forcing myself to not plan much at all. I already know the world and most of the characters due to them figuring in the trilogy also, and I know the basic plot. I’m pretty excited – and a bit scared – to try to write without the constraints of a scene-by-scene outline.

Sneaky Ninja question! When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?
Hard one 🙂

Since I was a kid, I have always tried to imagine up continuations of the storys I liked the most – kind of fanfiction I guess, tough I never wrote anything down until I was around 15-16. And that was not much. After that I started to imagine my own stories, still not writing anything.

I begun to write after I had my first child, in 2003. It was all those nights sitting up nursing and all those days at home from work that finally made me start trying to write down the story that had existed in my mind for a few years… That is the trilogy mentioned above. I’m still not finished with that – perhaps I never will be. I’ve written several other things since then, but that is what I always come back to….

One interesting tidbit is that I write almost exclusively in English – at least Fantasy – even though I’m from Sweden and not a native English speaker. I think the reason for that is partly because I pretty early begun to read in English (fantasy series tend to take long to get translated), so I am kind of used to ”thinking” Fantasy in that language  Also, the few online writing courses I’ve taken have been taught in English, and the English language often have more synonyms and variation of words than Swedish have. Often I find that descriptions of things and scenery comes easier in Swedish, while the characters ”talk” to me in English.

My preferred Fantasy story is one where things aren’t always what they seem and there are no clear line between good and evil. I prefer the term antagonist over villain, and very often characterize them so that I in many ways sympathize with them as much as I do with the protagonist of my story. That is why I have decided to make my trilogy antagonist the protagonist for this CampNano story, to explore the reason why he became what I know him to be.

Thanks for coming over to share the spotlight, Lily!