Clara Unleashed

 You know those horror movies about a group of friends renting a cabin surrounded by trees and you think ’why do you put yourself in that situation? How dumb are you?’

Well that was me and my friends this year.

I’ve been best friends with these six girls for around 8 years and this is the second time we’ve ever been on vacation together. The first time was 5 years ago where we went camping together the same place we went this year (Fjellerup Strand) only that time didn’t that well (don’t accept drinks from guys who are 4-5 years older than you) so we’ve been hesitant about doing it again.

But in the end we thought ‘we are all over 20 years old now and we are no longer children; lets do it’. So this time we rented a cabin instead of sleeping in a tent - which, let’s be honest, is only fun if the weather is good and this is Denmark so the weather is NEVER good.

So anyways here are some pictures and some things we did

Brunch

One of the best parts about being on vacation is getting up to eat breakfast at noon, and if you call it brunch no one can blame you for it. 

Also eating brunch outside is amazing. I am usually not so fond of eating outside (just because it's summer doesn't mean it's warm; it's Denmark after all), but brunch outside is just something special honestly.

Miniature golf

I suck at minigolf and I will yell at the course and at my competitors. We split up into two teams and my team never actually counted our scores. That might have been because I said something along the lines of ‘the most important thing is that we all had a fun time’… I didn’t want to see how much of a loser I was

Djurs Sommerland aka Amusement Park

This park is 15 minutes away from Fjellerup Strand where we lived and we obviously had to go there one of the days. Honestly it’s pretty close to where I live in general so I usually go there multiple times every summer anyways, but now it was even closer.

It doesn’t matter how many times I go there, it continues to be one of my favourite amusement parks.

The Beach

Fjellerup Strand is Danish for Fjellerup Beach and this cabin we stayed at was less than 5 minutes away from the beach. Obviously that meant we went bathing in the ocean every day despite the FREEZING water. Denmark is not exactly known for our nice warm oceans. In fact the beach was usually cold and windy. But it was nice anyways. And sometimes the wind would calm and the sun would shine for a bit making it a lot nicer.

We also went on several walks along the beach in the evenings, which usually led us to the best ice-cream shop in Jutland (some people will disagree with this but I stand by that statement).

General childishness

We may all be 20 or 21 but goddamn it, we will act like children if we feel like it. Therefor balloon animals, fake tattoos (aka we drew on eachother) and playing board games and kubb was a big part of the week.

Being with my friends

Alright this is about to get really cheesy but I freaking love my friends and spending time with them is always nice. My depression has been making a comeback lately so I took several naps and isolated myself quite a bit. Not once did any of my friends make a comment about this or got mad. They are so lovely and understanding when it comes to mental health problems (the majority of us got it; we are millennials after all) and they understand that sometimes you just need to be alone.

In conclusion: I had a great week with my amazing friends. 10/10 would recommend these girls as friends... The cabin was pretty good as well...

I signed up to Camp NaNoWriMo (July) this year, hoping that it would be the necessary push for me to actually get going on my novel. I started last year during NaNoWriMo (November) but I only wrote 10.000/50.000 words.

So how has the first 8 days of Camp NaNoWriMo 2017 gone?? Well… I’ve written 2000 words. And yeah sure, I put my goal at 10.000 so I could be sure I'd finish but I was hoping that I'd write at least 20.000

That's probably not gonna happen.

Guys this is going terribly. I am so bad at more than a general outline of chapters; how the fuck do you write a chapter longer than 1,400 words?? How do you describe setting and situations?? Literally the only thing I can describe is a panic attack and isn’t that just sad? 

The thing is, I know what you’re supposed to do, when writing the first draft of the novel. Just write, write, write until you got the basic beginning, middle and end. But I don’t really know what my middle is. Not even the basics. I just have around five scenes in my head and I don’t freaking know how to get to the end.

When I was younger everybody told me that I should become a writer. I loved writing stories and I loved reading so I was pretty good at writing as well. But now… I haven’t evolved in any way since I was 13 so suddenly my skills aren’t that good anymore.

For Christ sake, I don’t even know what my message is, which is like one of the main things you need, when you start writing a book.

I do know what my themes are though; Mental Health and Friendship. Also 100% of the characters are LGBT+ and 50% are POC but those are not really themes, because they’re not really a big part of the story.

 It makes me sad that I can’t get going with the story cause I really love the idea and I adore my characters. I have 4 big characters and I’d probably die for them. I have really well developed characters (in my head cause I have yet to get the development down on the page) so it sucks that I can’t give them the story they deserve.

Can someone give me any tips on how to get motivated when writing? Or how to describe… well anything really?

If you have an account on NaNoWriMo.org then add me as your writing buddy (you can’t add buddies on Camp NaNoWriMo sadly but I’ll probably participate in November again) My username is ClaraSElfving

Obviously everything we learned was from the North Korean perspective, which we knew before going in, but it was still interesting (and at times frightening) to learn what they truly believed was true.