Your daily Camp Care Package is brought to you in partnership with We Need Diverse Books. Author Alexandra Duncan brings us this week's Camp Care Packages:

Go to a busy public place, like a coffee shop. Bring along your notebook or computer. Your job is to observe people’s interactions with each other and take notes. If you can, transcribe any conversations you hear.

Later, think about how people interacted. What power or relationship dynamics were at play? How did that affect the way people talked to each other? Who interrupted whom? Did people change the way they spoke depending on who they were addressing? Use what you’ve learned when crafting dialogue and character interactions.

Where is your favorite place to write? Share your thoughts with Alexandra, or thank her for today's #CampCarePackage!

Camp Goings-On

• Join a Virtual Write In. NaNo Interns Maddi and Emily will be leading weekly Virtual Write-Ins all this month. Join our next VWI today, July 19, at 1:00 pm PDT.
• Get your early-bird Night of Writing Dangerously tickets. You can now sign up to fundraise for the 2017 Night of Writing Dangerously, the most glamorous write-in ever! Early-bird pricing runs until August 1st. Learn more about attending.

Today's Writing Challenge

Complete Alexandra's writing dare in a place you've never been before. Try a new coffee shop, go to a park you've never visited, or take your notebook to a bar. What are there differences between the people you observe and the people you normally interact with?

Alexandra Duncan is an author and librarian. Her YA sci-fi novels, Salvage and Sound, are available from Greenwillow Books, as is her forthcoming eco-thriller, Blight. She loves learning new things, especially anything that lets her get her hands dirty: pie-baking, leatherworking, gardening, drawing, and rolling sushi. She lives with her husband and two monstrous, furry cats in the mountains of Western North Carolina.