21 Day Novel Challenge

It’s been a fun journey. I’m on Day 22 now, looking back. It’s been a challenging trip. The goal: in 21 days, write, edit, and upload a novel. Mission accomplished. The final book was uploaded to Amazon at about 10:30PM on the 21st day. A lot of other people were inspired to work hard over this 21-day period – HUGE kudos to Chris Fox for getting us all so motivated! A few other people completed first drafts in the challenge days. One other person – Chris, the originator of the challenge – finished his edits too. His book is off …

21-Day Novel Challenge: Epilogue Read More »

Been a busy couple of days at the day job. Thursday, as seems to be the norm, was a “no writing” day. Didn’t get any time during the 17 hour shift to get any edits in. Friday was mostly a packing day, but I did manage to get a few more chapters done. So at this point, I am about eight chapters from finishing the edits. I’ll be doing those Saturday after the move, and then doing a final proofing pass either Saturday evening or Sunday morning. Then I have one more tweak for the cover. The book title is …

21-Day Novel Challenge: Day 19 Update Read More »

The book didn’t end up getting finished Monday night. Monday is kid day – and it seems Minecraft (the computer game) has a new patch, one which makes the monsters hit harder and the whole game much more tough. So my three kids and I spent most of the day beating up monsters and building virtual tree-houses together. Key moment: lightning strikes something, and creates a new monster none of us have seen before – a skeleton horse! One of my kids goes to investigate, but approaching the horse spawns a bunch of skeletons. She dies. We go try to …

21-Day Challenge: Days 15+16 Read More »

OK! I’m two weeks in. And had a great writing day today, despite work: 4446 words, bringing the total count to 53,133. I expect to finish the book tomorrow, which is WAY ahead of schedule. In the plan I wrote out, the first draft was to be completed by the end of Wednesday. I’m not finishing because I’m writing faster than expected, but rather because I have two chapters left to go, and expect the book to wrap up at about 56-57k words, instead of the 70k I’d initially planned. I’m OK with that… Remember my mentioning a while back …

21-Day Challenge: Day 14 Read More »

Went a little silent there for a few days, sorry! As I mentioned in my last post – I was moving into my long work period in the day job. With minutes to write, it gets hard to put them into a blog instead of story words! Playing a little catch up today. Thursday was Day 11. I arrived at work at 7am. I left work just before 1am on Friday. During that time, we had four new admissions, three of whom I had to manage all of the paperwork etc. for, solo. For those of you not working in …

21-Day Challenge: Days 11-13 Read More »

And the grand total at the end of the day: 45, 062 words! It was a long battle, but I got in 6025 words to finish another day on target. My biggest frustration right now, really, is that the story just isn’t as long as I was planning it to be. I’m very much below the 70k target. Going to struggle toward 60k, I think. I’ve added several scenes to the end, but I’m solidly into Act Three already. Accord of Honor was 67k words, so what happened with this one? I think part of the reason it’s running short …

21-Day Novel Challenge: Day 10 Read More »

Short post today, folks, because it is very late and I am very tired. 😉 Today was my day with the kids. They finished catching up on Supergirl episodes – all three of them love the show now. And then we had an epic D&D game. They’re all playing wizards, at a school for wizards founded in Waterdeep (Forgotten Realms) to help train young people in the proper use of magic after the Time of Troubles. (Which I missed, ’cause I haven’t played D&D in years, but the little I heard about it worked well enough as backstory for this …

21-Day Writing Challenge: Day 8 Read More »

It’s the end fo the first week for the challenge, and another highly productive day of writing! Just finished my last sprint for the day. The grand total: 6223 words today, and 32,311 total for the book. I’m starting to think this one won’t be as long as the last. Still not sure, as I continue to add chapters as I go. I’ve got at LEAST another 20k words left in the book. Might be as much as 60k total length, but I think the story might simply wrap up shorter than the 70k I’d originally planned, and shorter even …

21-Day Challenge: Day 7 Read More »

Today was awesome and productive for me. I hope your day was just as good! I slept in a bit, got up at 9am. I showered and made coffee. Then I went and played on the internet a little, checking messages and reading email. By about 11am I was already cracking in on the story, getting in my first sprints. I took a break for lunch, then back to work again. Sprint – go cruise the forums for a bit – sprint again. Good stuff. About 3pm I was sitting at a little over 3k words, and went to take …

21-Day Challenge: Day 6 Read More »