I am one week in to the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge. The challenge is to write the first draft of a novel in November, where a novel is defined as 50,000 words.
This is my first year attempting this challenge. Despite having started 2 days late, I am well on my way. I have a rough outline, and today I passed 10,000 words. Also today, during the sermon (sorry, reverend!), I flushed out the climax of the book. Now I just have to write it down on paper, and flush in the details.
I also have the cover art done - it served as a good distraction while waiting for my muse to kick in.
I have already learned a few things about myself, and my writing style (tho maybe not a surprise to frequent readers to my blog). First is that I am inconsistent with tenses, often mixing them in the same sentence. It was is quite confusing to read back.
The second is that writing a novel length work is a lot harder than the blog posts I am used to. I have become accustomed to terseness, but novels require a lot more detail to keep the story flowing.
Third, it can be quite annoying to keep all the minor details in my head, so I keep referencing back to the things I wrote. This process gets longer with every word I write. The major details are easy, but the bits that are important to keep consistent, but rather arbitrary (street and city names, for example), can be quite tricky. Keeping good notes is becoming vital!
This is definitely turning into a learning process.
