Search This Blog

Saturday, September 28, 2013

10 Day Novel Challenge: Day 8, 9, 10

As I'm writing this, today would be the start of day 10. Day 8 was another long day with too much to do, and I couldn't even get to the writing of the novel. Our phones came in, so after waking up at 10, and spending from 12:30 pm to 7:30 pm helping wife clean houses, eating, I then spent the rest of the time until 5:30 am activating the three phones, setting up email and the like, getting data and contacts transferred, installing needed apps, etc. Needless to say I didn't have the energy to make a blog post about it.

So today I started thinking. Originally, I'd planned to keep going on the novel and finish it even though it would take longer than 10 days. However, reality set in. I have an edit that came in on a novel that needs to get done within a month. I also planned on doing final edits and publishing Virtual Game, the third novel in the Virtual Chronicles series, during October. I can't afford to take another 10-20 days to finish this novel, which is the pace I'm currently working at. Fine for a NaNo pace, but this isn't even going to be close to 10 days. So finishing this, doing the edits, and being ready for NaNo in November just isn't going to happen. Something's got to give. Since the edit is for my publisher, that comes before finishing this novel.

Bottom line: I took the 10 day challenge and lost. Primarily due to slower typing than I used to have, but even at my old typing speed, I still would have only reached 20 something thousand by this point. This past week turned out to be the worst week of the year to attempt this because I've had much less time than normal to devote to such a project. No way I could have known that going in, but it is what it is.

So my plan now is to put this story on the shelf and schedule another 10 day writing challenge to finish it when I can devote more time to it. For now, I'm done with this challenge. I'll get back to a regular blog posting schedule (I've an interesting short story I'll be posting here once I can get it edited), get my novel edit done in the next few days, edit and publish the third novel of the Virtual Chronicles series, plan my novel for NaNo and get that done in Nov. I've got so many projects in the oven right now, its crazy. On top of that, this week, I came up with another novel idea I want to explore in the near future.

I should adjust the above statement a little. I say I "lost," but not really. True, I did lose the challenge itself. Didn't even come close to reaching the goal. But the truth is I mainly won. First, I've got a 10K start to this novel I didn't have before. It is shaping up to be a fun adventure story, and is exciting to see the world and characters develop. I'm liking the story. My main challenge is going to be to make time for it in the near future to finish it, and not forget about it with everything else going on. But the challenge was fun, logging it was educational, and I had fun even if it was mixed with some disappointments and setbacks. I hope those of you following my logs enjoyed reading about my experiences. Some day, however, I will write a novel in 10 days. Now it is a challenge I intend to conquer. Just not at this time. I will live to fight another day.

So the final ending tally on my 10 day challenge is 10164 words in 17.8 hours of writing. Thanks for taking the journey with me.

No comments:

Post a Comment