10 Days of Excitement

Some of you are going to think I'm crazy, but I'm going to write a novel in 10 days. Yes, that's right. A full novel in 10 days. Not only that, I'm going to put a daily log up each day of how I'm spending my day and progress on the novel.

This idea comes from writer Dean Wesley Smith, who for his yearly challenge decided starting August, among other things, to write a novel every month this year, taking 10 days to write each one. He ended up writing the last one in 15 days instead, but the goal is 10.

For some reason, I decided to join him in at least one run at this, so I told him on his blog when he started his next novel, I would join him in writing a novel in 10 days. I know, I know. He's a long-time professional who has written over 100 published novels. My high point was writing 110K one National Novel Writing  month back in 2008 or 2009, I forget. Close to one novel in 15 days. Now my left fingers don't work so good, so my typing speed is slower. I'll be doing good to put in 1K words an hour. If I can do that, it will be about 6 hours of writing a day. We'll see how it goes.

What's my novel about? Unlike Dean, who is very much a "seat of the pants" writer, I do know what my novel is about. Dean tends to combine half-titles together as a sort of writing prompt, and then start writing  a story. He is often not sure where it is going until almost halfway into writing the thing. I'm more of a hybrid writer in that regard. I like to have an outline of the major plot points and character list, then wing the details for each chapter. Often the outline gets significantly changed by the end, but if I have no idea where the story's going, I'll tend to just stare at the screen.

The story I'm going to do is an outline I created back in 2007.  I had planned to write this story for National Novel Writing Month that November. My publisher at the time suggested writing a sequel to my one published novella at the time, Infinite Realities. That novella was later expanded to a full novel and published by Splashdown Books as Reality's Dawn. Still available for sale. So on day one of NaNo, I changed my mind, shelved this outline, and whipped up a quick outline for what eventually was published as Transforming Realities, and later republished by Splashdown Books as Reality's Ascent.

So this outline has been sitting on my computer for six years, waiting for me to tell its story. I figured this challenge would be the perfect opportunity to bring it to life. The idea comes as a sequel to arguably my most popular short story, "Dragon Stew." As a matter of fact, I plan on using the short story as an opening prologue. But I won't be counting those words for the novel, just new words. The tentative title for the book is Dragon City. It will be a middle-grade/YA novel.

That's all I'm saying about it for now. But one other challenge I'm adding to this. This is part of the experiment. Once written, I'm going to have it edited for typos and the like and put it up for sale by sometime in November. At which point, I'll be writing my next NaNo novel. I don't plan on it being a series, just a one-shot novel story. But I've learned to never say never!

I'll be creating a new category to put these post in called "10 Day Novel Challenge." So if you want to follow the daily log of my progress and writing day, be sure to subscribe via RSS feed or email. Links to do so are under my picture, top-right side of this page. By early Saturday morning, you should see my first report on how my writing day went.

Should be fun!