My mini bucket list is silly because 1) I am not including anything personal on it since I don’t roll that way on the Internet anymore. 2) It doesn’t have an end date and 3) It does have an end date, which is the nebulous “whenever Mad Men comes back on.”
Anyway, I checked a big one off today: Write young adult paranormal romance novel in two months.
Done.
I started writing this book (not announcing the title yet), my first novel, on January 10 of this year. It still needs a lot of work, but I did finish it yesterday. It’s currently 270 pages.
The most important thing I learned is that I can write like a fast mofo when I have to and that it’s really not that hard.
At first I was proud of myself for writing maybe 800 words a day, but now I see that 3000-4000 is not unreasonable at all, especially if you’re not doing other writing work.
I relied heavily on Write or Die and also having a writing buddy, Michelle. We met on twitter and wrote together mostly every Tuesday and Wednesday, with other check-ins throughout the week.
Twitter is great for this kind of thing. It is filled with writers who have nothing but time on their hands. Kidding, but it is a great hangout for writers.
Stephen King recommends that you don’t spend more than three months on your first draft because you lose the energy and enthusiasm for the story. Now I get what he’s saying. I felt really immersed in my novel’s world since I cranked it out so fast.
Not gonna lie, though. I couldn’t have done it if I had been working on other things. Writing a book is freakin’ hard.
I am very impressed! This is also one of the things that I would like to accomplish (not the romance paranormal touchy feely stuff, Ha Ha!.) I just seem to put everything else in front of actually sitting down and putting words on paper (or the screen.) Kudos and Brava!!
Thank you! (Although some paranormal romance is kinda dark, not touchy feely). It’s really true what they say, though, one page at a time… if they say that? If you only wrote 1200 words a day you’d have a complete book in two months. It’s just doing it.