I’m back and ready for a challenge.

I never was good at keeping diaries or journals.  I wondered how long I would be faithful to doing a blog entry at last once or twice a week.  Answer: About 6 months, lol.  Well, now I vow to do better.  I am challenging myself in two ways.  Way 1: I will blog at least once a week.  Way 2:  Well this one’s the big challenge.

I know a lot of people know about NaNoWriMo where you pledge yourself to write 50,000 words in a month.  Well, a great writer by the name of Stephen King wrote one of my favorite writers craft books.  I don’t really read those things anymore, as I had a writing teacher once say something wonderful: The best way to learn to write in your genre is to READ in your genre, and read a lot.  Many rules and grammar lessons and such just don’t apply, especially as current trends in your genre are constantly evolving.  And, sometimes writers craft books are boring.  If you feel like you’re doing homwork, suddenly writing is not fun.  I ran into that rut for a while.  Writing became work and no play.

But anyways, I digress, Stephen King says writers should get all of their first drafts out in a month or you lose focus and intensity on what you’re writing.  I find the longer it takes me to get a work out the more spread out my ideas become and I have to do a lot of “tightening” up editing.  I’ll use my fan fiction as an example because I have finished fan fiction stories. ;). I find that the fan fics I finish in 4-6 weeks are tighter with better structure and more consistency than the ones I take a year to finish.  Mostly because my writing style is always growing, so you can tell what I wrote in January from what I wrote in May, and mainly because my interest in the project wans over time.  By the end of the year, I’m thinking about and working on different projects, so my focus is split.

So, I challenge myself.  I have gone back to a project I shelved for a very long time (7 years).  It is a novel that I’ve wanted to write since I was a kid, but I put it away because I let a lot of people tell me it was implausible and no good.  I’ve reworked the concepts and characters and I wanna try it again.  I’m very excited, but I also don’t want this to become another 6 year project.  (My last book took that long and now the edits are taking forever because… well, the writing differs in places and it’s too spread out due to me writing parts of it over the course of years).

So, here’s the bet: I bet that my novel, The Fourth Piece, will have a complete first draft by my birthday on April 10th.  I have given myself 4 weeks (1 month) to deliver.  If I loose, well, you guys can throw net bananas at me.  I will blog at least once a week to report my status.

Whoo, four weeks.  I can do it, I can do it.  When I’m not distracted, I’m a fast writer, and I have a bit of an outline to go off of.  Well, wish me luck and ice cream for banana splits.

You guys take care!