Since November was a bit too crazy for novel writing, I’ve joined up with some of my Clarion classmates for JaNoWriMo – JAnuary NOvel WRIting MOnth. In the interest of saving myself some prep work (January being right around the corner and all), I’ve opted to set my novel in the same world as ‘Tending the Mori Birds,’ which is the short story I sold to _Fantasy Magazine_. I consider this to be entirely a practice novel, so I’m going to do my best to burn through it as quickly as possible, and treat it solely as a learning experience. I’m also hoping that I’ll end up with bits and pieces of the novel that can be broken off as short stories and sent off to market (but I’ll be okay with it even if I don’t get anything out of the process except some experience).
For the next couple days I’m going to do as much outlining and note-taking as possible. So far today my focus has been on the geography of the world, what sorts of creatures live there, etc. I’m hoping to make some good progress on character sketches and plot outlining this afternoon. Starting January 1st, I’ll post wordcounts here on the blog. My goal is to have 50k words by the end of January, which means 1613 words per day (if I write every day, which I won’t) or 2174 words per day if I only write on weekdays. I’ll probably shoot for 2k per day since that’s a nice round number, and makes it so I can miss a couple days.
