The 25-Day Novel Challenge Day One

THE 25-DAY NOVEL CHALLENGE: DAY ONE

WORD COUNT: 4,001/75,000

Hey everyone! Welcome to the 25-Day Novel Challenge. In this challenge, I am attempting to write and edit (and maybe even publish, depending on how fast everything goes) a 75,000-word superhero novel, titled The Superhero’s Test (you can see the cover at the top of the post). During this challenge, I will also be blogging about my experiences writing and editing this novel every day.

Today is Day One of the challenge and I have already written my 4,000 words for the day (you can see my progress on the progress bar on the right side of the screen), so I will not be doing any more writing on the book today. These first 4,000 words came out very easily, but that doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve been looking forward to writing this book for several months now and I’ve discovered that my books are easier to write if I wait for a while before starting work on it. It helps that I did a lot of worldbuilding (but not too much; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write it at all) and have thought about the characters and what I want to happen in the story a lot.

But I don’t use an outline. While I understand that outlines work for a lot of writers, I just don’t like using them. I know most outliners say that an outline should be a guide and not rigid and inflexible, but to me it just seems like a waste of time to spend time making an outline only for a story to completely change when you actually write it. Why not just jump straight into the book and take whatever it throws at you?

Now granted, without an outline, I cannot guarantee that this book will be 75,000 words. It might be longer or it might be shorter, but I doubt the book will grow to monstrous lengths, because I am good at controlling the length of my books and making sure I don’t spend a lot of time going down rabbit trails that only pad a book rather than adding to the story.

I came up with the number 75,000 because I estimated that that was close to the word count for your average superhero novel, and this novel is written to market, so I am aiming to make it as similar as I can to other bestselling superhero novels. If I write 4,000 words a day every day, I should hit 75,000 words in 18 days.

Assuming the novel is 300 pages and I edit 40 pages a day, that should take only 7 days, and 18 + 7 = 25, so that’s where I got 25 from, for those who are interested in the math I did to figure this challenge out.

I believe this is completely doable for me, because I’ve written novels in 20 and 30 days before, although I’ve usually taken longer than a week to edit a full-length novel. We’ll see if I succeed or if I crash and burn.

Anyway, I don’t want to make these posts too long, so I’ll just end this by saying that I will post the blurb for the book tomorrow so people can know what it is about, since I have been keeping the actual story of the book a secret for a while. Or rather, I should say the blurbs, because I have written two blurbs and am not sure which one to pick.

And if you’d like to know about the release of the book, you can subscribe to my mailing list below by entering your email address into the box below:

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All right. Day One is down and now onto Day Two!