Some Thoughts on Challenges…
I’m reading stories for the short story challenge and also starting to get the first novels in for the June part of the novel challenge. Everyone seems to be doing fine. In fact, so far, I am impressed.
And the challenge is doing what it was intended to do, which was get writers to the keyboard in a rough time of year.
And I’m having fun reading.
For me, I seem to be working toward the July challenge in bits and pieces. I should finish this one novel by Sunday or Monday nights, and get other things worked out, including another issue of Smith’s Monthly turned in. That will be three in the space of two weeks if I do that.
And I have been watching the clock and realizing that over the last three days at least I could have been at my writing computer by midnight with very little changes. That is encouraging.
And interestingly enough, I am only looking at this as ONLY one month. The only part seems to keep coming up. Where I will be picking up an extra hour plus is television watching time, but for one month in the dead of summer that makes no difference at all.
If I focus like this for one month, it will be a lot of fun and accomplish a lot of things along the way. And really, really drag my overall focus back to production of words which I hope will then continue on into August and beyond.
I am also thinking I will start and make Saturday night late the deadline each week for the novel. That will give me eight days on the first one, then seven for the next three with two days extra.
No idea of books I want to write, but the next one up for Smith’s Monthly that I decided to do six months ago was Tombstone Canyon: A Thunder Mountain Novel, so I think I will do that one to start.
As I typed that I thought that wouldn’t it be fun to do all four as Thunder Mountain novels… Oh, oh, this could be fun.
So I am getting closer to deciding to go for this crazy one. Four novels in one month. Sure, why not?
Stay tuned.
It funny you chose TM novels for the challenge. I was going to ask if you were going to stay away from them for the challenge due to the complexity of the time travel in them.
Guess that’s not scaring you off after all!!
Go with the set of Thunder Mountain books.
Think in terms of building, or extending, “lists” on Amazon, not just writing four books in a month.
Once you do “four books in a month” you need to have a visual incentive to keep going, so that you aren’t saying “done that”. You need a visual aid to keep production going, the same way in the past that you would have planes flying across the wall to show where you were in the production pipeline.
Is there a place in your office, or in a hallway, that you can put post-it notes with the titles in rows to represent the “lists”. Or simply have links to each “list” you are building on Amazon so that you, and we, can quickly see how they are growing.
Play with the idea of maintaining a quick visual cue(A “queue”, get it. – HA!).