Well, for me it is.  After a a long Thanksgiving weekend of daily word counts over what I’d been doing all month, yesterday I reached 50,347 words in my novel.  The goal is for each writer sit down and in one month, write at least 50,000 words.  This may seem like a foolish and unnecessary challenge.  Many writers think so, the thought of trying to write an entire novel in thirty days is terrifying, unnecessary, and the list goes on.

For me, this is how I started writing last year.  I was challenged, I figured out how to go about it, and I did it.  I spent January 2012 until the end of June 2012 learning how to revise a novel. And in early October 2012, I released that novel.  If you’re interested, you can find it on Amazon.com (The Bad Seed by Connie Cockrell).

I thought the whole thing was so positive, and I had such a good result that in August of 2012 I repeated the process, (project manager speak for I did it again, lol.) in what the organizers call Camp NaNo.  I finished a book that time too, which I still need to revise, probably beginning in January 2013.

This November, after plotting out my third book, I began with high hopes.  It didn’t go as well as my first two efforts.  I didn’t have enough scenes planned out to get me to my 50,000 word goal.  I did not give up.  Since my story location was on a space station (the book is tentatively titled TriPoint Station) I decided to fill out my 50,000 words (I was 15,000 words short) with short stories about life on the station.

This did two things.  It got me over the goal, making me happy.  It also allowed me to develop a good background about the station.  Things that may have been vaguely mentioned in the original story, or affected the story in some way, or had nothing to do with the original story but helped me develop a better idea of the station’s culture, legal system, economic reality, and so on.  I found this very helpful.

It pointed out flaws in my original story’s physical layout, naming conventions, it helped me develop a slang for the station and put in place a cultural bias, such as, names of the working class tend to remain Irish based (I had the station settled by Irish originally) while the rich tended to more New Age type names.

While I liked my original idea, I really liked getting into the nuts and bolts of my station.  I even added aliens, which I hadn’t even thought about in the original story.  So, that’s it.  I’ll have a lot of work to do to revise what I wrote in November.  There are a lot of continuity issues I’ll have to resolve along with adding an additional level of conflict.  That’s OK.  When I’m done, sometime around next June or July, I’ll start sending it out to SciFi publishers.

I can hardly wait.