a challenge

January 15, 2007

Michele Hauf‘s just finishing up a challenge she and a friend are doing: rough draft their books in 10 days. Gail Dayton is doing a 20 pages a day for two weeks challenge.

Anybody wanna join me in something similar? The next book up for me is HANDS OF CHANGE, the third and final book in the Old Races Negotiator trilogy. It’s supposed to come in around 125K, so no way am I going to do a draft in 10 days (12K a day for 10 days? I’d spend the next two months lying on my back drooling.), but 20 pages a day, excluding weekends, for two weeks would do some serious damage to the first half of the book.

I wouldn’t ask other people to do 20 pages a day, just to do whatever goal they wanted to set for themselves. Me, I like a little competition… :)

Anyone up for it?

15 thoughts on “a challenge”

  1. (12K a day for 10 days? I’d spend the next two months lying on my back drooling.)

    But that approach repeated 5 times would still result in a 600,000 word year, which seems very respectable.

    Isn’t 20 pages a day 10,000 words? Or is a page considered to be double-spaced, so half that? Or is there some wierd Irish metric A4 thing involved here, like the way “Opens at 10” means 10:30?

  2. But that approach repeated 5 times would still result in a 600,000 word year, which seems very respectable.

    Gawd. o.O

    It’s 5K a day; 20 pages is generally assuming you’re writing in manuscript format, so, yeah, double-spaced (or actually 25pt exact spacing, but nevermind that). :)

    Shouldn’t you be sleeping? :)

  3. I’m interested, but I’m afraid that I’m off limits until February, because work sucks badly in January. When do you plan on doing such madness? :)

  4. At any other time, I’d jump on this, but alas–not the best time for me right now. But I’ll catch you on the next book!

  5. Sounds like just the thing I need to kick start DEAD MAN’S SHOES (and keep me from pounding my head against the wall when the revisions on NO PLACE TO GO get to me — like they did last night).

    I’m not sure I can manage a consistent 5K a day unless I start dosing the Seabeast’s sippy cup with creme de menthe, but I’m feeling brave and stupid enough to shoot for 2,500 a day.

    When were you thinking of starting this hoedown, ma’am?

  6. Actually, despite the icon, no. But if I were to take up a challenge, I’d totally want to play with you. Wait! That came out wrong!! ;)

    Seriously, real life is being too mean right now. This is actually good in a way as I can’t seem to get past “It was a dark and stormy night.”

  7. I’ll take you up on that challenge! I’ve got 6 more 10ish page papers to write by the 9th of February. 20 pages a week would be really cool.

  8. I’d be up for a 5 page a day challenge. could kick start something i’m a bit stuck on, and give me an excuse to slack off work…

  10. Ah, I would take up the challenge to get cracking on my master thesis… But alas, I’m smack in the middle of my exams. If it had been February, it might have worked.

    Good luck.

    By the way, I’ve been looking for your books in the local bookshop here in Belgium, but haven’t one of them yet…

  12. I would love this. Where would we post milestones?

    Still considering actual goal, but I do SO much better when I’ve got something like this to focus on.

  13. I’m in. Will have to average it over the week, though. Think I could average 2500 words a day. If I do more, great, but I need to make time to write class plans and teach, and I’m not counting that as writing.

    How much would prepping my Number Lesson method for copyright count for?

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