*laughs* I love my friends. All of them, but at this particular moment, the writer-friends in particular. Michelle Sagara is making popcorn to nibble on while she watches us do our Book Race. She alone among many seems to be holding out against the challenge–Laura Anne Gilman, Kari Sperring, and Kate Elliott have also signed on, and it looks like Alma Alexander is also teetering on the edge of doing so. :)
The book I’m aiming to write in 5 weeks is a middle grade novel about pirates and lost princes, and should only be about 60K words, which isn’t actually impossible in 5 weeks. Chaz is 13K into an 80K novel, Laura Anne’s 15K into a 70K novel, Kari’s 4K into a–I don’t know, actually, how long hers is!–Kate’s 70K into a 200K draft & aware that realistically she’s not going to get one of her amazing behemoth epics done in 5 weeks, and Alma, like me, is just starting out.
So I think that while the stated goal is a novel in 5 weeks, that the average of what we’re aiming for is also around 60K in 5 weeks.
Also, *technically* this is going to be spread over 8 weeks, since Chaz, who instigated this whole thing, is, y’know, off to Paris with his fiancee for 2 weeks (O THE POOR DARLING) and…doing something else…for another week. But since at least half of us have other stuff that needs doing, too, I figure those of us aiming for around 60K have 5 of those 8 weeks to work on the Book Race Novel, and those (like Kate) who are definitely going for the long end and who may not have other projects pending can have the whole eight and we’ll all announce a final wordcount on, like, October 1. Seems fair enough, right?
Alma quite reasonably wants to know if the winner actually gets a prize besides the shiny wordcount, so now I’m trying to think of a proper prize. Possibly one prize for people trying to finish the book in 5 weeks and another for the highest total wordcount over 8 weeks. Yes. That seems good. *thinks*
If anybody else wants to join the madness I see no reason you should not!
(LJ usernames in order, just in case you’re not following one of them and want to be:
(also, not at all related, “Heroic”, the all-women comics anthology, is $5500 shy of $100K, far and away the most successful Kickstarter campaign thus far run, and has 18 hours to go. I have this crazy hope that it’ll hit $100K! Check it out if you haven’t! And also, man, if I’m this excited over somebody else’s KS campaign, I’m going to go *nuts* when we do the ElectriCity one!)
I might possibly we willing to knit something (like socks?) for the winner, )or maybe some homemade soaps in a scent type of their choice?) assuming of course I get more than 5 weeks to do the knitting.
s/we/be