Welcome, welcome!

Writing challenges are a great way to stretch yourself either in meeting a deadline or increasing your daily word counts. Here’s what I learned from mine.

Starting August, I’m doing another writing challenge to finish my story Deadly Bloodlines, book 1 in my Deadly Series. I’m at 48k words and aiming to get to 80k. That’s 32k words which is a little over 1K words each day. Challenging, but not impossible.

Most writers have more words at the end of their story and have to cut back. Not me. I’m usually short words, because I skipped over scene descriptions, transitions, full character descriptions and development, even a foreshadowing scene or two. My outline usually consists of a skeletal story frame and that’s how I write it from start to finish. Once that’s done then I go back and add the rest of the body to fill it out so it a completed story.

Once the story is completed, I start the editing process, which I like to call the clothes and makeup, to make sure the story looks good before I send it out for submission.

Each story is a little different depending on whether the idea started with a character or the story, but the end result is the same.

I found out too late that submitting a series is little different from one story, so if you’re thinking of doing a series, do your research, especially if you’re submitting to a specific publisher or agent.

My other goal during the writing challenge is to plot out and write the synopsis for the other three books so I can get the series ready for submission by the end of September. I’m excited and terrified of this challenge as I’ve never done a series before, but I’m quickly falling in love with the characters and their stories and can’t wait to write them.

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WRITING CHALLENGES. Have you done any this year? Did you love or hate it?

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