If you know me, you almost definitely know about National Novel Writing Month, the quest to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in November. If you don’t, I promise you’ll find out about it very quickly. NaNo’s over two months away, and I’m already excited. So excited, in fact, that I’m taking on another writing challenge to pass the time.
Enter the 3-Day Novel Contest.
“Three days?” you ask. “That’s crazy. No one can write a novel in three days.” Oh, but lots of people do, and they’ve been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. This year is a great chance to do it: I can’t go anywhere on Labor Day weekend thanks to not having a car, and there’s not much to do here anyway. Why not write a book in three days (albeit without paying the official entrance fee)? Unlike NaNo, there’s no word count goal, but most submitted novels are between 90 and 150 pages according to the survival guide, tending toward the lower end most of the time. That’s closer to novella length, but I’ll take that, especially since I wrote over 25k in the first three days of NaNo 2009. This makes the Three-Day Novel Contest a bit of a push, but just a little more than what I did during the first day of NaNo times three. Actually, if I did that, I’d have a 60,000 word novel. I don’t have a goal for the challenge yet, but I’d really like to be able to hit 50k. That’d be a 20,000-word day and two 15,000-word days or two 20,000-word days and a 10,000-word day. 60,000 words would be a real push and probably my upper limit for three days of writing.
It’s silly to worry about a word count goal right now. I don’t even have a plot yet! Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?