Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

On this very late edition of the Casual Chat, I want to kind of ramble on a topic that I have considered talking about for a while, but have never really mentioned in any capacity, and that is my several attempts at writing my own novels.

A Brief History

Something that I don’t mention often is that I have been writing on the Internet on and off ever since 2010, which is a very long time.

My first forays into writing actually started within the realm of fanfiction, which while many people would be embarrassed to mention I see it more as a learning experience.

When I started writing, as you would expect the writing was very bad. Grammatically I was fine due to the fact that spell check had existed, but I wrote my early stories in screenplay format, meaning a lot of my writing was as follows:

Character A: Hello friend, how are you doing?

Character B looks and smiles at Character A, waving their hand.

Character B: I’m doing well, thank you for asking!

As you can see, not very good. I did change things up as I became more comfortable in my writing, but there was still a lot to be desired.

I was also a machine in terms of how often I would write when I first started, writing something every day or every couple of days in order to keep the story updated. That gradually slowed down as life began to take over, though after a break I started writing again, this time at a slower rate. Again, life happened and my writing ceased for a good period of time.

I will say that for a good bit of time when I was much more active in writing fanfiction I had a couple of well received stories that occasionally receive some decent reviews even after I stopped actively writing, though I will likely not return to writing fanfiction at this point in my life.

Over time my creative writing came in small bursts here and there, up until I decided that starting a blog talking about Magic the Gathering was a good idea and have stuck with it ever since.

Aspirations

Throughout my time writing there has always been something that I have wanted to do, but never pulled the trigger on doing so, and that was actually writing a novel.

There are a couple reasons why, but the main reason was that in the more creative aspects of my life, I tend to be much more indecisive in what I want to do.

I’ve mentioned this in a previous Casual Chat where I talked about making my own TCG where I can be indecisive when trying to pursue a theme for a game. Same concept, but amplified when it comes to actually writing my own stories.

For example, I have had a four part mystery story that follows two characters from high school to early adulthood as they unravel a web of conspiracies while also dealing with actual murder mysteries rolling around my head for years.

I have the basic premise for each book of the series as well as the beginning and end of each of them, but I have a lot of mental indecisiveness on story points, especially when I am planning for it to be four books, meaning that I would have to keep a lot of details in check, especially for a story that involves a series wide conspiracy.

I have a lot of ideas for stories and plot points, but then I get in my own head about if there should be a sequel or a plot point should be changed or a character should be a completely different person, it’s a mess.

I always start on something, even a basic outline or a premise and either keep it in my memory or have it written down somewhere where I can look at it and see if inspiration strikes, but nothing much usually comes from that, maybe a couple sentences at most.

A Challenge Approaches

About two or three years ago I had heard about the National Novel Writing Month challenge, often shorthanded to NaNoWriMo, which takes place every November where a bunch of people write with the goal of having written 50,000 words by the end of the month, which is a novel.

Now there has been some controversy with the original website that was the face of the challenge and that website has since shut down, but the task of writing a novel within the span of a month intrigued me. About two years ago I started to draft a story outline, but nothing came of it because I was busy.

A few weeks ago I remembered about the NaNoWriMo challenge and really thought about it. I looked at my stats for the blog and after doing a bit of quick math, I had found that ever since I started this blog, I had written about 13 novels worth of words, using the 50,000 words for the challenge as a base line.

The blogs average about 1000 words per blog, sometimes a bit more, and the average words needed to complete the challenge is 1667 words per day, which when comparing some Weekly Commander blogs isn’t too bad.

I then really thought about it and decided that, why not, let’s actually participate in this challenge.

Starting November 1st, I will be participating in the NaNoWriMo Challenge and by the end of the month I will have a novel draft ready, come hell or highwater.

Planning

Now the rules of the challenge are pretty straightforward. I can only start actually writing on November 1st, at least 50,000 words need to be done by the end of the month, and there is no limit to the genres.

What’s also important is that planning for the novel is allowed, just so long as I don’t do any actual writing of the novel until the 1st, which is where I am actually at currently.

One thing that kept me from participating in this challenge was that I had the skeleton of an idea for a novel with a few characters and scenes thought of, but not written down.

This time, I am locking in the ideas, characters, plot, the chapter structure, the personal goals for each day, and a tracker to make sure I keep honest with myself how many words I have written.

I already have a general outline of how I want the story to go, about half the characters made with basic personality traits, and am working to get chapter outlines ready to go so that when November actually comes I am ready to go swinging.

Ideally at the end of the month I have a functional first draft of an actual novel that can possibly become my first actual novel after a couple of revisions or editing, or at the very least be something that I can be proud of privately for having achieved, I haven’t decided yet.

I will update you all how the novel is going or whether or not I give up on the challenge. After all of the work I have put in planning the thing, I am not likely to give up so easily.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual