Day 1: 3,200 words

Extract:

The castle had an air of age to it, like it had stood still for hundreds of years.

Triss ran towards it, Hemming right behind her. They hurried past the old rampart and wooden palisade, which was now rotten and falling down in more places than it was standing. They ran under a stone arch laced with moss like mould in blue cheese, over cobbles drowning in grass and weeds. Triss darted right, between the wooden walls and an old stone building. Hemming followed, calling her name. A banner hung from a rusty iron pole. It was brown, the colour of clay mud, but Hemming knew it had once been deep red. It was torn and threadbare, but the outline of its sigil, the white shield, was still visible.

I was honestly taken aback by how easily this started.

It took a long time to get the first page done. I was reminded of that old mantra: "Sometimes writing is like chopping wood." It definitely felt that way to begin with; I had to fight my way through every word.

But as I wrote more, it began to flow better. My problem is that I frequently write short stories, so I have a severe case of "edit as you go". Because of this it was really hard to let my inhibitions go and just write whatever came to mind, but I definitely got better at it as the day went on. I did break the golden rule and glance back at what I'd written, and found a few big mistakes, but overall I feel like it is definitely a starting point that I can work from.

The best part about this process today is that I have a pretty good idea of where I want the plot to go - at least in the next 10,000 words. I also have an endgame ready that I want to work towards, but that is open to change.

George R R Martin says that there are two types of writer, 'Gardeners' and 'Architects'. In his analogy, gardeners like to plant an idea and watch it grow, watering certain parts and trimming others, while architects like to have the plot set out before they begin. My process is very much the architect approach - or at least it has been until now.

The thing with this "novel in a month" challenge is that it asks you to throw caution to the wind and just write whatever. I tried this process once, and trust me when I say it didn't go well. This time, however (though I have cheated in a way by using a fantasy world that I designed earlier) it has gone much better. I've had a brief idea of where this plot was going to go for a long time, but was paralysed when it came to starting it.

Now... well, we'll have to see how it goes, but I feel pretty good about how it has worked out so far.

(The goal for this project is to have written 50,000 words of rough draft by the end of 31 days. The short-term goal is to have written just under 12,000 by the end of the first week.)

P.S. I somehow managed to design another fictional world yesterday - a post-apocalyptic version of Sandoval, New Mexico, dominated by a religious dictatorship who think that the atomic war was a curse from God for humanity's sins. I need to stop doing this kind of thing! But at the same time I really want to talk about it and develop it, so if you are interested, just ask. And, of course, I am more than willing to talk more about the process of writing my "novel in a month" project.