Last week I was cruising around in my usual FB groups when an author friend proposed we all get back on the writing horse now that NaNoWriMo is over and fast draft a new book. Since I didn't participate in NaNo, and I had a brand new idea I had been mulling over for a little while, I decided to jump in and participate.

Before I got started I did the following things:

• I wrote a loose outline based on the questions in Chapter 8 of WRITE YOUR NOVEL FROM THE MIDDLE. It's a pretty solid idea of what I want to do for the whole novel. This is the first time I have ever outlined anything before starting writing!
• I wrote a pitch for the book. One sentence that sums up the entire book. It's what I would tell people if they said, “Pitch me your book” or “What is your book about?”
• I wrote a blurb. It's two paragraphs long with a tagline. Not bad.
• I made up my astrology profiles for the main characters. Each has information about their sign, good and bad traits, and how the two interact with each other. Plus, information on seducing each of the signs and how they react romantically.
• I made a Scrivener template for all my novels from here on out. It contains astrology templates for characters, a folder for images, a folder for outlines and beats, a folder for deleted scenes (always happens with me), and the right layout for my ebooks.

This is the most I have ever prepared for a novel before writing it! I'm going into my fourth year of writing novels full time, and it has taken me this long to start developing a system. Before this, I just wrote and I fumbled all over the place. But I had the story and it got out of me somehow ;) Now, I have the stories and I want to get them down faster and easier, with less drafts to get to the final product. Less than five drafts before publishing is my end goal. REMOVED took over ten drafts. This doesn't mean that the quality of my work will be any less. It just means that I am making better decisions initially about the stories, instead of trying to fix bad decisions in later drafts.

As of now, I have 7,660 words of a brand new draft! My plan is to write 2k-3k words per day unless it's the weekend or a babysitter day which means I will shoot for 5k. I hope to have a workable draft done by the end of the month so I can go into 2015 with drafts of two novels I can work towards publishing next year!

What's this book, you ask? This is a New Adult contemporary romance idea I've had for a while now. It involves a Japanese-American girl from Michigan State University and Olympic marathon running (but she's not the Olympian). Quite a mashup, right? The current code name for this novel is Tokyo Run, but that's not the title. I have a working title, but I'm not happy with it yet. I hope to have this book to you all in 2015. Stay tuned!