What I Learned, writing a novel in 30 days.
1) Chris Baty, author of No Plot? No Problem! is a genius. I don't think I've ever had such well-placed, well-delivered advice in such helpful quantities about anything, ever in my entire life. It makes me wish he wrote a book on surviving Marjorie Hayes.
2) Writing actually comes pretty naturally to me. Like, abnormally so. I'm not saying I'm good at it, just that the actual act of writing is easy - it kind of flows out of my head and into the keyboard with almost no fuss.
3) I tried to make my main character not-me. I tried. Oh, I tried so hard. But... she ended up with all of my thoughts and most of my issues, so I kinda went with it.
4) Say what you will about evil monopolistic exploitive consumer-driven empires, but Starbucks rocks. They have thousands of outlets right up next to every seat in the house, and they have a wide enough menu that I can always find something I'm pleased to drink while writing.
5) My school has no outlets next to chairs. Zero. OH THE HORROR.
6) I have no idea how to move my characters perceptibly forward in time without sounding cliche. I keep describing their day until it's about 2 in the morning, book-time, and then I just make them fall asleep during whatever they're doing, and then I awkwardly proclaim what day of the week they wake up on. We'll fix it later, I know, but it's something that I never would have foreseen being a problem. Which is why it's a problem, maybe.
7) Satanism is weird. I was doing research for one of my characters and I picked up the book "The Satanic Witch" in Borders and flipped through it. It was hard not to throw it at a wall, but I didn't own it and I sure as hell never will, research or no. I don't know what I expected... maybe I was giving Satanists too much credit... but I was really shocked at how blatantly vapid and fruity it all sounded.
8) There are no affordable Tarot decks in the universe, so high school witches with their modest allowances are SOL. Everything is either Way too expensive or way too tiny to be useful, and even the tiny ones seem too expensive for how dinky they look. My high school witches all either painted their own or ended up with the little Tarot Kit Box! things that you can get at Barnes and Noble for $8.
9) Characters slip through the cracks. Like, you introduce them, and somehow you expect that now that you've named them and given them shoe sizes, they'll stick around. But No! You have to watch the little buggers or the book will be almost over and they still will never have become frequent enough to be "recurring." This is irritating to me, because I love my characters and they're all so nifty and different!
10) Achieving my word count quota was easier than it should have been... but damn, I have a power for rambling. (looks at length this post has gotten, laughs nervously)
11) Text Edit on Macs does not have any apparent word count or page count tool. This was a blessing and a curse - I had to be connected to the internet to get my word counts (using this page), and I would print my file to PDF every once in a while to check my page count, which was a mild pain but it also meant that if I wrote somewhere without internet (Starbucks' pay-to-blog internet deals with T-Mobile and ATT irritate me), then I couldn't be constantly checking my word count, so I was free to focus on writing. Yay clever accidents!
12) I really miss writing my book. I want to start the next one, NOW. I know exactly which plot I'm going to use and it'll be the same characters not too long later, and ooooh... this and this and that.... but I really think, at least this once, that I should wait and see how different my final draft ends up being, before I build on the facts present in the first draft. Darn my impenetrable logic!
13) I ended up basing several of my characters off of people I know. At least one of you is probably reading this... you do comment sometimes, so I know you're there.
14) Improv games also helped random word flow. If the assignment is to sit down, shut up, and spontaneously produce huge amounts of mildly coherent B.S., well, I can do it.
15) It really helped to have at least one serious writing buddy who was just as committed as I was to make the deadline. Thanks, Tyna! WEEEEEEE ARE THE CHAAAAAAAMPIONS, MY FRIEEEEEEEEEEEND!!!
And now I am off to school, to attain affordable (free) early bird parking.
-turtle