Novel In Progress--A Personal Challenge

Although I'm mostly a poet, I've tried unsucessfully to create novels from ideas that I've had in the past. Today, though, I got what I consider the "perfect" inspiration for a novel. Keeping the details under wraps, but I can say that the theme relates to music and how it shapes our culture as well as our individual psyches.

I've set up a personal challenge goal for my first draft: write one chapter per day for thirty days. That is a minimum. If I feel like writing more than one chapter any given day, that will be great. Still, I am not focusing on doing that more than I can stand. I want to have a schedule but not make it a burden for me. That, more than anything, has stilted my authorial voice many times before.

This is going to be a labor of love as well as a challenge. If I find that I can go longer than thirty days, that will be up to how the novel is progressing. Depending on the finished length, it may either be a novella or a full-blown novel. The process will dictate the result, whatever the finished product may be.

Usually, I hate using words like "product" to describe any creative endeavor--sounds far too commercial, like a Sidney Sheldon bestseller. I've sold far too many bestsellers to people early on in my life when I worked at a bookstore, and much preferred the Literature, Poetry and Drama sections to the mountains of bestselling novels, many of them I would consider a substitute for toilet paper should one run out of the stuff.

My hope is that the finished work is less like toilet paper substitute and more like the sort of work that may or may not sell millions of copies, but will be remembered far beyond my lifespan. It's a crapshoot, but unlike the state lottery, one that depends less on blind luck and more on quality of effort. I will create a journal to document the process at a later date. For now, I will concentrate on my challenge and not just toss it aside out of boredom or other interferences.