Sharkbait Writes

A New Challenge for 2012

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I decided to accept the #WIP500 challenge that my friend Cara Michaels is hosting. If you aren’t familiar with the #WIP500 challenge, I’ll give a brief explanation. First of all, for those of you that use Twitter (which is probably everyone who follows this site) you’ll recognize the title of the challenge is in the form of a hash tag, so everyone interested and involved have a place to announce their successes and communicate with other writers taking the challenge. Basically, the #WIP500 challenge involves writing at least 500 words every day for your current work-in-progress (WIP). Since this year is a leap year, if you write 500 words a day, you’ll have 183,000 words written by the end of the year! That’s plenty of words for multiple projects. Writing 500 words a day seemed like a reasonable goal for me, so I jumped on board.

The last time I checked, 125 people have accepted the #WIP500 challenge with more than half of them already reporting their daily word counts. So far, for the first two days I have added 1300 words for my current project, The Devil’s Nightmare, bringing it to a grand total of 2034 words.

The Devil’s Nightmare

My current WIP, The Devil’s Nightmare, is only in its infant stage right now, but I’m excited to be writing again and working in a genre that I have always loved…horror! I’ve had this story floating around in the back of my mind for a while now and decided that 2012 was going to be the year to take stab at the horror genre. If I don’t do it now, I may not get another chance later…you know, considering that the world is suppose to end on Dec. 21, 2012. Let’s just hope the Mayans were wrong about that one!

My tentative goal is to have The Devil’s Nightmare ready for e-book distribution by Oct. 31, 2012 and then in print sometime shortly after that. This is, of course, if everything goes as planned, but you know how that goes! If I manage to hit my 500-word daily #WIP500 quota, then getting The Devil’s Nightmare published this year shouldn’t be a problem. One thing is for sure, though…I don’t want to rush through this one! I want to make sure that The Devil’s Nightmare is handled correctly, written well, edited well, and has a great cover. Thanks to the awesome writing community on Twitter that I have had the pleasure networking with in 2011, finding the perfect editor and cover artist for The Devil’s Nightmare will be a heck of a lot easier (and here come the marketing tweets and emails). 🙂

Pushing Forward

Last year was like riding an emotional roller coaster. I have a lot of great things to reflect on from last year, but there were also some events that got me a bit depressed too. However, as the new year approached I was ready to leave the past in the rear view mirror and tackle 2012 head on. I decided to focus on my goals with my head held high and a confident heart that I can and will succeed this year no matter what it takes to do so. In my next post I’ll be writing a little bit about my experience of quitting a job that I loved to pursue a dream of operating my own business and focusing more on writing.

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