I have three novels outlined. I’m finally turning one of those outlines into a full-fledged draft.

I began drafting for the Three Weeks project a while back, but I’ve shelved it for the time being–I’ve reconsidered the basic book format and want to be certain about that before moving forward.

The book I’m drafting now has no working title.  It’s a contemporary mystery that I outlined using the Marshall Plan for Novel Writing back in 2004. I’d say it’s been shelved long enough.

As you can see, I’ve added a word tracker tool to the sidebar of this blog. My goal is 70,000 words, but ideally I’d like to go well over that (I always write too much the first time around, and I know I’ll have a lot to cut in the editing process).

As you can also see, I haven’t gotten very far yet.

My goal is to write 5 days per week, and a minimum of 500 words each of those days. That would come to around 7 months from start to finish for the first draft. I’d like to finish much sooner than that, so I’ll be shooting for more most days–I think that gives me a good starting place in the beginning though.

Writing without a working title is strange for me. Whether I’m working on a client’s press release or a blog post of my own, I like to have a title up front. Even my other two novel outlines have working titles. I just haven’t found something to fit yet.

Something I did decide on was using a pen name. I talked about the implications of pseudnyms at All Book Marketing today, so give that a read if you’d like to know more about why I made that choice for fictional works.

That’s where my fiction work stands at the moment. I’ll try to remember to update the wordcount weekly at a bare minimum here.

Has anyone else started a new writing project for the new year?