November Writing Challenge Check In – November 9

Welcome to the first check in for the November Writing Challenge for Book Bloggers and Reviewers! I am excited to bring you my writing progress from the past 8 days and share a bit about how the focus on writing has been going for me. I will also talk about some insights I have so far as well as things I have interested in finding out more about as the month progresses. Let’s get started.

Progress Update:

Between November 1-8, I have been successful in writing 5 book reviews! In the month of October, I wrote 6 total so I am on my way to exceed that number. 😁

No. of books reviewed – 5
Total word count of reviews – 4,156 words

In order of writing:

• The Palace Dressmaker | Goodreads – 540 words
• Before Your Memory Fades | Goodreads – 818 words
• The Truth About Ben And June | Goodreads – 914 words
• Moon Of The Turning Leaves | Goodreads – 955 words
• The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant | Goodreads – 929 words 

Insights:

• Over 2 years ago, I established a spot for writing all my reviews. Every birthday, I start a new document and add my reviews for the year there. Having a go-to place has been very helpful in this challenge so far. When I am ready to write a review, I go there.
• Also, having a list of books I want to write about has been great! At the start of the month, I knew the couple of titles I wanted to handle first and as one got done. I had another one to focus on. This kind of momentum is very important, especially when the books themselves are not related to one another. 
• As expected, making time for writing is taking it away from something else. I read less but that was a combination of recovering from a cold and spending more time writing. The weeks ahead will tell how much reading is reduced overall. At this point, since I had one book from last month to finish and one tour book to read for an early November post, I have read 3 books so far.

Tips: Tackling the blank page:

There is no one way to write a book review. As soon as I sat down to write The Palace Dressmaker, I felt stuck. Welcome, writer’s block, maybe. I didn’t have paragraphs to write, just a few points about the book so I decided to make a 10 point list on why this book was enjoyable. All my other reviews are long form, talking about the books and their various themes, aspects, etc. Having an older review from the series was helpful in organizing a new one (Tales from the Café was helpful in how I wrote Before Your Memory Fades).

Sometimes, I use my reading experience criteria to organize my thoughts about the book though I didn’t need to for these books.

Looks at the next week:

As we head into the next 7 days of this challenge, I am excited to write about one book that needs to be returned to the library soon and discuss another one with Ariel this weekend!

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Closing Thoughts:

November Writing Challenge is turning out to be a really good exercise in more writing but also reflecting on the writing process along the way. I am marvelling at how much I remember from some books. Of the 5 listed above,The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant and The Truth About Ben And June were read in March and July respectively. 

If you review books, I have some questions for you:

• Where do you write your reviews? Directly in Goodreads, in a document, in a journal? I am curious!
• What propels you to write the review of a book? 

Whether you are writing a novel, short story or book review this month, share your word count in the comments! I love that we are writing together this month. 🥰

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Word count for this post: 656 words

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Links to check out:

• November Writing Challenge for Book Bloggers – The Introduction post
• The Palace Dressmaker – Review posted!
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King’s classic book about writing that offered me some inspiration