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For those of you who don’t know, yesterday was my birthday. Not only did I get The Writers Market 2010 (which I’m going to review at a later time), my aunt, who happens to be a fairly big editor, also gave me a black journal; almost empty.

At first glance, it may seem like nothing, but upon further examination, it’s actually extremely valuable.

What she did was buy a journal, and write the first paragraph of a story (78 words, to be exact). In return, I wrote 85 words, and in the next day or two, she’ll write the next paragraph and so on.

It may seem like we’re going pretty slowly, but actually, at this rate, we should be done in about six months. That’s less than the average novel, and this should be about 60,000 words.

We also don’t tell each other the plot or where we’re going with the story, so we really have to make it up as we go along. That normally wouldn’t be a good idea, as the story wouldn’t hold itself together and it would be very difficult to continue the story, however, as we’re only writing a paragraph at a time, it’s pretty easy to move forward, even without planning.

This can be really great practice for a writer, because it’s easy to write; not only because you’re writing only a paragraph at a time, but because you don’t have to come up with all the ideas–only half. You also definitely don’t want to let down the other writer and not continue the story.

Writing a book like this with a writing partner can keepy you motivated, keep writing fun, and make it easy to finish a book.

What I’m also doing with this is I’m typing it up and editing it as we go along. Because we’re only writing a paragraph each, we tend to leave out a lot of detail’s that could be included. It’s easy to edit two paragraph’s at a time very carefully, so it’s very possible to publish the book.

In the coming week’s and month’s, I’ll be posting the chapter’s of the book as they come. I can’t wait to share with you how it end’s up, and I highly encourage you to do the same. In my opinion, for five or ten minutes a day, it’s well worth it.

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