After several months of keeping a blog in order to get back into writing (I studied Creative Writing at university and then life got in the way) I'm ready to have a crack at a novel. I already keep a blog and have a rough draft of a novel I wrote shortly after graduation which I believe would lend itself well to a blog format. My plan is to write the blovel in real time, i.e. the amount of time between blog posts being the amount of time that passes in the fictional world (the protagonist keeping an online diary).
Has anyone tried this before? I found the following tips online:
- Posts should be 250-500 words in length.
- Posts should end in cliffhangers or at least with suspenseful elements that keep the reader wanting to read the next days' post.
- Post should be posted regularly, typically every 1-3 days.
- Readers should be allowed to comment on the posts.
- Authors should create the novel online through the daily posts and not simply cut and paste already written novels into blog posts.
- Blovels should be shorter works, typically 40,000-60,000 words in length.
- Blovels should follow the same pattern as novels with a beginning, climactic conflict, and denouement or resolution.
- A blovel should run for no more than one year.
This all seems like sensible advice - the only trouble being that my first draft begins in September 2002 and takes place over a few months...
If it was you, how would you get around this? Would it jar as a reader if a blog post published on, say, February 2015 was 'posted' in September 2002? Would include some kind of framing post to explain the delay between writing and posting? Or would adjust the publishing time and alert readers to a new post via something like twitter?