Welcome to Novel Anatomy: First Post

When I was younger I loved blogs because they were an informal way to learn about someone else's life. One of my favorite blogs was Patrick McKenzie's blog about his business, Bingo Card Creator. It was a small, simple business, but he explained everything about his work, the finances of the business, and the logistics. He told his audience every boring detail. And it was incredibly valuable. It made me want to start my own business. It made creating a business seem doable.

Now that I'm older, I want to become a writer. It can seem intimidating to become a writer. Where do you start? How do you market your book? How do you get an agent? How do you get published?

Well, I don't know any of those answers. And if you're reading this, probably you don't either. So let's learn together. I am going to try and share as much as I can about my writing process, my struggles, my challenges, what works and what doesn't. Maybe I'll write a book successfully and publish it, maybe I won't. But I'm hoping that hearing the details of my process will be valuable.

A little bit about me. My day job isn't to be a writer. In my day job, I'm a doctor. I'm actually a pediatrician. I love my job and I'm privileged and lucky to have a well-paying profession. My situation would be totally different if I couldn't rely on my primary profession for funding. I'm hoping that won't take away from the value of hearing about how I write my novel and how I try to publish it.

Since I like both writing and medicine, I picked the title Novel Anatomy. It describes my goal for this blog which is to explain the construction, that is the "anatomy", of the book that I am writing. I also love programming and computers, math, technology, and science, so my writing format is probably not typical of most writers. But hey, maybe this will help you. And if you see me doing something dumb, let me know, and hopefully I'll get better.

Thanks for reading!
Ben

My novel so far:
I'm writing a sci-fi novel. More details to come soon.
Number of words so far: 18,046. Goal number of words: 100,000.
Time spent writing today: 1 hour
Time spent writing so far (estimated): 36 hours