Here are my challenges thus far. I know it's only been one day and I'm only at 1106 words but it's my first time so I'm really overwhelmed by a lot of this! Losing my novel-ginity is a lot harder than I thought.

Starting - I had no idea how to start. How the hell do you start a novel? I did the traditional describing a scene or setting thing. Is that traditional? I don't even know. I haven't read a lot of books in my life so that really doesn't help me out any. But yeah, I'm sure along the way I'll end up changing the beginning but for now at least I have a starting point.

Here's an excerpt from my starting as of now:

It was a surprisingly warm evening for Halloween at Niagara Falls. Stefani had come there from Toronto to celebrate her birthday with her boyfriend, Alex. It was always nice having a birthday on Halloween, with everyone celebrating your birthday with you.

I was told that starting is the hardest part, and once you get passed it you're good to go. It was true enough for me, the first 500 words really pissed me off and I was ready to give up, but I stopped caring and just wrote. The next 600 words were much easier and I actually enjoyed writing those. I started focusing on my protagonist's background which was really fun to make up. I felt like a god creating this person with whatever past and whatever traits I desired. I guess I'm starting to understand the rush that writer's get.

Dialogue - Writing dialogue is stressing me out. I just don't know how to do it. I know how to make the characters sound genuine, but I don't know the structure for dialogue or anything. Are you supposed to reference each person talking on every line, or is it a given when only two people are having a conversation? Are you supposed to start each new dialogue on a line of its own? And I really don't know what to do with dialogue tags without sounding redundant. Beyond "He said," "She replied," I really don't have much of a variety so my dialogues end up sounding bland. I'm also kind of annoyed (or lazy I guess) to add quotation marks every time so I find that I'm just narrating a lot of things to make the dialogue go by faster.

Resources - I don't really have a lot of background knowledge in a lot of the stuff that I plan to be writing about. Doesn't really make sense I know but I know roughly what I want to write about but not everything in detail. My story is going to involve a lot of superstition and such for example, so it would be helpful to know about myths or legends or things like that to incorporate into the story. I know a handful of the common superstitions and such but knowing some more Biblical or religious facts in general would help me out more. It's really hard to research at the same time as writing all in one month, along with balancing school and other things but I guess I'll see how it goes.