Thirty Day Novel

I saw the web page for writing a novel in thirty days and thought it was interesting. I've wanted to see if I could write for a while now, since I've read a lot of books, I thought it would be easier to write a book. Also, I like to see what other people are writing at the same time. It's harder than I thought, since it's difficult to write natural sounding dialogue. The timing of the action has to be right, and it hard to know when to move the action along or go into more detail. I think I have the problem of making the male characters sound too much like women. It's hard to know how to make them sound like men, without making them completely macho and stereotypical. So far though, the plot is turning out different than I thought it would, which is good. The story is about a woman who goes back to her hometown to confront her father and deal with her past, but meets someone unexpected on the trip there. That's what it is so far. I'm not sure where to take the story next, and according to the thirty day schedule, I have to write about 40 pages by the end of this week.