Only Popping in for a Moment...

I've disappeared for most of the month while dedicating myself to my National Novel Writing Month challenge. I should probably have kept more careful track of the ups and downs (there have been an abundance of both!) but I rather suspect writing a book is like having a baby--for a long time you get big and fat and unwieldy and uncomfortable. Then you have the insane pain of giving birth. But after it's all over and you're holding that baby (or novel) in your arms, you completely forget all those times in the past year (nine months, whatever) where you said "I AM NEVER DOING THIS AGAIN" and you just think Oh, this is the best feeling in the WORLD!

Writing books is fun, but it is also stressful. It involves this strange blend of cockiness ('Well, of course someone will want to read this! It's brilliant!') and humility ('Will someone want to read this? Do I want to read this?')

In this blog entry, however, I want to share my new favourite thing: the magical ten-minute power-write. The magical ten-minute power-write has changed my life! I'm not kidding. Ten minutes--it's practically nothing. It's a third of a sitcom. Hell, it's the amount of time you spend watching commercials during a sitcom! (Give or take a minute or two.) My point is, everyone has ten minutes here and there. So, in order to plow through the last 10000 words of my 50000 word challenge, I knew I was going to do something drastic. Meandering through my day writing ten words here and there was not going to cut it. So I set the alarm on my cell phone for ten minutes, put my fingers to the keyboard, and did not allow myself to stop typing until the phone beeped at me.

First time out: 424 words. Followed by a second ten minutes: 440 words. Then 400, 477, 439, 404, 483, 505, 486 and 482.

That's right, my friends. 100 minutes and 4140 words. If you wrote an average of 450 words in ten minutes, and only spent ten minutes A DAY (do you realize how many ten minute blocks are in a day??!!) writing... you'd have an 80,000 word novel in less than six months. Imagine what you could do if you spent three ten minute blocks writing every day. Or six. Or ten. That's right, just imagine it. And that, my friends, is the magical ten-minute power-write.

Hey... you got ten minutes?