One Day, Ten K ....

This spring, things sort of went haywire for me. We were living in a house that had issues, and as the final straw in a long, long list of straws, our basement flooded to the point where my children had to vacate their bedrooms and bring all their stuff up into the living room. Yeah, that was fun. We found a new place to live and moved into it eight days after finding it. For anyone who's counting, that means we moved three times in eight months. Not my favorite thing ever. The side effect of this is that I got very behind on my work, which meant a lot of scrambling trying to catch up. Catching up never did happen, but I did get the projects done ... very late, but done. Some of that was accomplished by pulling several ten-thousand-word days. Yeah, crazy, huh? Some authors do that as a matter of course, but I never had. I'm in the groove now, baby!

Let me share some tips on how to make it work.

1. Get your family on board. Tell them you have a lot to do and ask for their cooperation. Do this a day or two in advance so they know what to expect.

2. Have plenty of your favorite writing snacks on hand.

3. Team up with other writers who also want to write all day, and check in with each other regularly to cheer everyone on. This is a pretty important part of the process. Gotta keep that motivation high.

4. Have an idea what you're going to write - take a few minutes to jot down key words for your scenes so you aren't spending precious time just staring at the screen.

 5. Once you start, don't stop to edit or criticize yourself. Just get it out on paper. You can edit it later.

6. Stand up and walk around a lot, and while you're walking, be thinking about the next thing you're going to write so you can dive right back in.

 7. Take a nap in the middle if you need to, or a shower, or a walk. But get right back to it when you're done.

 I warn you, your hands might be a little numb afterwards, and your brain will feel like it's been turned to pudding. But you can do it! Maybe not 10K, if you're new to writing or not a quick typist, but you can increase your word counts and amaze yourself with your awesomeness. And I may have actually hit almost 13K on one of those days, but who's counting, right?