Chapter Two: Writing a Novel in Five Days While Traveling

WRITING A NOVEL IN FIVE DAYS WHILE TRAVELING…

CHAPTER TWO…

Third day of traveling and I will be starting the novel tomorrow. So doing these introduction and preparation chapters first for the nonfiction book as I go along. A sort of writing travel book. Sort of.

Travel Today…

I have my computer set up just fine where it will sit for the next five days.

And today was a much easier drive than the previous two days by a long ways. I left Fresno, CA around 11 a.m. and was in this suite in Las Vegas before 6 p.m.

I went out for dinner by 7 p.m., then a long walk to do some research for a friend (not for the coming book), then did the workshop assignments I needed to do for the rest of the night.

So now I am ready to start writing fiction tomorrow.

Again, I do not have a clue what the book will be about. But let me give a few more hints about getting ready to do something like this. And a couple of warnings if you are thinking of a challenge like this.

Hint #1… Attitude is everything. Once I decided to try this, I started working on my attitude. Positive attitude.

Every time a negative thought or worry crept in over the last four or five days, I would go back to the basics. The basics are the hours this will take.

I have the hours in the next five days. So if I use the hours correctly, I can enjoy poker tournaments, spending time with friends over lunches and dinners, do my e-mail and business stuff, and still write this novel.

What do I mean by the hours? I know that to do 8,000 words of fiction in a day, I need to spend about 6 hours or so at it. Maybe a little longer. So I picked 7 hours per day of writing time to be safe. That’s what I mean by hours.

Hint #2… Plan the days ahead to convince yourself you have the time.

I have no intention of following some silly plan while here, and no way I can control my friends or if I go deep into a big poker tournament. But I had to lay it out ahead of time to make sure the hours really were possible. There are seven hours per day for five days easily on this trip.

Hint #3… Plan on not thinking about the book. In other words, I plan on just getting out of my own way, slamming my critical voice into a corner to whimper for five days, and write a clean novel. I will not rewrite this. (I never rewrite anything anyway.) So I will be writing clean and if all things fall into place I will have a finished 40,000 plus novel by the end of five days.

This is back on the attitude point. Attitude and belief  are everything.

And planning to have a good attitude and a belief something is possible.

Some basic warnings.

Warning #1… If you are deathly afraid of failure, never try anything like this. About a thousand things could go wrong to derail this or any challenge like it. I am prepared for failure if it happens. Not afraid of it.

Warning #2… If you don’t have all the myths of writing cleared out of your system, don’t even think of trying this. If you have to write perfect, this challenge will kill you dead. If you write sloppy, this challenge will be a waste of time. If you think everything your write is important, run from this idea.

And so on and so on.

Warning #3… If you don’t know exactly how many words you can write in an hour, tested over time, don’t try this. Chances are you will be wrong about your writing speed and you will just set up for an automatic failure.

This gets deadly when you think you can write at a certain speed and suddenly a story becomes important to you for some critical voice reason, so you slow down, and the challenge pressures you into madness.

Warning #4… If the fear of doing something like this kills the flexibility I talked about in the first chapter, run away from this idea. Fear often makes people very rigid and if you are naturally one of those people, find other ways to challenge yourself.

Also, if you are normally a ridged schedule person in real life, the needed flexibility to do this kind of challenge will kill you. Avoid completely.

Warning #5… If you can’t handle an emotional up-and-down ride, don’t try a challenge like this one. No chance on the planet this kind of thing will not be a bumpy ride emotionally.

For me that will be part of the fun. Writing into the dark completely will mean at times I will be stuck. And when stuck here, there are lots of other things for me to go do. Oh, oh…

What will happen next?

Each day I will do a chapter here about the day, the details of the day, and how it shaped up and how I did with the writing.

You will be able to follow the progress of the word count and when this book and the novel are eventually bundled together, you will be able to see exactly what I wrote on any given day.

I will also detail out how I am feeling. Tired, excited, and so on. In other words, the ups and downs of the ride through the writing of the book.

So here we go.

I have driven three days to get here to Las Vegas. And tomorrow my friends start arriving. And poker tournaments start.

And tomorrow I start a brand new novel called Ace High: A Cold Poker Gang Novel.

Not a clue what it will be about, but it will be set here in Las Vegas, I know that much.

Stay tuned. The ride should be interesting, if nothing else. Just hope I can keep this ride on the tracks.