So my last blog post talked about how I was having bad dreams, but how there was a slight silver lining with it giving me an idea for a story. At the time I wrote that I had no idea just how much that would consume my time. As I expected it took me away from my book for basically the entire week, but the experience was ultimately very good for me.
In roughly 24 hours I wrote about 12,000 words, which is frankly absurd. My usual pace is about 2,000/day, so this was over 6 times that. I was actually writing so much and so fast that I had these cold shivers and my body was trembling, and although the result is pretty much a trunk story I feel like the writing actually came out remarkably good considering how fast I got it out. Showed it to a few close friends and all agreed it is quite emotionally intense.
Also probably the closest thing I’ll ever write to horror.
Anyway, once the writing was done I just couldn’t let the story sit, so I ended up spending the rest of the week tweaking and revising it over and over until I had something I was happy with. Made many changes to soften the story from what happened in my dream (dreams being dreams, there was a lot in there that I think was just random sadism thrown in to make the dream worse), and made a major change to how I was writing to focus on a single perspective and give the story more focus.
In the end, I think I learned a lot about this. While I doubt 12k words/day is a pace I can keep up day after day (this experience felt like it was literally killing me in some ways) it was a lot of fun in a way. Plus it showed me that I am fully capable of writing faster than I currently am, so maybe my goal of eventually hitting a consistent 4k words/day isn’t as insane as I initially thought. Got to play around with the first person perspective and a flow of consciousness narrative style too.
Back to working on my book as of tonight (I just pushed 1k words into it), and that feels good too. Never expected this to happen, but honestly maybe I needed to let my muse have it’s head for a few days.
