Sprint Writing

I've heard NaNoWriMo, where the goal is to write 50K words in 30 days, compared to a marathon of writing.  Personally, I think it's more like a series of sprints.  Unless you are actually writing all those words in a row without stopping, which I think is damn near impossible. 

A series of sprints that add up to a marathon maybe?  A marathon of sprint writing, perhaps? :shrug:

Anyway, I'm doing something similar this month.  I'm trying to complete the first draft of one book before another book comes back from my editor.   Here's what something like that looks like...

Screenshot from my email where I've mailed the file to myself every night.

So, you can see the progression on WHTF (Wish Hits the Fan).  I started out the month with the 4128 words I'd left off on back in October '16, which I'd started back in September.  I sat down on February 3rd - which was when I'd finally decided what book I was going to work on - and was off to the races. 

I started out slow because I wasn't quite certain where I was going, but as I went along, the word counts jumped.  Almost every night, I sat my ass here and wrote something.  (Missed three days, which ain't bad.  The 5th, the 10th, and the 18th?  I'm claiming those as mental health days. LOL)

Sprint writing over a long period of time isn't for everyone, naturally.  Hell, when I first tried it way back in like November of '06, it was freaking hard.  But you can train yourself to it, I think, if you really want to be a faster writer.  Which is why I did it in the first place.  Training for the day when I would be a published novelist with deadlines and junk.  Once I commit to writing, I can now crank out the words.  And they aren't crap words either.  Better and better with every quick manuscript I write.  (I think.  We'll see how much editing I have to do on this sucker when I'm done.)

Now I have to train myself to do this or something like it every month.  Speed editing followed by speed writing followed by speed editing and so on so on so forth.  As you can see from the above pic, I have the speed writing down, but lollygagging from October to February isn't kosher.  (Okay, so I did finish writing and then editing Natural Causes in there, but I want more.)

Anyway, there's what a month in the life of sprint writing looks like.