Page 40

> Carrie, my lifeline to sanity right now, reads a draft and says, "No, Jeff, I love it, it's really good!" She did fall asleep over it even though it's a sci-fi horror mystery thriller, but I'm sure she was just tired.

I made the 40 page mark at 11 p.m. last night.

On sleep
The contest survival guide doesn't say anything about sleep, one way or the other. Maybe it's just implied that you won't sleep at all? Is that the whole point?

Anyway, I felt pretty tired last night, and I think if I'm calculating right I might be ahead of the game. So I turned in for a full eight hours, deciding that hitting my brain's reset button might be more useful than the time I'm giving up.

I had a dream last night that I was writing a term paper for an English class and still had 6 pages to go. I think I was freaking out in my dream.

I woke up and realized, actually, I have about 60 pages to go.

This is the kind of math I do
The guide also suggests that I should be halfway through by 6 p.m. tonight.

They also say that while there's no prescribed length, novels that win are usually around 100 pages. Sometimes 120. But that, nonetheless, you should write as much as the story requires.

So let's say I aim for 100 pages. That means I have 9.5 hours to write 10 pages to hit the halfway mark by this evening. I write at least 2.5 pages an hour. Piece of cake.

It's the variables that kill you
However, I have a few things working against me:

• This blog
• An accumulation of 10 notes that need fact-checking or problem solving in the editing stage
• No chapter breaks (yet)
• A lot of typos and grammatical sloppiness (again, I'm assuming I'll have time for a good editing pass)
• My highly distractable nature (i.e., this blog) and my consequent inability to sit at the computer for more than 2 hours at time.

Time to get strategic
Ok, so the plan is, for the next hour, type as fast as possible. Not stream-of-consciousness exactly, but minimal use of the backspace key. Get a sense of absolute fastest page-per-minute rate.

Take a break, eat breakfast.

Next, do it for two hours before my next break.

Then three, and four, and so on, until it's done.

Tonight will be my brutal all-nighter. By noon on Monday I should be moving into editing.