Everyone thinks I’ve been on holidays, but really, I’ve been on writer’s boot camp, training for a guest spot on Writing Races, the Australian Writer’s Marketplace online forum.
I thought it was an inspired bit of fun aimed at getting the procrastinators up and writing, if only for an hour, between 8.00 and 9.00 pm on a Tuesday. I thought the idea was to set aside the hour, get writing, and hopefully make some progress on the work-in-progress.
Then I find out that other racers have been known to clock over a thousand words in the hour. A thousand words! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, talk about performance anxiety.
It was enough to make me suck in my writer’s gut and hit the keyboard for a gruelling week of finger agility exercises, keyboard readiness training, writer’s block attack strategies and a pre-race fitness program in scene mapping and character development.
I’d like to say that after just one week of training, I am now a lean, mean, writing machine. I would also like to say that I look fantastic in a g-string, but that doesn’t make it true, does it?
This writing machine was built for comfort, not for speed. I am a literary tortoise, taking a long, scenic amble through the landscape, smelling the roses, tapping out a few words, wandering off for a nibble, adding a semi-colon, jogging downhill for a couple of paragraphs, before circling back to replace the semi-colon with a comma.
Who am I trying to kid? Christy Brown wrote faster than me with his left foot. Dead poets write faster than I do.
You don’t believe me? OK, then, I dare you. Come along tonight (Tuesday 21 April) to Writing Races, the online forum at Australian Writer’s Marketplace.
We’ll be lining up at 7.30 pm sharp for an online chat with the punters, then we’ll be racing off-line from 8.00 pm. An hour later, we’ll check in to compare personal bests and word tallies.
Who will be the biggest loser in the history of Writing Races? Tune in to find out (but here’s a tip for free, the smart money is on me). 😉