Writing a book (Part 1): The splurge technique

I have reached the end of what is technically known (at least, in my world) as the ‘splurge’ stage of writing a book.

After reading everything I can get my hands on about sugar – books, blog posts, websites, journals, newspaper articles – I literally have sugar coming out of my ears (a nasty complaint).

For the past three weeks I have been busy ‘splurging’ this information.

My sole aim has been to type as fast as possible and ‘vomit’ words out; not giving a flying shit how they sound (which inevitably means, they kind of sound OK).

This approach has several major things going for it as far as I can see:

• It makes you feel like you’re writing, when really you’re not
• It’s reassuring to see the pages mounting up (ooooh).
• It’s exciting to know you have oodles of information ready to craft.
• It gives your subconscious time to marinate all your research and cook up some most excellent thoughts.

I am a fan.

In case you’re wondering how this all fits into my daily life, the answer is, it doesn’t. (Well, it does, but there’s not much daily life left.)

I work 3 days a week at the publishing company and 2 days a week from home. This sounds like a nice split until you realise I’m working to a very tight deadline (‘tight’ as in, if I think about it my brain goes funny, so I try not to think about it too much.)

This means I also research/splurge in the evenings and weekends. And, just to make sure I really have no life left, I get up at 5.30am to fit a few hours in before the day officially starts.

This is what Wednesday looked like this week:

05.30 write
08.30 yoga
09.00 meditate
09.20 shower and breakfast
10.00  write
12.00  walk
12.30  write
13.30  lunch
14.00  write
18:00  cook supper
20.00 write
21.00  watch One Born Every Minute
22.00 read in bed
22.30 sleep (or rather, stay awake for hours with my brain whirring)

I have one word to say about this regime: ??:!%>*^*&X%F*!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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P.S. A big thank you for all your support and encouragement – it means a lot to me (that sounds a bit lame but seriously, it matters more than you’d ever imagine) x