This past weekend, I did one of the most stupid things of my writing career. Stupid, but also quite productive. Remember how I had some new ideas and useful feedback for my Japan novel? The insanity all stemmed from this.

It started out calmly on Sunday morning. The sun was shining for the first time in ages, so I put on some washing. So far, so good, and so housewifey. Then I sat down at my computer to incorporate the feedback my friend sent me. She’s a clever gal, and her ideas about what should stay and what should go were absolutely spot-on, I think. By the time I’d expanded some parts of the story and dramatically cut down others, my novel had taken a beating and was down to about 36,000 words. Yep, more a novella or just a really long short story. I was a little depressed.

The big problems began when I flicked through my to-do list (I use Remember the Milk, because it’s got a cute cow logo and it’s Australian, too) and realised that the deadline for the TAG Hungerford Award, a nice local prize for manuscripts from unpublished Western Australian writers, was Monday. That is to say, I had 24 hours to get my manuscript ready. I’ve wanted to enter this contest for ages, and it only takes place every two years, so I was really keen. And really stupid.

I’ve been thinking for ages about the extra chapters to go into this novel. You see, without giving too much away, everything I’d written so far looked at the situation (including life in Japan) from the point of view of foreigners. I really wanted to put a Japanese perspective in as well. So I’d long since created the character who would do this, using her own chapters interspersed between the original chapters. (FYI, I stuck with third person this time, because to put her in first would have given her too much emphasis in the whole scheme of the story.)

All of this meant that I ended up churning out around 15,000 words in less than eight hours. I was on fire. As I type this two days later my wrists are on fire, the muscular aftermath. Now, it’s abundantly clear to me that writing 15,000 words in one day is not the smartest way to go about finishing a novel, and not just because of the physical consequences. I edited and proofread the new bits the next morning, however, and it really wasn’t bad. In fact, I actually think it made the whole novel make more sense. So I printed it all out and sent it off to the TAG Hungerford just to see what happens, and to satisfy my goal of entering it.

Looking ahead to the next NaNoWriMo, the meager target of just short of 1,700 words per day seems like nothing when I’ve discovered it’s physically and mentally possible to write almost ten times that. Not that I’m going to plan a 500,000 word epic for this year’s NaNo or anything, but perhaps I can at least plan to write 1,700 really, really good words, rather than the 1,700 “any old words will do” that I wrote last year.

Anyone out there have a record number of words they’ve churned out in a day? Please share!