Writing Marathon Finished
I finally finished marathoning my book “Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland” yesterday. Most of the time when I write a book I will lock myself away from the world and do nothing but write, eat, and sleep until it is finished. Well, most of the time my books are on the short side so I can finish them in 3-7 days. This book took me 20 days to complete. It is about 3-4 times longer than my usual books. It came out to be almost 80,000 words and 400 pages. The longest book I’ve written since 1999 (It might actually be longer than Satan Burger, which would make it my longest book since EJC in 1995).
This was probably the most exhausting writing experience I’ve ever gone through. Some days I could do nothing but stare at the computer screen, forcing out just a few sentences an hour. Other times I got so into it I forgot who I was or what I was doing and could get out thousands of words in a big gush. I drank dozens of energy drinks (which I never used to buy before) and smoked a ton of hazelnut tobacco.
Despite its Troma-esque title, this book is a little more serious in its approach than a lot of my books, but no more than most of my recent stuff. It’s basically like a bizarro version of Road Warrior with werewolves. I was watching a lot of anime and re-reading Vonnegut’s “Slapstick” the week before I started this book, and now that I’m going over the recently finished draft of this book I realize that those two things really rubbed off on this book. I’m not saying the book is like an anime written by Vonnegut (which would probably be pretty interesting)… its just like a book by me with a lot of influence from Vonnegut and anime.
After finishing the book, I went up to Olympia to a cocktail party at Kevin Shamel’s house. Kevin Shamel recently got his short novel “Rotten Little Animals” accepted to be published as one of the first books in the New Bizarro Author Series. Anyway, after 20 days of nonstop writing I was hardly able to hold up my martini glass or think of anything else but my book. It was a weird experience coming out of that daze.
While it was fun, I’m not doing the 20 day writing marathon anytime soon if I can avoid it. But I also probably won’t be writing any 80,000 word books unless I do.
Carlton Mellick III 
July 21, 2009 at 10:45 am
Sounds like a kickass book, looking forward to hungrily devouring it.
Your writing process amazes me. As a beginning writer, I’m still struggling with the whole “actually getting myself to write” thing, so it’s totally mind-boggling to me that you can manage to write an entire book in, say, a week. If I really push myself – something I need to do more often – and I have a good outline already prepared, I can finish a short story in about 9 days.
July 21, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Christ in a crock-pot Carlton, 80 thousand words in three WEEKS? Are there going to be serious edits, or are you going to retain the epic length?
July 21, 2009 at 3:04 pm
There will definitely be edits. A lot of the language needs to be cleaned up. I might be expanding some sections.
July 21, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I totally agree with you, Alexander Jerusalem. I have really bad chronic procrastination. I have all these cool ideas, but I just can’t properly motivated myself to actually sit down and write. I write a lot of poetry and I am trying to get myself to write a short story.
July 11, 2012 at 2:47 pm
Great blog post, Carlton. I find binge writing to be very helpful. The last time, I just did it for 3 days. I can’t imagine 20!