The Summer Sprint

During a summer hiatus in the month of May, I stumbled across a smattering of books by Chris Fox, an insightful writer who challenged my writing process. Specifically, his books, “5,000 Words per Hour,” and “Lifelong Writing Habit,” forever changed the way I approach the craft.



While writing sprints are nothing I haven’t heard of before, his books presented my first opportunity to envision what the practice could look like in my own life. In short, they dramatically bolster writing momentum while simultaneously saving time. I discovered that disciplining myself to thoroughly remove all distractions works, as overkill as that may sound (if it doesn’t sound like overkill, you’re a much more disciplined writer than myself, for which I applaud you). I followed his advice for thirty minutes at a time, sequestering myself to a quieter corner of the household, putting on noise-canceling headphones, setting my phone to “Do Not Disturb,” and closing all applications on my laptop but for Microsoft Word and Excel (the latter tracks my word counts after each sprint).

I’ve found that my word counts thus far tend to be around 900 per half hour sprint, which definitely boosts my words per hour. Before, I’d attempt to write for two hours a day, counting myself lucky if I broached 2000 words in that span, while with sprints, I easily reach that word count in little over an hour. I literally churn out twice the words in half the time, squeezing in thirty-minute intervals when before, I refused to write unless I had two spare hours available because I didn’t want to “squeeze the creative process.” If the “creative process” involved two hours of largely undisciplined time spent fumbling with the keyboard, occasionally taking a “research break,” and ambling in the restroom, then yes, two hours was far too short a time to accomplish anything.

The writing sprints have proved wildly successful…but the process is unfortunately still a marathon. I’ve found that fantasy requires nothing less: the fantasy I read usually lands around 200k words a novel, and while my first manuscripts fell shorter, they still landed around 170K words each. Such a number requires many writing sprints to achieve…and to complicate matters, I found myself a new day job.

Loading trailers all day was hot, mind-numbing, and you never saw the outdoors. This crippled my passion for photography and it never let me daydream either, for the photography always aided the daydreaming process.



"You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it"        - Neil Gaiman



Give me an hour outside, be it with a camera or not, and I’ll have new ideas to work into my novel.

Therefore, I found a new job as a food delivery driver, and this makes writing sprints crucial. To my chagrin, trucking jobs present boundless variables to forever eradicate consistent hours, banishing any notion of an “optimum writing schedule.” I’m sure every writer has probably been asked about their “prime writing time,” and I used to say mine was in the early morning. I suspect it still is, but very rarely are those hours open anymore. Now, my prime hours are anytime I can squeeze writing in, which varies between early morning, late afternoon, or the wee hours of the night. Writing sprints offer a fluidity I never had before, and the new job supplements the habit to comprise a new chapter of life.



This chapter sees me revising a first novel before sending it back for a proofreading edit, despairing over the process of said revision, and unwittingly starting two other novels in what I suspect is an unconscious survival mechanism. One of these novels is the second book in my trilogy, while another is a standalone novel fleshing out the backstories of a character within the first book. It’s a more “classic” take on dark fantasy, beset with the brooding forests, bloodthirsty fairies, and autumnal horror we all crave on a chilly October night. Hopefully, said book could be finished right around October, because nothing says Halloween like a healthy dose of magic and bloodshed.

That said, I can’t pass a summer by without some sort of trip, not since the summer of 2019, which saw me road tripping from Virginia to Yosemite National Park and back, the Grand American Road Trip that originally inspired my current desert trilogy. Growing up, I’d always thought Yosemite would be the destination of a lifetime, but it was UTAH that truly inspired. The austere, silent, desolate ruggedness of the desert, the whimsical, fascinating, extraordinary shapes of the badlands…the Southwest immediately garnered a special place in my heart.

The following summer saw me back in Utah, and this summer, the summer of 2021, I’m going for a THIRD time. There’s always more to see, but my trip will start with the last item on my bucket list (at least, the bucket list for the continental US while excluding Alaska, which will DEFINITELY be visited at a later date): a visit to White Sands National Park.

I’ll leave for photography and inevitably return with more ideas to write when I already have too many to keep track of; such is the plight of the hapless artist. Suffice it to say, if I don’t return with at least three new book ideas, it’ll be a record.

Stay tuned for photos of next week’s escapade. After wandering through deserts for a week, I suppose I’ll get back to concluding my literary rendition of the process by publishing my first book in the desert trilogy. Until then, the writing sprints continue…at a different time every day.

Geez, and I remember hearing about how boring and ordinary an author’s life could be. Clearly, those authors were doing something wrong.