How to write a book in a day – a photo story

On Sunday August 16,  the  Prana Writers (8 of us including yours truly) wrote a children’s chapter book for 10 to 14 year olds in 12 hours start to finish.  It is part of a a national fundraiser for children’s hospitals and needed to be a minimum of 8,000 words.  The deal was: we raise money and commit to writing  the book between 8am and 8pm on the specified day.  There could be no preparation.  To ensure this, they email us, at 8am on the day, the 3 main characters, the setting, the issue and some random words to slip into the text.  Then its all go.  We have 12 hours to write, edit, illustrate, print, bind and email  the book.  The bound book is sent off by express post the next morning to become part of the hospital’s collection.  We may publish the book ourselves afterwards with half the royalties going to the hospital.  Here’s the day’s story…

Anticipation - the morning briefing 7am to 8am.. Tom, Rebecca and Angela from the left.

Beck picks me up at 6.15, sharpish.  We collect a coffee and Helen then head down to Angela’s house in the Tallebudgera Valley.  We’s the second lot to arrive – Tom’s already there  enjoying a servo meat pie.  Rob, Angela’s partner, has freshly baked us muffins for breakfast.  Angela leads a briefing while we munch.  We discuss the plan and the strategy.  Angela has an example of writing for the age group as some of use are usually adult writers.

Muffins for breakfast - Margaret, Jerry & Helen from the left

Beck & Kerry, with a penchant for horror took a little time to come to terms with the fact there could be no blood, gore, swearing or terror in the story.  We waited for the email to arrive at 8am. The clock struck the hour of 8,  but strangely there was no email. Finally a phone call had it sorted.  The email had gone into the junk email box.  It was 8.15 when Angela came running out with it.  Fifteen precious minutes wasted.  Here’s what we were given:

Rob our master chef and technical advisor - every team should have one!

Three main characters:  A podiatrist, A sheep shearer and a sea creature
Setting: The motorway
Issue:  Love
Words to include: plop, beef stroganoff, amongst, hearty and a couple of others.

8.15 to 9.30  We spread out the butchers paper and start plotting and ‘drawing’ our main characters, wondering how on earth we would manage to cast  children in as a  Podiatrist and a Sheep shearer as main  characters.    The sea creature was easy – a sea monster,  and the title “The Coral Sea Monster” came out early early on.

We decided the opening scene would be at Pimpama with both sides of the motorway blocked.  You see, the truck carrying their feature attraction at OceanWorld, “The Coral Sea Monster” had crashed.  That’s when our main characters, Penny, the wanna be podiatrist, and Jack, the sheep shearer from Thargomindah meet.  The story moves quickly to  Jack & Penny discovering the “Sea Monster” in the Pimpama canefields.  It then becomes a race against time to return Coral, our sea monster,  to the ocean while she is still alive and before the evil OceanWorld curator, Mr Measly, stops them.  There is much adventure, mishaps, ingenuity and even a little romance.  And, its probably not giving too much away to say, many of our characters find out a little more about true love.

So, there we were.  It was 9.30.  We had a plan, we allocated chapters and off we headed to find our writing spaces.  I’ll let the photos tell the story of how the rest of the day panned out…

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So we made it.  We got it all done in time.  16,600 words, and a great story told.

Once again, thank-you to the children’s hospitals for staging this event, Angela & Rob for hosting it, all those who have sponsors us, our families for putting up with us and the Prana Writers – all of them, even those who were unable to participate.  You are all so amazing.

That's me - with the book. That tired, joyful state of having delivered a book.

More photos can bee seen at Angela’s   and Helen’s respective blogs about the event.