WRITING
Book-in-a-week
By Olgy Gary, December 14, 2003

Have you heard of the book-in-a-week group? I'm thinking there probably are several around but I wanted to let you know about one I recently joined and how much it helped me with the middle grade novel I'm working on. I've been wanting to put time on task on this novel for some time now but my 9 to 5 and family and just life in general keep me so busy there never seems to be any time left.

Book-in-a-week (BIW) describes itself as "writers connected through a list created at Yahoo. The main purpose of the group is to write, but we also exchange information, publishing news and kudos. Anything writing related." 

They have one week a month where they carry out the BIW challenge, where you tell them ahead of time how many pages you want to write in a week and then you report your daily output back to the BIW moderator. This, of course, entails locking your internal editor in the closet while you write as much as you can.

In preparation for my first BIW I thoroughly outlined my middle grade novel and when Monday came around I took off writing. By Sunday night I'd written 45 new pages and, at 250 words per page, a good week's work. The middle grade novel came alive as it saw me paying attention to it. It has a strong storyline alongside a solid historical thread. I was so excited about the outcome I'm going to keep writing and hope to finish it by year's end.

I found the members, and especially the moderator, to be supportive. The energy shared by their posts is quite contageous. As I saw folks posting the number of pages they were getting done, from 1 to 20+, in the middle of everything else they needed to attend to, my excuses for not spending time on task writing my novel evaporated and I rode the BIW train alongside them. 

BIW is listed under yahoo groups, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biw/