Discovery Channel Magazine: the Great Fire of London
1 March, 2013Smart Investor: Earning It, March 2013
1 March, 2013Discovery Channel Magazine, March 2013
Saturday, January 26. 7.15am
It is still dark and freezing on this January Saturday morning, yet a crowd of us have assembled at an office block in Clerkenwell, London. We are an unlikely gathering. This guy’s in food retailing. This woman works for a magazine about British tourism. This man looks haggard: he was performing as a stand-up comedian last night. And her? Well, she’s tired because she went dancing. In fact, in thigh-high stockings and a skinny purple mini-dress, I wonder if she’s even been home. She must be freezing.
We are bonded, 30 of us here and 300 more on laptops around the world, by a preposterous challenge: write an entire novel, from scratch, in 30 hours. It is an idea of the British magazine Kernel, and is a cruel concentrated revamp of the annual American challenge to write a novel in a month.
The rules are simple. It has to be fiction. Not one word of it can be material you have written before today. You must be the sole author. And you are strongly discouraged from writing the same word 50,000 times, as this is considered unlikely to win.
And the prize? HarperCollins will publish the winner. In the unspeakably difficult world of London publishing, where no major house has accepted an unsolicited manuscript for years and where even most agents won’t now contemplate new clients, that is a considerable draw.
To read more of this article, contact the author or Discovery Channel Magazine. To read In Flight, the author’s entry in the 30-hour novel, click here:
