There was never a plan. No blueprint, no disciplined sprint toward a 91,000-word manuscript in twenty days. That kind of target feels like something an optimisation algorithm might dream up, not a human being with rent to pay.

But it happened anyway. Here’s the shape of it.

I wrote every day, in the gaps where the rest of my life wasn’t looking. Mornings before the city had booted up. Lunch breaks carved out of a full-time job. Nights lit by a laptop’s cold glow. Weekends were worse—or better. Errands, chores, the normal rituals. Then the writing, unspooling long past the point of good sense.

That’s the trick with a novel: sustained throughput. Eighty-five thousand words or more. You don’t architect it. You ride it. Keep the flow going before it collapses back into static.

I don’t plot. Never have. If I tried? The circuitry would fry. Plotting is for people who believe in maps. All I ever had was the signal: a story pulse somewhere deep in the dark.

I’d sit down, and the words would surface, like intercepted transmissions from characters who existed just beyond the firewall. I kept expecting the feed to cut out—because it had, four times over the past decade. I’d hit twenty thousand words, then lose the thread, the bandwidth, the faith.

This time was different. I caught an idea—just a hundred-word burst, tapped into Bear Notes. A “what if” stripped down to bare metal. Enough to seed the system.

Every day after that, the subconscious pushed the story forward. I never knew what was coming until it arrived. Discovery writing, they call it. I call it listening. And now I’m closing in on a second novel, same technique, same strange momentum.

Is there a method?

Maybe. Start with a core idea that feels like a kernel—small, dense, capable of unfolding into something vast. You won’t know the whole story consciously. That’s not how it works. The idea drops into the background processes, and the architecture emerges from there.

Focus on the story. No character dossiers, no timelines, no elaborate scaffolding. Each scene begins in free-fall. But there’s always a landing, even if I don’t see it coming.

And the characters—somehow they become real. Not immediately. But as the story grows, they resolve into focus, like faces in old security footage sharpening frame by frame. I know them because it’s their story, not mine. I’m just the one catching it as it comes through.

Writing a novel in twenty days is absurd. But I did it. And the second is moving faster. I still have a day job. The writing runs in the margins.

Why so fast? Maybe because when a story decides it wants out, it behaves like a breach—pressure building behind a wall that wasn’t as strong as you thought. And when it blows, you write.