Thank you London Writer’s Salon
This weekend I did something I’ve been turning over in my mind since I signed up for it: I joined the London Writer’s Salon’s 24-Hour Writing Sprint, wrote through the night without sleeping, and came out the other side with four manuscripts in various states of completion and a very specific kind of tired that I don’t have a better word for than earned.
This is my attempt to write it down before the feeling fades.
What the London Writers’ Salon Is
Before I get into the sprint itself, I want to talk about the organization behind it, because I think it matters.
The is a global writing community built around one core idea: that writing, especially when done in community, makes for a healthier and more meaningful life. They offer live author interviews and masterclasses, a private member community, and courses. But the heartbeat of LWS is something called Writers’ Hour.
Writers’ Hour is a free daily writing session, open to everyone. Four sessions run every weekday: 8am London, 8am New York City, 8am Los Angeles, and 8am Melbourne or Wellington depending on the time of year. There is also a Saturday morning session at 9am London. You show up, you write for an hour alongside other writers around the world, and you leave. That is it. They offer a free seven-day trial, and if you cannot afford the suggested monthly membership after that, they will give you free access with no questions asked.
I have found a steadiness in those sessions that I did not expect. The 24-Hour Sprint, which only happens once a year, is a different creature entirely. It is the Writers’ Hour format taken to its most extreme form: a full day and night of structured writing sessions with breaks between each hour block, held globally and open to all.
I have been going to Writers’ Hour long enough to trust the LWS structure. That trust is a big part of why I signed up for the sprint.
What the Sprint Actually Is
The 24-Hour Writing Sprint runs as a free global event. Structured sessions with built-in breaks keep you from just staring into the void alone. There is something about knowing hundreds of other writers are also awake somewhere, also fighting their sentences at 3am, that does something to your resolve. I leaned on that more than I expected.
I went in with a plan: four manuscripts, roughly six hours each. What actually happened was messier, more interesting, and more revealing than the plan.
The Four Projects
I have been carrying all four of these manuscripts for a while. Some of them longer than I want to admit. Going into the sprint, I wanted to either finish a first draft or complete a full edit pass on each one. Here is the honest account.
Manuscript #1: The Immortal Record
Time spent: Approximately 6 hours
Status going in: Unfinished first draft
Status coming out: Complete first draft
This one went the way I hoped it would. The Immortal Record follows Bailey Hallowell, a burned-out archaeologist who arrives in the Shenandoah Valley two years after a professional failure that taught her exactly the wrong lesson. What she finds there is a colleague’s abandoned research and a woman named Corinna Blackwood, who has been signing her name to land records in this valley, under different names, since before the United States was a country.
Corinna is not a vampire or a ghost. She is a woman who formed a bond with the land five centuries ago and has been held by it ever since, carrying the accumulated weight of everyone she has ever loved and everything the valley has ever recorded. The land itself is a living archive. And when Bailey arrives, someone is trying to extract it.
What drew me to this story and what kept me writing through the fatigue is that it is fundamentally a love story between two women who have both, for very different reasons, learned not to want things they cannot keep. Watching that break open over the course of the draft was worth the sleeplessness.
I have a full first draft now. I get to revise it. I have been waiting to say that for a year.
Manuscript #2: The Museum of Ephemeral Arts
Time spent: Shorter than planned, as time was borrowed for manuscript #3
Status going in: Existing draft (third or fourth)
Status coming out: Touched the chapters that needed it, but not the full pass I had planned
This one I feel tenderness and mild guilt about in equal measure. The Museum of Ephemeral Arts is a ghost story and a love story, and it centers on Mel Malone, who has spent thirty-two years quietly finding the people who died with something unfinished. She keeps forty-four notebooks in a shorthand no one else can read. One month into her job at a museum that collects almost-lost things (dying trades, vanishing skills), she knows something is in the east corridor. Standard practice: she has not told anyone yet.
What she finds is Bette Heron, a Romani muralist who painted something extraordinary in that corridor in 1937 and 1938, and was murdered before she could see it finished. The murder was covered up cleanly. The mural was painted over. Eighty-six years later, Bette is still there, bound by an object in the basement that has been quietly holding the unresolved dead of the building since 1899.
It is a book about institutional memory and chosen family and the specific cost of being the kind of person who can hear what most people cannot. It deserved more hours than I gave it. Next time.
Manuscript #3: The Last Knight
Time spent: More than planned. I borrowed time from both manuscripts #2 and #4 to give it what it needed.
Status going in: Sitting mostly untouched for over a year
Status coming out: Significantly further along
I will be honest: this is the spicy one. I have been sitting on it partly because of nerves. It is extra, it is extra extra, and I have half-joked with myself about publishing it under a pen name so that certain people in my life cannot find it. (Hi, if you somehow found this. Please close the tab.)
The Last Knight is an urban fantasy set in New Orleans. Nicola Knight is a homicide detective returning to the city after three years away, following the death of her wife. She walks into a body in the garden of romance novelist Grace Broadchurch and within hours, everything she thought she understood about her life, her family history, and the nature of the world begins to come apart.
Nicola’s bloodline has guarded a supernatural threshold for centuries. The sigil her grandmother carved into her at seven years old was not a family tradition. Grace, meanwhile, was turned into a vampire without her consent while dying of a brain tumor, forced to reckon with a survival that cost her the death she had chosen and the life she had built.
The question at the heart of this book is what it means to be asked to become something you did not choose to be. I love that question. I love these women. I have been afraid to let people read them, which probably means I have to.
The New Orleans setting does real work throughout: a city built on layers of buried and occasionally escaping history, which is exactly what the book is about. The sprint broke something loose in this manuscript that I had been stuck behind. That alone was worth the whole night.
Manuscript #4: Shadow Pine Lodge
Time spent: Got through chapter 4 of 17
Status going in: Needed editing
Status coming out: Partially edited, with significant work remaining
Shadow Pine Lodge follows Vera Montgomery, a three hundred year old vampire who has spent the last two years working as a public library archivist, managing her nature the way she manages everything: carefully, precisely, and at considerable personal cost. Her colleagues do not know what she is. The woman she has been quietly, catastrophically falling in love with does not know what she is.
When the four of them take a weekend trip to a supernatural lodge deep in old growth pines, a neutrality zone that sounds safe and turns out to be the opposite, everything Vera has spent three centuries holding together comes apart at the boundary line.
This book has real darkness in it and I did not write around any of it. Vera and Avery’s relationship is physical and specific and earned, and the horror and the heat come from the same place. I only made it to chapter 4, but those four chapters are cleaner and more honest than they were before I started.
Seventeen chapters is a long way from four, but I will get there.
What I Learned
The plan is a fiction you tell yourself to start. I went in with four equal blocks of six hours. By hour fourteen I had redistributed everything in ways I could not have predicted. That is fine. The sprint is not about executing the plan. It is about doing the work.
Fatigue is clarifying in a specific way. Somewhere around 2am, the part of my brain that second-guesses goes quiet. What is left is just the story and what it needs. Some of my best sentences from the weekend came from that window. I do not recommend running on no sleep as a lifestyle, but as a tool, it has a strange integrity to it.
The community matters more than I thought it would. The structured breaks, knowing other people were in it too: that scaffolding held me up more than I expected. Writing is lonely by nature. A 24-hour sprint where you are genuinely not alone is a different experience than writing alone for 24 hours. It sounds like a small distinction. It is not.
I was more afraid of these manuscripts than I realized. Especially The Last Knight. Putting hours into it, real hours, middle-of-the-night hours, forced a kind of commitment I had been avoiding. I cannot un-love it now. That is probably what I needed.
What’s Next
I have a first draft of The Immortal Record to revise. I have chapters of The Museum of Ephemeral Arts that need more time. I have a manuscript that terrifies me and that I now have to finish because I have already told you about it. And I have thirteen more chapters of Shadow Pine Lodge to edit.
None of this is small. All of it is mine.
If you have been thinking about building a more consistent writing practice, I genuinely recommend starting with the London Writer’s Salon’s Writers’ Hour. It runs every weekday morning across four time zones and it is the kind of quiet accountability that adds up over time. The 24-Hour Sprint only comes around once a year, but the daily sessions are there whenever you are ready for them. You can find out more at londonwriterssalon.com.
I went into the sprint hoping to make progress. I came out having moved something I had not been able to move alone.
That is what this is for.
Have you done a writing sprint or marathon session? I would love to know what broke loose for you. Drop it in the comments.
Leave a Reply