Six day novel nets $475K advance

Today's Chicago Tribune has an article about a young journalist whose proposal for a book about "Latina divas" was going nowhere.

That effort came to nothing, but several of the editors who saw a sample chapter asked Daniels if Valdes-Rodriguez had a novel in one of her desk drawers. Daniels didn't know so, around the first of the year, she asked her client. And Valdes-Rodriguez said, well, yes, she did; she just needed to polish it.

In fact, she didn't. But she had made several attempts at novels since high school, and, using those drafts as raw material, she began working up a list of characters and an outline. ... Finally, in February, she sat down to write at a local Starbucks, and, for six days straight, she created the book on her laptop, writing for as many as 15 hours a day. And, four months later, after some editing by Daniels, the book was sold. "It was a process of years leading up to those days," she says. "A lot of it was sort of cut-and-paste from the other books I had written."

(Thanks to Romenesko's MediaNews for the link)

All I can say to that is, wow. Of course, the crucial part of that story is the "years leading up" to the six-day writing frenzy. But it is reminiscent of some other famous intense and productive writing stints: the three weeks it took Jack Kerouac to produce "On the Road" and the three days when the unknown Sylvester Stallone paced up and down in a room dictating the script for the first "Rocky."