A few years ago I was at home for a week on my own, dogsitting. María had taken the kids to Spain. I was bored and a bit lonely and — another side project — decided to see if I could write a book in a week. The experience was… weird. Very intense, an idea that just seemed to appear from nowhere. The result was Killing Kind — a 20,000-word thriller that ended up being the free book I use to grow my newsletter. People still email me about it, and recently we signed a deal for the screen rights.
It all got me thinking. It's clearly possible to write a book in one week that people actually like. What could we do with that thought? The idea was obvious — do it again, but bigger, and with cameras.
There's a famous precedent for the idea. In the summer of 1816, the poet Lord Byron rented a villa on Lake Geneva and invited some friends. The weather was terrible — a volcano had filled the atmosphere with dust, and it became known as the year without a summer — and they ended up stuck inside for days. To pass the time, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Two of them, Percy Shelley and Byron himself, gave up (quitters). Mary Shelley, though, she wrote Frankenstein.
The point isn't that we're going to produce Frankenstein. The point is that interesting things sometimes happen when you put writers somewhere together with a constraint and a deadline.