It’s the birthday of 19th century writing machine Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), famous for novels that have resurged in popularity in the past few decades and also for his writing routine: he demanded of himself 250 words every 15 minutes from 5:30 – 8:30 a.m., so that’s 3,000 words in three hours every damn day, and let’s pause now while all the writers out there quietly weep into their coffee.*

Trollope was born in London and had the requisite unhappy childhood of a brilliant British author. His father was a morose barrister who did worse and worse financially; his mother went to America with several of the children in 1827 and blew more of the family money on failed enterprises. She returned to England and began supporting the family through her writing, starting with the book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which trashed Americans. Meanwhile Trollope was a most ungainly adolescent and attended various shi-shi public schools where he didn’t fit in. His miserable youth was followed by a miserable first job as a junior clerk in the General Post Office in London. For seven years, Trollope lived in poverty with few friends. Bleak, bleak, bleak.

Then Trollope was transferred to Ireland as a postal surveyor and things looked up. He made more money and loved Ireland, the outdoors, and an Englishwoman named Rose Heseltine, whom he married in 1844. He began writing and warmed up with a couple of fair-to-middlin’ novels, then came out with The Warden in 1855, which became the first of his famed Barchester (or Barsetshire) series. He moved back to London in 1859 and continued writing, ultimately producing 47 novels as well as stories, travel books, articles, plays, and an autobiography (published posthumously). While his reputation fell after his death—people wondered how someone that rigorously disciplined could be that good—he has returned with a vengeance and is one of the most widely read English novelists today. (Your mission, should you choose to accept it: read or reread the very funny Barchester Towers.)

Have your own version of a wildly productive day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.

*It’s not that 3,000 words in three hours isn’t perfectly possible. But to do that daily with robotic consistency while producing masterfully written non-robotic novels is astounding.