PORTLAND, Ore. – For someone who managed to write a novel in just three days, Jan Underwood is decidedly … uncaffeinated.

In truth, she is more herbal tea than double macchiato, surprisingly mellow, placid even, as she sits in a Portland coffeehouse, talking about her new life of book tours, readings and signings.

Some authors take years to write a book. Underwood needed just 72 hours.

The 41-year-old Spanish teacher at Portland Community College is the reigning champion of possibly the most masochistic literary contest in the world: the International 3-Day Novel Contest.

Each year since 1977, an intense band of aspiring writers from around the world have spent Labor Day weekend under a self-imposed house arrest of sorts, living off adrenaline, coffee, candy and no small amount of self-belief as they attempt to grind out a coherent opus in a matter of days. It’s a test of willpower, endurance and sometimes sanity.

At its simplest, it’s a great way to break through procrastination and writer’s block and attempt that novel you’d always said you wanted to write. But the stakes of the Canadian contest actually are high, especially for aspiring authors who have been looking for a way to get their work noticed: The grand prize is publication. Your name, your words, immortalized forever between two paper covers.

Underwood’s winning entry last year, “Day Shift Werewolf,” is a series of interlocking stories exploring the existential crises of monsters living and working in a small Northwest town: a zombie mother who frets her son’s curiosity and apparent passion for life is setting him apart from the other undead; a werewolf who struggles to rebuild his life after he realizes he really doesn’t want to be a werewolf anymore.

a demon assigned to possess a little girl who discovers that he actually likes “the wonder and magic” of tea parties and horsies and the color pink a lot more than making his charge’s life a living hell on Earth; an obsessive-compulsive witch whose 17 cats trigger an intervention by her coven.

It’s a thin book, perhaps more on the novella side of the continuum, but still, reading it, you find yourself stopping several times to admire that anyone could write like this in such a short amount of time. You could imagine someone spending three days to write just two of these pages, never mind 80.

In a way, Underwood had been in training for this moment for a long time, she says, writing stories “as soon as I knew how to make my letters.” When she wasn’t teaching (or pursuing her other passions, which include organic gardening, dance and photography), she filled drawers and files with unfinished short stories and manuscripts.

She spent years working on her first novel, a serious work about a dancer diagnosed with a debilitating illness and facing the end of her career (“all my characters seem to be facing identity crises,” she says), polishing it, getting it just right. She spent several more years shopping it around, without success. “And the thing I write in three days is the one that ends up getting published.” She laughs.

She was hunting the Internet for writing contests – another way to try to get attention for her first novel, she thought – when she spotted the 3-Day Novel Contest. It sounded like something fun to do with her daughter, Majida, then 14, “in the doldrum days at the end of summer.”

They worked at computers at opposite ends of the house. “From time to time we’d meet in the living room and commiserate,” Underwood said.

The rules of the contest expressly forbid writing anything beyond an outline beforehand.

The first day went well, Underwood says. But halfway through the second day, “the ideas started to peter out. The third day was pure torture.”

Aside from amassing a three-day supply of SweeTarts, Underwood’s plan of attack was to take as good care of herself as possible. She made sure she slept. She didn’t drink coffee. She took breaks. “I even worked out one day,” she says. “You have to have a functioning brain to do this.”

Cool. Calm.

And yet, here’s how Majida describes the scene in their home: “I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, and she (her mother) was in the kitchen, and she started screaming. I thought, has a tiger come in the kitchen and started grabbing her arm? Was a man attacking her? I set my toothbrush down and ran in there, and she was jumping up and down in front of the computer, crying.”

Underwood knows she has more novels in her. “If there are editors out there who like my style, I’d love to show them what I can do in more than three days,” she says. She’s already at work on a few books, which she goes on to describe to her own surprise, but she also looks pleased.

That’s something she would have felt too superstitious about before, she says: sharing those kinds of details before she knew where it was all headed, and she just wouldn’t have done it. But all that’s changed now with the contest, with “Day Shift Werewolf.”

“I have been freed,” she writes at the end of her book, in a chapter exploring the perspective of a mummy who has managed to transcend what he was before, rising up toward what he will be, “and I can breathe now at last, deeply, I am unbound, I float up into the bracing blue.”