I've posted the first installment of a new, two-part extract from The Last Monk, which introduces the hottest young tea-cosy in modern Australian literature. As always, feel free to hand it around, comment on it or print it for use as the raw materials of a complex origami moose.

The following post will contain no transitive or intransitive verbs. Any resemblance to an extract from Bridget Jones' Diary is purely the result of massive holes in Helen Fielding's education.

I've always wanted to start a post with a line that could have fallen from the mouth of Jane Eyre.

And then, of course, in the second week the novelty wears off and the lazy blogger begins to post lacklustre material with decreasing punctuality, losing what few readers he had to the Herald Sun website, where Andrew Bolt can always be trusted to edify.

Fortunately for the reader, I am not that blogger.

I've reached an interesting point at the end of my first week of full-time writing. I've written much more than I thought, so much in fact that I've written myself out into unknown territory.

And then, in my mind, a guy walked past selling t-shirts. On the t-shirts was printed 'WHATEVER'S ABOUT TO HAPPEN, I WAS THERE'. From him came a flood of other ideas, from the outbreak of civil war in a marching band to the exquisite, liberating sensation of pushing a stilt-walking juggler off a pier.

Some days aren't that newsworthy: the most interesting thing to happen today was a ten-minute search of various reference texts to answer the question: 'trench-coats' or 'trench coats'? Although I found the answer, I think it's safe for me to leave you hanging over this one. You'll simply have to buy the book to find out.

The more mathematically-inclined reader will have been performing some basic arithmetic during my opening panhandle and come to the ineluctable conclusion that my novel is now a mere 158 words longer than it was yesterday.

There's a common misapprehension about writing that it is a modern form of alchemy. With the exception of the odd long, miserable day when it appears nothing will convert this lead to gold, writing resembles alchemy only as far as its practitioners enjoy making it seem arcane. Writing is less scientific, and tends to work something like this: