Wordcount=81,038

In seven hours I will get up and spend a day writing The Last Monk. In twenty-two hours you will know what happened.

Of course, it could all go wrong.

Humiliatingly, cataclysmically wrong. I may never finish this novel. Worse, I may finish it and find no one likes it. In fact, since we're starting like this, let's spend a moment considering the most hideous possibility - it takes me six months longer than I've promised to finish The Last Monk, during which time someone invents a series of new emoticons which resemble rotten vegetables, which the many regular visitors to this website use to fully illustrate their feelings about my book, my blog and me. Upon submitting my manuscript, a number of major publishers draw my attention to a hot new paperback from a famous, bestselling airport-paperback novelist which includes all my ideas plus some nonsense about the Knights Templars, I'm bankrupted by the ensuing legal action and finally reduced to proofing copy for the Young Liberals' Christmas Ball flyer.

Let's put that out there, let it very briefly stimulate a million or so otherwise unoccupied neurons, and move on.

Because when you look at it on paper, most of the work is done. I began work on my first novel, The Last Monk, five years ago. It is now 81,038 words long, with a forecast for fine, sunny and 95,000 by October. I spent most of that five years in full-time employment as a university administrator, but in seven hours, when I get out of bed, sit down at my computer and watch the monitor warm up, I will for the first time in my life be able to say (to my editorial consultant, if I can unpeel his attention from the mudlark in the tree outside my window which he spends much of his days poised to leap through the glass and devour) that I am a full-time writer.

With nothing to distract me, fourteen thousand words in four months should be a dawdle, shouldn't it?

You'll know when I do.

This blog is an attempt answer to questions constantly asked of novelists amateur and professional around the world - what's writing a novel like? How do you write? Do you get up early, or stay up late? Are you disciplined? Do you bathe? How much do you write each day? What do you do to inspire yourself?

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:

1. You have an idea;
2. you write something down (n.b. the order of 1. and 2. may be reversed, more or less at random);
3. you read the thing you wrote;
4. you go and make a big sandwich;
5. you eat the big sandwich;
6. you clean out the coffee pot;
7. during 6., you find the large spoon you were looking for the previous day;
8. you perform a vigorous dance around the kitchen with the spoon;
9. you return to the desk feeling much better and read what you wrote before the sandwich;
10. you remember the coffee;
11. you make coffee, tossing the spoon randomly into the washing-up as you leave the kitchen;
12. you read the thing you wrote again;
13. you decide what you really need is space to properly think this thing through;
14. you take the tram to Office Works to buy another white board;
15. on the tram home, you have another, much better idea, but you can't find the big texta or poke a big enough hole in the shrink-wrapping, and anyway, people are staring, so you try to remember it;
16. you get home to find you've written something down.

Over the next few days, I'll be filling the Last Monk section of this website with information about the book, its characters and story, and also periodically uploading short extracts from the book itself. I'll also be posting as frequently as possible, so if you've always wanted to know what it's like to write a novel, allow me to dive into the deep end ahead of you.

Upon announcing my intention to blog the writing of this novel, a friend pointed out to me that this was a perfect tool for not writing anything at all, but instead wasting my days on the internet. I said I would append a word count to every post I submitted. He said mmm. There's little you can say to that.