Wordcount = 85,205

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 (still not confident enough to use the plural), I am not that blogger.

It's easy in the first week. Having spent the past six months corking his creative juices, the first full week of writing inevitably leads to the writer extravagantly unburdening himself in the manner of an overshaken jeriboam of cheap pink champagne on a Formula One podium.

Mmm. This metaphor is turning unpleasantly euphemistic, so I'll abandon it at this point. I'll also calm down and stop referring to myself in the third person. Draw a discreet veil over the previous paragraph and move on.

What I'm saying is that I had a lot of ideas in my head in the first week, and by now most of them have been committed at the very least to the Whiteboard Dungeon of Semi-Formed Ideas, so the second week is where you need some sense of professionalism. A lot of people have recently heard me pronounce that whereas hobby writers write when they feel inspired, professional writers write when they don't. This is the part where I prove it.

That's probably being a bit harsh. I am still inspired, now as much as ever, but the last act, which you'll be hearing a lot about should you deign to return to these pages, is a technical exercise, and like Middle East diplomacy requires more careful planning than wild adventurism.

Hence yesterday. Yesterday my plan was not to add a word to my manuscript, a plan which, I can now reveal, succeeded beautifully. Instead of typing, which can be confused with writing, I cleared the nearest whiteboard and drew my last act. All of my major characters are involved, and all the plotlines get very close without touching. There are some things the reader needs to learn. Not all of them are true. There are also many things the reader shouldn't learn, and I have to be very careful not to let someone blurt them out in an unguarded moment. This is harder than it sounds because, although it is precisely the kind of naff authorly pronouncement I exist to exorcise, fictional characters do not always do what the author intends. Generally, they do something much more interesting.

So I drew my map, placed my characters on it then tried to work out what they might do to work their way towards the novel's dramatic, thrilling and, ideally, surprising conclusion. Okay, so if A goes here, B can make their way a bit more slowly towards there, which opens up some time for C to say what they need to say about D before D enters the room carrying the bloody, severed head of E, oh but then A hasn't got there yet, and E is his sister, after all. Back to the whiteboard. Right, what if B goes here...

It's a long process which clearly I'm flattering with the adjective 'professional'. At least I didn't make little cardboard characters and walk them around. As far as you know.

By Monday night, however, I had a clear map of exactly where everyone was going, and there was plenty of room to have fun along the way.

Today was the beginning of writing it. Although it will probably end up as one or two long chapters, I've started by breaking it up into five, chapters 30 to 34, each with its own piece of plot. I'll work on all five at once, as a way of staying close to all the action. Later, when most of the work is done, I'll knit them together as required, another method of staying flexible right until the last minute.

Finally, last week I reported that a friend was running ahead of my wordcount, dropping supplies. I reached the first milestone on Friday, and there when I opened my front door after lunch was his Woody Allen CD, just where he said he'd leave it at 83,215.

Today I overshot his second drop, two Lucksmiths CDs at 85,023. I'll keep my eyes peeled.