With the end of The Ghost Smuggler in striking distance and the temperature in Vancouver dropping, I decided to take today off from my day job and make it…a writing day. I’ll be locking myself in my office and hammering out words for most of the day.

It’s a holiday weekend in BC as well and we have no plans apart from 42km of running. All of which means I’ve got four straight days available to write so this is going to officially be a “writing weekend”.

I don’t think that’s enough to completely finish the first draft. I may get to “The End” but there are a couple of chapters I want to rework and I’m pretty sure there’s a hole somewhere that means the book won’t make sense to anyone but me. I want to get those fixed before I declare the first draft complete and put it in a virtual drawer to cool off before I start revising it.

The day has already got off to a good start. I woke up early (as usual) and lay in bed for an hour or so, mulling over plot points and scenes and characters. I ended up with some nice little additions to a couple of scenes I’ve already written that will help me show, not tell, what’s going on. I also worked out how to tie up one of the loose ends that has been gnawing at me for a while and in the process created what should be a satisfying resolution to the main conflict.

Over the last month, I’ve been able to get back into a rhythm with my writing. I’ve started tracking my writing streak and I’ve written some fiction every day for the last 33 days. I find myself enjoying the actual act of writing more and more. Of course, there are days when writing feels like trying to wrestle an amorous octopus into a barrel of claustrophobic monkeys but the good days more than make up for that.

For a very long time, I felt like a want-to writer. Now I feel like a need-to writer.

[Like a Snow Day But Warmer by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 2nd August 2013]