If there's one thing I'd like to leave you with at the end of this special, exhausting, exhilarating month, it is this — say yes to your writing by saying no to something else.

107,910 words, and still nowhere near finished — but for now, I’m content to keep wandering across the universe of this strange, sad, redemptive novel.

I’m now getting to the stage where I am required to write characters whose attitudes, opinions and experiences do not correspond to my own, in three primary and overlapping areas: sexuality, religion and politics.

I wrote my first ever sex scenes this week. Every aspect of these scenes could be viewed as a template for the kind of questions we need to ask ourselves about every single thing we write.

I’ve written a total of 24,136 words this week. Considering I pledged to finish a 90,000-word draft this month, you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m well on course.

I've got to thinking more about a technique which I've used more often than any other in all of my writing. It's the thing which even helped to give this blog its title. I'm talking about my great love of digression.

By way of a bit of bonus content, I decided I should quickly follow up this week’s latest post with another one in which I put my money where my mouth is, by sharing an example of me putting all that I think and feel about long sentences into practice.

What does it mean to be a “professional” writer? Is it that you devote lots of your time and effort to writing? Or that you get paid for writing?

On the basis that you’re supposed to write the books you want to read, that’s precisely what I’m setting about doing.

The computer I’m writing on is not in the best of health today — it’s just come back from a service to investigate a defective trackpad, and is now functioning even worse than it was before.

I don’t fall asleep easily, so for a good many years, I’ve listened to audiobooks and radio plays in bed — and now I’ve got an elasticated headphone band to make it a more comfortable experience.

One of the things that marks out a great writer for me is when something they have written in fiction eventually seems to be paralleled by something that happens in real life, often years or decades after they’ve written it.

Forgetting time and money for a minute, I might as well start this blog with one of the things which held me back from writing my first novel for many, many years — the presumption that there was one right way to do it, and therefore a million wrong ways to do it.