Day 22

10:30

Wake up feeling pretty groggy. I've got to start writing earlier.

21:30

Wrote for a couple of hours between the morning and the early afternoon, and I liked it. I can see why a lot of authors go for writing first thing.

The problem is that my first thing is normally early afternoon, by which time the rest of life starts to intervene. If I put a rein on my night-owlishness, I might actually get more done.

It would be a good feeling to finish my hours and word count before it was dark. But that might also have something to do with Scotland in mid-winter.

Also, I feel pretty good tonight, because my beautiful girlfriend just told me that she read the whole of my blog today and really enjoyed it. There isn't much in this world that could make me feel better than that.

Can't let it make me cocky, though. Back to work.

11:15

Finished for the day: my earliest finish in a long time. I feel like keeping going, but I have other stuff to do, and feel pretty positive. For the first time today I started to get a handle on what I want to learn about these crusading characters before I write about them.

It's very easy to read a lot of books with a pen and notepad next to you, jot down little observations and generally get very frustrated that you're not really finding out what you want. I realised today, I have to know what I want, then find out - relatively quickly - what I can, and make up the rest.

It seems very simple, but I've spent days trying to get a handle on the main characters without very much luck. So I decided to write down a list of questions and try to answer them: what did a crusader look like? What and when did he eat? How did he fight? What were the Palestinian villages he raided like? Suddenly, I know what I want, and the process of researching doesn't devolve into some kind of pretentious, never-ending quest to understand everything. And I find out little details that I can add to individual characters.

I also managed to write out the next couple of scenes from the 'novelisation'. It still feels tedious, it also still feels useful. I worked out today that, at the rate I'm going through the script, that this 'novelisation' will run to about 50,000 words - or about a month's writing, by my count. So I'll have to stretch it out over fallow periods (I can feel that there might be a few of those around the corner...) Still, the fucker feels like homework, there's no getting around it.

But then, doing my homework dilligently is what got me here today. Which is: mostly unemployed, living in a one-bedroom flat in Glasgow.

And on that note, I think I'm going to reward myself with a bath.

word count: 2,683
hours writing: 4