29,553

Greetings from an antique Indian desk. With curtains drawn to 5.10pm black night and air that's fast falling below zero. Inside this warm, writer's hibernation zone, Jeff Buckley is singing on the local radio station. There is a pile of notebooks to my right. There is an open green leather notebook to my left. There is an empty tea pot next to a clock and a little handwritten sign that optimistically says: "OK creative force: you take care of the quality, I'll take care of the quantity."

Welcome to Day 13 in the National Novel Writing Month. I have hit 29,553 words! And bizarrely, I am not yet frothing at the mouth. I am not going insane. I am finding it suprisingly easy to write 3,000 words a day. Just sit down, let it fall out on fingers tapping keys, then walk away from the desk feeling like nothing has actually happened.

Of course, this could mean that when December dawns I will read over these thousands of thousands of words and be stupified at my horrendous creation. Or I could be pleasantly surprised. Who the hell knows? What I do know is that I will have 50,000 words that contain one or two nice scenes, some cool lines and the odd moment when words and images work together to recreate life.

And amusingly, despite being 29,553 words into it, I still don't know what this story is about. But that is absolutely fine. As writer Lynda Barry recently wrote in a Pep Talk that was emailed into my inbox: "You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing."

So here's to writing into the unknown.