I’ve lost track of the count. While I’ve been making notes and thinking over the past two days, the only writing I’ve done (other than legal work) has been a couple scribbled notes. (I nearly wrote “a few,” but the truth is there are only two, one yesterday and one today. If I’m going to confess, I may as well be honest.)

At first, if I missed a day, I circled it on the calendar. Then, I found I was forgetting to cross off days, and I had to try to remember whether it was because I’d written and not noted it or if I’d simply not written. Either way, it wasn’t terrific. At this point, I could make a decent guess about how many days I’ve missed—ten, maybe. Not brilliant, but at least I’ve plodded along.

The upside is that by pushing myself in the past two months, I’ve made very good progress on the section of the book that really, really needed work—as in, it wasn’t there. All I had was a note that I had to add a climax and a conclusion. Those are pretty big things to need to add.

My problem was that I hadn’t figured out what they were going to be, apart from a vague notion about something at the very end. I’d also forgotten the most important thing about my process, which is that I write to discover the story. When I started following the characters instead of dictating to them, the final ascent to the climax began to unfold. (Yes, I’m mixing the hell out of my metaphors. Enjoy.)

One thing that has helped is listening to audiobooks. I’ve never been fond of fiction read aloud—I’m always losing track of the plot—but I’m a huge fan of memoirs read by the author (or, in the case of Dame Judi Dench’s amazing Shakespeare: The Man Who Paid the Rent, an actress who sounds exactly like Dame Judi). At present, I’m listening to Stanley Tucci talk about what he’s been cooking and eating, and I’m enthralled. (Seriously: the name of the book is What I Ate in One Year (And Related Thoughts).) Last year, I listened to him narrate another of his books, Taste, which is about his life as well as food. He’s a wonderful narrator, dry and funny and occasionally a charming curmudgeon, as when he indulges in a brief rant against Halloween. He inspired me to start watching his series, Searching for Italy, which he constantly renames in What I Ate, as when he talks about how filming would soon start on Where the Fuck is Stan in Italy? or something like that.

One advantage to listening to Stanley Tucci talk about what he cooks and watching him as he chats with Italian chefs is that he’s inspiring me to experiment in the kitchen. Another, much bigger advantage is that he’s giving me ideas for how to make scenes in my book more vivid by going deeper into issues such as what people are eating in various locales to highlight the differences between their worlds. Granted, I was already doing this, but one of my notes is “more re distinctive food.” After all, what we eat is usually quite specific to where we are. Here in New England, we eat cod and lobster and other local seafood because nearly all the New England states have coastlines, while in Kansas and Utah, any ocean fare has to be flown in. People tend to eat what’s local (and therefore more affordable), which is one reason that I doubt a lot of households in southern Florida are serving venison for the upcoming holiday weekend. On the other hand, the best salmon sashimi I’ve ever eaten was at a restaurant in Seattle, because that’s what they have in the Pacific Northwest. (I still say that they don’t let you leave the state of Washington until you’ve eaten salmon prepared at least five different ways.) In the U.S., a significant percentage of the meat on our plates is beef, chicken, turkey, or pork, because the main animals being raised for food here are cattle, poultry, and pigs.

All of which means that my characters at the North Pole will have very different diets than I presently do. My research has revealed that people in the Arctic eat polar bear, reindeer, and walrus, among other local meats. They don’t have the climate to be growing corn or citrus fruit, so such items aren’t part of their diet unless someone imports them. In the same way, the chefs in Searching for Italy use the terrain and climate and circumstances available to them, which is how it happens that one region is renowned for its basil pesto while a chef in Rome makes brilliant creations using offal because the neighborhood where she’s located was so poor that at one time, when they butchered animals, the good parts went to the wealthy located elsewhere and they were left with the innards that the rich people wouldn’t touch.

Of course, my book is fantasy, so my characters have other ways of obtaining foods that most people living in Arctic regions wouldn’t have ready access to. After all, the North Pole must have Christmas cookies, and how could there Christmas cookies without eggs and flour and sugar? While I’m certain I’ve still left a million world-building questions unanswered (some deliberately), I’ve tried to address the issues that matter to the stories I’m telling, such as food. As a result, listening to Stanley Tucci tell me about his menus and recipes (which include a lot of pasta) inspires me as an author even though people in the Arctic will have vastly different diets than those in southern Italy.

In any case, it looks as if I really am going to have a completed draft in the not-too-terribly distant future. Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that I’m going to spend at least part of the upcoming holiday weekend working, which means that the break I’d anticipated—a break when I could have spent hours on the porch writing—will need to be pared down. Fingers crossed that I’ll be able to spend a good chunk of one of the days on the back porch filling in gaps. If all goes swimmingly, I may even wrap up this draft before the end of the month—which was my original end date for the 100-day project—which would mean that even if I haven’t worked every one of the hundred days, setting that goal actually accomplished what it was supposed to, i.e., getting me back to work.

Wouldn’t that be something?