Last month, our scuba diving expedition saw us travel on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so we never actually had a proper Christmas meal, surviving on bar food and airport snacks instead. But I’m about to make up for that tonight. On the menu will be a beautiful turkey breast prepared sous-vide, with all the trimmings (except for cranberry sauce – too much sugar). The significant advantage of this cooking method is the near impossibility of ending up with dry turkey meat. The breast will be cooked to the same juicy consistency all the way through. The softly falling snow outside will help give the right ambiance as well.

In my last blog post, I spoke about the fickleness of inspiration. Right now, I’m unfortunately besieged by the inertia of procrastination. Progress on Victory’s Bright Dawn over the last week has been excellent. I’m just about at the 20% completion point, writing approximately one chapter per day. And yet today, I’m doing everything except writing, but not because I’m blocked. I know exactly what happens in the next chapter. However, I’ve been spending more time staring at dancing snowflakes outside than at the blank page of the manuscript, when I’m not planning out the evening meal, which will take three to three and a half hours of cooking time on top of everything else. Oh well. I’m sure that I’ll still manage to get my daily quota done at some point. Perhaps when the new keyboard I ordered from Amazon shows up this afternoon, I’ll find the mental fortitude to overcome my laziness. There’s nothing like a new toy to generate a burst of enthusiasm and energy, and since it’s a mechanical keyboard, it’ll feel better to an old school touch typist such as myself than the ergonomic one I currently use. Besides, muscle memory being what it is, I never did get used to the non-standard way in which some of the keys are placed, even after a year of daily use, and over time, the little mistakes caused by not finding the right key in the right spot add up.

When will I be done with Victory’s Bright Dawn? At this point, I’m not committing myself to an estimate. The one thing that’s sure is the snow will be gone by the time it shows up on the bookshelves. Beyond that, it depends mostly on my daily struggle with inspiration and procrastination. My hour at the gym every morning takes care of the perspiration.