It’s what I call the act of writing — The Process.

For me writing is almost ritualistic, definitely fraught with fidgeting and distractions, just as I’m doing right now by blogging about The Process. Writing is a necessarily solitary, will-sapping endeavour that if I’m lucky renders an article, a short story, if I’m really determined, a novel.

Music is part of that process. All kinds of music, depending on what it is I’m writing, which, for these next months is my latest novel, From Mountains of Ice. The music helps set the tone for me, lure me into the discipline required to sit still and allow my thoughts to enlarge to the point I can encompass a world, a people, a story worth telling.

The music for this novel ranges from the Benedictine Monks of Santo Dominigo singing Gregorian Chants, and the Russian Easter service to the score from Pan’s Labyrinth and Gladiator, then to Johnny Whitehorse’s Totemic Flute Chants, Dead Can Dance and Delirium.

Even with music, however, it’s easy to find every excuse to avoid writing. I twitch. I ride my recumbent bike when the twitching becomes unbearable. I check email. Check Facebook. Check Chapters Community. I scritch the cats, look out the loft windows where now the trees are stripped to dark limbs and flies smash against the glass like kamikaze pilots, eventually gluing themselves in a gas of death. I pivot in the large, blue chair and look out to the east, down the length of the loft where pink insulation bulges against the confines of plastic vapour barrier, waiting for next year when the roof will be clad in steel, and then wallboard to be applied inside. I study the enormous purlins of what I think is butternut and devise interior designs in my head that will allow those purlins to remain exposed once the loft is renovated.

I chide myself and turn back to the computer screen, re-read what I’ve written in the past hour, hesitate to continue with the scene, brutalize myself into tapping out the next sequence until the thoughts run dry again, usually at a transition, and once again the whole process turns again.