Tell us about your morning routine.

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I can’t pretend I do anything exciting. Mornings seem very much to be governed by daylight. It’s quite dark right now so I was awake at seven and after a while listening to the radio, was up at eight. In the height of summer, that’ll be four or five.

The computer goes on as soon as I’m up, and I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can start being productive as soon as I’m logged in. I’ll deal with anything that came in overnight, essentially emails and my WordPress feed. That could take 2 minutes or 2 hours, depending on how deep I want to go. At the moment, I’m deliberately trying to create fresh content for my blog, so am spending longer on it than I usually do.

After that, the general plan is to write. At the moment, I’m working on another novel. But it’s not a linear process. Some mornings are good, but equally, I can get sidetracked. A lot depends on my mood, but even if I’m not productive writing-wise, I can be productive thinking about things like plot. Plus I find some stages of a novel are easier than others. Developing a plot is generally fun, but it can be taxing to make implausible situations seem plausible, writing it down can be a pain in the arse, and editing is straightforward but painstaking. I think the last novel went through nine drafts before I was happy to even allow another pair of eyes to see it. So if I happen not to be very productive, I don’t beat myself up. There’s always tomorrow. One of the big differences from when I worked is that now, the only deadlines I set are my own. And if I happen to slip, it’s not the end of the world. I’ve always held the belief that quality beats haste hands down.

I’ll try to write until about lunchtime, with a short break about halfway for breakfast.  Then I’ll start to think about things like taking a shower, getting dressed and, of course, lunch.

I don’t plan on writing much after lunch, on a good day I’ll have done eight hours already, but if I’m in the mood… there’s invariably a nap at some point, because I can. No rules.

Once or twice a week, I’ll go out. Because I’m now reliant on public transport, any excursion takes at least half a day, and that’s just to a town ten miles away. And overall I’ll have walked at least a mile, so I’m always shattered when I return home, and I need to take a longer nap. When I go out, I usually just write off the whole day. Because I can. But if I need to pick up meds, or buy groceries, it’s necessary. I tend not to use taxis now because I live on a budget, and out here there is no such thing as Uber.

There’s 2 minutes you’ll never get back!