I work from home full-time as a writer and my husband does the school runs, so there are days when I don’t leave the house at all.
A Summer Scandal
My days generally start in the same way; getting the boys up and ready for school, the usual hubbub of breakfast, uniform hunting and bag packing. It’s loud and busy for an hour, and then they all go out and the house falls quiet and peaceful. We’ve recently moved into a house with quite a big garden, so if the weather is up to it I’ll go and have a coffee outside and plan for the day ahead. I find that my days are 90% spent at home and 10% spent going to London for meetings or events - it’s a strange all or nothing existence, but I think I need those punctuations of buzzing life to remind me that there’s a world outside mine where people have to actually get dressed!
I try to be at my desk for nine thirty, and I find I’m much more productive if I write first without opening the internet - I’m horribly undisciplined and can tumble down a rabbit hole on the net and surface an hour later and wonder what happened to the time. So I try to get an hour or so in of writing on whatever book I’m working on, and if I can do that it tends to set me up on the right track for the day.
I’m trying out dictation software at the moment, and so far I'm not enjoying. It’s an interesting new way to write, and great because it allows me some freedom from my desk as it can be done via a Dictaphone. I’m ambitiously hoping to be able to do it whilst walking now the weather has taken a turn for the better, it’s a work in progress. I do love the physical act of typing though; my husband gave me a lovely mechanical keyboard a couple of Christmases ago and it makes a really pleasing clatter as I type - I find switching between various keyboards and writing methods helpful for variety. I move around the house throughout the day too; on winter mornings I sometimes go back to bed and work with my laptop and the cats, and sometimes at night I like to work on the sofa with my headphones on while the family watch a movie.
I find that my writing days get longer the deeper I get into a manuscript; towards the end I often work until one or two in the morning. It’s not so much that I leave it all until the last possible moment; it’s more that I like to immerse myself in the story and stay in it as much as possible. At the beginning of a book I might write a thousand words a day; towards the end I’m often closer to five thousand. It used to worry me, but I’ve come to accept that it’s the way that works best for me so I stick with it.
I don’t always break for lunch; but I do like to cook in the evenings so will mostly stop writing when the boys come in from school and spend some time with them. I pick up writing again after dinner if I need to; I don’t begrudge the long days, I feel pretty lucky to be doing a job I love.