We love your books, don't write anymore

You might have noticed that there's been a bit longer of a time lag between this entry and last, for which my most effusive apologies. The cause is one of those things that you don't dare complain about for fear of it never happening again, but is actually an issue for writers: all the wonderful fruits that publishing brings start to take up rather a lot of time.

I have a good friend who's a very successful author (far more so than me), and he warned me early on with my first published book:  'The second you publish a book, you'll find you have absolutely no time to write any more.'

I laughed, thinking he was saying it from a point of view of success which I'd never reach.

Well, I haven't reached it, but it turns out he was right anyway. In a big way.

I want to stress right here, right now that THIS IS NOT A COMPLAINT! Truthfully, if it was, it would be like saying, 'My wallet gets so heavy with all this money ...' and you could rightfully chuck me out a window (or to use the proper vocabulary: defenestrate me - sounds dirty, but isn't).

But it can be a bit of a hazard. In the stretch of a month, I will have appeared at three book festivals, spoken at six different schools (in three different countries, including the Graveney students who keep leaving nice comments on this site!), had three launch events, done the first round of judging on a major children's prize (that's the round where you read all the books), sat for a number of interviews, and signed upwards of a thousand books (not an exaggeration; you try thinking of 1000 different witty things to say. The pressure!).

Again, NOT complaining, I've enjoyed all of it. I can't say it enough, writing is a blessing and to be able to do it for a living is a daily miracle which I regularly expect someone to wise up to and take away. 

But it can have the paradoxical effect of robbing my calendar of the very thing that's causing all these events: simple writing time. I've been trying to get my second draft done, as I've been saying, and it's been war sometimes just to have a stretch of empty hours. I've managed because I'm terribly stubborn, but that did include Friday evenings and Sunday mornings and late hours on public transport ...

Plus, the things that I'm being asked to do are so much fun it's hard to say no. Particularly if you can meet readers or speak to groups of librarians or booksellers, meeting the people who do all the real work of keeping the public reading. It's great stuff, so how do you say no?

Sometimes people do. According to the Independent, Kazuo Ishiguro isn't touring for his new book, Nocturnes, for this very reason. He's got a new book he needs to be working on and who can blame him? Anne Tyler stopped giving interviews years ago, her reason being one of my favourite quotes ever from a writer:  'I don't like them and I don't have to.'

But then I realised this is actually a familiar feeling for me. I wrote most of my first novel while working a full-time job. It kind of feels like those days, snatching hours here and there, getting up an hour earlier to try get a few hundred words down, thinking of your ideas in the oddest places ...

This is a quality problem, I know, one that I'll miss the instant it's not happening anymore. But this discussion of it has spawned two things: 1) a plea for understanding about my recent tardiness, and 2) a rather more serious realisation that there could be a vital set of new writer's tips in this, about how to find your own time to write when the pressures of life keep knocking on the door.