7 a.m. (ish)

Slide out of bed, dimly aware that members of the 5 a.m. Writers’ Club will have been up for two hours already and probably written at least 2,000 words.

But hey, we’re all on different journeys…

So I’ll stumble downstairs, trying not to trip over our silent assassin, Ninja-black cat, Ivy A.K.A. Infinite Void, who may or may not have left a small rodent in the kitchen as a sacrificial offering.

Bolstered by tea and Weetabix, I’ll sit at my wife Tracey’s desktop computer in her office, also the place from where I’ll normally join WriteMentor Zoom chats. If I’m drafting something, I’ll read my way into where I was and then start writing – so far I’ve been very lucky and never really suffered from writer’s block. I guess it helps not being too precious about the initial draft, figuring I can always wrangle the words in the editing and rewriting later.

If, like now, I’m editing something, I’ll look through the notes of my heroic beta readers then dive straight into it. I know many writers like to just abandon their first or ‘trash’ drafts and start afresh, but I can never do that, it’s too painful. So I do a ‘Save As’ and draft 1 becomes draft 2 and I feel safe to start savaging, knowing that the original words are still there to be resurrected if necessary.

8.30 a.m.

Hopefully I’ll have managed 1,000 new words or to edit 3 or 4 chapters by now, because on a weekday I have to stop and wake Tracey and my daughter Lizzie with tea. If I didn’t do this, they would literally sleep the morning away as they’re both night owls. Tracey reacts to being woken up by saying ‘Shit!’, ‘Get lost!’ or letting out a theatrical gasp, while Lizzie gives me a grateful smile before going back to sleep for another hour or two.

10 a.m.

By this stage at least two of us are usually at work, Tracey having reclaimed her office, called ‘The Study’ to distinguish it from mine and Lizzie’s office upstairs, called ‘The Office’. She’ll often be in a Zoom appointment with a client – either a perpetrator or a victim in a domestic violence case where she’s been called in to write a risk assessment – during which at some point I’ll sneak into the room behind the camera from outside to deliver her more tea. Meanwhile, I’ll be doing something related to her (our) organisation’s work, like analysing previous assessments to see if there patterns in domestic violence clients, or proofreading colleagues’ assessments. Although I’ve got no formal background in domestic violence work, I’ve learned a lot about it through working with Tracey and I’m planning to use some of that knowledge in my next MS…

12 midday (ish)

Before COVID, most of Tracey’s client appointments were face-to-face, while she’d also sometimes be called upon to appear in court in person as an expert witness in relation to a case. These days, most of these are done via Zoom but she does still have the occasional one where she has to travel, and unless it’s to Central London I’ll do one of my other jobs and chauffeur her there, allowing her to read the case papers in the car before I drop her off at the door.

I’ve then got a couple of hours to kill when I’ll usually find a café and write/edit on my iPad, using mini cordless keyboard and mouse. I’ve never really taken to using laptops and much prefer a physical keyboard, so the iPad setup is a good compromise. Although there’s often a lot of background noise, I can usually shut it out and concentrate on what I’m doing. Once, I was writing in a supermarket café in Barking and gradually became aware that people had gone to the window to look out. When I joined them, I realised that there’d been a police operation in the car park where they’d hemmed a car in and broken its windows to get the occupants out, involving the Met Police’s SCO-19 Armed Response Unit. So, it was like an episode of ‘Line Of Duty’ playing out under my nose and I’d missed it…

3.00 p.m.

If we’re at home, I’ll have been fortified by lunch and managed another hour’s work by this stage, but by now I’ll be starting to flag. Especially if I’ve been doing another of my jobs, namely typing while Tracey dictates one of her reports. I am, apparently, slightly better than AI voice recognition when it comes to doing this, until I get too sleepy and everything goes haywire. This is often the point where I go for a walk to blow the cobwebs away and also mentally wrestle with tricky plot points in whatever I’m writing. At least, that’s the theory. But my regular walks either take me past the unremarkable patch of grass verge in Sunderland Avenue, Oxford, where Philip Pullman has Will going through a portal following Lyra out of his – and our – world for the first time in ‘The Subtle Knife’, or Wolvercote Cemetery where J.R.R. Tolkien is buried. No pressure, then. Talk about falling off the shoulders of giants…

8.00 p.m.

On most days we’ll have had dinner and I’ll be washing up, listening to either 6Music or one of my playlists. At the moment, that’s ‘Dry Your Eyes’, the Noughties-based soundtrack to the MS I’m currently editing, so occasionally I’ll dry my hands and add another song that’s just occurred to me, or that music gurus Ian Johnson and Steve Blackman have recommended. Music’s really important to all of my stories, and I find just listening to songs helps me shape the MS. Although I don’t listen to anything while actually writing or editing as that’s too distracting for me (unlike, say, armed police operations).

You’d think that having spent most of the day together, this would be the point when the three of us would all be sick of the sight of each other and want to do different things. But we usually sit down together as a family and do what millions of other families are doing, watching the likes of ‘Bake-Off’, ‘Traitors’, ‘Blue Lights’, ‘Slow Horses’, ‘Only Connect’ and ‘House of Games’. Although we’re also big sports fans – particularly football and athletics – so in the spring and summer we may be watching the Diamond League, while in the autumn and winter it might be the Premier League.

Many years ago, I used to be a regular football-goer, attending more than 500 matches at more than 50 grounds up and down the country following my team, Nottingham Forest. Not surprisingly, they were the inspiration for a lot of my early writing, including my first (non-fiction) book, the somewhat prosaically titled ‘Diary Of A Football Season’. Soon after writing this I started contributing pieces to a Forest fanzine, ‘Brian’ – in honour of the legendary manager, Brian Clough, as opposed to the Monty Python one – and had the thrill for the first time of seeing my words in print, being read by several thousand people…

And of course, the sting of getting the odd negative review, which I can still recall now – the praise, not so much.

11.00 p.m.

Bedtime. What shall I read? Well, high on my TBR pile at the moment are some great stories by up-and-coming authors Abigail Kikuchi, Mia Flodquist Chadney, Rachel Lewis, Sarah Dollar and Vanessa Elle, so I’m spoilt for choice!

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