I get up really early, when everyone’s still asleep, generally not later than four am. Crazy, I know, but that’s generally when I get my best work done. Then, after Angus and the horde have been fed and watered, I spend most of my days either writing, editing, social networking, or doing some other book related thing. Living here makes online activities quite challenging. We have power load-shedding, which means that the electricity is regularly switched off. Sometimes for just a few hours each day, but sometimes for days at a time. Also, we have a satellite internet system that really is always incredibly slow, and also regularly goes off altogether. So my days depend on that quite a lot. I have to try and cram as much of my online work into the time that these things are working, and then everything else has to wait. Fortunately Angus doesn’t complain too much about hasty thrown together meals, and the horde generally helps themselves to whatever they fancy.
I’ve always been obsessed with books and reading. Not many days have gone by in my life when I didn’t read. And if I ran out of new books, I was just as happy to revisit old ones from my bookshelf. I’m a chronic re-reader of favourite books, and I’ve never thrown one away in my life. I used to imagine how fantastic it must be to be a writer. My favourite part of buying a lovely crisp new book was always poring over the “About the Author” section. They seemed to be such godly, magical beings to me. But I’ve always been absolutely convinced that there was no way I could ever be one. It just seemed a goal too lofty for me to aspire to, so I never tried. I imagined that you would have to learn how to tell a story, and have a degree of some sort before anyone would take you seriously. I believed that there must be rules cast in stone somewhere, about how to string a sentence together at the very least. that I would never be party to, and that writers were like rock stars. Not in my universe, and in a world that I could never ever dream of being part of.
6
A Typical Day.
Becoming a Writer.