What we do all day: 2

9am ish. This is the hardest part - hard to talk about and hard to do. I pour another cup of coffee, go upstairs to one of the little bedrooms, sit at a camping table in front of my laptop and try to write fiction. At the moment I'm writing short stories. Before Easter I was working on a novel and had reached the end of the first section - about 40,000 words so far, and then I put it aside for a while. I'm going to start on the next section soon but don't feel quite ready to begin. I've got two more short story ideas brewing at the moment and want to work on these before getting stuck into the long haul of the novel.

I write from 9 until about 1pm. I'm very committed to it but I also find it very difficult. I'm trying to focus more on stories because I'd like to get some new work published/read within the next millennium. Next week I'm going to create a link/parallel blog, and publish some of my stories plus work in progress there.

The common idea of what writers do, how it works, how you're supposed to feel, hardly connects with the reality - or at least my reality. Maybe there are lots of people out there who feel inspired, who know what the stories are about from the beginning, whose characters 'take over' and tell them what to write et cetera et cetera. Maybe. If so, I'm not one of them. A lot of the time writing fiction is like tight-rope walking. It's frightening but it can be done although it's best not to think about it too much.

I try hard not to say I'm a writer. When I was a teacher, I could hide behind that label, but now, if anybody asks me I sometimes say I'm a bit of a writer. Up to now, nobody's asked me which bit. The right knee, if you're interested. If you tell people you write, often the next thing some say is, 'Have you written a best-seller yet?' Or, 'Will I have heard of you?' As the answer to both these questions is obviously no, I'm wrong-footed, a loser, and probably also a bit of a fake before we've even started on the second drink. I mean, if someone says they're a chemist, you don't ask them if they've won the Nobel Prize yet, do you? If they play football, you don't ask when Man United are going to sign them up, do you? Not if you don't want a punch on the nose.

I just write stuff. Occasionally, say 10% of the time, what I write feels good enough to send out to be published. Approximately 10% of the stuff I send out gets published. Usually in something hardly anybody reads. So, as you see, you've got to like doing it. And I do. I really do. Words. Sentences. Characters. Stories. Books. Reading. Ideas. All that. I just wish I was better at it.

And while I'm grinding away at my own self-doubt, R is two floors down in the garage, grinding away with his planes and thicknessers.

He's making wooden boxes, lovely curved shapes with impossible dove-tails.

At 1pm ish we sit down for lunch and compare notes.

'How's it going?' I say?
'Slow,' he says. 'Too bloody slow.'
'Ditto?' he says.
'Ditto.' I say back.

Ah, the creative life.