Aside from the odd-spot of freelance journalism, I have three projects on the go at the moment which are more or less equally exciting. I'll talk about the second two over the next week or so.

The first is a short-story for a forthcoming anthology, which should be troubling me more than it is. It should be troubling me for two reasons.

One reason is that it's been years since I wrote a short story and they've always caused me immense pain. I had planned to write several short stories (such as My Chalk Outline) under the banner of The Terrible Business of Salmon & Dusk. Writing a shorter tale, I discovered was no less effort than a novel as the storytelling has to be so concise and focussed. I like to ramble a bit. There's charm in a bit of ramble (I tell myself.) MCO was almost as exhausting as the year I spent on HtDC.

The main reason I should worry is that I haven't written it yet and I seem to recall a June deadline being bandied about. No problem really, as I write best under pressure. Well, I write most under pressure. Without any deadlines, my portfolio would consist of three hundred first chapters of several different novels. When it comes to freelancing, I rarely miss a deadline but I do need to feel it pressing at my eyes with the balls of its thumbs.

I only finished Electricity as I'd started it as part of NaNoBlogMo - a competition run in November of every year, in which aspiring writers are encouraged to write a novel inside a month. I had a particularly untaxing job at the time, so I thought I'd give it a go. At the time it had been six years since I had written the first chapter and I felt a lack of time to prevaricate might encourage me to finally write the second. As it was, I think it took me about six months to finish. But I finished! I'm sure my 10 loyal readers were rather glad. Well, one or two of them, at least.

(Actually, I'd tried a similar experiment a couple of years earlier, in which I published a novel Burnt Toast & Unrequited Love on a website as I wrote it. I think I only had about 3 readers, but the attention - or their expectation - was encouragement enough to finish it. Which is almost a shame as I now think it was a bit rubbish. I might redraft it one day.)

When it came to write to How to Disappear Completely, I'd written about five chapters before I began podcasting it. Insane. Quite, quite insane. For a while I was attempting to write AND record AND edit AND post a chapter EVERY WEEK. This was the same year I began a career as a full-time teacher, a move widely known to bring about nervous breakdowns in most who attempt it. Now I think about it, I did possibly go a bit strange.

Ultimately I settled down into a pattern by which I wrote a chapter one week (generally on my iBook during an hour-long commute) and recorded and edited it the following week. A fortnightly pattern was more sustainable but still rather hectic. Chapter 25 was written during a month in New York, most of it over Green Tea Lattes in a Midtown Starbucks.

Time is my enemy then, when it comes to writing. I need to feel time-starved before I get anything done. Some sort of balance is ideal, I suspect, as currently I've been too time-starved to get much done at all. I used to write from midnight to three a.m. but having a partner and a full-time job has tended to preclude this. I still creep from the covers in the early hours some mornings but I generally end up just making a few bleary-eyed notes before returning. (And then lying awake in plotting-induced insomnia.)

The demands of a listening public provided the push necessary to finish How to Disappear Completely, written in snatched moments across a year or so. Obviously, there's a lot I'd now change and have changed for the second draft. Act II, for example, is completely upside down and overlong in the podcasted version. But the important thing was getting it written, getting it right comes later. In fact, the whole Act structure works against the book. If there's a print version, we'll see a far more streamlined, plot driven version. The current structure owes more to television than commercial fiction. I'm looking forward to rebuilding it into something tighter over the next few months.

(That said, I still think it's rather marvellous. I read it again recently and surprised myself - Did I write that? I think that's my favourite part of the writing process.)

Would I write more given more time? Well, yes. Obviously. I have far more discipline than pre-Electricity and have learned a hell of a lot about plotting from mistakes I made on HtDC. The next book is going to be much better structured, even if written at the same breakneck speed.