The will, the way and carbohydrates

So I have started a new writing regime and it seems to be working. Though it is only in its second day so perhaps that's a premature statement. Anyway, this isn't really about the new regime but how writers, this writer at least, write when they also work full-time. 

Like many I work full-time as well as writing novels. I'm lucky in the respect that I write fairly quickly by most standards, in that I wrote the first draft of Thirst in about six months: two of them full-time and four of them wherever I could shoehorn in a few hours with Dave and Alena, Hackney and Siberia. 

I'm really close to Thirst being finished enough I think. Like weeks away from finished enough. And by 'finished enough' I mean there's still work to do but I'm able show it to others without finding the nearest bar and getting numb-fingered-drunk at the thought of someone else reading it - though I still might do that in celebration.

But. My job. The one that pays for my nice coffees, movie tickets and jumble sale tat (and less essential things like sustenance). It is a proper job, I've worked around the same area for the last seven years but knowing it's your responsibility to raise over £1 million for a charity you're very invested in means you end up working pretty damn hard at it. Mostly after a ten hour day what I want to do is go home, put on tracksuit bottoms and mainline white carbohydrates. But I'm not alone in that am I? 

So what is the answer to that balancing act? I don't know really to be honest, I'm working it out. Right now I'm trying early mornings - 6.30 to be exact, when I work for an hour - I like the semi-consciousness. If that doesn't work next week I'll do lunch breaks; hunched in Pret muttering about donkeys and vodka when I return to my desk. I wrote almost the whole first draft of Thirst wedged under armpits on the District Line, so that's an option. I'll text myself little paragraphs in the queue at Tesco's. I'll tell everyone, they'll understand, that I just don't have time for them. I'll use the alpha-fridge-magnets while waiting for the kettle to boil.

In short, my time is short but so is the distance Dave, Alena and I now have to travel.   

My grandma had many sayings (one she was particularly fond of used the c-word 5 times) but she always said, when times were tight or we were up against it, 'Where there's a will, there's a way.'

I couldn't say it better myself.