I like to swim in the early morning. I'm not entirely sure how I manage to get from the bed to my local pool because I only become fully awake on about my sixteenth length - halfway through the half mile.
I love the mindlessness of ploughing up and down like a happy porpoise and no, I don't dream up watery plots. Or maybe I do unconsciously, since the novel I've just finished is called Walking on Water.
I'm home for breakfast before eight. In the summer, we sometimes have it in the garden. It's a leisurely, muted affair with my husband and I grunting companionably over the newspaper. I work my way to my study in stages via a bit of mild housework while I plan what we'll eat for dinner.
In the steady state I start my writing day about 10 a.m. and work through the day, with the odd dart to the town for provisions, or to visit the various boutiques I frequent. Good food and beautiful clothes are my weaknesses. One of these days the food is going to get the upper hand and I won't need - or be able to fit into - the clothes. I work on a word processor, though I make the first rough drafts in A5 spiral notebooks with bright covers. A different colour for each book; blue for Walking on Water.
I never start the actual writing until I have not so much a plot as an incident. Each of my books is based on a simple event, either real or imagined, from which I draw out strands, knit them together into a plot, then unravel the situation or mystery.
The next stage is finding a good cast. Usually, the incident will provide me with one or two principals to whom I add and add. Often the really interesting characters only come in the second or third draft.
In Walking on Water, I was well into my second draft when I introduced, or should I say, a small boy called Gil introduced himself - a small deaf boy - and quite literally took over the plot, wrapping the story around himself. Once Gil arrived, I was away.
To say I have a regular schedule would be misleading, since in the writing of every book there are distinct stages. The start is a sort of freefall into panic when I mostly drive around the countryside trying to dream up interesting characters.
The next stage is naming them and giving them histories. Most of this stuff you just keep in your head. Next I have to get to know them. What they look like, how they speak etc.
Stage three is when the slog really starts. Me sitting at a blank word processor beginning page one.
Once I stop counting the words and pages, I am steaming ahead. At some stage I start waking between three and five every morning and lying in a state I call slooming, when my body is inactive but my mind is moving along a single track - in a leisurely but focused way.
Once I get to the final draft my hours gradually increase, until I am doing a suicidal 12- or 14-hour day. Up at seven, then six, and then five each morning. I always do that last bit at a gallop, simply because by then the plot has got hugely complex and the characters become very wayward.
I can keep them in order only if I know the damn story inside out and back to front. I'm totally concentrated in that world and lost to it. A real pain to live with.
Walking on Water by Gemma O'Connor will be published by Bantam early next year.
(This is the last in the current series)