The longer the days the shorter the work - that's been the case with my writing since I began. There are just too many distractions in summer time, and I don't even have to leave home to find them. We moved into our current house just two years ago and since then there's been an acre of garden to bring under some kind of control. That's a year-round struggle, but summer is the busiest.
Then there are the essentials, like the day job. I work in RTE Radio so I commute 50 miles each way, but I find I can do a lot of reading and thinking and jotting on the train, so that helps to get ideas in some kind of order. In fact my new novel, A Haunted Heart, grew out of an idea I got from a passing glance I had of an elderly woman, a strikingly beautiful woman. I started thinking about why she was on that train, where she was going, how her life might have brought her to that moment, and so the novel was born.
Getting home about seven, it takes a couple of hours to unwind and there are the essentials to get through, like games of football on the lawn.
Finally, I get started on the writing at eleven or so and work through till two (or later, if it's going well). I try to write every day, but I find the first 40 pages of a novel really tough going. Nothing seems right - characters are unconvincing, the storyline isn't working, the ideas won't stretch to the length of a novel. The next 200 pages are better, and then the last 40 are a problem for different reasons - mainly because I don't want to let go and trust the book to the wide world.
A Haunted Heart was written while we were renting a house which had no garden, so that meant there were fewer distractions and I actually wrote a lot of it during the summer of 1997. Since settling in here I find the attraction of the garden jostling with the writing. Nothing beats digging and sowing and building dry-stone walls, and writing comes a poor second.
Come September, however, I will get back to the routine, which sees me through the winter. Settling down to writing once our seven-year-old is in bed (though not asleep!) about half-nine and working through until one or so.
I find it very difficult to write during the day, even when there's time to do it. Night time is the right time. I do, however, use the morning train journey to reread and edit what I've written the night before. I find I have a much tougher editorial eye in daylight, and what seemed exciting when I wrote it often gets binned in the morning.
I suppose, the hardest thing of all is to write when you don't want to, but that's when it's most important to keep going. It's easy when it's going well, it's the real job when it's not going anywhere. Having said that, writers often moan about how tough the writer's life is, but in my experience, it's nowhere nearly as tough as working in hotels, on the railways or building sites.
John Mackenna's new book A Haunted Heart is published by Picador