Seven months and eleven days

Alice having an apparently hilarious time in her cot:

Time poor

I was obviously being facetious about publishing a novel before I'm 30, but the way things are going at the moment I'll be lucky to finish the damn thing before I'm 300... it's not for lack of ideas, or even motivation (for a change), it's the sheer impossibility of finding any TIME. Sometimes I write on the train on the way to work, but the actual process of putting the words on paper is frustratingly slow compared to the completed lines, paragraphs, chapters that already exist in my head. Then I usually use Alice's nap times to transfer the resulting garbled notes onto the laptop and edit them, but these are unpredictable snatched moments at best. Especially when you subtract the time it takes me to do the household chores that prove impossible to tackle when Alice is awake. How do other people manage?

Meanwhile, I have three poetry gigs booked in September and October, which is great but also worrying, because I haven't written any new poems for months. And I don't think a performance based on fragments of a barely started crime novel will be an acceptable substitute, somehow...