I worked in an office once. For three weeks. It didn’t last.

The guy I worked for directly was cool and all, and even if the job itself wasn’t really that fun it wasn’t awful. It was the two hour commute that made it untenable. That and the way offices work.

If you read my books, you might notice there’s a general disdain amongst my characters for the dynamics of “office people”. Having remembered that this is a thing that I do, I thought I’d take a moment to differentiate between “office people” and “people who work in an office”, because they are not in fact the same thing. Most notably, they are distinguished by one being able to use the phrase “by the close of play” unironically.

Anyway, this is neither here nor there. The important thing is that, being essentially self-employed, I get to set the pace for how and when I work. Which is awesome. I can get up at midday, slob around until 3, then smash out my daily quota of words and have a sandwich. LIVING THE DREAM.

Except for the fact that no-one ever wants to work, even if it is something they love doing, which sounds like nonsense. When you are beholden to doing something as a career, there’s always going to be that little bit of resentment, and part of the reason good writers manage to exist is because we have become a dab hand at using that resentment to fuel anything other than what we’re supposed to be doing. So we sit there and we write novels instead of doing essays, because “you’ll never make money doing that, go and get a real job”.

When that becomes your real job, this doesn’t go away.

I expect most people who are their own boss actually have some external power figure they really answer to — like a wife or dog or something — but I haven’t managed to procure one of those yet. So mostly I have to threaten myself with crushing guilt to actually get myself to start working.

Writers are weird, okay?