It takes an age for me to get my head together in the mornings. In the Glenroe days my alarm would be set for a hellishly early hour if we were filming out on location, now it's a civilised eight-thirty. I potter, do some yoga, cycle to the pool and do a hundred laps. This makes me sound sick-makingly fit, but my work is so sedentary now that if I didn't do it sagging would set it. Back at home, I get into work clothes. I used to love dressing up in gorgeous things in my old life as an actress - now it's baggy cotton trousers, T-shirt, woolly socks if it's cold. My workplace is a windowless attic crammed with debris, but really the surroundings aren't important - it's just me and the screen. I make a big flask of strong black coffee, some cheese on toast and leg it up the ladder. It makes me very antsy if anything delays me from getting up there - horrible real-life letters, phone calls, whatever.
My working day is usually six to seven hours without much of a break - I don't need lunch because the cheese on toast keeps me going until I grab more toast and Marmite and a cup of tea around four. I work very fast, and get quite lost in the narrative - if my heroine weeps I weep with her, if she does something cringeworthy I cringe with her. I laugh at all her jokes and love it when she stands up to bullies.
At six o'clock it's time to re-enter the real world and return to the bosom of my family. Watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch with my daughter Clara because it makes me laugh out loud. I am blessed to have a husband who loves to cook. I hate it, and if he didn't put food in front of me I wouldn't bother. My diet would consist exclusively of toast and cheese. We have a bottle of wine with dinner. Malcolm will have read the day's work, and we'll talk about where the book's going. Clara has come up with some excellent ideas, and Malcolm is a brilliant sounding board. He's learned to be the personification of tact. Anything negative is devastating. I stopped writing for a week once when someone made a negative comment - it really floors you. When a book is finished I'm inconsolable, and stagger around weeping dramatically. There's always a bottle of champagne in the fridge on the day I deliver, but even that has occasionally failed to cheer me up.
Most evenings are spent reading. I rarely watch television - so much of it is a complete waste of time. If we're feeling energetic and the weather's fine, we might go for a dive off Dalkey Island. We were recently certified as advanced scuba-divers and we're addicted. It's the ultimate escape - like descending into another world.
If I'm not hooked into a book I might listen to music, or spend hours talking to friends on the phone. That's one drawback about working from home - you have no social interaction with other people. I miss my colleagues like mad, but we keep in touch diligently, and meet up for meals from time to time. Voiceover work is very seductive and can lure me out of the attic, so at least I'm not completely cut off. Most advertising agencies are very obliging and will book studio time to accommodate me, but occasionally it's necessary to disrupt a writing day if an agency has a deadline to meet. When I look back on how life used to be - running between RTE, recording studios, school runs and my attic, I wonder how I managed. I have now reached a place in my life where I really couldn't be happier.
Kate Thompson's second novel, More Mischief, will be published by New Island in July