I’m welcoming the new year from behind a desk piled high with lists, post-its and books, and, of course, the enormous plot grid for Book 3, which some of you might have caught on Facebook. Always, right around the end of the year, I seem to get a second wind and it suddenly becomes of paramount importance that I reach the next writing goal posts — in this case finishing Draft 2 of Book 3 — before the kids go back to school in January.

It got me thinking (in the three spare minutes when I don’t trawl the internet for apple harvest details in 1940s England, the date of the 50th Remembrance Sunday, or how a seventeen-year-old girl could leave home without the police chasing after her) about the way my creative energy seems to mirror the unfolding of the year. There’s the back-to-school mania, when one can legitimately indulge one’s love for notebooks and the summer lull gives way to the urgent rush to be productive, to sharpen pencils and get all those important thoughts down on paper. There’s the dip in mid-November, when even the stoutest optimist can no longer deny that we’re rapidly approaching the shortest day of the year. And then, early December. The world is surfing on a wave of twinkly lights and anticipation and writers everywhere are racing towards the end of the year with only one thing in mind, to finish something, anything, by January 1, because under no circumstances could you possibly sully the lovely blank slate of January 1 with an unfinished pile of old-year words. February, in turn, is a long, slow slog and just when you think you couldn’t type any slower, spring has sprung and creative greens shoot up left, right and centre. And before you know it, it’s June and you’ve written more words than in the entire first three months together; and now you’re rushing because you really, really, must finish whatever you’re working on by the time summer arrives, at which stage all you’ll be able to do is slump in the shade and fan yourself with a wodge of manuscript pages. Back to school again, more notebooks, more sharpening of pencils…

There’s always a lot of talk about setting goals and filling diaries at this point in the year. And obviously, I’m first in line with my three different notebooks and eleventy billion lists. At the same time, there’s something immensely reassuring and quite lovely about the natural ebb and flow of the writing year, of watching the seasons come and go outside my study window, of my imagination emptying and filling up with stories as the months pass. Now I just need to remember this when I find myself in one of the lulls, when every word drops onto the page with a weary clunk: that the year will flow on, it will eventually bring around empty notebooks and new ideas, and, at some point, too, the finishing line.