Sometimes I get up and write straight away without getting dressed; the story is awake when I'm half asleep, the images and sounds are very clear. I write with my eyes shut, watching and listening and trying to write it down quickly so I don't miss anything.
When I stop writing I'm still in it, still in this half-dream, and I go to the cafe down the road for lunch. There are always some regulars like me; the man with the trilby hat, the lady in the wheelchair, then some paint-spattered decorators, builders discussing the job, usually a table of laughing South Americans, a man who dresses as a woman and always smiles at everyone. The food is your usual egg and chips, steak and kidney along with a Thai menu, king prawns and special noodles, chicken ginger and rice. The cafe is run by Scottish Heather and Thai Michael.
Then I walk round the corner to the park, still in a daze, and probably with my notebook because sometimes they'll start having a conversation and I have to write it down then and there. In the cold the park is empty. I climb up the hill and have a view of the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station and all the high buildings look blue. There's a walled garden with paths between the flower-beds and a fountain that I walk round every time, though in the winter the plants are hibernating. But there's still the yew tunnel and the twisting limbs of the wisteria and all the roses pruned back for the winter. Then I walk round the duck pond and up to the Italian cafe for a coffee. Food and walking bring me down to earth. I have been in London a year now and I miss walking in the hills. I end up going round and round the park sometimes like a demented goldfish.
I trained and worked as a painter for a few years before writing, and at the moment, into the second novel and without a studio, I miss certain colours like I miss people, cobalt violet especially. Between them paintings and writing create a big factory of chaos, a lot of rubbish, and nearly "rights", and now and then a picture or piece of writing that has come out right. But whether I'm painting or writing, my work includes a lot of doing nothing. Just listening or being still, or wondering what on earth I think I'm doing. And I need that. After those times of nothing, something unexpected comes, and I find myself in a place I've never been before.
Helena McEwen's first novel, The Big House, has just been published by Bloomsbury at £12 in UK