Main cause of stress:
Writing can be stressful because you know you should be doing something every day, or you'll fall out of the habit of writing. When I'm at the cinema or watching television, I feel guilty. I set limits on what I should do every day, usually a word count. Once I get to that I can relax, but if things don't go well it can be stressful. Then you have the expectations of publishers who have paid a considerable amount of money for your past work and expect a certain quality. Mystery readers are quite impatient and like their fix regularly. I get e-mails from people saying:"why can't you write quicker?" You also put pressure on yourself, because you are always trying to do something different and make each book better than the last. Doing publicity can be stressful, because you are working on your own for six or seven months and then, suddenly, you are out meeting so many people, and you have to be good fun and cheerful even if you are fed up talking about yourself. Remember that you are only 25 per cent as interesting as you think.
Coping with stress:
I'm not good at coping with it at all. I tend to get very antisocial, very solitary and resentful of people who invade my privacy. I go to the gym, and that's such a change from sitting in a room, working at a keyboard. I walk to and from home and I like cooking. I like to bring a book to a coffee shop and sit reading.
Being self-employed:
There's great satisfaction in being your own boss. Anything you do is your own work; you don't have other people telling you what to do. Writing is hard work, but it's not as hard as tarring a road. The sort of things I worry about are niggly little things, such as whether the book I'm writing will be as good as the last one. Your expectations get higher and higher and you never quite achieve them.
In conversation with Alison Healy