Nothing much happens in a writer's average day. Well, nothing much happens in mine anyway. When I'm working on a project, I write 12 hours a day - but not in the school holidays. I've just finished writing my first novel, Picture This. It's set in 1980s London, and it's about a 20-year-old girl's search for her father. It took me a year.
I write at home [in West Sussex]. My children are nine, almost four, and almost two; Charlie, Joe, and Gabriel. I made the decision when I started writing to work from home so I could be there if anything terrible happened to the children, but I think now that was very misguided. It would have been better just to say goodbye to them in the mornings and come back in the evening. They know that I'm in the house, and they can't understand why they can't come and see me when they want. Joe stands outside the door knocking sometimes to be let in, and it's impossible to ignore him and impossible to do any work if I let him in. But I'm lucky; we have a fantastic nanny, Jaz, who's been with us eight years now.
If I didn't have children I don't think I'd ever take a break from writing books. I'd just go from one book to another. I start at 11 in the morning and go through until seven in the evening, when I spend time with the children. Then I go back in again and start at 8.30. I write in a study off the kitchen, which is not ideal as it's quite noisy, but I can't write anywhere else. I've tried writing in the bedroom and other places around the house, and even in the summerhouse, which is in a peaceful part of the garden where nobody ever goes, but nothing else works.
My desk is in front of the window overlooking the garden, which I actually find hugely distracting. I've had to cover the window. I've stuck up pictures of the children and postcards and some of the hundreds of scraps of paper I've written things down on. I need them all, all those bits of paper. I never know when I'll use something from them.
I write on a laptop, but I don't have anything else on it to distract me; no e-mail or Internet, just a word processor. I'm quite superstitious about having a clear desk. I can't have bills or anything like that on the desk - nothing that isn't to do with what I'm working on. I share the study with my husband, which is a bit unfair on him, since I won't let him in there when I'm working.
The book that's out at the moment, Lying in Bed, was easier to write in bits because it's a collection of stories. I could write one story and then maybe not write another for a month. I didn't write any of it in bed, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it in bed! But the novel was much harder; I had to keep working on that continuously. I constantly edit on screen as I go along. That's what I did with the stories, but I did print out sections of the novel. However much you edit on screen, you can still do much more with a hard copy when you can see more of the text.
I don't eat very much when I'm writing. I don't think writers do eat when they're writing, do they? They tend to forget. I do drink lots of coffee. And smoke lots. My treats to myself are cigarettes. I've always smoked very heavily and that's the way I reward myself: I promise myself, oh, I'll just get to the end of this paragraph and then I can have another cigarette. While I've been writing Picture This, I've been on 40 a day. I've just given up now, so I have to think of some other way of treating myself - which will probably be something fattening like chocolate.
(In conversation with Rosita Boland).
Lying in Bed, a collection of stories by Polly Samson, has just been published by Virago at £14.99 in UK. Her novel, Picture This, will be published by Virago next year