Rowan Coleman | Life in the Fast Lane

Saturday 19th September 11.30 a.m

Shhhh....my month old baby boy, Freddie, is asleep. As blissful as it is to see him snoozing, content after a feed, this poses something of a problem for me.

All the experts agree that when your new baby sleeps you should sleep, but as delightful as the prospect of a few snatched minutes of dreamless oblivion seems, were I to doze off now then all the million things that need to be done - a mountain of baby clothes laundry, a month's worth of house work, a guest blog for Fresh Fiction and not to mention the beginings of a new novel - will not get done. Again. And the sun will set on another day when I consider myself a high achiever for having got myself dressed in time to get my eight year old daughter to school and back again whilst remembering to brush my hair - a consideration that is probably not that accurate now that the world now seems to be entirely populated by women (Yummy Mummies, as they are known in the UK) who emerge half an hour after childbirth, with a washboard stomach, hair perfect, on trend outfit color co-ordinated and accessorised to within an inch of their life. What happened to the grace period of unwashed hair, elasticated waistbands and a little extra padding on the hips? Or maybe its just me, perhaps I am the only mother of an infant in the whole world who still blinks her way blearily through the daylight hours with her shirt on inside out.

The truth is, I need to take a well pressed leaf out of the books of these super efficient paragons of new motherhood and get my act together. I have a new book to write. My month off is nearly up, and its time to start forming the idea that I have had kicking around my head for the last few months into a proper structure, work on bringing the characters to life, outline the plot and get started writing. I need to find where ever it is I left my brain (ironically, I can't remember...) pop it back in and start working at full speed again.

This is not the first time that I have written a book with a new baby. I wrote my second novel, After Ever After soon after the birth of my little girl, Lily. It's a hazy period of my life, I don't remember writing anything at all, but I must have done somehow because the evidence is there it is sitting on the shelf in my office, a solid 300 pages of words, bound together in a jacket. It is however, the only one of my books that I have never re-read since completing. I'm more than a little worried that it won't make any sense at all.

So where to start....oh hang on. He's woken up again. Back soon.

Sunday 20th September 9.41a.m

It's not that he didn't sleep again between yesterday morning and today. It's just that it feels like it. He was up four times in the night and, unlike his mother, doesn't seem to need a Sunday morning lie-in to compensate for the lack of sleep. I have had laid him under the baby gym where he has been engaging in eye to eye contact with a lilac and pink elephant for sometime, as if they are locked in some psychological warfare that I can only guess at. If they were, it looks like the elephant won, because now he is doing his 'pick me up mummy' cry and bashing the elephany for dear life. One moment.

Ok, now have irritable baby on left shoulder and am typing with one finger, but still must press on. Promised to have this blog in by the 21st and have school uniforms to get ready, and a hat to make for the mad hatters birthday party my daughter is going to later on. So, given that getting this blog together has been almost as epic as ...oh wait, now he wants feeding.

Monday 21st September 10.59 am Well after spending quite some time fashioning a mad hat for my eight year old and then helping out at the party I didn't have time to get back to the blog. However today Freddie's dad is in charge of him. That mean's I have a fighting chance of getting this done.

Ok so it's taken me the best part of three days to write a few hundred words. Given that the average length of one of my novels is about one hundred and twenty thousand words, at this rate I could be in trouble. You could be seeing my new book hitting the shops sometime in late 2015. This would be bad for two reasons. Firstly all the lovely people that have read my books in the U.S.A will have forgotten who I am by then and secondly they don't pay you until you've finished and I have a mortgage to pay. So writing five words a day is not an option, which ever way you look at it.

As I mentioned (please excuse me, I'm prone to repeating myself right now, its to cover up the fact I've lost the power of cognitive thought) I wrote my second book around my daughter when she was newborn. This involved writing at all hours of the day and night, sitting up sometimes at three o clock in the morning, willing the creative juices to flow through the fog of weariness.

The thing about being pregnant and writing is that for some reason - those pesky hormones probably,the same ones that make you cry at commercials and impulse buy tight leather pants for when you've got your pre-baby figure back, the same pre-baby figure that would never go near or ever fit in tight leather pants - you are extra creative. Ideas flow, words pour out - it really is a wonderful (if a little extreme) way of getting your writing going.

The thing about being a new mum and writing is that you are exhausted, constantly chasing the lost hours of sleep that you know you are not going to get back for at least five years and you obsessed with your baby. For example I've been waiting for the last four days for Freddie's dad to be back from working away so that he can look after him for a while and allow me to write. He's had him for about fifteen minutes and I miss Freddie already.

Of course this is not the dilemma of a writer alone. Plenty of mothers have to go back to work earlier than they'd like because of financial or professional pressures. A friend of mine works in the financial sector where it is actively frowned on if a mother takes longer than six weeks of maternity leave. I know she struggled walking back into a hight powered job having left her baby with a nanny and on three hours sleep a night. All I have to do is make stuff up - and I don't even have to get dressed to do it. How hard can it be?

But I know that I don't want to leave him with a nanny, not just yet - he's so tiny and somehow it seems wrong to have another woman look after him when I am just in the next room. So its back to the working all hours of the day and night option, hoping that the words I'm pounding out on the key board make some kind of sense, remembering to write that idea down that strikes me during a nappy change before I forget it and most of all remembering to take the time to enjoy him in these precious weeks and months that will fly by and never come again.

As to whether the new book makes any sense at all once its completed - well we'll have to wait and see.

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