Time to Write

What an unaccustomed luxury to have time to write. My first book, Dancing in the Wilderness, was published in 2001 and I wrote a lot of it after midnight, after the kids were in bed, after the after-hours work was polished off. From then on, writing was secondary to the day job, squeezed in between running a very busy business and looking after two equally busy teenagers. In fact it was the demands of those very teenagers, combined with the growing demands of having elderly, increasingly frail parents, plus the job, the community work and a badly behaved spaniel, that inspired me to write my fourth, fifth and sixth books, including the best-selling Sandwich Short of a Picnic. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AM7FHCC

I was a fully fledged member of the Sandwich Generation - sandwiched between elderly parents, teenagers and a career, all making demands on my time and leaving no time for me, let alone for writing. 
But as all authors know, you just make the time. You're driven to. There's something about that laptop, those characters, the sudden plot twist that overtook you the last time you typed out a chapter. You just can't keep away. 
In July this year, as a long-planned bucket-list move, my husband and I spent three months in Menton, in the south of France, where I had plenty of time to write - as well as eat a lot of cheese, drink a lot of wine and swim in the sea every day. My eighth novel sped onto the page. And now that we're back home and waiting for the right job to come by, there's even more time to write. I can't believe how much fun it is, sitting down at the laptop every day. Now I can be just like Stephen King, who sets himself a 2000 word limit every day. And without another job to go to, it's not that hard to achieve.
Like all good things it can't last forever. Like most writers, I have to have a day job. Besides, how will I get that real-life experience I can write about at some later date?