I put up a status report about the current project on Facebook. Not as riveting as Farmville, I know, but there you go. In response Gwynne Conlyn from South Africa asked, 'I am purple with envy. How do you write with such seeming ease?'

Anyone who writes a book a year or more gets that question a lot. Let me try to answer it.

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Firstly, you have to remember this is what I do for a living. A job. A warped kind of career. Monday to Friday, eight till five thirty or so, I will be working on something to do with a book. It would be very remiss of me if I achieved nothing with all that time.

Does writing get easier the more you do it? In some ways I think. When I was starting out, and working simultaneously as a journalist, I was constantly worrying about one thing or another. Would I manage to complete the book? Was it any good? Was I pursuing the right career path? When would the money run out?

I don't worry so much any more. Not because there aren't things to worry about. More because I've come to realise there's no point in worrying about things over which I have no control. A writer really has power over one thing alone, whatever it is he or she is writing. It's an absolute power too. Only you can wield it, only you can make something good or bad. Agents and editors can help, but they can't fix something that's broken. Your career is your responsibility, not theirs.

So these days I just try to write the best book I can and leave the nagging doubts to others. Yes, the publishing business appears to be going to hell in a hand cart in some ways. But I'm a writer, not a publisher. What do you expect me to do about it?

I also don't worry about key aspects of the book any more. I <em>know</em> I have the ability to finish it, and the time too these days. I know I can rewrite and edit and juggle aspects of the story, quite substantially sometimes, if it's needed. I have no fear of that process. In fact I welcome it.

I don't worry about covers. I don't worry about marketing campaigns. I don't even worry that much about sales figures, to be honest, though like any author I probably should. My publishers around the world know that if there's anything I can do to help with these things all that they have to do is call me. But I'm not going to sit at home chewing my fingernails over matters that are really somebody else's business. Authors write books. Other people sell them. That may change in the years to come but it hasn't, for most of us anyway, just yet. Thank goodness.

Also, more and more I'm cutting back on public engagements. By this time last year I'd been on the road for almost a month, legging it around the US mainly. My sole travelling this year has been two weeks for research in Venice and a week on the road with Ann Cleeves in the north of England. The current book is a month ahead of last year's at the moment. These two things are not unconnected. Events can be fun but they're horribly time consuming and expensive. In the past I've said yes to just about everything. In the future I'm going to be more picky. However hard you try working on the road is not as productive as working at home, for me anyway.

Once you take the worry factor out of things you'd be amazed how much free time you have left to do what matters, work on the book. And time, it seems to me, is the busy writer's most precious commodity, provided you're mentally prepared to do something useful with it (a subject I'll address later).

So if there's 'seeming ease' in the way I work it comes, I think, more from what I don't do than what I do.