Happily, most days consists of two things only. Writing and dealing with the ephemeral side of writing, email, the odd phone call, sending out the odd gibberish message on Twitter, writing a blog post when I feel like it.

When it comes to priorities it's not hard to work out which is the most important there: writing, naturally. If I haven't done something about that (and it doesn't necessarily mean producing more words, as we've discussed before) I haven't really worked at all. I've malingered. And malingering is bad.

But today I am faced with a true horror. I have several important things facing me. Writing the present project. Very soon revising next year's book. Plus a couple of projects I can't talk about yet, both of which keep beeping at me from my subconscious saying, 'I