When my novel has "gone to bed" for a while I just start editing another project (I've 2 novels, 2 screenplays in various stages of completion). How sad is that? To finish one grueling editing and writing schedule to take up another. Though I unwind by writing music. I can't stop writing, in case something happens and my ideas may never be seen or heard again.

Sleep, catch up on cleaning and paperwork - after my last book was too knackered to get out and socialise.

Next time round will plan a proper break and go and lie in the sun somewhere cheap!

Saw your short story in the Express mag on Sun, Emma. Am doing a fair amount of features for them at the moment - good financially but means I'm procrastinating re next book proposal.

Ooh, nice to know you saw it, Maria. I could be a grumbly author on various small points about how it came out, but I shan't because in principle, not being a journalist by trade, I get pathetically thrilled about having things in the national press. And being paid for it!

Emma

Aha! I've just realised another refuelling joy. I've rounded up my current PhD reading, a notebook, a pen, and I'm off to sit in the sun in the garden of my favourite café to work. For novels I'm chained to my bookshelves, a hardcopy, Google and Wikipedia, which of course also means I haven't a hope of resisting WW...

Emma

Ah, but we all know now that resistance is futile.

Lovely day though isn't it?

Gorgeous, so much so that one coffee and cake later, I was falling asleep and had to walk home to wake myself up.

Emma

I do everything I neglect when I'm writing, which is pretty much everything else in my life.

- overtime at work
- meeting people with romantic potential
- getting out more
- shoping for beautiful clothes

However, I much prefer writing to all of the above, esp the first.

Ah, didn't see page two when I hit on this.

Cornwall, good fish restaurants, galleries, gossip, emails, days out to market towns etc.

Walk, buy clothes, see friends, start editing or writing something else, look in the mirror and shriek 'Dear God, what have I become??'
Sign up for those evening classes I never had time for before... go to museums.

To be honest, I find no reprieve from my imagination. I'm constantly thinking of stories, or seeing stories happen around me. When I'm halfway through one thing, I'm thinking of the next. I already have about six fully planned out novels I want to write, and countless short stories.

Sorry if I sound obtuse, but I find the imagination refuels itself, and the creative act itself the release from it. It isn't something I either want or need to escape from.

JB

I'm the same as JB. My imagination works 24 / 7 regardless of what I'm doing and whether I'm asleep or awake. It can never be tamed and it can mever be repressed. If I watch something on TV, meet someone new, find out an interesting fact or a million and one other things I instinctively think how that might be worked into fiction. It sounds like a chore but it's not, never is and never will be. In fact, if I'm ever lacking the confidence it's the one thing that tells me maybe I was meant to be a writer.

Ironically, a lot of my ideas come to me when I'm trying not to relax.

Go down to Cornwall and clear my head of junk by gazing at beautiful views and eating fish.