Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Banish to the garden shed that small child practicing the violin. Delegate to one’s long-suffering spouse the task of reading to one’s offspring selected pages from Harry Potter and the Geranium of Fear. Turn away, O turn away from the TV news; banish the seductress that is Desperate Housewives and that big bag of pretzels. Switch off the radio, bringing with it news of the latest disaster to befall Norwich City Football Club, and put away those books. For it has started. The Writing Fever is upon me.

I have a constitutive inability to suffer from writer’s block. Some say that this literary derepression is my greatest curse as well as my greatest asset, in that I can write voluminously and very much more quickly than I can think. The hardest thing in the world is to not to write.

Last year I sat down to write a novel, just to see if I could. Four months and 178,000 words later it was done. If you like, you can read it here, but even if you don’t, and even if no-body reads it at all, that won’t detract a whit from a feeling of personal achievement that will, for me, mark one of the more satisfying of my life. True, perhaps I should get out more. And in any case, having, as I do, a case of constitutive inability to suffer from writer’s block, I am perhaps not the best judge of its quality.

Not too long after I finished my novel, appetite whetted, I started to plot another. My agent, who had been kind enough to plough through my novel not once but twice, advised me to try something with a more integrated plot, like The Da Vinci Code, only better.

But plotting is agony, like writing a story without using any of the actual words. And, like Monty Python’s production of Wuthering Heights by semaphore, it loses something of the mood and nuance.

But the plotting is done, so on 7 March (it might have been a day either way, actually) I launched into the actual writing, a sensation of release akin, presumably, to that experienced by the straining terrier finally allowed to chase a rabbit. To mix my sporting metaphors still further, I’m now well into it, and at it like a buttered ferret up a teflon trouserleg.

Because this project is better laid-out than the last one, you’d think (I thought) that I’d have less freedom to experiment. Paradoxically, I have more, because I can do all sorts of experiments—with mood, tone, dialogue, characterization—secure in the knowledge that I have a solid reference frame to which I can return. Freedom always works best when it operates within rules.

I love writing. I love it when I write, the feeling I get. It’s not so much fun for everyone else, though (when I was writing The Science of Middle-earth my wife said I spent hours in the study just tolkien to myself). For when I am writing, I am completely immersed in another world, not so much writing about characters and situations as watching them come to life, of their own accord. Once, when I heard authors talking about this phenomenon, I thought it pretentious nonsense … until it happened to me. And when I am not writing, I am thinking about writing.

This mania will continue relentlessly until the middle of the summer, I expect, when I shall stop, re-connect the telephone, and find, by some kind of relativistic effect, that I am actually a character in Sleeper, emerging to find that the world has changed utterly in my absence.

This has happened before. Back in 1990, or perhaps it was 1991, I borrowed a cousin’s hut in the country, in woodland out of sight from any other habitation and about a mile from the nearest shop (don’t knock it – that’s about as remote as it gets in South-East England), to write up my PhD thesis. The hut had electricity but retained an outside privy, and, it being winter, I spent a lot of time chopping wood, and going for long walks in the snow. Imagine Henry David Thoreau (only with a computer).

I was away for just two weeks. But during my absence, Nelson Mandela was released from jail, and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. Ho hum. When the cat’s away…