Author of 29 books, “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN shares a glimpse of the crazy, self-absorbing life of the long-distance writer.

IN our Tuross bolthole we have a magic mirror. 

I guess many readers have one, that special looking glass where the light is perfectly positioned so your reflection is far more flattering than in any other. 

Hypnotic isn’t it? Ours is in “my” bathroom – the old original one with the shower and the washing machine. But when I glanced at it last night after showering, the bloke in the reflection had his face lathered in shave cream!

I was hurrying to watch “7.30” and here I was lathering for a shave, just as I had that morning and every other day of my adult life. A “senior’s moment”, you say? Oh, if only… The truth is, it’s been happening for all the years I’ve been writing those 29 books (so far). It’s an occupational disease. 

It comes on gradually. For the first 20,000 words you’re happily raising a literary trot until you’re cantering down a well-defined track. You have friends over for lunch, catch a play at the Rep… but then, without willing it, you fall into a routine. 

It’s fairly sloppy to begin. After a boiled egg and the ABC news feed, the mornings are for writing. Around midday there’s a stroll and in summer maybe a swim. Afternoons are editing time, maybe organising research for the next day’s writing, but then a break to watch that last quarter again when your team beat Collingwood. 

Feeling pretty good, you tell the Beloved you’ll make dinner, and afterwards you negotiate over her “Antiques Roadshow” or an SBS World Movie, or maybe both. After all, working and sleeping hours are really yours to decide; it’s one of the rare benefits of the game.

But then the book starts to take control. You rise earlier; shower, shave; and breakfast is now toast and coffee – and you start timing your preparation. You begin writing at 8.30 exactly with the ideas that arrived when you woke. The fingers are flying over the keys and, at 11 sharp, it’s tools down – exercise time – so off on the walk up a certain hill. 

A break for lunch but at 1.30 precisely you’re back at the computer and after a quick edit you’re plunging into the story as your hero grapples with his next mighty challenge till you hear: “Your turn tonight, dear!” (Oh no.)

You invent a wise old saw: “A meal should take no longer to prepare than to eat” and for the next 20 minutes you’re juggling a frypan, microwave and stove-top in a blur of flying limbs. 

Then comes the evening viewing, but your mind now has a mind of its own and it’s back with your hero struggling through the jungles of head-hunter infested Dutch New Guinea in 1943 until bed and a harmless melatonin to “ravel up that sleave of care”. Briefly… 

By now it’s 80,000 words and you’re at full gallop. Beloved’s lady friends tiptoe past the writing room and share their mutual hilarity three closed doors away. 

The days lose their identity, their passing goes unnoticed, sleeping becomes an optional extra, the routine is rigid as ironbark… until one day you look up at the magic mirror to a clown face covered in shaving lather. 

“Damn it,” you say. “This is crazy. I’ll walk away. I’ll be a real person again.” But then, as the lather disappears behind the blade, that handsome devil whispers: “Wait. Writing is not what you do, it’s what you are.”

“Nonsense,” you cry. “There’s too many books in the world already.”

“Maybe so…but isn’t yours just the best work you’ve ever done?”

“Well…”

“You need a little break. Um, I know… Why not just write about it… just a sip, a little ‘Gadfly’ perhaps?” 

robert@robertmacklin.com