It's about time we heard from our guest blogger Henry Feltham, so luckily, here he is. Henry is holed up in deepest darkest Dunedin, trapped in a virtual world, wondering if he needs to leave it in order to get rid of the lump in his gut. Intrigued? Then continue, dear reader …

A long time ago I went to the launch of a book by Ingrid Horrocks, called Travels with Augusta. It was held at Unity Books, where she used to work. She stood there, slightly to the right of the counter and talked about the way she had written her book, which traced her journey guided by a great-great-aunt's memoirs. The story of her travels through the same region. A lovely idea, that made for a lovely book. What sticks with me, though, is something else, something random: the image of Ingrid pronouncing – as though forever settling some long-standing argument – that it is impossible to write while working full-time. Her resignation from Unity was apparently prerequisite to her standing there, once more, with her book in her hand.

I have little or no control over the facts and fragments my brain hugs to its bosom. Facts sometimes gain an utterly irrational precedence – I remember the number of descendents a single pair of rats can have at the end of 12 months (as many as 15,000), or that Georgia O'Keefe died a few days before her 100th birthday, or that potassium is an important chemical in synaptic memory function. These are not important facts. They're just stuck in my head. Likewise, people say things that linger in my mind far beyond their import or reason – for the longest time I believed I could only write three hours a day, because Roald Dahl (pictured) said three was his limit. I'm not sure I even have this right, but that's not the point, is it?

Likewise, Ingrid Horrocks has a lot to answer for.
Is this true? Is it possible to both work and write?

I'm currently tethered to a rock in the shape of a computer game. I write screenplays for a game so realistic that video footage blends seamlessly with the digital environments. It's a good job, and in some senses feels more relevant than the prose I still long to produce. Because long I do, and promise myself I wil return to the page. Sometimes I even spend spare hours arranging notes, jotting and plotting. But then I remember Ingrid's words and think: It's impossible. Don't overreach yourself.
There is, though, a second thought in competition with Ingrid's.

She is not alone in there.

Other little things mutter in dark corners about self-deception, excuses, denial (before moving on to darker, weirder things that I will not put down here). One of them is accompanied by an image, a lambent thing, flickering in a time before electric light. I think it might be DaVinci, or else Hogarth, labouring over a nighttime desk with a reflector strapped to his brow, the better to concentrate on the sketches before him. I think about the quantity of work produced by these men, Renaissance and otherwise. I remember that DaVinci slept something like four hours a night, and then find myself wondering whether I couldn't arrange my days like that.

Nagging, then, at the hem of my certainty is this – a sense that I'm not pushing hard enough, that I could spend the hours between, say, 7.00 and 10.00 writing a novel that is all but ready to be begun.
And then things get slippery.

I think of Lawrence Fearnly, or George Saunders, and remember that writing doesn't pay. It feels that there is no other way, beyond the miracle of patronage or residency, to produce a first novel than to contrive for moments of dedication to erupt in these spaces between work and sleep.

One final transformation occurs – a balancing between the prolific and the massive – all of it going toward the question: what kind of writer am I? (… I know I am straying into the mawkish territory of blogs-as-therapy, but I am past resistance here …)

I have had spates of productivity: when I first decided to throw myself fiercely at the short-story form, I wrote perhaps a draft every ten days. Then, as quality slowly took hold I slowed, and like many first time writers fell into the trap of endlessly editing existing work. Then I won a competition, tossed the stories in, and began a novel. It was derailed by necessity, by the need for stability, and the need to eat. As a result, I write computer games and think about something Ingrid Horrocks said to a crowd of people almost five years ago.

This whole issue can be defused by answering that one simple question: What kind of a writer am I?

If I am the kind who labours at a work for years, sculpting something until they are finally so sick of its sight they birth it into the world, then perhaps I have one, or three, novels in me. (Currently, I feel I have two.) This kind of writer can happily bide their time, constructing their great edifice section by section as time allows. A clock is somewhere ticking, but the sound passes in and out of hearing, like houses in the flightpath of airports.

Generally, I sleep soundly.
And if not?
I do not know.

Sometimes the urge to return to the page is so strong, it becomes physical, a lump in my gut which I know is my novel – I can laugh at my own histrionics, or lapse into metaphors of pregnancy, but it's there, all the same …

I should not confuse this somatic thing with this other kind of writer, the kind who composes in a steady current, a Maupassant or James, catering their words to the latest eddies.

I don't think gestation is compatible with that sort of talent.

So I have answered my question.

My second question.