Flexible Working

When I first planned my move to London in 2019, it never occurred to me I might be able to work part-time.

I was fortunate that the job offer I received happened to be for an institution that pays well for the sector, so even though the contract was for 4 days per week, the salary still represented a significant increase from what I’d previously earned working full-time hours in Yorkshire.

It’s probably no surprise to learn that I loved it. Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely enjoy my day job (another reason I feel fortunate), and my team are a delightful bunch of supportive and friendly people. Also, the university I work for did a stellar job of handling the covid situation, in my opinion. They were supportive of working from home even before a formal lockdown came into play. Afterwards, they’ve been flexible about trialling hybrid work patterns. Overall, I’ve felt consistently safe in my working life, and I’m glad I was employed here when all of that happened.

Still. I do not dream of labour, as the youths correctly say, and to be clear, I have no further ambitions when it comes to my professional life. I feel like I’ve achieved what I wanted to in day-job terms: I’m paid a good salary, I get a strong sense of reward from my work and I feel like I’m good at what I do. I don’t want a promotion. Honestly, the only promotion I could reasonably apply for would be if my boss left, and a) I don’t want him to leave because he’s a great boss and b) I don’t want his job. Too many spreadsheets.

I would now be happy to stay in this job for the next five, ten, or twenty years.

BUT - that's not to say I’m not ambitious, of course. It’s just that… I’m ambitious for things outside of my day job. Literary ambitions. That is: I wanna write more books and one day, get some of those books published.

I know, shocker, right?

The thing is, it was only after I accepted this 4-days-per-week job that it felt like there was a possibility of my writing ambitions coming to anything.

In some ways, I hate banging on about my past, because it feels a bit self-indulgent, and yet here we are. Because, I do think it’s relevant that for a long time, I didn’t have the brain space to write. It was too taken up with worrying about money, and how to improve my abilities at my day jobs so I could apply for better day jobs, and very often I was working significantly in excess of full-time hours so I was too tired to write.

I did a Creative Writing MA during this, part-time, and that helped - but only until two author alumni did a talk for us in which both of them admitted they wrote their novels during maternity leave. I do not want children, and at the time I did not have a supportive partner/spouse. It felt like proof that I was trying to do the impossible.

So moving to London, and taking this new job, was a revelation. For the first time in recent memory, I have enough money coming in that I don’t have to stress too much. That’s not to say the cost of living crisis isn’t niggling at me, because it is, but I’m still better off than I have been for a long time. There are no bailiffs chasing me. No outstanding bills. Some debt, but not like, loads.

And, crucially, I also had time. I wrote. I cleaned my flat more often. I continued to write, and built a community of writers and…

That’s how I ended up writing two whole manuscripts and two partial ones. One of these became All Hell, a book I’d been trying to write on and off since I was sixteen. A book that means so much to me - and ended up getting shortlisted for a prize, which is so cool I sometimes have to remind myself it’s actually real.

But old habits die hard.

And last year, my boss asked if I’d like to go full-time. We had some extra funding, we didn’t want to lose it, and the best way to use it was for me to go up a day.

Almost as soon as I’d agreed to it, I regretted it. Sure, the money’s been nice, especially because my partner and I had to move to a new flat and in London, that’s a particularly expensive thing to do.

But I haven’t written nearly as much this year. I’m tired, all the time. I’m struggling to believe in my new story as much as I need to, because some nights I can’t focus on the plot or the characters. Oh, and my flat’s a mess.

So, I’ve told my boss I want to go back to 4 days. He’s agreed, and as of 1st February, that’s what I’ll be doing.

I know some people don’t have the luxury of this choice. I know some of those people manage to write novels while juggling multiple jobs, or caring for family and friends, or doing a range of other things that I don’t have to - so I’m not complaining about my lot. If anything, I’m impressed, because I know I couldn’t do that.

For me, this is the right thing, and that’s why I want to make this promise: I will finish my new book when I am back part-time. I won’t take my good fortune for granted.