A typical writing day with Jenny Hollander

Jenny Hollander’s debut crime fiction, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead, came out earlier this year and we asked her to share with us what a regular writing day looks like for her. Over to you, Jenny!

Ninety-nine percent of my writing is done under the supervision of my dog, Captain. He has a nearly perfect sense of my timings—when I usually start, how long I write for, and when I should be finished—and if I’m having a slow day and don’t finish on time, he’ll paw at me as though to say, Come on, you’re done by now, right?

As he’ll tell you, I usually write between 10am-1pm, right after his walk and right before lunch, because I work American hours and start work between 1 and 2 p.m. I use an alarmingly old MacBook—I think it’s a 2013 model—that they let me keep when I left an old job because, even then, it was too old for them to reuse. When I started writing fiction, I pulled it out of storage and wiped it clean of every app and every file aside from Scrivener (which I use to write) and Word (which I use to send files to my editor). You can barely even use the internet on this thing. It’s impossible to get distracted when it takes ten minutes to check your email, 1998-style.

We don’t have an office (and I hate office chairs), so I write on a big, old, sunken sofa in our living room, with my archaeological MacBook on my lap and Captain at my side. Here’s a photo of what that looks like—you’ll see that I’m also wearing pajamas with Captain’s face on them. Honestly, that probably won’t surprise you at this point.

Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead is out now in hardback, ebook and audio. Order your copy here.