Time, Mr. Jagger, is not always on my side. She is, in fact, a fickle friend who, like rainfall or banking institutions, gives when you don’t need and takes back when you don’t have. She reaches out to you during those long, glorious days of childhood, when the chasm between now and whenever is measureable only in sleeps, cursing your young mind with the weight of boredom.

Then suddenly, you’re a grown-up and Time turns again. It’s a cliché – but then so is every truth repeated often enough – that life gathers speed as the years go on. Whether or not that wiry guy with the placard and the soapbox is right and the government really is stealing minutes off our weekends remains to be seen, but it’s undeniable that as we reach adulthood the days start to gallop and clock hands produce motion blur.

And it’s a sad fact but the first things to be shunted from our ever-filling schedules are those that aren’t paying the mortgage or saving the family from less than clean living, those that can be left for another day, those that aren’t quite reality yet: the dreams.

If you’re lucky, you manage to do a little of what you love in your spare time. But that’s what the time is: spare. And the minute something more important comes along, something urgent or that involves anyone higher up the list than yourself (i.e. everyone), how do you make up the shortfall? Pinch a little back from the spares. Suddenly, there’s no space left to do that one thing you protected for yourself because once those hours melt into the main stock pot, they’re never coming loose again.

In my early twenties, I wrote a book. I was employed at the time in a job that didn’t really require much mental gymnastics so, when I wasn’t tea-drinking with co-workers, I was planning and plotting my first novel. Back then, I wasn’t exactly a social animal so my nights were spent scribbling down what my days had devised, and within a year or so, I’d written The End. The story surprisingly received quite positive feedback and I was lucky enough to work for a while with a top authors’ agent, revising the typescript for clarity and, at times, sense – in hindsight, maybe aliens didn’t quite fit in a crime fiction piece – but Time, she wore on, and the market changed, and I just wasn’t skilled enough to change with it.

Now, with the benefit of more practice and renewed enthusiasm, I want nothing more than to write another. But there’s that callous mistress, Time, again, withdrawing her hand just when I need to hold it most. Like every other adult, I have responsibilities, both joyful and tedious, gnawing at my reserves. Family, work, baking: you know, the important stuff that pushes everything else into the blurring background.

But I’ve decided, this time around, not to let Time set the pace. Instead, I’ll be playing the short game, stealing back the advantage – and those precious minutes – before she has thought to catch up. In short, I’ll be attempting to write this book in a week.

Obviously, I can’t just lay aside an entire seven-day period, hole myself up in a lovely library and take to the writing desk. For one thing, I’m self-employed and there’s no such beast as a paid holiday for freelancers. So the days won’t be whole, the time not consecutive, I’ll simply be using that 24/7 mentality to find out if writing a book in the equivalent of a week is possible or just Fifty Shades of Stupid.

119: that’s the number of hours in a week (168), minus the hours of sleep that a tired writer would need to stay on literary (or just rational) form (49). The scribbling will start on Sunday 14th September and hopefully be completed on the last day of the month with a fully-formed book or a full-blown psychosis.

Who knows, maybe I’ll write something worth reading, maybe Quick-Lit will become a new genre, and maybe I’ll even show Time a thing or two about friendship.

Paula.