On Writing in the Margins: A Record of Stolen Hours

Every Sunday at 10:00 I write live on TikTok, in 25-minute sprints, with Scrappy for company.

This is where Dustling gets written.

The Archive Does Not Announce Itself

People ask sometimes how you write a novel around a full-time job. The assumption, I think, is that there must be a system. A schedule. Five-AM cold plunges and colour-coded notebooks and a word count tracker with a satisfying green grid.

But really, I write everywhere and all the time: on my iPad, my phone or my desktop PC. Scrivener is the app I use most.

Saelynn's story came out of one of the hardest periods of my life. The tuberculosis. The hospital. Losing my dad. Losing my friend. Writing was not a discipline I picked up after that. It was more like something I fell into because the alternative was falling into nothing. So the book has always been written in the margins. I mean that literally.

What Sustains a Slow Draft

I have one real opinion about this, and I will defend it: consistency of presence matters more than consistency of word count.

Every productivity framework will tell you to write every day, even if it is only fifty words. And I understand the logic. Habit is real. Momentum is real. But there is a version of that advice that quietly teaches you to feel like a failure every time life intervenes, and life, when you work full-time and carry grief in your coat pocket, intervenes constantly.

What actually works, at least for me, is keeping the story somewhere accessible in my mind. Not forcing output.

The draft does not care how it was produced. The reader does not receive a graph of your word count. They receive the book.

A Note on Guilt

It will find you. Probably around week three of slower progress, when the manuscript sits at the same number it had ten days ago and everyone on BookTok seems to be announcing their fifth chapter of the week.

Dustling is currently sitting at 65,375 words. The target is 120,000.

But here is what the Archives teach us, if we read them honestly: most things of lasting value were built slowly, by people who had other obligations, in rooms that were not designed for greatness. The fragments survived anyway.

The slow draft is still a draft. The stolen hour still counts.

I am curious about you, reader, specifically. Not in a general way. If you are building something around a full-time life, whether that is a book or a degree or just a small creative practice that matters to you, what does your version of the stolen hour look like? What keeps you returning to the page, or the canvas, or whatever the thing is?

The Archives are, after all, a collective record. Not mine alone.