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Living by the Pen, Not the Clock
For most of his working life, Howard G. Franklin wrote to a deadline. Magazine assignments arrived with due dates stamped on the page, and the novels came with publisher schedules, marketing windows, and the quiet pressure of an editor waiting by the phone. The discipline was real, and it shaped him. But after the last manuscript left his desk, after the final proof was approved and the last interview filed, a different rhythm settled in. The pen kept moving, but the clock stepped aside. Today, a writer with no deadline lives inside a slower weather.
What that looks like is unhurried, ordinary, and almost entirely unwitnessed by anyone but the writer himself. There is no newsroom echo, no marketing team pinging at five. Instead, the day unfolds in pieces that bend around attention rather than the other way around. It is a life that has its own season, its own small rituals, and its own particular kind of temptation. Anyone who has ever tried to write without a net will recognise the territory. Anyone who has only ever written to deadlines may feel a touch of envy, and also a touch of dread.
The Morning Begins Without an Alarm
The first thing to understand about a deadline-free morning is that there is no first thing. Waking happens when the body decides to wake, and the writer lies still for a while, listening. In Sydney, the lorikeets might be shriaking in the fig tree outside the window. In Melbourne, the distant clatter of an early tram along Nicholson Street could be the alarm if it weren't for the blackout curtains. There is no rush toward a particular hour, no coffee timed against a commute. The kettle boils when the kettle boils, and the day can begin with a long shower and a half-read newspaper folded on the kitchen table.
Breakfast, in the Australian manner, is unhurried. Avocado on toasted sourdough for one, with sliced tomato and a sprinkle of flaky salt. A flat white, made properly, with the milk textured just so. Reading happens at the table, not on a screen. A slim journal of new poetry sits beside the bowl of fruit, and a battered copy of something older waits on the arm of the chair. The writer makes notes in the margins, not because a deadline demands them but because a sentence catches at the corner of attention and asks to be remembered.
This is the hour that the working world rarely sees, when the writer is most invisible. There is no desk yet, only the slow assembly of a self that can work. The phone stays face-down. Email waits. The first cup of coffee is a ceremony, not a stimulant, and by the time the second cup is poured there is usually a small, quiet decision made about what the day will actually hold.
Writing as Weather, Not Work
Without a deadline, writing becomes closer to weather than to work. Some days it rains; the sentences pour out and the paragraphs build themselves without supervision. Other days the page stays blank and the only honest answer is to close the notebook and walk out the door. Down at the harbour, or along the Brisbane River path, or out toward the dunes at Byron Bay, the sky is doing its own work instead. The writer learns to read the inner barometer and not to argue with it. Forcing a page is its own kind of failure, and there is no editor to blame it on now.
When the weather is good, the writer may sit for three straight hours and produce two thousand words that feel like nothing. When it turns, he may produce two hundred words that feel like everything. The trade is fair, and it is the trade that every writer without a deadline eventually makes with himself. There is no longer any external measure. The only judge is the page itself, and the page is patient.
This kind of work cannot really be explained to anyone who has never had it. It looks, from the outside, like a man at a desk staring into space. From the inside, it is a slow negotiation between what the writer thinks he wants to say and what the story actually wants to become. It is the part of the life that justifies every other part, and also the part that no schedule can manufacture.
The Long Lunch and the Wider World
By early arvo, the writer's stomach begins to make its own suggestions. Lunch, in this country, is allowed to be a meal in its own right. A simple bowl of pumpkin soup with toasted sourdough. A chicken sandwich with sliced cucumber and mayonnaise on white bread. Or, when the day permits, a long table at a favourite local with a glass of something cold and a friend who understands that the writer may want to talk about anything except the work in progress. Australian friendships, particularly among older writers, have this easy informality. You don't need much of an excuse to share a meal and put the world to rights.
After lunch comes the wandering part. In Carlton, a turn through the stacks at Readings can eat an entire afternoon and leave the writer richer for it. In Glebe, the same can be said of a secondhand shop with a back room full of unsorted Penguins. These are not distractions so much as compost. The writer feeds his own sentences on the sentences of others, on overheard scraps of conversation, on the title of a book he will never actually read. The mind, well-watered, will produce its own harvest later in the week, sometimes in a sentence that surprises even him when it arrives.
An hour of this and the writer may sit on a bench somewhere, watching the harbour traffic or the river light, and scribble a few lines in a pocket notebook. None of it is urgent. All of it matters, in ways that won't be clear for a month or a year. This is the harvest the deadline-driven life never had time for.
Reading, Listening, Remembering
A serious reader is half a writer, and in a deadline-free life the reading hour is sacred. After lunch, after the walk, the writer returns to the chair and opens whatever has been waiting. A new Australian novel. A collection of essays from a publisher he has followed for decades. A long-form piece in a journal he has subscribed to for thirty years and will not give up. Reading is not research for a project now, because there is no project. It is simply the steady intake that keeps the ear honest and the eye awake.
Late afternoon is for listening. A favourite record, the kind that has meant something since boyhood. A cricket broadcast floating up from the kitchen radio, the kind of background music that belongs to this country the way pub chatter belongs to Dublin. Sometimes a phone call with an old friend in another time zone, where the conversation drifts easily from books to children to what is happening in the world. The writer takes notes after these calls, not because he must but because he cannot help himself.
It is during this part of the day that the writer often returns to subjects he cares about deeply and cannot escape. The struggle for civil rights, in particular, never leaves him alone. A recent post on the blog, why civil rights still demands fiction, grew out of exactly this kind of afternoon, and he thinks about how to extend those ideas into a longer piece that may or may not ever find a publisher. The not-finding is no longer a problem. It is the air he breathes now.
Evening Light and the Open Page
Dinner is quiet and simple. Often the writer cooks for one, something that simmers while he reads in the next room. The kitchen fills with the smell of onions and garlic and whatever else the week has supplied. When the pot is ready, he eats at the table with a book propped against the salt cellar and reads the same page three times without minding. This is the evening's own pleasure, and it asks for nothing in return.
After dinner, if the weather is fair and the writer's energy holds, there is one more session at the desk. Not a long one. Forty minutes, sometimes an hour. The evening light in Australia is famous for its gold, and the writer knows that the last hour of useful work is the one that pays back the most. He edits what the morning left behind. He makes a single new note in the journal. He closes the file and saves it under a name that means nothing to anyone but him.
Before sleep, there is often a short walk. Down the street, around the block, through the small park with the jacarandas if the season is right. The dog walkers nod. The possums peer from the branches. The writer breathes the night air and lets the day settle into memory. By the time he turns the key in his own front door, he is already half inside tomorrow's first sentence.
For those who knew Howard G. Franklin during his working years, or for readers who have only just discovered him, his blog remains the best place to follow the wandering life he chose at the end. There you will find pieces on literature, on Ireland, on the long arc of civil rights, and on the small obsessions that keep a writer turning the page. His novel Gideon's Children and his memoir-travelogue An Irish Experience are available through the usual booksellers, and a portion of every sale keeps the archive of his work alive online. Pour a proper cup, open the blog, and step inside.