“Middle of the night fear hits me every now and again.”

You claim on your website that 'Coma Songs' isn't autobiographical. Is this really true or are you fibbing a little to distance yourself from the subject matter?

Astonishingly few of the poems in Coma Songs are autobiographical so I actually didn’t do those [often disgusting, hopefully comic] things in some of the poems. Sometimes at the end of a performance a few people give me quizzing, accusing looks, and you know they’re thinking, ’Dirty bastard’.

What is much more likely, ask any writer, is that clips of experience, bits of me, the hair in the plughole and the toe clippings in the bathroom, get into my poems. I hope that some of the better ones have a more universal quality than washing dirty laundry in public. But the actual autobiographical, ‘Thinking of Gary Lineker’ for example are few and far between. Quite a few poems come from stories that folk have told me and I’ve wanted to re-tell; so in 'Drawn on My Body', the female narrator is certainly not me. Writers play with the truth to tell a truth.

What's your typical creative routine?

I try to be at the computer at 8am on days when I’m at home. I go on Facebook, Twitter a bit and generally get myself warmed up before I start writing. I work for a few hours, have coffee and work until about 12.30, have lunch and then take the dog out at about 3pm. After that I have no creative energy left, so I might do admin [invoicing, preparing workshops etc] until it’s time to cook supper and go to the gym.

You mentioned something called the '3am fear' once- what is it and how do you defeat it?

Middle of the night fear hits me every now and again. It’s part of the life on any free-lancer or creative person. It runs on the completely circular lines of, ’I’m really shit. I’m so shit. I’m more shit than anyone. I must talk to my accountant re my tax situation. No-one will offer me work again because I’m really shit. I’m so shit. I’m more shit than anyone.’ From long experience I’ve discovered the only way to deal with it is to get up and have a cup of tea, read a book or the newspaper. It’s always gone in the morning. I look in the bathroom mirror and I’m my usual self again, but with more bags under my eyes. But if you live my kind of life you are always going to be a bit haunted; you are haunted by friends’ success, publishers’ rejections and extremely young people landing huge publishing deals. You are also haunted about whether you will ever write anything really good. This is not the time to read TS Eliot or Carol Ann Duffy. Being haunted may not be comfortable but it’s certainly character building.

Has the emergence of technology provided any particular advantages or disadvantages for you as a writer?

New technology and social networking are wonderful timewasters for folk like me [who want to put off working], but it’s also given me a presence and an immediacy which I couldn’t have achieved before my web-site, Facebook, endless Twittering et al, so quite honestly it’s part of the terrain that you have to conquer in the world I inhabit, just as you have to learn how to perform your work in public, and take risks in your actual writing.

-You can read more about James Nash on his website: http://www.jamesnash.co.uk/
- ‘Coma Songs’ is available here: http://www.jamesnash.co.uk/shop/coma-songs.html