So Best Beloveds – here I am outside at the back of the cabin in New York State with – I kid you not – a crimson dragonfly perched attractively on the top right-hand corner of my laptop. I am wearing my glasses which means the surrounding trees are now so in focus that they're mildly trippy (the dragonfly, at this point is getting it on with another dragonfly ... ah, nature ... ) and much is well with my world. Over the last few months I was aware – especially when I caught sight of myself in shop windows and other cruelly reflective surfaces – that I was slightly stressed. I am now unstressed to the extent that I realise my spine was actually making arrangements to slip away in the night if I cranked it up any nearer to playing high C every time I coughed. It is, apparently – and who could have guessed? – not quite possible to pinball around the UK and Europe while writing slivers of journalism and essays and doing spots of teaching and standup and a touring show and bits of radio and fragments of telly and to write a large and complicated novel and to worry without becoming poorly as a result. I apologise to my workforce – I am a bad self-employer.

And I am trying to make amends. Crossing to America by boat has begun to ease the condition my condition is in. I'm aware that some people were incredulous about this travel option and I'm aware that yet others thought I was simply making an effort towards a niftily upmarket lifestyle choice. If it is a lifestyle choice, then my lifestyle is based on fear – not a desire to join large Germans and orange Brummies on Deck 3 for a duty-free perfume sale. I fear flying and yet I must travel; I have solved my problem as best I can and am not pretending to be classy. Plus – for some reason, being rocked to sleep by a potentially fatal ocean while strangers take tutorials in napkin folding does me no end of good and there are few things better than sitting on deck – in a deck chair – and chiselling at your novel while blokes in uniforms bring you bouillon. You did not know you wanted bouillon, you are not an habitual bouillon-drinker and yet, "Yes, thank you – oh, and crackers. Why not? Thank you again. Can you arrange for the rest of my life to be like this, but not cost me the price of a healthy kidney per week? Or just throw me overboard now. My spine would bless you for it." So the novel and I spent a dandy six nights traversing the Atlantic, battering away at the pages and looking out for porpoises. There were rumours of a gannet, but as some of you will know, I have a history with gannets and tried to avoid it.

I am now – in the nicest possible sense – being patronised. A very pleasant individual has offered me – not for the first time – accommodation and food and time in a wooden house with wooden furnishings in a wood. It's a bit of a wood-themed experience. Writers may not get the freebies and refreshingly frank sexual encounters offered to sportspersons, actors, musicians and politicians, but we do get accommodation. For some reason charities, acquaintances, institutions and collectors of curiosities are often just falling over themselves to give us rooms that aren't our own. So here I am. I sit and write uninterruptedly during the weeks and at the weekends I appear at the big house, get proper dinners, say hello and meet people who might want to meet a novelist.

There are many things which are good about my current circumstances. A) I am in a radically different time zone and location from many people who might otherwise want me to write things for them or do things for them. B) If you don't have to cook, clean, shop, or attend to your usual life, you will find you have enormous amounts of time to both potter and type. (Suddenly the huge volumes, complicated love lives and ornate hobbies of the servant-wielding authors of bygone ages become explicable, if not less impressive.) C) I am surrounded by scampering animals, alien birds, wiffling greenery, pleasant walks and many of the things which delight my gnarled and weary heart.

Of course, what with me being me, there are also a few drawbacks. A) My extremely palatable surroundings, flexible hours and general lack of any restraints mean that I pass my eccentricity event horizon about three hours after I arrive here. And then I spend hours and hours with people who don't exist, trying to scribble round them. My dress sense (what there was of it) evaporates, my sleeping, eating, strolling, bathing and typing happen at increasingly random points. (Which, when they appear to check on me, can be highly alarming for those people we will have to refer to as "the staff" – although obviously they are not my staff.) I talk to the animals. I talk to the people who don't exist. I talk to the staff. "Hello. Yes. Does this work, I don't seem to be able to ... Oh. And when I do that ... Oh, I shouldn't do that, then. And what day is it? Oh, meatballs. Great. Sorry for eating with my hands, I've lost the fork again. Why are you crying? Well, I'd be wearing more if I hadn't been in the bath. Sorrysorrysorry ... " I celebrated page 250 with a small alfresco dance involving Mr Hendrix on the extremely effective stereo. I am basically now in a feral condition. B) Even when I'm not in an animal state I don't really take well to meeting people and if I am being presented exactly and precisely as a novelist in unknown company then I tend to come apart like a chocolate hammock. I have, during previous stays, demolished a number of dinner services and sets of glasses with my generally nervous flailings and have not – I feel – given anyone an even passable impression of writers as a species. C) This is a cabin in the woods. It is, indeed, surrounded by nature. And as soon as the sun goes down nature spends every moment of darkness scrabbling, thumping, tramping, breathing, creaking and generally impersonating every possible type of assassin. I have never packed a flimsy negligee, high heels and a broken torch for my stays here and so have been unable to "just go outside and check on that funny noise" and therefore I have not been murdered even slightly. I have a functional torch, I have boots, I have my grandpa's patented self-defence moves, I am surrounded (appropriately) by a large fence. Nevertheless, it has taken me a number of stays here to acclimatise to the bloody racket caused by peaceful countryside.

But mainly, Best Beloveds, I am writing. I sleep soundly because I am deaf with exhaustion and then I get up and write again and then I write some more and this is lovely. This is what I do, what I always wanted to do. I'm lucky to be here. Patronage isn't in any way a replacement for proper arts funding. I'm a UK citizen, very temporarily in the US – a land of private funding, of savage poverty and savage wealth – enjoying the effect of an individual will. In the UK the government we pay for doesn't want to prevent us from dying or help us to lead even tolerable lives, so you know that arts funding's a goner. I repeat, I am lucky. Currently lucky and generally lucky. I am able to do something I love and sometimes the circumstances in which I do it are more than pleasant. I would love it anyway, should always remember to love it, and at the moment I have the energy to do so. I wish you all your own versions of the same opportunity – the space to express what you need to express. Onwards.