Twenty years ago, I was on the phone with a school friend. I was reading out something I had typed in blinking green Word Perfect text on my mother’s enormous beige home computer.

“‘His love was not even worth the paper this is printed on’,” I read.

“That’s terrible. Delete it,” the friend said.

After a dab of rewriting, that became my first book, Seahorses. A book deal was cut within six months of that phone conversation and I went from being a 16-year-old style hack who went out all the time, to getting bogged down in the mainstream entertainment industry with my incredibly dark adult novel about child abuse. I have no idea how I came up with it given that in 1994 I was like a cross between Kim Kardashian and a Bratz doll. The title was an in-joke: I promised my friend I would call it that because we wanted to get rich and live together in a Soho yuppie loft full of fish tanks containing seahorses.

I wasn’t even consciously interested in writing fiction, but somehow the seasonal suspension of ordinary business, the uncanny slowing of time, the suburban silence and chilled darkness all fostered my creativity, clarity and focus. The novel arose magically, without any forethought, struggle or doubt. That is what happens when you stop over-thinking and allow your mind to relax in silence. It was a Zen moment which led to tangible worldly gain: the perfect trajectory.

I’ve loved Christmas ever since, and always try to be alone for it – preferably starting the festive season the day after Halloween and finishing on International Women’s Day the following March. I don’t want to see anyone, go anywhere or do anything. I just want to stay in, fairy lights twinkling, and wallow in the sense of stillness and waiting as the year deepens, bottoms out and rounds off. Best of all is that blissful week of strange, thick nothingness between Christmas and new year.

Uninterrupted, alone, a writer can collect and smooth out their ideas, see what new thoughts and ideas bubble up, complete the stubs of half-finished work at leisure and watch pirated box sets of Xena Warrior Princess, Buffy, and The L Word bought from a knock-off DVD market in Beijing – sorry, I mean meditate on emerging intellectual hypotheses. Every writer dreams of carving out space and time to dedicate completely to their work. Last year I used this time to complete my adventure story Esha Ex. The year before, I worked on my forthcoming book about asylum seekers and refugees.

I have learned over the past two decades that Christmas need not be about other people, giving, family or Jesus – it can be about oneself. Still, I know that the overwhelming majority of women do not have this luxury and that Christmas is their busiest time. Some may say I am like a cat lady that does not have a cat: a nearly 40-year-old celibate spinster who lives with her mother, never moved out or grew up, has no responsibilities or expenditures, and sleeps in a single bed in the bedroom she’s had since she was seven. That is true in factual terms, but I prefer to think of myself as a repository of spiritual power which concentrates and sets, like a particularly dense Christmas pudding, at this time of year.

I’m writing this in the same room, in the same house, on the same street that I wrote Seahorses two decades ago, although the novel is long out of print and we changed the carpet to an open-weave hessian. I’ve stacked fairy lights and candles in a glorious fire hazard of inspiring secular spirituality and made a wreath using chicken wire entwined with holly from the garden. Hanging from the centre of the wreath is a little silver doe – for were I a knight, that would be my emblem. This house, this period and this tradition of solitude symbolise a core healing and regeneration without which I would begin the year psychically depleted and professionally wrongfooted.

Maybe that’s pathetic. There’s an alternative take on this whole story, which is that early success somehow damaged me and I am too otherworldly to survive in the harsh adult realm. I do sometimes contemplate returning to writing novels and wonder if I could conjure up the unthinking ease and natural momentum I felt in December 1994. Maybe now’s the perfect time to find out.