Robert Rotenberg is a criminal lawyer, former magazine publisher, and the author the bestselling novel Old City Hall, which was published in 2009. Rotenberg, whose new novel is called The Guilty Plea, will be guest editing The Afterword this week.

People always ask me if my characters are based on real people. Of course I say they aren’t. Then they ask if any parts of the novels are autobiographical. I deny it.

But I will concede there’s one thing in my books that parrots my real life as a criminal lawyer, which is the way I portray the day-to-day pressure the job imposes. In my first novel,Old City Hall, there’s a scene when Nancy Parish, the defence counsel, scurries back to work after a ruthlessly busy day in court.

Nancy Parish rushed into her office and threw her coat onto one of the two client chairs facing her desk. Without breaking stride, she sank into the chair behind her desk, tossed her briefcase onto the floor, and with one hand tapped her phone to call her voice mail while with the other she flicked on her computer and opened her e-mail. “You have eighteen new messages,” her voice mail told her. She’d received thirty-two new e-mails. “Would you all just fucking leave me alone, she muttered as she unhitched her cell phone and put it in its charger on the desk.

In a nutshell, that was my life for almost two decades as a full-time criminal lawyer. But two years ago, once Old City Hall was published and I was on deadline for my second book, things started to change. I was still practicing, (and still do), but not at the frenetic pace I’d kept up for so long.

People in the publishing biz had warned me about the “writer’s sophomore jinx.” How difficult Book Two could be. It makes sense. I spent ten years writing what I call Book X – my first novel that is locked safely in a drawer. Old City Hall took seven. To suddenly turn around my new book, The Guilty Plea, in a year was a bigger challenge than I realized. After about eight months I hit the wall, and my editor, Sarah Crichton, gave me the best advice.

“Stop writing,” she said. “Take some time, and think.”

For someone who has spent his life on deadline, first as a magazine editor, then a full-time criminal lawyer/parent of three children/and secret novelist on the side, slowing down was not in my vocabulary. It meant I had to put away the endless to-do list. Give myself permission to spend my time doing what for all the world looked like what? A waste of time? Doing nothing?

That was two winters ago. I shoveled snow. I built a skating rink in the backyard. I walked and walked and walked through the city. I rode the subway. Twice I took the train up to Cobalt, Ontario and walked some more. Talking to myself, thinking to myself, playing over and over again the lives of my characters, the key points in the plot, turns of phrases, bits of conversation, similes that fit.

Agatha Christie once said she got her best ideas doing the dishes. For me, the more boring, repetitive and physical the activity the better.

At last when I started to write, it wasn’t the book I was working on. But short stories about the characters. Or long histories of who they were, where their families came from. New ideas about the plot. Scheming through endless scenarios. I ended up with twenty-five thousand words, about a quarter of a whole novel. And them locked that in the drawer too.

At last spring came and I got back to the novel. There was no magic moment when every piece fit together. But I had the four corners of the puzzle, and the outside border too.

And most of all, I think I’d made the transition to this new job.