Alexis Hall has published since 2013 and released four romance novels in 2022 alone, all while holding down a day job the entire time. His schedule runs on a small, repeatable daily minimum rather than dedicated writing hours.

The Direct Answer
He writes around a day job rather than in fixed hours, using a minimum daily word count as the actual mechanism that keeps output moving.
Hall has described a former habit of at least 500 words a day, a target small enough to hit even after a full shift at work.

A Day Job First, Then the Words

Hall has been direct about the order his life runs in. "I have a dayjob and a life to live," he's said, naming time, not motivation or ideas, as the real constraint on how much he writes. There's no publicized block of hours reserved for fiction. The writing gets fit into whatever time is left over once the day job and everything else is accounted for.

500 Words, Come Hell or High Water

For a stretch of his career, Hall held to a specific daily minimum. "I used to have a policy of writing at least five hundred words a day come hell or high water," he's said, describing it as a habit that worked well while he kept it up. He's also been honest that he fell out of the habit during a difficult period and has spoken about trying to rebuild it since, once he noticed how much slower the pages came without it.

Five hundred words is a modest target by design, low enough to hit on a tired evening after work. Hall has framed the underlying philosophy plainly: "It's quite important to see writing as a thing you choose to do, rather than as some kind of spirit of inspiration that comes upon you." For the fuller picture of how that habit fits into his wider process, see the full Alexis Hall writing routine.

What You Can Steal