Fourteen days on, fourteen days off

I cook on an offshore oil platform in the North Sea, out of Stavanger, on a fourteen-and-fourteen rotation. What that schedule has done for my writing is remove the excuse of inconsistent time. Fourteen days on the platform: cook, sleep, have no social life, write. Fourteen days ashore: live normally, revise. I've drafted three crime novels this way since 2017 and the structure has forced me to be disciplined in a way that writing-advice books describe and that I only achieved by accident through shift work. The novels are not set offshore, though the first one was and I scrapped it after two drafts because the setting was too isolated. The ones I'm working on now are set in Stavanger, in the city I come home to, which has its own relationship to the oil industry and its own particular social texture. I read mostly Scandinavian crime, which is an obvious influence and a competitive field, and I've been trying to write against the genre's tendency toward the bleak. My protagonist is not suffering. She is competent and moderately happy and she solves things through professional skill rather than personal trauma. I'm aware this is contrarian for Nordic crime. I think it's more interesting.