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Right. Where was I? Oh yes. Hello. It’s me again, Jane Lovering. Here to give you my tale of woe and words of wisdom. It might turn out to be a tale of wisdom and words of woe, so stay with me.

Now. We’ll skip some miserable years where I went to college and got boring qualifications in boring subjects like Biology and History and Milking Cows (yep, it’s a real qualification and I got it). So, let’s all make that ‘wheeeeeeeep’ fast-forwarding noise that indicates we’ve travelled far, far ahead...all right, you at the back. You can stop now.

Here I am, aged twenty seven. I’m a healthy, hearty specimen, still writing, still eating Eccles cakes, still not published. And I’m about to get a Life. No, literally.

I gave birth to my first son, then a daughter. Then another daughter. Then another son. Then another daughter, then it all got ridiculous and I stopped. I mean, this happened over a period of seven years, not that I had quins or anything, but you know what I mean. And my writing came to a bit of a standstill for a while. It’s tricky, working out plot points and character details whilst playing ‘horsey’ for a two year old, breast feeding the baby, listening to two children read and trying to find the Calamine lotion for a chicken-pox infested four year old. I did, however, manage to win a prize for ‘Best Opening Chapter of a Romantic Novel’. God knows how, romance is a bit thin on the ground when you’ve five children and you only see your other half through a fug of sleep deprivation and nit lotion.

And this brings me to Pet Hate of the Day – people who say that they will write a book ‘when they have time’. Oh, how that makes me chuckle and then chew off my elbows! Time! No-one has time! It has to be clawed from the very maw of the day, seconds wrestled, moments wrangled, chances, err...(‘where’s that thesaurus? Bugger, it was here a minute ago...’) wrenched. Don’t expect sympathy from me – that’s all I’m saying. Well, no, it’s not all I’m saying because I’d like to pontificate a bit more about this...

After my husband and I split up, ( it’s tricky to stay married to someone you only see through a haze of anti-nit chemicals. I‘d got the impression he was taller. With more hair.) I was a single mum of five. Two dogs, four cats, assorted small rodents (some invited, some not, that’s the way it goes when you live in the country), and I still found time to write. I did this by the radical move of Not Watching Television. Ever. OK, so I was out of the loop on Big Brother and I never saw a single episode of Celebrity Sword-Juggling. But I wrote a book.

It was rubbish, obviously. I mean, what sort of book can be written by someone who missed Celebrity Sword-Juggling? But the point is – I did it. And if I can do it – by heck, anybody can! So, in celebration, I did what any aspiring author would do – I got a tattoo with the title of my first-ever completed novel. Just to remind me that I did it once, I could do it again. (As an aside, my first novel was called ‘Psi’. My tattooist, when asked for the letters P.S.I asked me if I knew that spelled ‘Piss’. Great, just what you need, a dyslexic tattoo artist. There’s a book in that, somewhere.)

So. Upshot. If you’re a writer, or you want to be a writer; then write. If you’re a writer who doesn’t write, then you’re not a writer. You’re a talker. Or possibly a TV celebrity who missed out on the sword-juggling audition. Just write. Anything. Notes, poems, lines of dialogue. It’s all writing. Don’t look for excuses, because they are very easy to find; look for plots, for characters, for stories that have to be told.

And if you come back, I’ll tell you more about How I Did It. Except for you at the back, still making that ‘wheeeeeep’ noise. I don’t want to see you again, do you hear?