7. What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I wanted to be an author. Or, as my brother would have said at the time, I wanted to "auth" books.

I love writing but I haven't written fiction for a few years now. I still don't know why that is. I stopped getting joy out of writing stories, and I didn't really know what I wanted to say in a longer form piece. I was good at writing characters but not so good at plot, and that frustrated me. I started this fantasy story with all these excellent characters that I loved, and they gathered together at this meeting place and then -

Nothing. I couldn't work out what they ought to do. There wasn't anything they needed to discover or fight for that seemed important. So they are still stranded at that semi-circular village on the edge of a forest, waiting for me to come back to them.

Mum, every so often, looks wistful and says, "I'd just love for you to write a book." I would love that too, but for some reason the creative energy I have at the moment doesn't extend to stories. I'm glad I still blog, and writing here daily has been a great reminder that words come pretty easily to me, when they don't to everyone.

But as I say to people when they ask me about it, at least you can only improve as a writer as you learn more about life. It's not like I was trying to be a ballet dancer and I've missed my peak years. I'll get back to it. One day.