Stop making excuses, you have got time

Stop making excuses, you have got time

Ever since I was a boy, I’ve dreamed of being a novelist. I ground my parents down until they bought me an electric typewriter when I was about 11 years old so I could write a rip off Hardy Boys adventure yarn on it. Utter rubbish, I’m sure, and luckily no copies survive to tell the tale.

When I was about 15, I convinced my mother to buy me one of those writing courses that were always advertised in the newspaper in the late 1980s. It was a distance lear...