Let's start with a confession...

I have blogged, on and off, in various forms, for a number of years. But blogging, it seems, is not something that comes easily to me. As you can imagine, that's pretty frustrating for someone who identifies herself as a writer.

Blogging is a fairly specialist form of writing and, as it's not a form that comes most easily to me, I've let blogs wane over the years.

So why step back into BlogLand if I've already established that this is not a natural home for me?

Because I have writer's block. You could go as far as to say that I am a Failed Writer.

Let me give you some context - I have always wanted to write. As a child I wrote stories for fun, excelled when a class called for some fictionalisation and I hoovered up Story, in all its forms. I pursued my passion for storytelling in all its forms all the way to university, which (I naively planned) would be my stepping stone to becoming a screenwriter and novelist.

I look back on that completely unfashionable, gauche, wide-eyed and optimistic university student fondly, as I can hardly blame her for having no idea. She wrote hard, honed her craft and thought that she was doing everything right because, unfortunately, nobody told her that there is actually a business to writing and you have to learn that as thoroughly as you learn how to construct a story.

So when the novel went unpublished, the screenwriting jobs failed to appear and no agent came knocking on her door... Well, I've been avoiding saying it for a pretty long time, but let's stop that now - I gave up.

I pursued other possible career paths - make up artist, teacher, skincare, marketing... And what I always come back to is the driving need to make a story out of words on a page.

Only now, what I am actually coming back to - is writer's block. The great brick wall between me and the page and my ability to fill it with the words that used to come screaming out of my fingers.

I have nursed this suffocation of self-expression for far too long and now the only way out of it is to write my way through it.

Blogging seemed a good place to start, so I hope you will indulge me.