For me, writing has never been easy. Like most writers I know, my life as a storyteller is characterised by rejection. It is a path riddled with uncertainty.

When I was eighteen I studied creative writing at university. My marks were average. In fact, most of my life back then was average. Three days a week I packed shelves in the suburban cocoon of a Franklins supermarket. At night and on weekends I played bass guitar badly in a half-arsed pop-rock band. We had a few monster amps, some Fender Stratocaster guitars and a motley crew of distortion pedals, but little real talent. When I wasn’t being booed off stage I spent my time recovering from hangovers and knocking out whiny and contrived prose with a multitude of grammatical sins. My lecturers marked my writing assignments accordingly.