The bills were mounting up when an email slid quietly into my inbox: a mutual friend had given my name to a publisher. Was I interested in ghostwriting a memoir? The book’s subject was a community arts worker. The name rang a bell.

At the time I was writing my first novel while scraping by as a freelance journo and a research assistant. My credit card was maxed out. A concentrated chunk of work, with a decent pay cheque, held practical appeal. The catch (or so I thought) was that I’d have just 11 weeks to write the memoir while working my day job. Full of rash optimism, and keen to explore a possible sideline to support my fiction-writing habit, I said yes. ‘The timeline’s tight,’ warned the publisher. ‘I’m pretty organised,’ I replied breezily. ‘If we stick to a schedule we’ll be fine.’