Excuses, excuses

"My computer crashed." "The dog ate it." We all recognise these old excuses.

It's a well known joke in the industry that, when a writer commits to a Friday deadline, that means it'll be arriving Monday. Or Tuesday. With luck.

But these are, for the most part, professional writers - people already working, with strings of credits and agents and so forth.

New writers are just as prone to excuses: but it's the excuses they tell themselves that are the most damaging.

For example, a new writer might tell themselves they aren't progressing because they didn't go to Oxbridge.

That...