So...more haphazard writing from me, as I try to engage some special force that gets me making something mind bogglingly brilliant. But of course I'm writing about writing, or writing about problems rather than writing about something that actually interests me or that I think will be commercial or brilliant or actually art.

And of course what you focus on is what stays with you. The imagination is a powerful force: when I think about failure I fail, and when I think about success I succeed. Dwelling on the irritating limbo of neither here nor there means staying in that limbo.

But it's true that one of my constant problems throughout life has been thinking too much, and procrastinating. Fact is, it all feels like such an uphill struggle to reach that place where I think I deserve to say I feel good about myself. For all I've learned about self respect and self discipline, self love and all of it, I know I get stuck, or have got stuck in this irritating place of not liking what I do or who I am. I know that, even now, I want to have already done things that are exciting, brilliant, or worthy of fame and fortune.

I was out running this morning, and I became aware of the monumental task ahead of me of becoming hugely successful, rich and famous, and powerful beyond all belief. I am aware of the decision I made when I was about 15, sitting at my desk at school just as I awoke once more from dozing in some kind of adolescent depression. I can remember really wanting to concentrate on my work, but suddenly finding myself asleep, there at my desk, and wondering how it had happened.

And I made that decision there and then to "show them all" that I was capable.

And now, it seems, I'm nearly 52 and wondering what happened, and why I've been putting that moment of "told you so" off for so long. And then of course there's the part of me that says "I can't do it after all" and that I just might be useless and not the brilliant mind I'd been telling myself I was deep down.

How can anyone succeed at The Arts when they're constantly being chased by ancient demons? When some inner 14 year old - himself the victim of impossible parental and peer group pressure - is demanding something so unreasonable from him?

I don't feel nurtured, and that's a fact. I didn't when I was 14 and trying to do well at school. I don't now. I didn't feel supported, and I didn't feel loved and accepted then. Neither do I now. And perhaps the reason I haven't really got my act togther to write the great screenplay or make the great novel or whatever other task I've set for my creative self is because I need something that it - the art, or the making of it - just doesn't give me.

Art has to be the product of something put in. Just as one can't make a casserole without ingredients, I feel short of the ingredients I need to make my great art. I can't even say for sure what the ingredients are - are they motivation, joy, confidence or some other thing? Or some degree of bravado or guts or....

So there we are.

But what IS so is that I wrote this. And that means something, doesn't it?

I know I must write, though, to reach those places where the real stuff comes from.