Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.

It was not uncommon for the children to be told they were being treated this way because it was their bad karma and they must have hurt a child in a past life.

I decided to write about the myths of divorce.

My inner critic who had begun piping up about how hopeless I was and how I didn’t know to write.

My block was due to two overlapping factors: laziness and lack of discipline.

In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I’d give up after a few minutes. I’d find other things to do: Anything but writing.

In the early 1930s, flying from England to Australia was the longest flight in the world. It was considered extremely dangerous and hazardous, pushing pilots to the limits of mechanical skills and human endurance. Aviation was young.

If you really want to write, then shut yourself in a room, close the door, and WRITE. If you don’t want to write, do something else. It’s as simple as that.

For a long period in my life – it lasted about 10 years – I had writer’s block.

I was a new devotee of Eastern mysticism and even though I did not join that particular group, I could well have done. They seemed a bit extreme but I regarded myself as not quite ready.

Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world.

A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity.

I deleted all the games from my computer. I spent days trawling the Internet. I started slowly.

Reading Stephen King’s book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.

Research on child abuse suggests that religious beliefs can foster, encourage, and justify the abuse of children. When contempt for sex underlies teachings, this creates a breeding ground for abuse.

My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer’s block, as if it was some kind of illness.