So I have spent most of my adult life believing I needed to lock my creative - and to some extent my sexual - life locked away. My most creative times were working in a rebel, underground collective (story not to be told, even here) and later when I was working in Glasgow, far from home.

But all my life I had wanted to write fiction. When I had some redundancy money and had broken up with my destructive girlfriend I bought a fsecond-floor flat to live and write in. After a few months I realised it felt like a cupboard - narrow corridors, lots of doors, small room with too much of my stuff in. I felt like a closet writer.

I remember reaching the end of writng my first novel. No one but me had read a word. I hardly mentioned the writing process to my friends. If I died tomorrow, I thought melodramatically, would anyone think to check my computer and find my work of genius?

I rushed the creative process, cut myself off from the world too much - I've almost forgotten the novel, now. It was never published.

Since then I've kept on writing and moved to a house. But it still feels a bit cupboard like. Not it's size so much as my lifestyle, the fact that few people come round to see me here... To be honest, I really don't understand this cupboard feeling. Perhaps it's because, I see my mother every week, talk to her evey day. She wants to know everything about my life, and I tell her very little. ("What do you mean, darling, when you say the book is about a girl who pretends to be a prostitute? And am I in it?" I don't think so.)

Anyway here is a slightly feelgood, Hollywoodish ending. Because this time round, writing the book hasn't felt so lonely, isolating - cupboard-like. I'm not a closet writer any more. I'm writing an instantly published blog.

What's more I can tell you as little or as much as I like - about my novel writing or anything else. Sympathetic, flesh-friends always asked too many questions. They've all got a bit tired of me saying, year after year, "Actually, it's going rather well. I should finish in two months." But you lot are all new to me and I feel i can tell you anything, however perverse. As a result, it's been easier to keep on writing, and not rush at the end,

So thanks to the blogosphere, i think the cupboard walls are falling down