Technology offers great communication tools. Social media helps make connections. And, heart to heart conversations take place face to face and not over email, Whatsup, Facebook or Twitter. Don't be deceived.

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:-We become the hero or heroine. We are the ones who thwart evil. We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family. We cry when we lose a good friend.

And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn__ with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn__ with a friend turned foe, it isn__ with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn__ with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn__ with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn__ with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn__ with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn__ with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn__ with your ill fate and it isn__ with that superior being above you. Your battle, your fight isn__ against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day.

Don__ we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be_ doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.

The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.