#18 I should not move to remote islands to write novels

Inside every reporter, journalist and travel writer is a budding novelist.

Wilson: your only friend while you write that illusive novel

I travel a lot.

But even when the anchor of domestic normality grounds me and I decide to settle down, I usually end up moving somewhere remote.

One of my bright ideas was to buy a house on a tiny island off the coast of Queensland.

Sound idyllic?

I thought so.

Not.

Replace the white sand with mangroves and mud and fill the ocean with Bull Sharks and Great Whites and the occasional Tiger Shark. 

I lived there for a full year, in isolation, writing my travel diaries.

It should have been ideal.

I should have written that bestseller.

What actually happened was I bought a lot of crap off the internet, spent hours rubbing calamine lotion into the countless sand fly and mosquito bites and extracting ticks from my unmentionables.

Power cuts and burst sewer mains kept me distracted too.

Finally, my mother sent me a present: a Wilson ball to jolt me out of my self-imposed exile and remind me that my only human contact was with a piece of spherical sporting equipment.