Okay, I’ve been avoiding telling you this for a year, under the excuse that it involves a confidential mentoring thing I did. But the truth is that I’ve really been avoiding it because I cocked up. And a thing happened this week that reminded me of it.

So.

I can’t tell you the project — much as I want to because it was an excellent, excellent project that I was proud to be asked to contribute to, and because a separate mentoring part I did for it went very well. At least, I think it did, I know I had a good time and I believe I was of at least some use.

But I can’t tell you any of that because of this other part, my failure, and I most definitely can’t tell you any names. But since the only one you need to know is mine, I think we’re okay with that.

Previously on mentoring… I was booked for a certain number of hours working with a writer on anything she wanted, anything she was writing. She was part of a much bigger project, I was like an add-on extra, hardly important and certainly hour for hour I wasn’t a large part of her work.

Exactly halfway through the writing, though, I mean exactly to the minute, she told me she didn’t want any writing mentoring. Her writing was good enough, she said.

And that’s where I went wrong. Twice. In very quick succession. I realise that this first one is only my opinion, but in that opinion, her writing isn’t good enough. It’s not bad, or she wouldn’t have earned her place on this project, but there wasn’t any life to it, any verve, and there were specific things I had been going to suggest to her.

I didn’t say that.

Instead, I asked what else she was interested in and unfortunately it turned out to be something that I knew about. Or at least have quite a few years of experience in. So where I should have ended the mentoring, I offered to continue using what I knew. I did tell the project’s organisers, I wasn’t that idiotic, but I should have pulled out, taken the cancellation or reduction in the fee, all of that.

Only, I had been doing this other thing for a long time and I like it. So here was a chance to talk about a topic I enjoy. I’m a man, we can’t resist talking about topics we enjoy. I wanted her version to go as well as mine, for her to have as much fun and at least as much income from it.

And I would have said that the remainder of the sessions went well. There was one overriding issue that this writer kept starting new projects and abandoning them, she would not stick with anything. Except, that is, for one of her ideas. Unfortunately, that idea seemed to me to be necessarily limited, plus it had huge and neon-light-obvious problems ranging from the technical and editorial to practically even legal.

I did point all of those out and also that I thought her other latest idea was more promising, but I don’t think she listened to the legal worry and she positively refused to do anything about the technical side.

So that left editorial, and right or wrong, I thought I was on solid ground here after decades of doing little else.

As I say, the rest of the sessions went well, I thought I was useful, and when it was all over, when I’d been paid and the entire project was done, I checked in with her to see how things were going. That was when she told me that she hadn’t done anything I’d told her, that she wouldn’t do anything I’d said, that my ideas were stupid and that she knew better than me.

Mic drop.

Earlier this week she came back to me. She’s started yet another new project and wants to pick through my contacts list for people to help her.

I know I was wrong to continue the mentoring and you can definitely see I was wrong to check back in with her. But there is something I know I’m right about: when you’ve dropped the mic, you can’t pick it back up again.