_{(Want to skip the blog? Click here to read this week’s short short.)}

On the scale of ‘Excuses to stop writing for a while’, I reckon I’m pretty well covered this year. We’ll start with ‘Global pandemic’, move to ‘Had a baby (and one who doesn’t value sleep high on his list of priorities, bless his socks)’ and then on to family loss and – most recently – tooth extraction followed by infected mouth.

So I’ll not beat myself up. You shouldn’t either, you know. A pretty great Google Talk by Kelly McGonigal on will power goes over a lot of the science behind it, with one of the key messages stating ‘Being hard on yourself when you mess up does more harm than good.’ Obviously it would be easy to take this too far – ‘Hey, I messed up again! For the fifth time! Today! But I’ll not worry as that would just make things worse.’ Don’t do that.

 So. Writing. Yes. How’s that going?

All things considered, not the worst. Here is where I’m at project wise.

Follow Me! – Probably my best idea for a novel and the one I’ll push hardest to publish once finished. Currently sitting at about 35% of first draft complete (circa 21.5k words) and maybe 10% overall. Currently taking a short break from it to try and get as much other writing practise in.

Nobody for Breakfast – The mutant story. Started as an idea for a short horror story, turned into a short crime story and is possibly morphing again into a short novel. About 40% through first draft of third version of this (circa 6k words). I’m looking forward to finishing this.

A Fallen World – A fantasy series that will probably only see completion when I’m in my 40s. Too big and hard to write at the minute. First book about 15% complete (circa 22k words).

Black Rain – An audio series I wrote for a failed podcast attempt a few years ago. The script is surprisingly good I feel, given I’ve never really tried to write in that ‘screenplay’ style. About 5% through 4^th draft which I’m going to see if I can submit anywhere. I may not be able to and that’s fine.

Writing for this website – I was having a problem with this. There are a few reasons why I shouldn’t post everything I write to this site (mostly to do with legalities and rights if I ever wanted to publish). That said, I’m under no illusions that I’ll definitely get published and it’s nice to have this site as my own little back catalogue.

But then being able to write a full story every week (or even every other week) is crazy, and I don’t want people just coming to read these short journal updates. SO. Each week I’ll be publishing a bit of Flash Fiction, using prompts that friends will provide. These will always be less than 800 words and I’ll never spend more than about half an hour or an hour on them. It’s a fun challenge to try and make a compelling story, exercise the old creative juices and continue to put out content that isn’t massively daunting.

You can find this week’s edition here, courtesy of my friend Meabh. Her prompt was ‘It sounded strange, almost like the trees were laughing at her.’

One last thing. I checked my stats after updating the website and October 2020 (a month when I did not visit this site) saw more unique visitors to this website than ever before. Wahey! (On further inspection though, the majority of these appear to be bots attempting to access the site. So, I hope you’re enjoying the read bots!)

Thanks for reading.