Ernest Hemmingway apparently said, ‘The first draft of everything is shit.’ This has always been a source of consolation to me. It and the phrase ‘Perfection is the enemy of completion’, have been the strongest motivators for getting me to write.

I’m going to go right ahead and add a bit to Hemingway’s advice: the second draft of everything is also shit. But – probably less shit.

To test the theory, I’ve uploaded a fairly long short story I wrote recently. Flying High was written about the apocalypse. If you have a spare twenty minutes, please feel free to read it and let me know what you thought – good or bad. It’s fun, I think, and dark. There are notes in there on it also.

I don’t have time to read that long short story – do you have a short short story I could sample?

It just so happens I do. Flash fiction is a short short story, usually less than 1,000 words. The Bath Flash Fiction competition which I’m hoping to enter (deadline 16^th Feb) is looking for a 300-word story on any theme. This is surprisingly hard. I’ve written two and am going to submit one of them. The other is called Rules of Engagement – I hope you enjoy it! (Edit: I had a different story up here, but I’ve changed it for this one)

‘People actually are reading this stuff!’

I had a quick look at the analytics (again thanks in large part to my brother in law, who is a tech – and life – genius; check out his tech site, Sequential Networks) and was blown away by how many people clicked on here. Shout out to the 106 readers from the Russian Federation. Even more so by all the lovely messages people left me on Facebook and Instagram. Sincerely, thank you!

The Writing Club

Even cooler, the Writing Club now has four members; which is exactly three members more than I really ever expected it to have. They’ve given me permission to dox them, so do please check out Francis McCaughan, Hazel O’Rourke and Niamh Campbell. If you’d like to join, send me a PM on Instagram or drop me an email.

Thanks again for reading!