Friday 22 July 2011

Out of the Wilderness

Okay, so I should come clean and state that I haven't actually been in any wilderness. But it has been over 6 weeks since I blogged here, so you would be forgiven for thinking I had.

Where have I been, you ask? Well, if you follow my other blog at flash365.blogspot.com (and if you don't, why not?! Go and follow it now, and 'like' the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/flash365 while you're at it, too!) then you know that I have, if nothing else, been carrying on with my project to write a new flash fiction every day for a year.

However, considering these are such short stories, they can't account for the whole lost time. So, what else? Well, I've been moving house from Manchester to live with my gf in Southampton. A much bigger and more difficult experience than I had ever anticipated. However, I am now safely ensconsed and getting back to work, hence my return to this blog.

One thing which has been good, however, is that despite the disruptive, tiring and time-consuming nature of the house-move, I have still managed to make time every day to write my new flash365 story. I've talked before, both here and in other places, about how useful I find it to have an external project which is publicly announced as a way of applying pressure to myself to write. This is a prime example of this. Under any other circumstances (and if I was actually sane!) I would have used the house-move as an excuse not to write for a while. Knowing me as well as I do, that excuse would have lasted most of the summer, perhaps even into the next teaching year (when that becomes the next excuse). As it is, I've kept my motor turning over with a few hundred words a day, and now that I am settled I am ready to start up again on the other projects I have in mind, as well as that single flash a day.

So, to all of you who do nothing more than read my stories on a daily basis, thank you for keeping me writing through it all.

Now I'm back I shall blog a bit more often about the other things I'm up to. But for now, I'm off to actually do them!