Burns' Night and A' That

In all honesty I've never celebrated Burns' Night - despite counting myself a member of the fine Scottish folk. I blame my parents - they moved away from Ayrshire, Scotland in the '70s and settled south of the border in London, and neither of them can stand the Burns Night stuff. It's often been described to me as "a night when fat, psuedo-Scots cover themselves in tartan and recite the same boring ol' shite." Actually they say a lot more than that - the tartan thing in particular pisses them off, what with it being a tourist thing, rather than something that all Scots historically wore. My folks are big on the whole "historical accuracy" thing. Especially where Scotland's concerned.*

Stories Make Me Feel Better

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will have noticed I've been quiet this week, and the few tweets I did were along the lines of "Stress! Too much to do, might break everything, end of the world. Argh". Well, I'm relieved to report that I didn't end up destroying myself or the online tools my department use with the changes I've been project managing*, so I'm feeling a lot more chipper than I was on Monday. To celebrate, I thought I'd write some flash fiction, and who better to provide inspiration than Chuck Wendig and his Flash Fiction challenge.

The challenge this week is to choose one option from his selection of "Sub-genre", Conflict" and "Must Feature". I used a random number generator and the gods of tale-telling have been super kind:

1. Weird West
5. Enemy at the Gates
6. Someone gone or going mad

New Year and New Challenges

First off, let's get the necessaries out of the way: Happy New Year! Hope you had a good celebration, or at least a good sleep with cool dreams, featuring unicorns and dragons.

My last post was a while ago and the main reason for that has been that I just haven't wanted to write. I've been deep in my own head these past few weeks, working out what's important to me and what's not, career-wise, and what I can do about it. But with the dawn of a new year I will hopefully find new inspiration (as well as old - see below) and get back on the writing horse.

My working life hasn't so much resembled a clear path but rather a shambolic, drunken wander through the woods, with a bag over my head and only my sense of smell to point the way. Which inevitably means I've always known what I don't want to do and not so much what I do.