I don’t like being afraid of things. I’m that idiot who goes outside to investigate the weird noise in the middle of the night, or looks inside the ancient, mysterious box even when the scary music is playing. So, I opened the work-in-progress to see if it was as bad as I remembered...   It kind of was. I had point of view slips and inconsistent characterisation. Really rookie stuff. It also felt like a bunch of 500-word attempts mashed together, which, in fairness, it was. M

I haven’t worked on my short story for just over two months. It is sitting at 2,222 words exactly. The numbers-weirdo in me likes that figure, perhaps that’s why I left it there? Or perhaps I know I’m butchering the story and I don’t want to keep inflicting more damage?   I can’t even bring myself to open it and read it. I can watch the movie of the story in my brain at will, and it is great in the fully immersive experience of my imagination. But the written version is like

It has never taken me so long to write a short story as the one I’m writing now. I know the storyline, and so far it is doing everything my imagined-on-the-bus version did. In the old days these were the stories that would trap me at my computer for five hours and I’d write 8,000+ words in a day to get it finished.   I’m trying to work out what has changed. This story is meant to be an allegory for something pretty ugly. This makes the writing process a tough slog, because wh