Okay, so I’m going to out myself as a freak here; I don’t have any streaming services. Even more weird; I watch free to air TV. Now those admissions are out of the way, I can share that I binged a TV show last night. Difficult to do with the restrictions I admitted to before, but while I may watch free to air TV, I don’t watch it in real time. I record everything on a PVR (like a VCR but digital, why it’s not called a DVR I don’t know) so I can skip past the ads.   Anyway, I

Last week I spent a fairly large chunk of my weekly salary on a visit to the dermatologist. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that she did a lot of study to get there. Also, two biopsies later she uncovered a pre-cancerous spot that now won’t get a chance to kill me. So, I believe it’s money well spent. But the other thing she advised me I had several of were senile warts . Ugh, gross, right?   I’m not sure if the senile  refers to the wart itself, which grows quite flat and l

I was recently asked to be a judge for a short story competition. Despite my full-blown imposter syndrome, I accepted the invitation as part of my ‘doing something differently in 2024’ mantra. Having entered several competitions over the years, I was keen to see the other side.   Let me start by saying that there are some great writers out there. Even the stories that weren’t in the running for the top 5 were still entertaining and swept me up in their storylines. It’s terrib

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

Every now and then Einstein's definition of insanity wafts through my brain in a pungent reminder that this Groundhog Day of my life is of my own making; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is insane. So, I’ve decided to make 2024 the year of doing something different. Lots of somethings.   This month’s folly was to attend a Crime Writing workshop. I expected to sit in a room of mostly middle-aged women and get told a bunch of things I co