Another hiatus. Another return.

I’m back again. Not sure in what form. Possibly human. Possibly not.

I’ve been away from Medium for a few months now. It seems my back catalog of posts still get a few hundred views per month. I suppose that’s nice. Very little engagement, though.

But who cares, right? It’s all about the craft.

Speaking of craft, I feel like I have honed my own particular brand of writing over the last year.

(Urgh. I just used the word “brand”. I hate myself.)

I have explored the shorter poetic form and I have revived my passion for short stories. The journey will certainly continue on into the future but it is encouraging to be able to look back and see one’s progress and feel more confident in one’s abilities.

My creative process comes and goes in waves. I think I’ve spoken about this before. I’m waiting for my novel-writing wave to return and hit me head on. But perhaps we’ll come back to that discussion another time.

My wife mentioned a little anecdote recently about how she and her family returned home from holiday when she was younger and they found a pair of deck chairs on their lawn. They had no clue as to how they had got there. Had a pair of neighbours been using their front lawn as a place to hang out while they were on holiday? Who knows!

The point being, I had the itch to create a short story from this tantalising little piece of familial history. I wrote over five hundred words of it this afternoon and fleshed out a very, very rough outline of the overall narrative. Two parallel story lines flirt with each other until they gently collide at the end. We’ll see how it turns out.

Anyway, for the time being, I feel I need to get my daily word count up again so I’ll try to use Medium as my outlet and motivation for this. It may well be drivel so brace yourselves for that but at least I’ll be trying to dust off the literary cobwebs and flex my atrophying creative muscles.

As a wise man once said, “If you wish to be happy, be.”

So it’s time I stopped wishing I was writing and simply write.

Onwards!