Dodo Au Go-Go

Last Thursday night, I feel asleep early. This isn't exactly an unusual thing to do, but it had some unexpected consequences.  One of which was that I'd forgotten to do the weekly online shop before zonking out. So, the next morning as the grey sky started to fill with light, I feverishly did my online shop and opted for the same-day delivery option, rather than my usual next day option. Because if my household runs out of butter, the world will come to end. And by "my household", I of course mean "I". I noted the supermarket said that the same-day delivery service would be offered through their partner deliverers. I didn't know what that meant and just assumed it was a third-party company or something. Well. Turns out that it was a third-party company or something.  Kind of. But not quite. The first clue that something was different was that my shop order was limited to 80 items. I only found this out when I went over the 80 item limit. OK, unusual, I t

This time last weekend, I was feeling despondent. Not the wider blue of this post, but the specific blue of having a story deadline coming up and feeling absolutely bereft of ideas and words.  Lost in a desert, empty of words, dead of ideas, not a shred of creativity remaining. Not a unique feeling by any means, but still frustrating. Frustrating af, actually.  On Tuesday morning, I threw my hands in the air and went to my go-to-for-inspiration book, Neil Gaiman's The View from the Cheap Seats .  Indi poses for me. This is a collection of his non-fiction writings - intros, prefaces, speeches and the like - all reflecting in some way on the process of writing, creativity and the writers and writings he admires. For whatever reason, it's a book that I find easy to dip in and out of. It inspired me to write 'The Diamond Taster', one of the stories I'm proudest of in my Falling into the Five Senses anthology (see the full story here ). I browsed and read, a