Dodo Au Go-Go

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...

It's amazing how difficult I find some days to tweet something. Or even anything. It used to be easy to bash out something and send it flying into the tweetosphere. Try and say something witty or pithy (or try to not pith people off) and have an interesting convo or two. But now... now, I find myself staring at my feed, wondering what on earth to say that might be of interest to anyone. Sure, I could plug my antho. But people get annoyed (me included) if all you have to say for yourself is "buy-my-book-buy-my-book". These days, I keep checking my timeline with trepidation, worried that I'm just retweeting stuff rather than saying stuff. Yes, I'm retweeting stuff that's of interest to me, but they're still just retweets, rather than my own words. A timeline filled with retweets is something else that annoys me. I've previously snarkily moaned that people should use their own words on their timelines! And yet, what do I do when my own words seem to...