Mr. Dreadful - Give a man a fish and he might not like fish and you've just wasted a fish...

I have a tattoo.

This month my writing group (http://www.swindonfreewriters.co.uk/) is writing outside our comfort zone. For me, this means writing a light-hearted romance. I have also set the additional challenges of grounding it in reality, and writing a female character in the first person.

What I'm finding interesting in this short story is how things develop as they go along. I knew immediately I wanted Doctor Who to feature in the story somehow, and the initial idea was a hetero couple watching a classic serial. Then it became a hetero couple meeting in a shop that sold lots of Doctor Who stuff. Then two guys. Finally, it's ended up with two women meeting over the long-awaited release of Power of the Daleks on DVD (for those who don't know Power of the Daleks is the first Doctor Who serial featuring Patrick Troughton, it's also entirely missing. If it were found and released it would be hugely significant for Whovians everywhere, so it seemed like the ideal set up for the story).

I'm doing surprisingly well at it (though I have had to remove some deep social commentary to retain the 'light-hearted' bit and not fall into my usual 'humans are rubbish' stuff), and in an inadvertant twist the tone of the story would be entirely ruined by smut so nobody can accuse me of being a man writing about lesbians just so I can be smutty about it.

In 2013 I have decided that at least 75% of the music I buy will be on vinyl.

A permanent one too!

This year I am taking the plunge...

I've always ummed and ahhed and procrastinated and made excuses but I was inspired by a friend of mine not only entering but winning whilst at the same time dealing with depression and anxiety issues. And so I thought that if she could do it without a complete allocation of spoons, I have no excuse whatsoever.

I have started making notes and putting together a rough plot outline. The story is going to be post-apocalyptic horror. The main character is named Kenwood Birmingham Mitchell which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about his parents.