Engineering time is always the difficult thing, right? Not as easy as the science fiction stories of those tinkering with time make it out to be. But – and here’s the thing, there are tools that can get you prompted and sat down in the chair writing away. I did write some things – I dug back into some old projects that I hadn’t looked at in a while, and slipped back into the skin of those characters.

Doing this is something that I have never found that hard – just like turning on the Twin Peaks revival and being able to get back into that head space. I like to do as much work as I can, and I like to keep a tight schedule that leads from short fictions all scattered around to collections, or from chapters to complete books, or from loose poems to a poetry collection. I like there to be an end product in sight, and then I like to attain that goal.

The one thing I haven’t done lately – at least in terms of my personal work, is to get the damned stuff published and out there.

I have had the pleasure of publishing a couple of great books by other people, but my own stuff has been languishing in limbo … this is not so cool.

Getting a schedule worked out for when stories are going to hit, and challenging myself to hit that target, and then succeeding, makes a book materialising a real thing, and not just some pipe dream. Pipe dreams aren’t much use to anyone at all, so why bother with them? Vague insubstantial things that claim to be plans but are actually rather elaborate circle jerks. Circle jerks do no not interest me.

I have got caught up and delivered the books I intended to deliver by the time I intended to deliver them, but now I have a load of them slated, with no real date named out, and therefore plans that are about as flabby as a middle aged man who doesn’t hit his step count every day.

Hit your word count if you can’t hit your step count – there’s a target, right?

I want my publishing company to fly, and I have attracted the talent, so it is a totally real thing. I want to get out there and be doing spoken word again, because it works different muscles in the writing. I am always seeking to challenge myself, and if it stops being a challenge I get a little bored.

Put restrictions on what you can do in a short story – work out a new way to write something longform – meld more than one literary form together – base the writing on prompts – if you spot a bad habit or something you do automatically, stop yourself from doing it. I loved the Dogme movement for the shackles it out on the creators involved; it made them find new and creative ways to make films, and generally the products were fantastic.

I hate formulaic factory-turned bullshit that seems to have nothing of the creator invested in it. If I find myself doing that kind of shit I take myself outside and give myself a good talking to. Anyway – a solid foundation … a way to think around the writing and explore new ways of writing, a testbed for sounding out ideas … that is what this place always was about and what I intend to resurrect as I try and piece together the original notion of what it was before the old provider erased my site from existence.