On Finishing and Starting
And how things always seem to take longer than you think they will
But! Finally, and at long last, Where the Stars Used to Sing is finished!1
Although I didn’t finish it by 20 December as I’d planned, I did finish it on 28 December and, thus, before my self-imposed final deadline2 of 1 January 2025. In the end, the collection contains nine stories3 which adds up to about 11,000 words – quite a quick read. I had immense fun though, especially with the final editing. In-between the editing (and my day job, of course) I have also been prepping for the collection to go up on my new website.
A new website
The old one had fallen completely by the wayside over the past few years, and I realised that there is no one place on the internet with all my writing and work and that it’s all scattered across various platforms and links.4 So, I brushed off ye olde WordPress skills and started creating a brand-new website-portfolio-thing where I can host All the Things while still writing my newsletter over here on Substack.
As these things tend to go,5 the website is taking longer to complete than I thought it would, not least because I’ve actually written a lot more over the years than I thought I had (which I’m not complaining about). This means that it’s a task and half to gather everything together, but also that I’m re-reading and revisiting a lot of the fiction I’ve written.6 The good thing about putting all of this together, is that I’m now itching to write a lot more, not only short fiction, but also really putting time into Porselein (which ended up falling by the wayside last year).
If all goes according to plan, the first part of the website will be live this weekend, including the whole of Where the Stars Used to Sing!
I’ll end on some music – here’s The Parlotones with “Reach Our Dreams”:
Since I started it back in 2020, it’s about time.
Because there is always a deadline with a buffer before the real deadline.
Which I obviously chose well in advance as it’s a very magical and symbolic number and it didn’t just happen to be nine and I only realised that while while struggling with formatting the compiled document.
Some of which I’d completely forgotten about, to be honest.
When I don’t have a fixed and final come-hell-or-highwater-deadline in place.
The most difficult thing is not editing or even rewriting them!