Hurrah!

I discovered this week that one of my 420-character submissions to Short, Fast and Deadly has been accepted and will appear in issue 25. I'm very excited about this, and the whole process was made doubly enjoyable by the polite and charming editor, who was good enough to respond to me within 24 hours.

Moreover, the other two 420-character pieces I wrote have given me great ideas for things to work up into proper short stories, which is excellent.

I'm struggling a bit with writing at the moment. My day job isn't something I can do on auto-pilot, and it's mentally exhausting. I'm finding it very hard to work all day, then come home and write. Not because I haven't got time, but because my brain is exhausted by the time I get home. Back in the distant days before I went to university and I did bar and retail work, this wouldn't have been a problem, because although I was physically shattered after a shift, my brain was raring to go. Now it's the other way round.

But, of course, I haven't got the option to give up work, so I need to find some sort of strategy to cope with this.