Three days in January 2026
10/01/26
Last year was fucking horrible, so this one continuing in the same vein stands to reason. But That's Fine. I've managed to submit a story. I'm pleased about that. I've still got a few more places to send it, but I'll do that next week. More importantly, I've finalised the spine and started a draft of the next one, a small horror project I've been thinking about since early last year, which I'll complete before the end of the month. My journaling is remaining pretty constant. It's been some time since I was productive, but this does feel like something. I'm glad to have completed that piece last month, and it feels good to play in a genre with the horror story. A lot of fun. And I don't think I'm going to have any real issue in terms of ideas for the lit stories. Dunno. Doesn't feel too hard to sit writing at the moment, so I'm just going to produce.
11/01/26
I've started learning how to mix techno recently, which has been great. Just great to explore the music and play with some entirely new tech. Great. No really, it has been great. I've enjoyed watching a lot of sets on YouTube and buying music to mix, something I've never done before. It's a little like photography in that you can get a relatively pleasing result with little effort due to the remixing of pre-existing elements. You take a picture of something. Even if you're lacking in photography skills, if you take a photo of something cool you're going to get a cool photo, at least on some level. Watch this, though. Sick music:
18/01/26
I've had to run the horror story through a few people to finalise the spine. Lapsing into cliché is easy with horror. Nothing's new. This one's in the "cursed ring" category. I was talking about it with a friend last night and she effectively guessed a bunch of the story because "the possessed arm" is about as mainstream as horror gets. Think Venom. Ash's hand in The Evil Dead. The biggest problem in the story I had planned is that the hand becomes antagonistic and autonomous. Initially, I had the arm and the hand physically altering and becoming murderous. Ruth doesn't stop the arm when it goes to kill Kat, but she fights its attempt to threaten Lynne. In fact, the story works a lot better with the ring's influence backgrounded. The murder and suicide could easily be part of a fantasy, which corresponds well to the external-internal voice confusion.
Ruth finding Kat in the flat instead of Lynne was also pretty obvious (she guessed this, too), but it's a valid expectation gap for a short story. Unimportant.