Spring cleaning

Rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic

Well, a whole month has gone by and I haven’t done anything. On purpose this time, not the usual procrastination.

I’ve been deliberately leaving this year’s Christmas story untouched. Once you’ve written something, it’s usually a good idea to walk away from it for a while. That way, once you come back to it, you can do so with fresh eyes.

So I’ve been doing nothing, until last week, when I re-read the whole thing and discovered…

…I’ll tell you in a bit.

But first I’m going to admit to you that I lied.

I have been doing something Christmas story related. I have, in fact, been engaged in the classic displacement activity of updating my website. For a long time christmasstories.co.uk has been just a single page, but now I’ve expanded it.

There’s a player for the podcast on the homepage but most importantly I’ve now given each story its own page, with a dedicated player (and embedded video where I’ve made it so far). I’m hoping this will make it easier to publicise the individual stories in different ways, because they’re quite different to each other.

To this end, I’ve also made a bit of an effort to classify them, to help people find the kind of story they like, to say that Timothy Hope, for example, is pretty child friendly, but Secret Satan is quite dark and cynical.

Which brings us back to this year’s story.