My job (the one that pays, not the writing) covers many different areas, and allows me to learn all sorts of different things.

One of the things I’m currently learning about is the Renaissance. It sounds like an amazing time. All that culture and learning and creativity. Definitely one of the more exciting times in human history. Learning about what people were able to achieve hundreds of years ago is always an eye-opener, and puts lots of so-called modern day achievements into perspective.

It’s a common enough refrain – to wish that your dreams come true. It’s the basis of many stories, and pretty much the whole raison d’etre of the Disney multimedia empire. But when you think about it, is it really such a great thing? Do you really want your dreams to come true?

I’m a really organised person. Everything that I do needs to be planned and mapped out in the utmost detail.

Nothing is worth doing if it’s not planned. I regularly spend hours working out all the details – every step I need to take, in the exact order it needs to be taken. Contingencies for unexpected events. I make sure they’re all included in my plans.

A few months ago, I did a post about this writer’s group I lurk on in Facebook, and how one of the main strategies shared was to pump out as many books as they possibly could.

Now as I mentioned in that post, I don’t want to sound like I’m criticising that approach – if it works for them, that’s great. I just made the point that I could never do that. I can’t help but take the time to polish everything I write, often taking several years on a single work.

Well, we’re just over the one quarter mark for the year. There’s a feeling that 2021 still hasn’t quite shown its true colours. Vaccines are out and seem to be making a big difference – at least to those folks who are able to receive them. There’s a sense that a return to normality is imminent, but still not quite there yet. And anyway, is normality really what we want to get back to, or can we aim a little higher than that.