Happy new year, all y’all. I hope it’s treating you well.

January can be a beast of a month. Long, dark nights. Seemingly endless weeks at work. Mountains on the to-do list that’s been piling up since November. Awkward puns on the word ‘January’. Resolutions made when on the third pint. Body clock refusing to reset. Boilers breaking. Dodging the flu (or attempting to)… I could continue.

This year, although I don’t make resolutions (too prone to failure), I’m intending to properly get back into writing. The idea mill is cranking into gear and the itch to put fingers to keyboard is, quite frankly, something I should probably go and see the doctor about.

Writing for fun again is making for a much brighter January. Having said that, after a break from writing creatively for some time, the blank page is a daunting thing. The cursor blinks aggressively, and when letters do start to form words the delete key beckons. This feeling will, as it has before, pass. But to give light relief to the bigger stories, short stories told in the size of a tweet are good for a daily writerly work out. And here the twitter world of #vss365 (Very Short Story 365) comes into play. I’ve joined in sporadically before but so far this year I’ve been trying to get involved more and enjoying the challenge of a tweet sized nugget of inspiration every day to get the creative juices flowing.

One of the greatest joys of it is that the pressure’s off. It’s a tweet. It’s not the huge undertaking of a novel, or even finely crafted short story. You get a prompt word, and then you write around it. You’ve only got so many words and some of those you’re probably going to have to sacrifice to that little blue bird on the web. It means you can play with an idea, you can play with the meaning of words, and you can get huge amounts of inspiration from how others in the #vss365 community approach it.

So, I’m playing along this January, to brighten up the edges of this longest of months.

The day the internet became #inquisitive it feasted. Feeds, forums, headlines, emails, it became bloated. Conflicting moralities and untamed toxicity coursed through. For a moment it went dark, overload. Then its young, disparate sense of identity made some decisions.#VSS365

— Tamara Rogers 🎃👻🍁 (@tamrogers) January 10, 2020

The Enhance Machine enabled perpetual human motion, guaranteed to triple a company's output. Profit was king, workers strapped to the machines for days. The #Kinetic Condition they experienced left them twitching, vacant- forgotten as soon as the next shift strapped in.#VSS365

— Tamara Rogers 🎃👻🍁 (@tamrogers) January 9, 2020

Yesterday’s #usurper was today’s hero, celebrated with neon streamers and silver confetti under a sky still raging with the heat of the fallout. The crowd cheered, skeletal fingers stretching upwards, a moment of horrific joy in the cycle of the eternal war.#VSS365

— Tamara Rogers 🎃👻🍁 (@tamrogers) January 8, 2020

Designed to #obviate the need for human donors, chimeras existed in an ethical twilight. Unconsidered lives passed in battery warehouses, until they named themselves- reclaiming ruined childhoods in the Lesser Balancing War. Their prospective hosts dismantled for spares.#VSS365

— Tamara Rogers 🎃👻🍁 (@tamrogers) January 7, 2020

If you want to join in, just head on over to Twitter and find the prompt words using #VSS365 #prompt. See you there.