My friend Rachael Hattersley has been talking today about choices on her Facebook page and I found it inspiring. She also photographed the moon in Cornwall, and I have done the same here in Sussex.

Today I have sent off a short story to a competition and I have lined up another for another competition, and another for another. I’ve been writing all my life and I have many stories and they are all in my computer or in piles of paper in cupboards. There is one story that I wrote forty years ago that will go out soon. It is quite a good one about cryogenic storage, and yes I really did write it forty years ago.

The thing with these stories that sit unchallenged in ‘storage’ is that I have not been making choices. I have just left them. They have not died, but they have not lived either. Today I have begun the process of resuscitation to see if they are well, if they can now be cured, or if they must be destroyed. I will make the choice. I will work though all the stories and I will give them a chance to live. If they need healing I will do what I can, and if they are good enough I will send them out. That will be the rule now – a story will either be out in the world, in hospital or in the graveyard. There is no more cold storage. (My story about cryogenic storage does not end well.)

Rachael compared choices to steps taken, and there is no right or wrong. There is only a requirement to choose. People talk about difficult choices, but actually the only difficult thing is not making the choice. That limboland of indecision is a horrible place, and when you remember that no choice is a wrong choice, there is no need to ever be there.

One other thing tonight. I go on here and elsewhere about my tiny problems but there are people in the world who are not free to write what they want.There is an organisation called English Pen that sends messages to writers at risk. I have asked for details today. I will paste the link here https://www.englishpen.org/campaigns/seasons-greetings-2016-write-to-a-writer-at-risk/ it may not work as I’m not entirely sure how to do it, but if it fails google English Pen. Most of us here in the West are free to make choices and it is a freedom we can celebrate by actually making choices.