#95. Goal Setting, the Indie Writer’s Voice and a Short Story by Moonlight

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​Hello imaginative people. I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 95 of Brainstoryum. Creeping ever closer to the 100th episode… and I can’t believe we’re in December. As the penultimate episode of 2025, this is the Brainstoryum equivalent of Christmas eve!
 
Now, this month sees the release of a magazine for which I was interviewed, and that also includes one of my short stories: the December issue of the Indie Writer’s Voice, which you can find at philparker-fantasywriter.com (I will put the full url in the show notes). It’s a free download as a PDF or you can just read it on your browser.
 
This edition is focussed on goal-setting, which may seem a little early if you are thinking about new year’s resolutions… Funnily enough (well, maybe it isn’t funny at all), I hesitated, just for a moment, when I was invited to do this interview, because goals are a bit of a sore topic for me.
 
As I’m not in perfect health, my energy levels are still affected by long covid, and I still experience mild flu-like symptoms which I have no choice but to work through, I often find myself frustrated that I can’t write more. I haven’t released the number of books I would have liked to over the last few years, and it’s been really slow-going for—3 years now, mind-numbingly slow. Brainstoryum has kept me going as a way to share something of my creativity on a regular basis. Otherwise, I think I would just be wilting in a corner, tapping away and wondering if anyone will ever know my writing exists. It’s also a great collaborative space as I get to enjoy and share other authors’ stories and poems in response to the writing prompts—for which I am forever grateful.
 
So. Goals. When I think of goals, some part of me is always thinking of what I haven’t achieved; what I might not be able to achieve; which is a really negative way of looking at this. I don’t see myself as a negative person—and it gave me a bit of a jolt to realise I’d been subconsciously thinking along these lines. You have an uncomfortable feeling about something, but then you let yourself think about it, and you start to understand why. To unravel it.
 
So I was really glad in the end, to tackle this topic for the interview. It’s easy to avoid the things that make you feel uncomfortable, and sometimes, so much better to sit down and face them. A difficulty is never just a barrier; and a barrier is surely a door that you have to push, some time. If you can’t open it, well, you can still learn from it.
 
It’s like the way we have to ask ‘why?’ of our characters, to find the reason for a story, and what makes it matter. Sometimes, when we feel awkward or even guilty about something, it’s worth gently examining what it is that’s causing this reaction, so we can find a way to see them in a more positive light.
 
I hear so much about procrastination around writing. Well, we all do that a little bit, but what about the risk of burnout? Of pushing too hard, and losing the joy of it?
 
In the interview, I talk about needing to be gentle with my goals; to adapt, instead of being relentless (as I tend to be); how I think that goals should be a way of making a big, overwhelming aim more reachable, one step at a time; and my own personal paradox of setting myself goals around pursuing the unknown, and of discovering the unexpected.
 
As we move towards the Christmas break (hoping that you get a decent Christmas break), here’s a reminder to not necessarily start goal-setting the moment we hit 1st January. If there are things you want to achieve in life, there’s no time like the present. If you know you want something, write it down, make it official, then try and break it down into achievable steps. You don’t have to wait for an excuse like new year, when you might be better off having a rest. There’s nothing quite like jotting something down when the idea occurs to you; when it’s fresh. That’s when you’ll get clarity. You can then set yourself the goal of relaxing at Christmas.
 
The magazine features several different authors’ views on goals; some of whom clearly have a much simpler relationship with goal-setting. And it’s always good to hear other people’s perspectives on things. The magazine ends with a lovely piece from Frasier Armitage, the scifi writer, about balancing the risks of goal-making. He says, “Every time you set a goal, you take a risk. But it’s a risk that’s rooted in the pursuit of your own personal joy.” Very positive and inspirational.
 
There’s even a shortlist of questions near the back of the mag to help you set goals, which includes planning how to celebrate your achievements. You can’t get much more positive than that.
 
But right now, let’s live in the moment, enjoy stories, and endless possibilities in the worlds of our imaginations. And do I have some stories to share with you!
 
**
 
The writing prompt I suggested in the last show for your response was “the blank-faced origami” which could be interpreted as “the blank-faced origami artist or expert”.
 
A tricky one; fewer responses this time, but some really fantastic ones.
 
The poet, Elena Dennison, wrote:
 
The blank-faced origami master
dreams a swan but folds a dog,
a shark that came out frog,
less big bison more a hog.
What a disaster, origami master.
Forfeit and fold, desist!
Poker faces with no aces
and no aces mean no wins
only heartbreak, papercuts,
and a chock-full rubbish bin.
 
I love the rhythm of this! I almost found myself dancing as I read it. And towards the end, as we reach ‘heartbreak’ and ‘papercuts’, this slows down, becomes more plodding, as the paper-folder’s creativity sputters and fails. This is so clever, a real gem of poem. Thank you, Elena!
 
Next, Eric Montgomery wrote a flash fiction story:

There’s something subtle about this, stirring questions oh so gently. What is going on between these two? What has happened? A kind of connection, but you’re not quite sure where it might lead afterwards. This kind of tenuous connection is as delicately constructed as one of the origami pieces. Thank you for sharing this story, Eric. And youcan find Eric’s stories and poems at madpoet.org, except that the ‘oe’ in poet is switched to zero three.

Paul Monteith wrote:
 
The Blank-Faced Origamist
 
“I saw a woman emerge from the night, her form illuminated by a lustrous, pearl-gray moon. She brushed the ebony night from the shoulders of her snowy frock coat as she crossed a meadow. The frosted grass blades glistened in the moonlight and crisply yielded beneath her high-heeled boots. The crunching sound brought a smile to her face, which lacked any distinctive features and was as undisturbed as a snowfield or a blank sheet of paper.

Brushing aside her ashen colored hair, she moved her arms with the grace of a swan in flight. Her nimble fingers pinched and creased the night air flecked with snowflakes. From between her fingers and thumb, she folded crystalline shapes—ice houses, horse-drawn carts, and street lamps that glowed with a cold blue light.

Whenever the wind whipped up a flurry of snow, she worked quickly, pleating and crimping the white powder into groups of adults and children, some sliding on makeshift ice slides, others chilling their hands around a brazier venting cold blue flames.

Watching her was like watching a master origamist engineering the snow-stippled night into a Dickensian Christmas village. She pleated, bent, and tucked the snowdrifts into poulterers' shops with geese and game hanging behind frosted windows, and grocery shop stalls laden with seasonal fruit and nuts. All dusted with ice crystals.

The woman walked the snow-flocked street and disappeared into the stillness of the white canvas from which she will fold new imaginings on winter nights yet to come.”
 
Wow, this is truly magical. Folding snow into origami? Such an amazing idea, and so beautifully described. Thank you, Paul. You can find Paul Monteith on Bluesky as Quantum Fairy.
 
Right, I think it’s time to reach for new words and new adventures in the Socks of Destiny.
 
**
 
SOCKS OF DESTINY ORGAN JINGLE
 
This part of the show is un-transpose-able! There's much giggling and rustling of paper as I pull words at random from the Socks of Destiny to create three unique sentences according to the rules of Exquisite Corpse, going: “Describing word—noun—action—describing word—noun.” Today’s resulting sentences are:
 
1. The damp pier was so afraid that they hid behind the mealy-mouthed box.
2. The smelly unicorn reluctantly gave forth the penultimate old flame.
3. The awesome ferret wandered by the welcoming loved one.
 
After some initial brainstorming, I use the "pause button" (at length!) to draft a scene or short story, using one of these as my chosen writing prompt. Here goes (fingers crossed)…
 
**
They grew in the spaces in between. The gaps. The silence. The slivers of shadow between the planks of the boardwalk. For the pier is already an in-between place: not quite on land, not quite in the sea.
 
After the riot of the daytime, the silence was deafening.
 
Exit sniffed, padding around on bare and grimy feet. His ears dangled lower, drawn by the sweet ache of the darkness.
 
He was a squat, squashed-looking creature, though lithe enough on those wide, fleshy feet, and blue-skinned like the archway over the exit.
 
Gap was here somewhere. Exit could sense her, a little shiver in the darkness. He frowned, shook his head with a flap of his ears, and tip-toed toward the bumper cars.
 
The sky above was blotted with indigo clouds, tinged white where the moon peeped through. Where she graced her silver light, the cars winked back.
 
But what was that dull block of un-shiny stuff, waiting like a sentry by the edge of the bumper cars?
 
A trunk. A pile of trunks. Where had they come from? Things ready to be shipped, or was it a delivery? Hidden in plain sight: just the sort of thing that their kind knew how to do; curious, that a human would know such tricks. Exit nearly gasped. As if his own thoughts had conjured the beast, a human-shaped figure, dressed all in black, strode up to the pile of boxes and hesitated.
 
Open-mouthed, Exit just managed to hop behind the boxes before his muscles froze stiff.
But clinging to the back of one of the trunks, a gnawed leather strap dangling from her mouth, was Gap.
 
“What are you doing?” said Exit, although he didn’t make a sound. The tip of his finger pressed lightly on Gap’s ankle, the part of her that was level with his shocked stare. That was all it took to transmit his question into her thoughts.
 
Gap didn’t move except to glare over her shoulder. Furiously, she thought back, “What do you think? Trying to get out of here.”
 
Exit almost withdrew his finger. This again. It wasn’t enough for Gap to glory under the bright goddess-moon, to dwell in the soft shadows, to drink the briny air. She was always dreaming of escape.
 
“You know there’s a lot of noise and light out there—?” He’d said it a hundred times, but clearly, Gap needed to be reminded of the obvious.
 
“There’s shadows enough for me. Different shadows. Different places to be. I want to see the world! Come on, Exit. Don’t give me away.”
 
Exit trembled, looked down, though he kept his finger dutifully pointed against her ankle. Sometimes, when she said his name… There were things Gap had asked him in the beginning, when she’d first emerged. About Exit’s name. How it must be his fate to leave this place. A frightening thing to say when, once, bored and lonely, he’d played ‘tight-rope’ along the metal handrails with nothing but the sea churning beneath him like a giant mouth. There was something that nipped at his fingers and toes whenever he got close to the threshold. If they tried to leave their home—danger. He wasn’t sure what. Death, maybe.
 
And even if Gap survived leaving the pier, what then? He’d be all alone, more or less. Moss barely spoke to him, obsessed with the buttons on the arcade games. And Shadow hadn’t seen enough moonlight to know himself yet. It was a rare thing that the moon touched the shadows in such a way that they grew solid, and conscious, and flat-footed. It took time.
 
A gift not to be thrown away.
 
He must have thought that clearly, for Gap shifted her ankle away and scowled.
 
That’s when Exit heard the noise coming from inside the trunk. A voice, muffled. A faint rattling, like something knocking with many fists. Too many fists.
 
Exit leaned closer, pressing his face against the trunk’s cool surface, breathing the leather smell. He sensed rather than saw Gap’s stillness above him as she probably did the same.
 
What in moonlight’s name—?
 
The human who stood on the other side of the pile of trunks coughed and stepped forward, his boot thumping on the boards. The shock of the cough and the thud, one after the other, sent Gap tumbling to the ground. Exit, his blue skin turning faintly jade with terror, stumbled after her, too late to catch her. She lay sprawled, but staring wide-eyed at the pile of trunks, and the massive, fleshy fingers that reached around the top two. Any moment, they’d be seen—unless they kept very still, and shut their eyes.
 
But neither of them was ready to shut their eyes.
 
The creature’s face was lost in shadow, but its meaty fingers grappled with the bottom of the box it was trying to lift. Exit stiffened as he saw the beast’s finger catch the edge of the strap that Gap had nibbled through. The lid shifted—Exit held his breath—and pandemonium broke free.
 
An explosion of stars, dropping over them like sharp-edged glitter, screams, bleeping of machines, wailing alarms, fake laughter, a recording of a man’s voice, bursting big and bright like a Santa’s oversized chuckle. Whirring, coins dropping, children cheering, and winding throughout it all was that clanging, jangling music the shadow-fairies hid from so deeply during the daytime, burrowing into the undersides of the pier.
 
The trunk contained every sound they’d ever cowered from.
 
Huffing in annoyance, the human shifted the trunks back over the opened one, mashing down the weight to keep it closed. After examining the broken strap, and scratching its head, the human shrugged, and grabbed the topmost trunk on its own, leaving the broken one pressed down by the other. On loud, trudging footsteps it carried the box away to the arcade, to store it somewhere. They weren’t being removed to somewhere else. They were a delivery to the pier, of pure sound and mayhem.
 
In the puddle of shadow under the remaining tower of boxes, a pair of eyes emerged. Two arms, two legs, stretching their spindly way into the darkness.
 
Exit and Gap stared at the thing, and each other. No need to touch fingers or toes or any part of them, for the understanding that flowed between them now.
 
It wasn’t just the moonlight that made the pier fairies possible. It was the contrast. The sweet silence that ached afterwards; the slanting shadows, the pitch darkness from which they first clambered and broke free, sniffing the briny air, like this fresh newbie, skinny and knobbly kneed. The noise and light and chaos of the daytime gave them the deepest night, the quiet from which their newness was born. The shock of the change was the thing that made them possible; the light that cast a shadow.
 
**
 
And that is how “The damp pier was so afraid that they hid behind the mealy-mouthed box”. Although the mealy-mouthed bit changed from a muffled noise into a complete cacophony.
 
I’m not sure about the end of this. I think the story needs a bit of tightening here and there, and needs to be tied off a bit better, but it is first draft material.
 
How did I get here? Well, I did try to do the 3 minute brainstorm like last time, focussing on setting and sights and smells, but it kind of got a bit out of control. I took much longer, and found myself writing brief descriptions of the pier at night, and the silence, and these funny little creatures emerged. At the end of the first brainstorm, which I did on paper, mostly on the bus for about half an hour, I reached a point where I realised I was missing the “why” of the story. I was hunting for a twist. So I put it down with that question, waiting to be answered next time I picked it up. And of course, the twist turned out to be a change of perception, a new understanding, based on the very nature of these fairies and how they came to exist.
 
Funnily enough, every time I tried to type the word ‘Exit’, I typed ‘exist’ instead. I guess I’m not used to writing the word exit, although I could handwrite it okay. Weird.
 
It’s a bit like when I try to type the word ‘begin’, and it often ends up as ‘being’.
 
Anyway, before I get lost down that very weird corridor of thoughts, next time will be the Christmas Special. And I will be exploring the art of playing Exquisite Corpse in person, for fun, with friends and family, not necessarily for writing prompts. But of course, once the game is over and everyone’s moved on to Jenga or secondsies of pudding, or they’ve slumped in front of the TV for the umpteenth re-run of Elf or Home Alone, or whatever it is, those mad moments of creativity and serendipity that were originally just for laughs could turn into something. A spark of a new story. Who knows?
 
But to get everyone in the mood for the game in the first place, there may be some simple, brief exercises to try, so that you don’t end up with sentences full of crackers, Christmas and Santa for the nouns, and sparkly, sleepy and drunk for describing words. While that can be fun at first, the sentences might turn out duller than you’d hoped. Help them get into the zone, into an imaginative state of mind, even if they have no interest whatsoever in creative writing, and the results will be all the more fun and intriguing. (Potentially inspiring for you, later on.)
 
Between now and the next show, I am planning to host an in-person game of Exquisite Corpse at my office party: this will indeed be an audience of people who either aren’t writers (that I know of) or at least aren’t in the writing mood. They just want to have some laughs, and I want to help them get into the zone and squeeze the most hilarity out of the game, by stirring up their imaginations. To this end, I will be testing out a couple of ideas on them—my unsuspecting colleagues (they won’t know what’s hit them)—and I’ll report back to you on what did and didn’t work. You never know, there might be something you can take away from this, to help you host a game of your own with colleagues or loved ones to the best possible effect—so people will always remember “that crazy word game we played at Christmas”. Stay tuned for the Christmas Special, out on Saturday the 20th of December. (And if all goes well, I may have some funny results to share with you.)
 
In the meantime, let me know if you have a story idea, a poem or short story up to 250 words on the “mealy-mouthed box”. A box that can’t quite tell you what it means; or a creature in that box; or some other interpretation, whatever you can think of. You know what to do: go to annatizard.com, hit the contact button on any page footer and let me know before next Friday.
 
Until next time, go forth and be inspired!