Diary Entry: My Brain is a Creative HMO, and Nobody Pays Rent (Especially the Day Job)

I'm utterly convinced that my brain, right now, looks like a crowded whiteboard in a crisis room. I have so many projects vying for my attention that I’m genuinely afraid to go to sleep, convinced my characters will start fighting in the hallway.

The fun part? All this happens after I've completed my actual day job. For 35 hours a week, I safely trade dragons and branching narratives for debugging and deployment, working as an Automation Specialist in FinTech. I spend my days building perfectly logical, testable systems, only to come home and try to make sense of the illogical, non-testable chaos of my own imagination.

The volume of creative work is at the same time exhausting, thrilling and probably a strong indicator that I need to investigate better time management—or possibly therapy.

Maybe both. 

The "Crick" Heard 'Round the World

A Lesson in Universal Language

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As a writer from Greater Manchester, I'm always looking to inject local flavour into my prose. Sometimes, though, I hesitate, worried that a phrase I grew up with might be too much of a regional colloquialism—a true "Mancunian-ism" that would stop a reader from, say, Texas or Australia in their tracks.

​That was my exact fear when I posted a single sentence on Threads and asked for feedback:

​"The crick in his neck complained at him as he tried to sit up and reach for the phone."

​I have always thought that the word "crick" - a word I've used since childhood to describe a sharp, nagging muscle spasm that only occurs in my neck was firmly rooted in North West England. I braced myself for comments suggesting a more standard term like "stiff neck" or "spasm." And I got a small number of these. 

However, the responses I got, and am still getting as I write this, are/were astonishing.

​The feedback is overwhelmingly clear: "crick in the neck" is understood globally. Replies have poured in from around the world. I'm honestly struggling to keep up, and I'm determined to read every one of them. Replies from the US, Canada, Australia, and across the UK all confirm that this was a perfectly clear and universally evocative term.