I stopped writing on a daily basis after the end of the year. Travel and some sickness and general ennui conspired to break the habit of three months. I'm a streaker. People who watch me do things are amazed at how I throw myself into them but they are not there when, one day, I just stop.
Weirdly I found a hole in my conscious and figured out after a few weeks that it was the lack of writing. If I force myself to work the 750words.com site I have a tether to the world. At worst if I do nothing constructive the rest of the day, I've written 750 words. At best it manages to empty out the garbage in my mind. So I started again and picked up more of my story. Here's a rather undramatic excerpt:
After the dip south we headed northwest into the Indian Ocean and to a weird place in the central IO called Diego Garcia. It is an island managed by the British and part of the Chagos Archipelago and is middle of nowhere. It became a strategic base in the cold war as a communications station and an airfield where the antisubmarine and surveillance planes called P3's were kept. I have no idea why we stopped at Diego Garcia but stop we did and I went ashore. Nothing but sand and palm trees and squat cement block buildings for the flyers and communicators and little else. The flyers promised sea snakes and sharks in the water so no one went swimming. All beach and no swimming. Just weird.
We did not spend long there and headed north to the Persian Gulf.
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