The Night Shift by David Fisher

I work night shifts. Every five weeks I do seven straight nights. It sounds brutal but in truth, it goes by quicker than you would think. Since the pandemic, I work them entirely from home too, which takes the edge off them a little.

2.30am. That seems to be the sweet spot. The early part of the night shift is busier, there are things to do but if you get those out of the way, you can have a relatively relaxed shift from around 1am, with plenty of time to kill. So by 2.30, precisely halfway through the shift, your mind is actively looking for things to occupy it. I often choose this moment to write in the online journals I keep for my daughters, where I detail things happening in our lives that we might otherwise forget, some general thoughts on the world and details about my life that they may not know. I plan to give it to them when they are adults, though it is as much for my own sanity that I do it.

I used to write a lot more. Short films, short stories, poetry, a dozen or so novel beginnings, a couple of graphic novels that I never got an illustrator for. I even had moderate success with the short films, showing at a few decent film festivals, winning a couple of awards. Due to a confluence of events I think I just burnt myself out though. Somewhere along the line, I just lost the ability to work up the energy. Perhaps the journals have been a sort of life raft in that respect, keeping me writing even when I didn’t want to.

On one night in August, I did something different. I spotted the Twisted50 call to action in my emails and something just clicked. A simple story popped, almost fully formed into my head, and for the first time in years I not only had a really clear idea, but also an incredibly strong desire to write a story, a piece of fiction. I rattled through a first draft that night and while I’ll admit to feeling a little rusty, it felt good to be writing. For the first time in over a decade I had that sense of flow, that sense that the story and the characters seemed sometimes to be leading me, rather than me them.

After redrafting one time, I submitted the story. While I waited on feedback something even more surprising happened. I got another idea for a short story and wrote and submitted that one too. In fact I’ve had four or five short story ideas since writing that first and I’m currently working on one of them. Twisted50 has reawakened a love of writing fiction that I was beginning to think I had lost. While of course I would love to be one of the lucky 50 included in the final anthology, it doesn’t really matter. This competition has brought me back to this thing that I have loved since I was a child and that is one of the most valuable things anyone could give me. I’m incredibly grateful for that.