Hi there,

Thanks for stopping by! My dad is doing the dishes, the news is playing out on TV, and people are driving home past our house. It’s a nice background purr. I hope wherever you are reading this, the day is relaxing and if it’s not, maybe it can wind its way there in time. Maybe a book or warm drink is in order. Welcome to my researcher’s rest journal.

For this week’s rest, I gave myself a treat and visited some old story concepts that I had shelved for a while. Show of hands, who have done that before?

I guess this isn’t so much a researcher’s rest, because one, we don’t need to have done research to write (think children’s stories, think poetry), and two, I ended up doing research for those renewed stories HA!

But I guess that’s the thing about creating a journal series around rest. Not literally every single post can reflect rest because if so, there’s no work to rest from.

What old stories did I dig up? Hmm, that’s for me to know… for now 😉

But I will share what I researched. Maybe sometimes that’s the fun of having writer friends (or in this case, fellow writers I get to monologue to)

Welcome to… my history 😉See what I did there?

Clearly, I currently have a fixation on Scottish history!! Maybe at some point on this journal series, I’ll reveal what the premise is, and where this research is building towards…

…maybe. I’m not usually one to disclose my projects too much unless I have something tangible to share. Are any of you like that too?

But anyway, I had an interesting read for those subjects. It gave me a pleasant morning and afternoon of thoughts. There’s a lot I don’t know about Scottish history, or Scotland—period! Here, if you are interested in watching what I checked out, here’s one of them.

I appreciate the voice of this Youtuber/narrator. He doesn’t make his content a boring, stuffy lecture; instead he makes the history come alive with his 21st century, millenial/Gen Z style-commentary.

Also, if I were to create another blog series (I don’t think so, I only got to create this blog thanks to this internship), it would be about committing to a singular project. I have been blessed with a number of story ideas, but I reaaally have trouble staying in one for long, which doesn’t make for a consistent and disciplined routine, so I suppose I have that to work on as well.

Wish me the best, my friends. Maybe this latest one I have returned to will be the one I end up sticking to till the end of this year. Who knows?

Journal question: Have you recently returned to any old, shelved story ideas? Are there any that lies dormant in a folder somewhere?

See you again next week,
Ian Tan, intern
History Through Fiction