When I Am Not Writing Poetry

This collection of short stories by Chris Armstrong - some very short and one almost the length of a novella - was written during the latter half of 2020 while he was locked down in front of his computer during Covid! And there are only so many poems a man can write! Several of the stories make oblique reference to the Covid 'plague' but other tales are a reflection of the author's earlier life, a half-dozen of them going all the way back to his time at sea! Regular readers - of both his poems and his fiction - may notice a tendency to link themes to the sea! And if not the sea, then the horizon! The sea is always there! Chris Armstrong has had three careers, working as a merchant seaman and navigator, a farmhand on the farm where he still lives in the mountains of mid-Wales, and as an information scientist before retiring to become a poet and writer. He has one longer collection of poems in print, Mostly Welsh (Y Lolfa, 2019) and a recent chapbook, Book of the Spirit (Curated Lines, 2022). Although initially entirely focussed on poetry, he moved on to short stories while his first full length work of fiction, The Dark Trilogy (Austin Macauley, 2022) was being published. A further collection of his poetry will be published later in 2023 and he is working on a further novel. He has been published, for example in Storgy, Agenda and London Grip New Poetry. He writes about his writing and publishes the occasional poem on the Curated Lines blog at https: //curatedlines.online/.