Monthnotes: December 2024

December was a long, worn-out month where I counted the days till my Christmas break. I always exhaust myself as the year ends, but this was worse then usual. I was happy enough, just burning out. It took about ten days to recover after finishing work.

Christmas itself was wonderful. I cooked for my family the Saturday before, then had Rosy and Olive staying for the day itself. We had lots of delicious food, including an amazing vegan cheese selection from Honestly Tasty, and caught a couple of classic Christmas movies at the Hebden Bridge Picture-house. I then had a quiet, wholesome New Years Eve.

Cameras with thermal printers are so cool

The trickiest part of December was adjusting to my new work client. It’s an exciting project but the scale of everything is overwhelming. On top of that, the weekly trip to the client site is a round-trip of 5½ hours. I’d budgeted for this, but it was still a shock. I’m finding ways to improve my commute (one being to leave on the quieter 5.56 train) but there is some way to go.

Despite an irregular schedule, I’ve continued my gym visits and daily steps. I walked a total of 374,259 steps, a daily average of 12,073. My peak was 17,476 steps. My fitness came second to work/celebrations and I put on 1.4 pounds which needs to come off in January.

I’ve talked about my writing in 2024 elsewhere, but December was particularly busy. I gave a seminar at Chichester Uni, released the Mycelium Parish News and did a live event for the Parish News Launch. The Advent Calendar was being read throughout the month, and I think it’s the best project I’ve done – work has now started on next year’s. Having so many things happen in the same month was hard work and, as usual, nothing was marketed as well as it deserved. But I feel inspired and have some interesting ideas for future projects.

We took Rosie to the pub but she got scare and hid from some other dogs.

Reading for December was mostly finishing books I’d started in previous months. Three books from the month made it onto my best-of-the-year list: Ben Edge’s book on folklore was entertaining, even when going over familiar ground; Daisy Johnson’s Hotel was on of the best horror short story collections I’ve read; and the Michael Lewis book Going Infinite was a gripping book about Sam Bankman-Fried, a subject I’d not thought I would be so interested in.

The paths in the woods by my house are often re-routed by fallen trees.

So many of the books I’m buying are 99p offers from Kindle. If I wait long enough, everything I want to buy turns up there. Knowing this has stopped me buying hardbacks sometimes – it’s frustrating to pay full price a week or two before being offered a bargain. This can’t be good for the publishing industry.

Isn’t this an amazing piece of moss?

Last month, I received a couple of awards for my contributions at work. This sort of thing used to make me very cynical, but my response to my current job is very different. I love both the client and internal work, especially the conference I helped put on a few weeks ago. This is close to being the longest I’ve had a single job, and I’m amazed at my continued enthusiasm.

But I do need to pace myself better. It took me over a week to clear all the piled things on my desk – which I wish I’d done sooner, given how calm I felt straight after. I tend to clutter my house easily, and I need to do something about that. I read a good forum discussion on house clearances and it made me realise how many things I’m keeping for no reason. I should be using the fancy glasses, not keeping them safe for who-knows-what.

  • My flickr account is still live! Maybe I will start posting there again. (But perhaps I should look for a federated image service instead?)
  • Spotify Wrapped was disappointing this year. In the past it’s suggested interesting patterns about what I listen to. This year’s just felt like engagement bait.
  • A taxi driver asked me what my religion was – not something I’ve been asked in a long time, and I struggled to explain maltheism.
  • I’ve continued to avoid reading news and I don’t feel like I’m missing much.
  • I picked up a cheap copy of Far Cry 6 at the town market and it seemed underwhelming. As much as I love some video games, I find many of them banal.
  • I completed a re-watch of Twin Peaks Season 1 and was surprised at how many scenes I didn’t remember at all, even after seeing the series several times.
  • Simon Indelicate’s piece Metrics are the Thief of Joy is essential reading.
  • I gave a tarot reading last week. My recall of the cards is sloppy but it was great fun. I really need to have another try at learning this.

A New Year: 2024/2025

2024 has been the best year of my life so far. The future might be a scary place – not least because, at some point, I die there – but, for now, I appreciate how fortunate I am. I live somewhere beautiful, I have a job I love, and I’m happy with my writing.

Living in a small town has made a huge contribution to my quality of life. I worried at first that I would be isolated but instead I feel calmer and happier. This suggests that I was finding Brighton far more stressful than I’d realised.

I’ve now had my current job for two years and in February this will be the longest I’ve had a single job. I find myself eager to become a better programmer and to deepen my involvement. Work has changed from being a toad squatting on my life to something that makes me happy (although work/life balance is still sometimes tricky).

I’ve written elsewhere about my writing, how happy I am with that currently, and my creative plans for next year.

Reading back on last year’s post, I was complaining about the number of headaches I had. This year I have suffered far fewer. It looked like one of the main triggers was dehydration, which was easily fixed. This has been a huge improvement.

Things won’t be this good forever, but I hope they stay this way for a long time. But there are things I am looking to work on.

Social Media

I’ve been frustrated with social media for a long time but I continue to read it. It’s definitely not worth the time spent. I need to stop social media being a default activity when I open my laptop.

Social media no longer works for me as a way of communicating with people – particularly as most sites have now removed the option of receiving notifications via email. As soon as I visit the sites I’m distracted by the streams.

I do enjoy writing posts for social media and sharing photographs, but it’s hard not to get caught by the distraction machine. The only place that I don’t find too noisy is Mastodon. While this is a small network, I still find it satisfying – not least because the lack of an algorithm reduces the incentives for people to make engagement bait.

The main reason creatives give for not leaving social media is that it will limit their promotion – but given how bad some sites have become for this, I’m not convinced it’s a big loss.

I’ll still keep the accounts open, but try to reduce my check-ins to every few days.

Health and Fitness

I’m making progress with my fitness – I ended 2023 having put on a lot of weight over that year and removed it in 2024. My back and shoulders are less tight, feeling better than I ever imagined they could. I’m stronger and have more energy.

Having a gym membership and personal trainer has been an important commitment. But I don’t feel I’m getting value for money, particularly as the cost of living rises. I need to focus more on the training, making sure I am eating properly and doing exercise outside the gym.

One positive about the training is that my hip is getting stronger, which means I can get back to running. Obviously, I’d love to set an ambitious goal for 2025, but let’s pick something modest – I want to be doing regular 5k runs by the Summer.

Clutter and Burnout

I ended work in December feeling very burned out; and throughout the year I’ve pushed myself too hard. I need to find ways to use my energy more efficiently.

Part of this is just reducing the clutter in my life. I tidied my study after Christmas and suddenly everything felt much simpler. It’s easy to let things pile up and chaos seems to take a constant toll on me.

The other aspect of this is over-committing and stressing about this. I’ve decided to stop using a daily to-do list app, switching instead to weekly lists, allowing me a little more flexibility. I’m also going to try reducing the amount of things I commit myself to. The days I enjoy most are the ones I allow myself to float a little – which also tend to be the days that I achieve most.

I also want to spend a little more time disconnected from networks. Back in October I found waiting somewhere while low on phone battery. It was the first time I’d sat quietly in months – no devices, no notebooks. I was amazed at the thoughts that emerged and realised there was a part of myself that I had suppressed. I need to make more space for that.

So, in summary, my goals for 2025 are:

  • Stop wasting time with social media
  • Exercise outside the gym
  • Build up my running
  • Prioritise calm by reducing clutter and commitment

My Favourite Books of 2024

I read 55 books in 2024. Looking back, there were some obvious great ones that stood out. In alphabetical order by title, the ten best are below:

  1. I wrote a long post on Jess Richards’ Birds & Ghosts and deleted it. Birds and Ghosts is beautifully written and technically impressive. It also made me very sad.
  2. Folklore Rising by Ben Edge looks like it’s going to be a story of a man’s ‘quest’ to explore English folklore. Edge somehow salvages this unpromising concept, partly through his artwork. His accounts of folk rituals are sometimes uncomfortable – while Edge is sometimes treated as an insider, there are more occasions where he is threatened as an outsider. Edge produces a good survey of folklore and current thinking around it.
  3. I didn’t expect much when starting Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ book on Sam Bankman-Fried. I was soon gripped by the bizarre story about how quickly someone can become a billionaire, and how suddenly that can fall apart. I was most surprised to finish the book convinced that SBF was mistreated by the justice system. It was interesting to see a discussion of Peter Singer and Effective Altruism, something I want to follow up more.
  4. Daisy Johnson’s Hotel was a beautiful book of fragile ghost stories set in a hotel. Despite this being a small book, Johnson finds many ways to explore the concept and the opening chapter is virtuosic.
  5. Live through this by Patty Schemel was another grunge biography. I already knew parts of Schemel’s story from her 2011 movie Hit So Hard. This edition was a UK release of Schemel’s biography and it tells a horrifying story about addiction, stripped of the cliches and bravado found in many other rock books.
  6. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is terrifying and remarkable. It lays out how bad a nuclear war might be. While it’s possible that this is a very worst case scenario, the book is an urgent warning. I’ve had nightmares since reading it, and can only hope that the forthcoming Denis Villeneuve movie helps grow a movement against nuclear weapons.
  7. I tend to feel intimidated by Booker Prize winners but Paul Sampson’s Prophet Song was very readable and terrifying.
  8. Translated from the Dutch, We Had to Remove this Post by Hanna Bervoets was a short, literary novel that produced a strong sense of dread as it described the lives of online content moderators.
  9. Nostalgia is death, but Uncommon People is the best book I’ve read so far on Britpop. Rather than retelling the mainstream story Miranda Sawyer picks up some of the stranger elements of the genre, before its mainstream co-option.
  10. Wicked and Weird by Buck 65 is an unconventional biography, full of tall tales. I’d rather read a biography where things are made up than boring.

Alongside my prose reading, I’ve been enjoying the new series from Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard, The Power Fantasy, which has completed its first arc. The book using superheroes as an allegory for nuclear diplomacy, producing a book where the characters have to avoid coming into conflict. It’s a gripping and horrifying work.

It’s been a tricky year for reading, and I’ve found myself bogged down in unrewarding books at times. My top ten feels a little weaker than recent years too, despite a few exceptional books. As ever, I need to be more eager to discard books that aren’t rewarding.

Writing in 2024

For the first time in my life, I feel happy with where my writing is at. I’ve a small but responsive audience, and it’s at just the right size for me to do some interesting projects. The year’s highlights were Peakrill Press publishing True Clown Stories and my 24-story advent calendar. I’ve also continued the weekly substack and my favourite stories from this were:

So, what are my plans for 2025? Well:

  1. I will continue the weekly substack – I like writing odd, quick stories for this. But, while the mailing list works for me, I’m increasingly frustrated with the substack platform, which is growth hacking its platform at the expense of direct engagement for individual lists. I expect to migrate some time this year.
  2. I need to get a better at promoting my publications – I’ve released some good things, my marketing is not as good as the work. The promotion needs to be planned as part of the project.
  3. I’m not interested in a large audience – Simon Indelicate’s essay Metrics are the Thief of Joy captured how I feel. I want engaged, responsive readers – the sort of audience relationships that don’t scale.
  4. The advent calendar project was the most enjoyable project I’ve done. Partly for its ridiculous ambition, but also for how it invited people to respond. I want to do more experiments like this, particularly around participation.
  5. I will start to work towards writing a novel in the next couple of years. There are many bad reasons for working on a novel, but I’m taken by Joseph Matheny’s suggestion that you should focus on an audience of 65 people.

Towards the end of 2024, I talked to a couple of groups about immediatism – how art needs to be as unmediated as possible. I have become very comfortable sitting at home writing – particularly as work has taken more of my energy. So, I want to spend more time with in-person writing groups. I also did a single performance last year, and I’d like to do more.

It’s not about the size of the audience. This was one of my favourite ever performances

At the end of 2023, I wondered if writing was worth the effort I put into it, when I could be putting that energy into my career. In 2024, my career has become more important to me, but so has the writing. Things are still not quite right – some of my creative projects drained more energy than they should have done – but I am getting there.

Attack Warning Red

Julie Mcdowall’s history of British preparations for nuclear war, Attack Warning Red, was one of two incredibly disturbing books I read about the subject this year. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear war has receded but it’s still there. The world has around 12,500 nuclear weapons, 2,000 on high alert (source).

Attack Warning Red discussed the often-futile measures taken in readiness for nuclear war with Russia. Britain is a small, densely packed country and the fallout from even a small number of strikes would have affected most people. Much of the preparations and planning was a sham. In the 1980s, journalist Duncan Campbell calculated that the sandbagging requirements of Hull alone would exhaust the entire national supply of sand.

Mcdowall discusses the plans for forced labour crews to clear corpses from the streets and how hospitals could mercifully end lives when there was no medicine. In one health authority, it was suggested that medical staff forage for folk remedies. Toilet facilities in large bunkers were designed without doors or were too few in number to reduce the risk of suicides.

Reading this book gave me a few nightmares and left me wrestling with the horror of a world in which we casually allow an existential threat to linger. There is little comfort. I read the Wikipedia list of nuclear tests in attempts to reassure myself – we’ve exploded over a thousand of these without the world ending. I read the essay collapse won’t reset society which looked at the black death and the fall of Nazi Berlin to show how bureaucracy endures even the worst disaster. Towards the end:

U.S. government estimates predict a death toll of between 13 to 34 million people for a nuclear exchange involving 3,000 warheads, with substantial additional fatalities that would result from a lack of medical care, lack of utilities, and ensuing food shortage. But even at a final death toll of 10 to 20 percent of the total population, and infrastructure destruction similar to the situation in Germany after the Second World War, the total shock of nuclear war could likely fall within the range historically absorbed by modern economies and governments.

I don’t understand how the world’s political leaders are not thinking about nuclear war all the time, and it horrifies me that nobody is trying to fix this. Wikipedia also lists military nuclear accidents and some of these are horrifying. In 1983, an order was given for a nuclear strike and refused. Eventually we are going to be very unlucky.

These weapons are so obscene that it’s hard to justify owning them, even in a defensive capacity. Trident is solely designed for retaliatory strikes, and I’m not sure it’s worth killing millions of civilians in revenge if the Trident deterrent fails.

Mycelium Parish News 2024 available to buy

The Mycelium Parish News for 2024 has been printed, and will be launched in Sheffield on Saturday 14th December. The zine is now listed on etsy for pre-order with copies for just £2.30 (£5 outside the UK) and will be send out next weekend.

This is the third time I’ve produced the Parish News with my friend Dan Sumption of Peakrill Press. The Mycelium Parish News is a collection of strange and interesting culture and events from over the last year, including podcasts, books, albums and more. This year’s text is significantly longer than the previous two issues.

We’re pleased that we’ve kept the price down to £2.30 – including postage and packing – as we want to get this into as many people’s hands as possible. As with last year, we have a print run of 300 copies, after which this edition will be posted online. You can see our previous issues at the Internet Archive.

The 2025 edition is already underway (a mere 270 words so far) – get in touch if there’s anything you think we should add!

Horror Advent Calendar

Earlier this year, I thought it would be cool to make an advent calendar featuring a short horror story for each day. This turned out to be a lot more work than expected, but well worth the stupid amount of time it took.

Image from @jennifer_allanson on instagram 

Each week during the spring and summer I wrote a new Christmas story. I finished 22, added a couple of other things (thanks, @muffichka!), gave them to my friend Emma to do the make look good, and sent everything to a printer.

When the box first arrived, I was convinced that the printers had made a mistake. But no, that’s what over 1,500 A5 sheets look like. And I had to fold and sticker each one.

In some ways, this whole project was an example of the sunk cost fallacy. I’d not considered all the costs and I’d not estimated how much time it would take. But I was too far in. Nothing else to do but set to folding-up a couple of calendars each day.

The stories made it out in good time for December 1st, and it’s been delightful to see people opening and enjoying them. Everyone seems happy – although they’ve not reached the more unpleasant stories yet.

Image from @sophystar on instagram

This was a stupid, ambitious project, but I’m glad I did it. Some ideas are so infeasible that you look for a way to make them happen.

The worst thing is, I’m doing this next year. I’ve got prompts for over 60 more potential stories, some of which I’ll be working on this month. Some things are so ridiculous, they’re worth doing more than once.

Monthnotes: November 2024

November has been very much over-committed, but I just about kept up with everything. In the second half of the month I flirted with burnout. The combination of running a training course at work and my personal deadlines put me under too much pressure. I slowed down enough to get through, but that’s something to be careful about.

November in the valley has featured a lot of weather

Despite the hard work, November was good for getting things done. The Secret Project – a horror advent calendar – went out after a few months of work (and a lot of folding). The text of the 3rd Mycelium Parish News zine was completed. I spoke at an event in London. And, best of all, after 13 years work, True Clown Stories has been published. It looks really good!

Photo by Dan Sumption

November was cold, made a little more frustrating by the fact I was supposed to be in Spain for part of it, but my business trip was cancelled. We had snow in the valley followed by an abrupt rise in temperature that melted it all, overwhelming the drainage. The town was almost flooded, with disaster averted by inches.

Amidst all November’s chaos, I struggled to keep up with training. My weight lurched upwards and concerted effort was needed to keep it on track for an overall gain of just 0.1 pounds over the month. The steps continued despite the dark and cold for a total of 358,596, averaging 11,953 a day. The highest was a mere 19,948 on my trip to London. It’s been a struggle, but I’m pleased that I mostly adhered to training.

The big world news was the US election. I was awake most of that night, watching the results. I gave up around dawn and went for a walk on the moors, which gave me a little perspective. As bad as the result feels, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m annoyed that the news sources I’d read gave me no idea of the size of the victory, which suggested that I was not as well-informed by them as I had thought. Like many people, I had no idea why anyone would vote for Trump against Harris, despite half the electorate thinking he was a sensible choice. I felt that the media had flattered my prejudices rather than explaining the world to me.

I immediately cut down my social media use and filtered terms related to the election. The noise on some platforms was insufferable with a large number of people stoking fear with their takes. The three weeks or so I’ve spent without reading the news is the longest I’ve done in my life, but I’m feeling better for it. I have considered using Wikipedia’s current events portal to keep up with things.

Fending off burnout has meant a few very early nights in November (as in 6pm early) and making more time to read. I enjoyed Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck, a collection of linked short stories about a fictional valley-town located near Hebden Bridge. Nicholas Royle’s book on second-hand books, Shadow Lines was a fun light read, which mentioned John Shire and Colin Lyall, my favourite booksellers.

2-Tone comics, my local shop, recommended Beneath the Tree, Where Nobody Sees, a book about a serial killer in a town of cute anthropomorphic animals. This took the concept to some clever, uncomfortable places. I also enjoyed Kieron Gillen’s We Called Them Giants. In the middle of the month, Muffy and I went to the Thought Bubble convention. This was mostly overwhelming, but I picked up some interesting things to read. Meanwhile, Keiron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy has justified the cost of reading it in single issues with some excellent cliff-hangers.

I watched a few movies this month, but Maxxxine was the only one I loved, mainly because Mia Goth is so engaging. I enjoyed how Love Lies Bleeding joyfully went too far. While I didn’t love The Substance it was an amazing cinema experience. The audience perceptibly reacted to some of the unpleasantness, and a few people walked out near the end, which amazed me, given what they’d made it through to that point. But I guess that ending was A Lot.

My main project at work came to an abrupt end, and it was sad to say farewell to an excellent team. After running a training course, I’ve started my new project which promises some exciting challenges. I was also pleased to be chosen as ’employee of the month’ in my local office. After so many years of hating work, I love my current job, even after two years. I’m not sure if the twenty-something me would be pleased or scornful, but I’m happy.

Piss Flowers

I spent a lovely afternoon in the Tate Modern with Kate Shields. I was delighted to see Piss Flowers by the Helen Chadwick. I’ve always remembered this appearing in Private Eye‘s Pseuds Corner, and being unsettled by this mockery of her artist’s statement. I hadn’t realised it was a major piece of work, so I was amazed to encounter it all those years later. We also visited Anthony McCall’s Solid Light exhibition. The display gave it little context and it’s hard not to take it as an example of ‘instagrammable art’.

Solid Light – good visuals though

As well as all my other writing, I worked on NaNoGenMo, where you use November to try writing software to produce a novel. My attempt was producing an oral history. The resulting text has the blandness of much LLM output and is not engaging enough to read in itself – although it’s still remarkable how easily LLMs produce plausible text. It was good to think about how LLMs work, and I very much enjoyed tinkering with a software project.

I headed into London for the opening of an exhibition at the All Good Bookshop, the final act of a collective I’ve been involved in since 2019. Due to reasons I couldn’t stay for the full event, but I did give an introductory speech. It’s been an interesting project to be involved with, and its dissolution had me thinking more about the importance of Immediatism.

Shrine to Donnie

As pleased as I am with my work in November, I did take on more than I should have done. I want to do NaNoGenMo, the Mycelium Parish News and an advent calendar again next year, so I need to reduce their overlap. I’m also looking forward to mid-January, when I’ve cleared my last deadline and I can simply focus on playing with my writing.

So, that’s November. It was a tough month, but I’m pleased with everything I achieved. I’m also glad that I managed to handle the deadlines sensibly, and rested as much as I needed to. December has some hectic commuting, but I’m excited about my (mandatory) vacation over Christmas and getting some rest.

  • At the start of the month, I visited an amazing event which included Justin Hopper’s talk The Great Satanic Swindle. Getting the last train home meant missing the last 10 minutes, so hopefully I can catch it again.
  • I loved Blindboy’s podcast on The Miserable Blood-Drenched History of Jaffa Cakes, which explored a simple object’s links to colonialism.
  • My lack of news is not helping with my nuclear war paranoia. I’m not sure how everyone is so calm about this.
  • A new shop in town, Mother, is producing some excellent bread, good enough to have me and others queueing for when it opens.

Monthnotes: October 2024

October was a tough month, for various reasons. for a start, I’ve not been sleeping well. Maybe that’s middle age, or maybe I’m just being sloppy about sleep hygiene. I’ve also felt overwhelmed by the modern world’s deluge of information and I’ve battened down the hatches a little. With everything going on I’ve not had much spare energy, and missed a few events I’d booked tickets for. But, as rough as I feel, I’ve kept moving and it’s not been too bad overall.

It’s felt like I’ve been travelling a lot, to Liverpool, Buxton and London. The second Spirits of Place event was superb, and well worth a tricky trip to the Wirral. I made a quick dash to London for work, where it was lovely to see my colleagues, even if I ended up staying out in Docklands.

Amidst all the chaos, my diet and exercise have been somewhat all over the place. I did however manage a couple of days of the Couch-to-5k – nothing consistent yet, but it’s good to know that my hip can stand more exercise than it used to. I walked 406,606 steps, an average of 13,116 a day, with the highest total being 20,339 for a day in Buxton. Despite a very poor diet, I still managed to lose a pound overall.

Whenever I see happy looking cows, I always want to warn them not to trust people.

I only finished a few books in October. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo was a flawed but impressive horror novel. Uncommon People was a brisk retelling of Britpop which was perfect for a slow Saturday. Movies were also thin on the ground, but I saw The Outrun at my local cinema, featuring a Q&A by Amy Liptrot. It was very strange to watch a biographical movie and then see the film’s subject in person.

Work was hard this month. Despite all my efforts with my current project, it was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. I was a little nervous about having to find a new role, but made some progress.

Last month, I realised that I was a little over-committed with my writing until January. I’ve continued working through these obligations and none of them have felt like a chore. I also did a few new substack pieces that I’m very happy with: The Bleak Stag, When Dad got the Bomb, Copthwaite’s Amusement Park. The short stories continue to flow and surprise me, which I love, but I’m also thinking about how I can do perhaps start doing something more with my writing.

A jail for trains

True Clown Stories is at the proofing stage. Reading it once more, I found that most of the stories still work for me. Hopefully this will be published in November. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people make of these pieces.

I can’t believe that a plastic dinosaur is £39.99.

At one point in October, I found myself waiting somewhere with no phone battery. I had no idea how long I would be there and had nothing to do but sit and think quietly. It’s the first moment of quiet I’ve had in a long time. I let my thoughts wander, tried to remember bits of poetry. I realised there’s a whole state of mind that technology and lifestyle has eliminated for me. It’s something I’d like more of. I think I might be happier in a life without messaging apps, but I can’t see myself getting rid of WhatsApp. But more quiet time would be good.

Filming for the new Sally Wainwright show
  • Ryan Broderick has started a new podcast called Panic World. I particularly enjoyed the episode where he interviewed Caroline Calloway.
  • The new Indelicates album, Avenue QAnon is now on Spotify.
  • I had the latest covid and flu jabs, which wiped me out so much I ended up taking a day off work.
  • The house has been covered in scaffolding for much of the past month, but the good news is that the roof has been completely redone.
  • I found a new writing group in Hebden Bridge and went along to a meeting. Hoping to make some more in the near future.
The new bread shop in town, which is only open for a few hours a week. Good bread though.

I like that some of my zines are currently in a university library

Monthnotes: September 2024

September has been an odd month, not standing out as any particular thing. That’s not to say it’s been bad: work was engaging, I caught up with some friends, and I visited London and Alton Towers. But the weather has turned, with the cold waking me at night a few times. I’ve been having incredible, intense dreams. I’m trying to do too much. Life has felt unsettled. Good, but unsettled.

London was fun – I saw the Indelicates perform their new record Avenue QAnon, then went to Borough Market with Emma. Later in the month I visited Alton Towers for my sister’s birthday. At the start of September, Katharine visited for a few days, which was lovely. Rosy has been away much of the month, but our friend Kate has been staying instead.

My walking continues at 10,000 steps a day, which is a little too much for doing the same routes in the valley, but I’m keeping the target high for my training. The total was 362,270 steps, with an average of 12,076 and a peak of 20,302 from walking around Alton Towers. I’m slowly shedding weight from the personal training, with another 3 pounds gone over September. I’m happy with this gradual pace. The training sessions have loosened my shoulders and I’m making progress with fixing my years-long hip injury. I should be running again in October.

Over the past few months, I’ve accumulated too many books, so in September I aimed to read more than I acquired. A highlight was Hit So Hard, the biography of Patty Schemel, drummer from Hole. This was a terrifying portrait of addiction, and it took me a while to realise what made this so stark. I’ve read very few women writing about addiction and I think the difference here was having no trace of boastfulness alongside the regrets. I also read several graphic novels, including some Astro City compilations. Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn was an impressive but sometimes difficult novel that starts with the Twin Towers re-appearing in the Dakota Badlands.

I’m not sure if it’s the reading, but I only watched three movies this month, and all of them in the cinema. Alien: Romulus was another disappointing sequel and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice seemed surprisingly good in comparison – mainly because it wasn’t obvious what would happen at any particular point. The best thing I saw was Hollywoodgate, a documentary about the Taliban airforce which alternated between hilarity and horror.

I continue to love my job more than any other one I’ve held – it’s challenging, but at just the right level, and I’m working as part of an excellent team. I am a little worried by the rumours of a return-to-office edict. I don’t think I can do more than two days a week commuting, And it would be ridiculous to travel to an office just to spend the day on calls to my distributed team.

Among all the other things I’ve been doing, I found a little time to play with embeddings and vector databases. I also wrote a review of I Am Code, a book that had some interesting ideas around generating literature with LLMs. I wish I had more time to learn about technology. But I guess it’s good that I am discovering so many things through work that I want to spend time on.

Hebden Bridge rainbows do not fuck around

I continued writing on the substack, with my favourite new stories being A Shrine to Light Entertainment and How to Write Cosmic Horror. The substack gives me an energy around my writing that I’ve not had since around 2010 (although I am missing the opportunities I had to perform back then). The most exciting thing is how I seem to be getting better at tuning into stories and finishing them; and I like the new pieces I’m writing.

At the start of the month, I tallied up how many projects I have in progress between now and January 23rd, and was shocked to find 10 of them:

  • ASAP: Completing the edits on True Clown stories
  • Weekly: My regular story email
  • October: planning a walk on a Liverpool ley line
  • November: a talk for the Invisibles unconvention in London
  • November: working on a piece for NaNoGenMo
  • November: sending out my Secret Project
  • December an undergraduate lecture on the comic book Promethea
  • December: sending out the 2024 Mycelium Parish News
  • December: a talk and event to launch the Mycelium Parish News
  • January: a new walking zine (my Horkos pledge)

Obviously, this a A Lot, but should be fine as long as I’m organised. I’m making sure to do regular small bits of work on each of these.

I received some worrying news recently, that my sister’s dog was going blind. It explained a few things, like why she couldn’t catch. It was very sad but there was apparently nothing to be done, although a last ditch referral to an opthalmologist was suggested. After a brief examination, the canine ophthalmologist said that Rosie is not going blind as the vet had suggested, but rather she is just ‘fucking clumsy’.

I don’t know what these things are, but they look cool. Since moving up here, I’ve come to appreciate moss

At the start of the month, I had some surprise dental work. I calmed myself during this by thinking through routes from Death Stranding. It made me long to revisit the game, but playing it didn’t feel all that fun. It was the same with returning to Days Gone – the memories of these games are great, but spending time on them felt dull. I’d like to enjoy video games more than I do.

I’m continuing to love being on mastodon. It seems to have that early twitter vibe of friendly people having positive conversations. My theory is that it’s because nobody uses algorithmic feeds, reducing the incentives for attention-at-any-cost. I also seem to be get more interaction on mastodon than I do on Bluesky or Twitter, which is surprising given my smaller audience. The other social networks keep me coming back to click aimlessly when I’m tired, but maybe I just need to log out for a while.

The new Indelicates album Avenue QAnon is one of the best records I’ve listened to in years. Part of this was the slow release of information in the run-up, which felt like the growing expectation I had about records in the 90s. The new songs are catchy, bleak and funny, with Live, Laugh, Love in particular sticking in my head. I’m hoping this record gets the attention it deserves – I think this is an important album I recently found myself comparing it to The Holy Bible.

  • I used to put the Nine Inch Nails instrumental A Warm Place on repeat as I fell asleep and I love this new orchestral version.
  • Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy is one of the best comics launches I’ve read in years, and is worth the outrageous cost of single issues nowadays. Superheroes as nuclear war allegory.
  • The NYT’s article on The Prince We Never Knew reminded me how remarkable Prince was, while being open-eyed about his flaws. I hope we do one day get to see this documentary.
  • My parents celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary this year. Wow.
  • I’m usually scornful of any adaptations that cling to close to earlier versions, but the new The Last of Us trailer has me desperate to see the new season – even if nostalgia is death
  • Warren Ellis’s Department of Midnight podcast has finished an excellent first season. I’m not a fan of narrative podcasts, but this was gripping. Good enough to listen to at 1x speed.