I picked up a cheap kindle copy of Gurnaik Johal’s novel, Saraswati, and have it cued up to read after You Dreamed of Empires. The Guardian review is lukewarm, but attracted me with this section:
…his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed “translit”… its features are all too recognisable. These novels contain multiple narratives, each set in a different country if not continent, often in a different century. Although long by modern standards, they are packed – with events, themes, facts. They address themselves to the big questions of the day, not by the traditional means of examining urban society but through a kind of bourgeois exotic. The characters are paleontologists, mixed media artists, every flavour of activist, but never dentists or electricians. The settings are often remote: tropical islands or frigid deserts.
The reader puts these novels together, like jigsaw puzzles. This term won’t catch on either, but one could call them “connection novels”; not in the Forsterian sense of human hearts, but rather the ecological, cultural and financial structures that link the globe… Not coincidentally, they owe a lot to science fiction.
The connection novel sounds similar to the systems novel (Keshava Guha’s review directly invokes DeLillo, Pynchon, Richard Powers and David Mitchell).
One of the thing I’m looking forward to with Saraswati is seeing a way of constructing a novel with smaller jigsaw pieces. I’ve always wanted to build something larger from the sort of microfictions that I write. The description of the ‘connection novel’ above sounds like a way forward.
The first part of December turned out to be even more challenging than November, and I counted the days until my Christmas break. Most of the month was working or hibernation, apart from a trip to Chichester where I led a seminar on comic books. I finished work with relief on the 19th and settled down to enjoy the end of the year. Both work laptops were stashed in a rucksack and hidden in a rarely-used cupboard. It took some time before I started to feel relaxed. Christmas Day was cosy, and we stretched out opening presents to about seven hours.
Abandoned snitch elf
Exercise continued to be neglected, and I added a couple of pounds to my current weight. The lack of movement has left me feeling sluggish, achy and heavy. Something to deal with in 2026.
It was another slow month with writing. I’ve struggled to find energy and was not clear-headed enough at times. Mostly, I’ve been removing obstacles and obligations, ready for the new year. I finished a draft of the Mycelium Parish News and need to see what happens next with that. The writing highlight was an excellent workshop at Inaland gallery, which gave me lots of ideas. People were also reading the advent calendar, which was fun – although we perhaps went harder than people would have liked with the final image.
Art show at inaland where pieces were sold from the wall
The pause in work allowed me to get back into reading. I read a brace of Jarett Kobek books – Atta was superb, but the Zodiac true crime duology felt less compelling. I read a dreadful 19290s pulp novel for the dystopian book club. I caught up with David Lapham’s comic book crime saga Stray Bullets. The best book I read was When We Were Real, set in a world seven years after everyone learned it was a simulation. A lighter read was a fesshole compilation, which made me laugh so much that I couldn’t read it on the train.
Dawn in Leeds
Despite an excellent programme at the Picturehouse, I made no trips to the cinema until Christmas Eve. The films I watched at home were mostly Christmas ones, and mostly disappointing. Kanye West documentary In Whose Name? was more interesting for its content rather than its form but was compulsive viewing. I disliked It was Just an Accident, which made me feel bad considering what the director went through. My favourite watch of the month was My Cousin Vinny – I loved the relationship between the main characters.
After not liking the first episode, I enjoyed the rest of the season of Pluribus. Taylor Swift puff-piece End of an Eras turned out to be compelling competence porn. Spartacus: House of Ashur is shameless pulp, but it has the same delight in language that Deadwood had. The Chair Company didn’t take on a first attempt, but I want to try it again.
I’ve talked about the stress of work, but it’s also gone well. I enjoyed the office party, which is a good sign. I was given an award for my contributions during the year, which was a wonderful surprise. The break gave me a little time to play with technology – I worked on an MCP demo which I’ll hopefully show at our Java group, and accidentally vibe coded an Obsidian plugin when I should have been doing something else.
The main reason I’m enjoying work is much is probably post-pandemic working. Not having to travel to an office five days a week is much less tiring. I only have one mandatory office day a week, with my client, but I usually visit my home office most weeks. This feels like a good balance.
Land art near the quarry
I took the opportunity offered by the Christmas break to clear some things out. I closed my mastodon account as that was proving to be more of a distraction than a joy. I’ve still not shut down the substack newsletter, but I’m now a paid-up user of Buttondown. I’m also getting closer to deleting my WhatsApp account.
In previous years, I’ve set resolutions. This year, someone suggested picking a single word – and the word I’ve chosen is ‘flow’. Having a single work makes more sense than a series of goals that inevitably includes ‘start running again’ like every other year.
Flow to me means removing the stagnation in my life. My impressions of 2025 were overwhelm and inertia. I was caught up in several unhelpful, repeating patterns. By increasing flow I can fix a number of issues – lack of exercise, distractions online, dissatisfaction with my writing. I can deal with the clutter in my life – virtual and physical.
I do need to get out of the house more. The pandemic was great for me, in that it removed the need to head to an office five days a week. But I also got out of practise with going out in general (not helped by giving up alcohol a few years back – I feel healthier for stopping, but I miss the energy of drunken nights out). Interestingly, this need to get out more was one of the themes that emerged in a tarot reading that I had a couple of days ago.
2026 is also the year that I turn 50. As a teenager, this seemed impossibly old but now I’m almost there. I think it’s important not to define or limit myself by my age, while making sure to draw the benefits from it. Sometimes, being this old excites me, other times it fills me with dread about all the wasted time in the past.
There are several things I still want to do in my life. I’d better hurry up and get on with them.
2025 was hard work, on the whole. One of the benefits of keeping my monthnotes is that I can look back at trends. It turns out that I’ve felt overworked and overwhelmed pretty much throughout the year – not just in the past few months, as I’d thought. That’s something I need to fix as soon as possible.
There were some great highlights to the year: seeing Guernica in Madrid and the Goldsworthy retrospective in Edinburgh. Rosy moved up to Hebden Bridge. Kitty and John got married. Sinners was an amazing movie. I did my first public tarot readings. I performed at a wonderful event in the Brighton Fringe and had my first reading in Hebden Bridge.
Work has gone well. I’m more than three years into this job and still love it. The pandemic has helped with this – permanent office attendance ground me down in all my other jobs. Having more energy has meant I’ve engaged more with my colleagues. My role is challenging but I’m excited about going into 2026.
I’ve struggled with my writing a little, with work stealing much of the energy that I need for that. I’ve wound up the weekly substack and I’m looking into how I can bring a new energy into whatever I produce. I also want to concentrate more on writing that involves real-world interactions.
I’m ending 2025 far more tired than I should feel. It was a good year, but I want next year to be better.
Despite everything, I read 78 books in 2025, about 20 more than last year. Not all of these were good – I still struggle with my primary school teaching about how you should always finish a book once you’ve started. Still, there were a lot of great books to choose from for my top ten this year. As usual, these are ordered alphabetically.
Max S Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence was a gift and I would not have read it otherwise – I grew bored of pop-science after uni. But this is one of those rare books that changes the way you look at the world forever. Bennett uses the latest neuroscience to show how intelligence has evolved on earth, and how human brains contain the remnants of simpler systems; and, in passing, the reason for dreams and fiction are explained. Great stuff.
We had two books from John Higgs this year. My favourite was Exerminate! Regenerate! (blogged here), which had a little more space for exploring its subject. Writing about Doctor Who risks being fan service, but Higgs explored the nature of storytelling, as well as telling some great anecdotes about the show.
I originally heard about Miranda July’s All Foursvia Sara Crowley’s blog. It’s not a perfect novel – too didactic in places, and sometimes blind to the main character’s privilege – but it’s also a book that’s been read by a lot of people I know, something I’ve not encountered in a long while.
Another excellent horror novel was I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan. I think we expected more haunted houses from the housing crisis, but this does the job perfectly. The iniquities of renting a home are almost more unsettling than the ghosts in this debut novel. I’m hoping Lanigan’s next book is also horror.
There have been a number of good books on folk customs over the year, but Lally MacBeth’s The Lost Folk stood out. MacBeth has a wide definition of folk, including church kneelers and cake-making, and the book ends with a rousing call about the importance of inclusion in folk.
Joseph Matheny is justly famous for Ong’s Hat, but the conspiracy aspects often overwhelm the literary ones. Matheny’s Ong’s Hat Compleat talks about all aspects of the experiment, including the building of an early language model. The form of the book is also experimental, being released as a parallel text and audiobook that explore different parts of the experiment.
Alison Rumfitt’s Brainwyrms is a deeply troubling and problematic book. It’s very much extreme horror and therefore not for everyone. But Rumfitt is an excellent writer, and this is one of the best horror novels I’ve read. Her first novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless would also have been a perfect addition to this list. She is very much on the list of writers I’ll pre-order.
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken (blogged here) is a polemic about modern food production and its dangers. van Tulleken’s writing is lurid and comes close to body horror at times.
The White Pube’s Poor Artists was picked up at Todmorden books. It was a well-written, provocative and empathic book about the struggles of artists within today’s society, as well as a polemic in favour of making art.
Careless People is a gossipy book about Sarah Wynn-Williams’ time working at Facebook. It’s also a worrying portrait of the flawed and unpleasant people who have been placed in charge of our world.
Every year, I write a post looking back on my writing over the past year. There are entries for 2024, 2023, and 2022. I was a little unexcited about doing one for 2025 as I’ve struggled with the flow of my writing this year – which I guess says something significant. Work has taken a lot of my energy and my writing finds it hard to compete.
It’s not been a bad year in terms of what I produced. I sent out a second horror advent calendar, had a poem in a poetry trail, and published a piece in Bryony Good’s In a Land zine. I also published a lot of stories that I was happy with:
But I’ve also felt frustrated. I’ve been questioning for a couple of years whether the writing is worth the effort I put into it. I love my job more than ever before and the writing takes up creative energy that could go into that. This was less of a problem when I had jobs I hated. The ideal answer is raise my writing game so it’s as satisfying as my job.
The interesting things about the stories that I listed above is that they were all written quickly, and most of them to theme. A lot of my being bogged down comes from trying to plan my writing rather than letting it emerge. So, 2026 is going to be very different. I’m going to prioritise having fun.
I stopped doing the weekly substack email as it had begun to feel like a chore. I’ve moved across to buttondown and will be sending some new things through that. But it will be an irregular thing, waiting for when I have something to share.
My big goal is to have more engagement between my writing and the physical world. I need to prioritise attending workshops and writing groups. I want to produce more physical objects and postal projects. I’d also love to do some collaborations – there are people I know who I’d love to work with, including SHIELDS, Francesca Cluney, Kitty Peels, The Indelicates, Lou Ice and DRPFD. Let’s see what the next year brings.
I also want to produce larger-scale work. I’ve spent 20 years obsessed with large texts composed of fragments. I want to do something with that idea.
The main reason was wanting to remove an attention sink, one less app that I might refresh to look for stimulation. While I love the concept of microblogging, and the existence of the fediverse, it was not working for me.
There were a few specific issues with Mastodon itself:
The protocol ties any content to the domain name it’s produced under. This means it is impossible to properly migrate posts to another account. I was not aware of this when I signed up, and it’s a fairly significant constraint.
The existence of an algorithmic ‘trending’ feed encouraged people to write content to appeal to an audience. I’d come to Mastodon to avoid that sort of karma-farming.
While I love microblogging, I hadn’t managed to build a large enough community. Looks like everyone went to Bluesky, and I’m not going near another VC-funded algorithmic system.
Rob Shearer gives a more detailed breakdown on some of the issues in his Mastodon Exit Interview.
I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging – and wordpress can now link to the fediverse as well.
Earlier this year I looked back at my old blog posts and I miss using it for more developed thoughts that I’d write on twitter/Bluesky/mastodon. Blogging and its RSS framework already provide most of what I actually want from the fediverse.
Last month’s notes are very late again, which shows how busy I’ve been with work. I’ll do this quickly rather than miss a month. I started November feeling burned out, which became a theme. I stripped down a lot of my plans for the month. I didn’t do NaNoGenMo, The Mycelium Parish News will now emerge in 2026, and I’ve stopped the weekly substack.
A brief flurry of intense woodland colour
The month included some fun outings. Work took me down to Shoreditch, where I ate a lot of excellent food. We had the Todmorden Book Festival which was fun, but is definitely in need of a fringe. I also went to Thought Bubble, where I caught up with an old friend from the Invisibles Cell and bought some interesting books. We also celebrated Practise Christmas, and it was great to spend time with old friends.
Look who I met at Thought Bubble!
I did less writing in December than any month in years. Balancing work and creative projects is proving more difficult than ever. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it forces me to be more careful about how I spend my free time. I chose to stop the Substack as the weekly rhythm had changed from being inspirational to being a drag. I was also fed up with Substack’s continual addition of growth hacks and social features. I’ve created a new mailing list on Buttondown, and I’m hoping to use that for more considered writing. Despite all the challenges, I produced and distributed a second Horror Advent Calendar.
Work stress stopped me from attending this month’s dystopian book group – a great shame, as I had a lot to say about Ling Ma’s Severance – not least that the sections about the immigrant experience were more interesting than the post-apocalyse. It was also weird to read a 2018 novel that gets the pandemic so right. I enjoyed the re-publication of qntm’s There is No Anti-Memetics Division and the new John Higgs, Lynchian. I bought Danielewski’s new book, but felt too intimidated by the 1200 pages to make a start. Saltwash was strange and mysterious. I also picked up some interesting things from Thought Bubble.
I managed to see several movies. Souleymane’s Story was tense and empathic. Del Toro’s Frankenstein felt like a tediously traditional adaptation. Also disappointing was The Commuter, which was like a boring version of Bullet Train. The Springsteen biopic was probably the most annoying film I’ve seen this year, entirely pointless. Zero Dark Thirty was another excellent Kathryn Bigelow movies which was also incredibly problematic. Come See Me in the Good Light was thought-provoking, but fell back on too many documentary cliches. Best screening of the month was Still Out, a response to the KLF’s Chill Out record, which was an intimate and enjoyable event.
November (and December, so far) have been tough months. I think it feels this way every year. A mix of the long run from September to Christmas, as well as the nights drawing in and the days getting colder. This might be something I should prepare for in the future.
I never get close enough to the deer for a good photograph
While I’m still not exercising regularly, being more careful about food meant that I dropped just under a pound.
I read Skullpocket by Nathan Ballingrud years ago, and it took me ages to find it once more on Google. An excellent story.
On the way to pick up Thai food one evening, I passed an astronomer with a telescope outside there house, who pointed out Saturn to me.
On the 12th I dream about talking to a record executive that pylons were going to be huge in 2026, and that this was a bandwagon that he should be preparing for.
I recently joined the Todmorden Dystopian Book Club. The second book I read with them was Nuclear War: A Scenario, which I previously read last year. My re-read finished a few days before I watched the new Kathryn Bigelow movie A House Made of Dynamite – probably the most stressful film I’ve ever seen – and I’m back to having nightmares about nuclear war.
The value of nuclear weapons lies in deterrence. The problem comes if this deterrence fails. Most of the crisis plans are based upon clear communications and slow escalation, allowing a situation to diffuse. In Jacobsen’s book and Bigelow’s film, a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ launch forces decisions about retaliation to be made in a very short period of time.
It takes about 20 minutes for a land-launched ICBM to travel from North Korea to the continental United States. Retaliations could take place before this landed, with the deaths of “a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone”. Up to 90% of the world’s population could die in the months following, if calculations about nuclear winter are correct.
These weapons do not kill just the people fighting the war – they kill children, civilians, people who don’t care about international tensions. Clouds of fallout don’t respect international borders – cold war plans for war with Russia involved the deaths of up to 300 million Chinese people. A war with the North Korean dictatorship would kill all tens of millions of North Korean civilians – most of them innocent people oppressed by the regime.
In his memoirs, Reagan wrote: “Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?” A House Made of Dynamite sums up how much more difficult things are with nuclear proliferation – retaliation is planned, but it’s not obvious who launched the weapon, North Korea, Russia or China. But the doctrine of deterrence demands a response before the missile lands.
These weapons are almost unthinkably powerful. We don’t engage with the threat of them as the idea is overwhelming. In 1954, America was producing two new nuclear weapons every three days, each many times more powerful than the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many people are scared of climate change but I’ve stopped worrying about that since reading Jacobsen’s book – I think we will be lucky to last that long.
Jacobsen considers other horrors beyond the nuclear explosions. EMP weapons could destroy the American power grid, killing 90% of Americans. Russia’s ‘dead hand’ automated retaliation system used seismic monitoring to automatically launch missiles. Project Sunshine studied the increase in radiation in children’s teeth from nuclear testing. There’s ‘the Devil’s scenario’ of a nuclear strike on a nuclear power plant, causing a meltdown. Jacobsen takes a couple of pages to describe the death of Louis Slotin from radiation poisoning. The same horrific experience would be faced by millions in a nuclear war.
I find myself praying for a small incident, something that is enough to shock us away from this path. We’re trapped in a paradox, with no easy way to de-escalate. Trillions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons and preventions, which we could be spending on better things.
Jacobsen’s book ends with a warning, that in the event of a war, it would seem obvious that we should have done something; “…this didn’t have to happen”.
After spinning so many plates last month, October had several being dropped. November looks like being a little calmer, which is a relief, but I’m longing for my Christmas break already. Among the month’s highlights were the Brighton launch of Rosy’s book I Love…, where I performed tarot readings, and the Hebden Bridge launch, where I was the support act.
It’s been a struggle to keep the writing on track against an unrelenting tide of work. I’ve had a few deadlines to chase, including the Advent Calendar and the Parish News. Once those are out the way, I’m going to change my approach to writing to feature fewer deadlines.
Me and Rosie at the station, waiting for Rosy
It’s been another month of minimal exercise, helped a little by Rosie the Puppy staying. I managed to keep my weight under control, ending October at exactly the same weight that I started it. Realistically, I won’t begin any new routines around exercise until some time in December, so for now it’s mostly damage limitation.
My first sea swim of the year
I read seven books, including a couple of re-reads. I remembered Terry Pratchett’s Reaper Man fondly; while the good bits remained excellent, much of the book’s humour was tiresome. I also re-read Code is Just and Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War, the latter a dystopian book group pick. Brainwyms was a horrific and shocking novel, at the very edge of what I think is acceptable – sometimes over that. I loved the White Pube book, Poor Artists, which described the challenges facing artists today, but ended on a hopeful note.
At the cinema, One Battle After Another didn’t really work for me. The Smashing Machine felt underwhelming, despite some great performances. Far more fun was Japanese time-travel comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. House of Dynamite was unbearably tense. I caught up with Severance but this was perhaps the wrong pick for the first full week of office work since the pandemic. I also saw Dreaming of You: The Making of The Coral, an inspiring documentary about creativity. .
We went to the takeaway after the launch and this is what Madi ordered
As part of Rosy’s Brighton book launch, I read tarot cards. It was a fun, challenging and draining activity, but I’m glad I did it. I’ve been struggling to learn tarot cards for 30 years, so setting a deadline worked well. It turns out reading tarot in a club is an intense experience, and the cards were often mischievous.
At the start of October, I spoke at the Leeds AWS group which was fun, but I wasn’t entirely happy with my preparation. Otherwise, work continued at a fast pace with too many meetings. I’ve not written any code in a while.
The only St George’s Cross I saw in Brighton. It doesn’t seem a respectful way to treat a flag.
I’ve taken Mastodon, LinkedIn, and RSS off my phone to see whether that gives me more space to think. I’m considering uninstalling Whatsapp: I loathe everything Meta is doing to our world, but the network effects make leaving that network difficult.
Andy Goldsworthy is one of my favourite artists, and I was determined to see his retrospective in Edinburgh. I ended up doing this as a day trip which was crazy, but I’m glad I did.
I have a good dentist, but even a minor check-up leaves me feeling shaky and exhausted. I guess I’ll always be that way.
