Category: monthnotes

August has mostly been about work, but this month it’s been a friendly toad squatting on my life. I’m on a project with decent, smart people, and basically being paid to do my hobby. As we’re close to a deadline, we’ve been asked to work two days a week in the office, which has felt burdensome, and it’s questionable how useful in-person work is, when half my team is in India and staying there. Otherwise, I’m enjoying it. I take a lot of meaning from my work – I like being part of a huge organisation, as well as the joy of collaborating with large groups of people to make complicated systems. This job is a little like looking after a puppy – it improves my life, but it takes a lot of effort. Overall, I’m feeling very happy. I wish my life could stay like this forever.

It’s been a rainy August, so it’s not been too bad being indoors. While I’d expected to spend August with my head down working, I’ve seen a fair few friends. nwv, Dan and Edith came by on their way back from the lake district. I also had an impromptu Saturday night dinner with James and Alex. Jay stayed for a weekend, my first time seeing him since the pandemic, which he spent in Italy. I also headed down to Bristol to see Libby and Vicky, where I was very well looked after, eating fresh food from the garden.

The bank holiday was spent on retreat in Wales, which was lovely. Good food and friends helped me relax after the crazy times at work. I came back early on the Monday to see a friend who had been staying in my house. She had a lovely time in Yorkshire but, after dinner on the Monday, fell over and broke her shoulder. She is recovering now, but we were in A&E until 4am. I’m very grateful to the passers-by who helped, waiting with us for over two hours until the ambulance arrived. Being a good samaritan is time-consuming in modern Britiain! It’s frightening how stretched our emergency services are after years of austerity.

I did very little walking in August, with a total of 315,484, an average of a mere 10,176 steps a day. I’ve been continuing my physio, and hopefully will soon be able to start running again.

I’ve been feeling much happier with my writing as I’ve been sending out a weekly short-story email (sign up here). I’ve now sent out 7 pieces from The South Downs Way and should be able to sustain this pace for some time. It’s a good way of working, although I need to figure out how to grow the audience. Memetic infection Hazards is still waiting on me completing the proof-reading. I think I am going to just have to book out an evening to do that. I’m not sure what’s blocking me there. Krill magazine was published with my micro-short story collection Fishscale and sold out quickly.

My reading has been a little better this month. I’ve been commuting to Manchester and bought a couple of physical books for this. Christopher Priest’s Airside was peculiar and interesting. Hannah Silver’s My Child, the Algorithm was an impressive and moving auto-fiction. I also read Ben Myer’s The Offing, a birthday gift from Jude, which was a lovely comfort read. Tom King’s Strange Adventures graphic novel was interesting, but the trick of having an innocent character facing adult problems starts to face diminishing returns. I also published a review of John Higg’s re-released KLF book.

I read more books than I’ve watched movies, managing 3 movies in August against 5 books. Knock at the Cabin continued Shyamalan’s run of ruining a good film with the ending. I had to buy Lost Highway as a Polish DVD, but it was good to return to after many years. It’s still confusing but undoubtedly a masterpiece. The Menu was fantastic, with great performances from Ralph Fiennes and Anna Taylor Joy. The set-up felt hackneyed, but the cast sold the concepts, and the story rose to a satisfying ending. I finished the series From, which mostly continues to be a Lost-style puzzle box, even down to the cliff-hanger echoing the other show. I’ll be in for the third season but I’m expecting little.

The social media diaspora feels strange. I’m enjoying bluesky a lot more than most other sites. Threads continues to be a disaster – there are just too many brands and content farmers. I managed 3 minute on Artefact – opening a site about curated reading by flinging a Daily Mail article at me was a very particular introduction. Instagram is OK, but low engagement. Despite my attempts to love it, I’m not feeling Mastodon. Probably the best social media site is an indie band discord with a small number of interesting and engaged posters, which turns out to be all I want. I did wonder whether I should rejoin Facebook for the local events and marketplace, but no.

• I recently passed the first anniversary of moving into this house, and celebrated by unpacking the last box.
• I’ve also finally put up some proper curtains in the bedroom and it’s transformative. I need to pay attention to other things that would make my life more comfortable.
• I realised with a shock that I don’t actually like vegan cheddar. It’s no good on its own, and I need to stop buying it.
• Oliver Burkeman wrote an excellent post on to-do lists as menus.
• My sleep hygiene has been improved by keeping my phone out of my bedroom to charge (something I normally do, but had got sloppy about). I don’t know how people manage who don’t do this.
• I am a strict vegan as far as what goes into my mouth, but I am loving the French egg shampoo that my sister gave me, which is a nostalgic memory from childhood holidays.

July has mostly been about two things: poor sleep and dog-sitting. As far as sleep goes, I’ve been getting by on about seven hours a night. Normally, anything less than eight makes me worn out and headachy, but I’ve avoided losing any days of work. Some of this lack of sleep has been due to travelling, but the main contributor has been Rosie the dog (who is a different person to Rosy my best friend, but the confusion is often hilarious).

The month started with cat-sitting in Blackpool and catching up with some of my relatives there. I also watched the new Indiana Jones film, which was very OK. The following weekend was Sentry 23, a gathering of some friends at the sentry stone circle. On the way to that was a three hour traffic jam which was… intense. I also got to spend a morning with Tom, who was visiting from San Francisco. On the way back from that I picked up Rosie the dog. I’ve also been hanging out with Rosy and Olive, who came to stay after watching Pulp.

Despite having the dog, long walks were prevented by work and rainy days, so I managed a total of 347,087 steps, with a daily average of 11,196, the highest being 27,942 walking around Blackpool at the start of the month, visiting relatives. Still no progress on my weight, but I’ve been reasonably compliant with my physio exercises and will hopefully be running again soon.

My writing has gone better. I spent more time on writing new things, and also sent out the first two issues of a monthly substack (please subscribe!). The two stories I’ve sent out so far were The Lost Village and The Money Burner. My upcoming publications are all moving along. Krill Magazine, which features my A4-page short story collection Fishscale, is now funded and available for sale on Etsy. Memetic Infection Hazards has a cover ready to go, and I just need to proof it and print it. I also wrote a bizarre horror story about swedish pizza, which went out to LouIce.

It’s been another month of disordered reading, but I did re-read John Higgs’ classic about the KLF. I also read Keiron Gillen’s Immortal X-Men, which felt like it was collected in trade rather than written for it. The X-men books are now an ongoing crossover, so much of the action happens in different books, making it hard to follow. Still, taken as raw spectacle, it was exciting and intense. Katharine and I tried to read London Fields for our 90s book club and both gave up. It was well-written, but just did nothing for me. I posted a review of computer-generated novel All the Minutes and some links from my AI workshop in June.

I’ve started watching time loop films again, this month watching Meet Cute and Tamil drama Maanaadu (review to come). I also reviewed Edge of Tomorrow. With Rosy and Olive I watched The Virgin Suicides, which is an iconic movie, and I liked it more than the book. I tried and failed to get into Marvel TV show Secret Invasion. At the end of the month, Liz and Jude came over to watch the first two episodes of From season 2, which were tense and strange; but the show feels like Lost, in that it could be writing itself cheques it can’t cash.

I listened to the BBC’s new podcast, The Banksy Story, featuring John Higgs, which was interesting, although it continued the kayfabe around Banksy being unknown. The discussion of how Banksy works are authenticated was interesting but should have been earlier and more detailed. John Higgs also turned up on the We Can Be Weirdos podcast with some fascinating ideas (my favourite: Chaos Magic is Thatcherite). Whiley and Lamacq’s The Rise and Fall of Britpop had some interesting moments, but my recollection of Britpop is very different to the official histories. This Podcast in a Ritual has been a joy, with Devin doing interviews in preparation for his trip to Sweden.

Social media has been weird. The collapse of Twitter continued as it rebranded as X. Some of the most worrying issues haven’t had the media attention they deserve. Threads drowns out any authentic conversation with brandshit. I’m enjoying a small community on BeReal, although I mourn the global feed’s replacement with “RealPeople” influencers. My most joyful places online are a band discord and watching films alongside letterboxd – do link up with me there.

• I completed the first section of The Last of Us Part 2 on grounded difficulty, but I have no idea how I’m going to get past the school.
• I’ve also finally put up some new curtains, with the help of my sister and brother-in-law. I also started work on clearing my patch of back garden.
• There are deer in the wood behind the house. It’s always magical to catch sight of them.
• You know what’s weird? When a random taxi driver has a picture of you on his phone that he took the night before. This happened in Blackpool at the start of the month – the driver had snapped my group climbing the Big One.
• My brother-in-law dropped off a stack of logs. It’s the middle of (a damp) summer, but it’s reassuring to have wood ready for the start of winter.

I started June feeling rough from a combination of caffeine, poor sleep, doomscrolling, bad food and illness. That slump lasted about a week, after which June rallied to become pretty good. I sailed on the Thames with Rosy, celebrated my birthday, spent some time in Wales, and ended the month in Blackpool. The week in Wales was particularly energising, spending time with friends old and new.

After a couple of high step-count months, June was calmer, with a total of 333,904 steps and a daily average of 11,130, the highest being on my birthday when I went hiking with Katharine and Helen. I’ve continued to put weight on, and am failing to muster any motivation to reverse that. I have, however, started seeing a local physio about fixing my hip problems so that I can start running again. I also wrote up the final stage of the Coast-to-Coast.

My writing was fairly scatty, but I have a number of projects moving. True Clown Stories, originally known as Clown Stories Volume 1, has been in progress for 12 years, but is set to come out in 2024 in association with Peakrill Press. I’ve also produced a short story collection for Peakrill, cramming 12 stories onto an A5 page (I’m particularly proud of a new six-word horror story). On top of all that, I’ve been working on Memetic Infection Hazards, a collection of horror stories which I’m, publishing and will likely be out in August. I’m enjoying working with self/small publishing, which is much more satisfying than submitting to online journals. I’ve just had a piece rejected after 13 months and, really, what is the fucking point? I’d rather sell my writing through etsy.

I finished a lot of half-complete books last month:

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky was an interesting space opera, but was at its best when dealing with the intelligent spiders. The human characters just felt like they were in a science fiction novel.
• I also read Tchaikovsky’s novella One Day This Will All Be Yours which was stuffed with clever ideas.
• Death of An Author was produced using ChatGPT. While the novel itself left me unmoved, the afterword was exciting and provocative.
• All The Minutes was a conceptual novel produced for NaNoGenMo, which was incredibly engaging.
• The writing in Johnson at 10 was annoying, not least for censoring the swearing. It did a good job of describing Boris Johnson’s essential failure in winning an 80-seat majority and wasting it.
• Andrew O’Neill’s History of Heavy Metal was engaging and helped me reclaim my 90’s self a little. I heard about this book through an excellent podcast appearance from O’Neill.
• I also wrote a small blog post about The Virgin Suicides, which I read last month.

After a few failed attempts I finished watching Yellowjackets Season 2, although this involved a fair amount of double-screening. It’s tonally all over the place, with the lightly comic tone interrupted by some genuinely disturbing moments towards the end of the season. Black Mirror was, as ever a mixed bag, the highlight being Joan is Awful. The BBC’s documentary The Trouble with KanYe was a grim look at the West’s career since 2016. Such a waste of talent.

I watched a few movies but the highlight was Martyrs. It’s difficult to recommend such an unpleasant movie, and one that is based around women being tortured. It would be easy dismiss the film as ‘torture porn’, but I’ve been thinking about it for a month now. My strongest reaction has been a lingering sadness. This may be one of the best horror films I’ve seen.

Towards the end of the month I ran a workshop on AI and Creative Writing (details and links here). Running a two-hour online event on a weeknight was a bit much, but it was fun I’m still cynical about LLMs, but there is something important happening. At a neighbourhood barbecue someone was telling me about how his company is seeing impressive results through using AI to make unit tests and documentation.

I am totally going to win at Spotify Unwrapped this year – although no-one really loses, do they? My playlist of interesting songs for 2023 has now reached 104 items, mostly new music. Andrew O’Neill’s death metal recommendations have also added some interesting tracks. But it looks like the most-played song will be My Neighbourhood, a minimalist song from the Martyrs soundtrack that I can’t stop playing.

I ended the month in Blackpool, cat-sitting for Muffy’s cat Sashimi. On the last night in June, I went on the walk to the top of the Big One roller coaster. It was an amazing experience.

The month ended with an awful spell of insomnia. I function very poorly on low sleep, the nadir of which was managing to throw my Fitbit out with my lunch at the office.

• I started playing the video game Alan Wake, but got bored when I reached the firsat boss fight. All of the combat elements made the story feel banal.
• I’m still settling into the house, but I did finally get a couple of pictures framed. I’m still making no progress on putting up new curtains.
• I published a blog post about my trip to Sweden in May.
• I read a cache of blog posts from 2001/2 which I was considering importing to this blog. The posts were interesting but also very scrappy. I think I’ve improved considerably as a writer since then.

After several months of hard work, May brought opportunities for restoration and recreation. I rolled off the stressful project onto a new one, as well as taking a couple of holidays: hiking the end of the Coast-to-Coast trail, and spending a week in a tiny village in Sweden. I also had a number of visitors to the valley, which was lovely.

Sweden was the highlight of my month. I arrived in the country a few hours after rolling off the project. There was a sense of relief to being away from England, with Manchester airport feeling like a metaphor for where our country is at. After a night in an airport hotel I took a series of buses to Uddebo, a tiny village of 250-400 people. I spent my time there reading and swimming in the river Assman. While the trip definitely had a pagan/Midsommar vibe, all the people I met were lovely and I can’t wait to go back.

I walked 487,475 steps during the month, an average of 15,725 per day. My total was boosted by a few days walking the final stages of the Coast-to-Coast trail. This is an incredibly sociable route, with some very well good food and accommodation stops. The Lion Inn at Blakey Ridge was probably one of the best pubs I’ve ever visited. I’ve also written up some of the Pennine Way hikes I did in April: Hebden Bridge to Ponden, Ponden to Gargrave and my grim hike from Gargrave to Horton-in-Ribblesdale. Despite all the walking I did in May, I put on 2½ pounds, so I guess I need to pay a little more attention to my diet.

Between work and holidays, my writing has been a little scrappy, but I’ve also had the chance to do some more strategic thinking, and have a new zine of short stories almost ready to go. The big challenge is producing a good-looking cover, but I am hoping to have something to on etsy in June. Once that is done then I will be returning to the South Downs Way stories. ChatGPT and creative writing continues to be an interesting area, and I’ve written up some of my research into this. I’ve also published a much-delayed post on Why ARGs never worked.

If my writing has been chaotic, my reading has been even worse, not helped by the Kindle – I have about a dozen e-books in various states of completion, and probably need to abandon some of the slower-moving ones. The Jeremy Deller book Art is Magic was a highlight, and Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir was good, light riverside reading. Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed was a second hand bookshop find, and provided an interesting view on how very strange the 70s were. One thing that stuck out in particular was how the current political situation is relatively stable compared to the depths Britain plumbed in the 70s.

Succession came to a close, although I’ve not really enjoyed the 4th season – I think I preferred watching Logan Roy torment the siblings to the actual succession drama. I completed From Season 1, still unsure where that is headed, and also finished The Last of Us. I managed to go about 8 weeks without watching a movie then crammed three in the Bank Holiday with Sooxanne: In the Earth, Old and a rewatch of time-loop sci-fi drama Edge of Tomorrow. I still haven’t managed to get into Yellowjackets Season 2.

I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts this month. Pop Could Never Save Us continues to be awesome. Despite being dropped by NPR, the Louder than a Riot team managed a great second season, including a fantastic episode about ilovemakonnen’s experience as a queer rapper. There was also a great emergency podcast on the coronation by the Indelicates, Cat Vincent and Rob Rider Hill.

I continue to feel uncertain about social media. Towards the end of the month, I had my Instagram account shut down because their automated systems thought I was a bot. The account wasn’t particularly precious to me, but almost losing it in such a high-handed way is frustrating. Mastodon seems great but doesn’t have the scale of community that Twitter does.

As I mentioned above, I rolled off the stressful work project. One downside to this was leaving a team that I loved working with (another is that I quickly stopped having work dreams and my nightmares are back to their old subjects). The new project has needed a little preparation, and I’ve enjoyed reading about Domain Driven Design and team topologies.

• I actually went to a gig, seeing Talvin Singh at the Trades Club, with support from Mayshe Mayshe.
• A lack of decent decaff in Sweden means I have started drinking caffeine again, which means I will have to go through the withdrawal at some point.
• I’ve long been signed up to El Sandifer’s patreon, and was delighted that she had her first professional comics publication in 2000AD this month.
• I failed to click with Department of Truth when I first read it, but I am now hooked. It’s a very strange comic about conspiracy theory, with some fantastic art.
• Ava and I went to the Ley-hunter’s annual gathering, held this year run Todmorden.

My aim in April was not to have the toad of work squatting on my life quite so hard. I tried to do more with the weekends, which included some good hiking as well as visits to Blackpool and York. I also made it to my writing group for the first time in ages.

Easter Weekend was spent in Blackpool for a family wedding. I stayed with Muffy and met her kitten, Sashimi. The wedding was fun, and a few of us sneaked away in our wedding outfits to play the 2p slots on the pier. The following week I went to York to go book shopping. Sadly very few good second hand bookshops remain, most being put out of business by the charity shops, which don’t have such interesting selections. I also had a visit from Jen and Dave, who suggested I help found an Arts Lab.

I walked 498,526 steps in April, an average of 16,617 a day. Wow. My highest total was on the last day of the month, walking from Malham to Horton-in-Ribblesdale along the Pennine Way. That was also one of the grimmest hikes I’ve done due to appalling weather. I did 6 days out on the Pennine Way during April and have written up three of them so far: Edale to Crowden, Crowden to Standedge, Standedge to Hebden Bridge. Fitbit also awarded me the ‘Pole to Pole badge’ for the somewhat arbitrary feat of walking 12,430 miles since I bought my first fitbit (in November 2016, I think).

I’ve been doing a little more writing recently, including a couple of very short stories that have appeared on the blog: Seeing Voices and the Fifth Beatle. I’ve also done audio recordings of these to see how well that works. There’s a separate site for my recordings, which is technically a podcast (which I should probably promote at some point). I also wrote a blog post about Writing and ChatGPT, something I’ve been thinking more about (and dreaming about) recently.

I finished a few books this month. Age of Vice was an excellent thriller set in India, although it ran out of energy at the end when the book decided to become a trilogy. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven was picked up as it was partly set in Hebden Bridge. The book functions as an anti-Harry Potter and was fun to read, but also suffered from expanding into a series at the end. Fern Brady’s autism memoir Strong Female Lead was an impulse daily Kindle sale purchase, and a quick interesting read.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History was mine and Katharine’s April choice for our 90’s book club (I’ve written this up on a separate post). Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke had an effective sense of dread in its title story, but the ending was not as dark as I expected. Stuart Braithwaite’s Spaceships Over Glasgow suffered the problem of many rock biographies – the rise is fascinating, but the storyline peters out towards the end, replaced by a list of records and celebrity encounters. Finally, literally show me a healthy person by Darcie Wilder was a fascinating short novel told as tweets, an interesting companion to Patricia Lockwood’s No-one is Talking About This.

The only movie I saw this month was The Empty Man, which I rewatched with Muffy in Blackpool and was slightly less impressed with on a second viewing. Otherwise, I’ve been watching a few TV series. Succession continues to be excellent, whereas From is interesting without so far moving much beyond the Strangehaven meets Lost concept.

I’d dismissed The Last of Us as being an unnecessary adaptation of the video game. Since I have a NowTV subscription for Succession I’ve started watching it and have enjoyed it, despite the slavish faithfulness to the source material. The characters of Henry and Sam were particularly moving, and I had a moment of fannish joy when the horse from part 2, Shimmer, was briefly introduced. I also restarted watching Yellowjackets, although I needed to read some recaps to remember where we were. Considering how much I loved the first season of this show, I’m finding it very hard to get into again.

No new music this month, but I’ve been relistening to Yoshimi Vs the Pink Robots – which has had a massive anniversary edition released. I’m in love with the live versions, where Wayne Coyne’s voice can’t quite hit the notes he’s aiming for, and somehow makes the songs even more beautiful. The Pop Could Never Save Us podcast continues to be amazing, with an 80s episode which looked at things such as how technology affected the charts and why Morten Harket’s voice is so special.

For years, I’ve had dreams about episodes from when I was a teenager. I hated how thirty years later, I was still dreaming about bitter things, when there were so many good things I could be dreaming of. One advantage of the work stress is that I’ve not had these sort of dreams for months – instead I dream about my job. I’ve now requested transfer to a new project. I felt I was unable to change the situation, and so it was be complicit in the toxic environment. I’m looking forward to the change.

I started March in Croydon, where I attended a series of work meetings. Despite all the times I’d been stranded in East Croydon station as a commuter, this was the first time I’d visited the place itself. Work went on to dominate my month.

I made a trip to Brighton – although I worked a day of that, and was too busy/stressed to plan much. I went book shopping with Ben Graham, visited KateS, saw Anna & Chris, and stayed with Rosy. I was there to give a talk at the Sunday Assembly, which was great fun. Brighton did its best to persuade me I still loved the place, and I bumped into some old friends by accident. It would have been good to meet up with more people, but I didn’t have the energy to arrange anything. I did have a surprise text from Tom, who was also passing through Brighton, and we had a brief but wonderful reunion. I also had visited Newcastle where I caught up with Laurence.

I walked 341,043 steps in March, an average of 11,001 a day. My highest total was 24,930, on a borrowmydoggy trip with Lola the Labrador. I finally got a new pair of scales, which told me I had put on 3½ pounds this year. It’s miraculous it’s not higher given the amount of bad food and stress I’ve been dealing with.

I’ve done very little writing recently, since work has left little space for it. I published a new story on the blog, The Bone Wardrobe. One good thing about being forced to pause the writing is having time to think about what I would like to be working on – and I am determined to make more time to write in April. I also posted an Introduction to Psychogeography on the blog, written in preparation for the Sunday Assembly event.

I didn’t finish many books this month. I re-read American Psycho, which was both more abhorrent and better written than I remembered. I attended a good literary event at the Trades Club, organised by White Rabbit Books, with readings from Terri White, Amy Liptrot and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. That was a lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Netflix B-Movie Fall was a great watch. Sadly I didn’t like Only God Forgives as much as Mr Spratt. I also made a rare trip to the cinema to watch Creed III which was disappointing. I enjoyed the first episode of Succession season 4, and have re-started The Last Of Us. I tried the first two episodes of Swarm which was good, but a little too ‘cold’ for me.

I’ve been working long days and have not had much energy by the end, so I’ve been playing more of The Last of Us Part 2, doing the encounters without auto-aiming, and experimenting with harder difficulty levels. The only trophy I’ve not claimed is for playing on Grounded difficulty. That seems an almost unthinkable achievement, but I seem to be working towards it.

• I’ve rejoined BeReal and I love the ambient intimacy. The ‘discover’ page is fascinating. I’m not sure my daily life is interesting enough for me to sustain this, but let’s see. I’m orbific.
• I had a power cut one Friday evening. I ended up going to bed very early that night, as I was too tired to think of things to do by candlelight.
• We also had snow towards the end of the month – a very light touch, but the cold was unwelcome. I’ll be glad when this winter is done.
• I find synchronicity fascinating, but I’ve always been immune to it. However, on my visit to Newcastle I had a run of 23’s. I’m not sure what this might mean.

The main theme in these monthnotes (as well as in February’s) is my job. I’m working hard, to the exclusion of many other things in my life. I should have visited Brighton twice last month, but missed Kate’s 40th as I didn’t have the energy. A few friends have asked if I’m enjoying it, and it’s been good to have the question raised. This job has not been fun, but it is compelling. However, I am not sure it’s worth the energy that I’ve been putting in. A recent announcement about layoffs – in response to the company’s highest-ever profits and growth – does suggest a need for more balance.

I asked myself what I would say to someone else working this hard at something. Back in 2005, working on Flirtomatic with Future Platforms, it felt good to be pushing myself that hard. There were times I hated that project, but I was working alongside talented and decent people. Looking back, I’m glad that I did that job. I can’t see myself feeling that way about this project, and if I’m going to work that hard then it needs to be for something meaningful. In April I will address my work/life balance. It’s good to know I can work this hard, and I should be spending that energy on things that matter.

In February, it felt like work took over my life. I do like the job, but I’m not enjoying its current form, with a limitless capacity for absorbing my energy. Weekends in February were mostly spent recovering, with some dreadful headaches. Work is also the reason why these monthnotes are so late. I enjoyed meeting up with colleagues in Manchester and Croydon, although I could have done without the long train journey.

My sister dropped off Rosie the puppy to stay while she was on holiday. It was lovely to have her to stay, but I think a dog will be too much trouble as a permanent pet. I also had my friends Naomi and Emma visit (the latter visit described on Emma’s visual diary). Emma lived in Hebden Bridge for a few years and introduced me to a few eating places I’ve not tried yet.

I walked 304,820 steps last month, an average of 10,886 a day, which is good enough. The highest total was for a day exploring woodlands with Rosie and Emma. I’ve not been particularly healthy this month. My scales have been broken and I’m in no particular hurry to find out what they have to say.

My writing was also underwhelming in February. I ended up dropping my usual daily writing towards the end of the month as work swamped me. Rosy had a look at my next South Downs Way pamphlet, and pointed out some huge flaws. This sets me a little behind, but I hope to pick things up in a few week’s time. I also received a single-line rejection for a long story, four months after sending it out. Submitting stories is relentlessly unrewarding, and I’ve had enough of it.

I did make a recording of a new story, A Slice of Heaven on Earth. It’s about how much the Devil loves fruitcake.

I didn’t read a great deal this month. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was very readable and full of 90s gaming nostalgia. The plot was predictable and emotionally manipulative – but it was a good book to get lost in. I re-read House of Leaves with Katharine, and enjoyed the experience of sharing the book, even at a distance. I also finished Nice House on the Lake, which didn’t quite live up to its early promise.

The best book of the month was Paul LaFarge’s The Night Ocean, which was recommended by Tom. It starts out as a novel about a queer HP Lovecraft, and then becomes something even more wonderful. The book does not shy away from Lovecraft’s faults, but still manages an empathic portrayal. There are also appearances from William Burroughs and some wonderful jokes about fandom. A beautiful book about long, sad lives.

I also watched very few TV shows or movies this month (I’m definitely picking up a theme here). I tried a Shudder description but, while I was excited about the idea of watching some of the films, in practise I couldn’t get into them. Time loop movie Meet Cute was too frustrating to finish, even as part of my project on time loop movies – although I might try again in a month or two. I did watch all of Happy Valley, which was dark but contained some great footage of the Calder Valley.

I’m continuing to listen to new music, and the Spotify algorithm appears to have responded well to that. I’m also finding good tunes on the Misfits 2.0 and Our Generation playlists, although neither are really age-appropriate.

The stress of work is giving me some strange dreams, including one where someone was so angry with me that they threatened to break every bone in my body, in alphabetical order.

January has been an unobtrusive month, as shown by how few photographs I’ve taken. I started the new year with my friend Lizi and an appalling migraine. I visited Blackpool for a weekend with Muffy in between strikes, and went to the Midlands for my Dad’s birthday. Much of the remaining time was spent hibernating. Hebden Bridge weather is as intense as I was promised, with more snow making the pavements treacherous for a week.

My work project continues to be tough. I can feel myself responding to the stress, particularly with weird dreams and disrupted sleep patterns. But this is the job I want to be doing, and I’m OK with where things are for the moment. Enduring a stressful project seems a little harder with remote working and not having all those friendly, informal interactions with colleagues. I should have had a visit to London at the end of the month to meet my team in person, but that was cancelled due to train strikes.

I walked about 288,000 steps last month, an average of 9,287 a day. My Fitbit lost a few day’s totals, which is frustrating. My highest count was for a hike with some colleagues from the Manchester branch of my company. I also had a decent hike with Commoner’s Choir the day after their Hebden Bridge gig – that walk should be featured on one of Clare Balding’s Ramblings show in February. I’ve not been eating particularly healthily, although things are improving. I put on a couple of pounds, which I am going to try and remove in the next couple of months.

I’ve done very little decent writing this month – again, due to work. I did write a couple of pieces for the Wednesday Writers, which I was fairly happy with. I need to get both of them posted online, I think. I’m waiting on a review of the next South Downs Way volume, and working away at another one, due for release in the summer.

I’ve got my reading under a little more control recently, including catching up on a lot of zines (Hwaet continues to be essential reading). I enjoyed the McSweeny’s retrospective, which contained a great deal of detail about publishing. Girlfriend in a Coma was an interesting re-read, although I didn’t like it so much this time round. I also caught up on The Constant Gardener, a post-Cold War Le Carre book that I’d missed at the time. Joe Hill’s short story Pop Art (from his collection 20th Century Ghosts) was sad and well written, using a weird concept, (a child is friends with an inflatable boy) and taking it very seriously.

The TV highlight this month was Atlanta, which concluded with another weird and uncompromising season – one of the best shows I’ve seen in some time. I also finished Andor, which was well made, but I don’t really see the point in ‘Star Wars for adults’. I watched the first episode of The Last of Us, and found it too faithful to the video game – like a very expensive Twitch stream. I might have watched more, but NowTV’s ads are increasingly intrusive. It amazes me that paying to see a TV show gives a worse experience than pirating it. I’ve also been watching The Rig as background. Very sad to hear that Netflix cancelled 1899 – although I would still have watched the first season if I’d known what its fate would be.

I watched several films over the month. The most inventive was One Cut of the Dead, which used its low budget for a brilliant concept. Smile and Knives Out were slick without quite grabbing me. I enjoyed Glorious for its high-concept plot about a haunted glory-hole – and making a spirited attempt at living up to that. Bodies Bodies Bodies was fantastic, telling its story about murder in a mansion flawlessly. I also tried watching The Lighthouse which seems like a good film, but did not work for me.

One of my aims for 2023 is to listen to more new music, rather than the same 90s hits I’ve been playing for years. I’ve managed to find some great new music, notably- Ethel Caine’s Preacher’s Daughter album. Spotify has played several songs by Samia, but it was only when the album Honey emerged I realised these songs came from the same artist. I’ve also enjoyed tracks by Vot and Lizzie McAlpine; a new Princess Superstar record; and Caroline Rose’s haunting single Miami. Not bad for the first month.

My musical explorations were helped by new chart podcast Pop Could Never Save Us. Episode 1 looked at a recent UK top 5 and it turned out to be pretty good. The hosts provide interesting context – I now know how the SP1200 sampler led to the Wu-Tang production style. Escapism was a catchy and clever number one, and Messy in Heaven and the new SZA single were also worth listening to. Episode 2 featured a review of a 1959 chart, which included a digression into skiffle’s origins. I’m hoping this makes a good replacement for The Content Mines, which ended its regular run this month. I’m going to miss it.

As work has taken over my life, I’ve had less focus on British politics – probably a good thing. The little I have seen supports the feeling that Britain is falling apart through underinvestment and corruption. It just doesn’t feel like there’s much hope, and I can’t see Labour offering enough compelling reasons for people to vote against the government. There’s none of the rising optimism I remember from New Labour’s ascendency, no feeling that things can get better.

Writing up these notes, I can see how much work has loomed over January. Things are improving, but if I have another month like this then I am going to look at moving to another project.

December was dominated by settling into my new job. Things are chaotic at present, with five hours of meetings some days, and little time to do my actual work. I’m mostly enjoying it but the job has sometimes felt vampiric. Christmas preparations were continually blown away as work took all my energy, and I sent many of my cards late and never got a tree. I didn’t transition to a crunch-mode lifestyle, so my diet was very poor. Things should calm down at the start of next year, but this was a tricky month.

I have done a few things other than work, with Kaylee coming to visit, and Vicky bringing Libby the Greyhound after Christmas. I also worked on the Discordian Parish Magazine, which we’re selling via etsy. I’m enjoying the social side of working in an office in Leeds, including the office Christmas party where we went to a darts venue. Hebden Bridge had snow in December’s second week, which looked beautiful, but turned the streets into a dangerous ice-rink.

I walked 317,061 steps in November, an average of just 10,227 a day, with the highest daily total being for a walk to Howarth. That trek also included a wintry fresh water swim – very short but invigorating. I also had a good snowy walk to High Brown Knoll with Lola the Labrador. There was a failed attempt to walk to the Bridestones where we left too late in the afternoon. We might have annoyed the boggarts, since Jamie’s shoes fell apart. My weight remained pretty much unchanged through the month.

Elon Musk managed to turn twitter into a fiasco with surprising speed, and this spurred me to start using my Mastodon account. First impressions are that Mastodon is slower and quieter, but it’s also friendlier, with some of the feeling of early twitter. The local moderation seems to work much better than the one-size-fits-all approach taken by Twitter or Meta. It’s a very different experience, but could be a good replacement. I’m @orbific@mastodonapp.uk.

With the end of the year, I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing and decided that I’d rather not spend so much energy on submitting stories to publications. I’d prefer to make my own little story zines, or other artefacts. I’m excited about the prospect, although self-publishing brings its own challenges.

I read 9 books in December. Last One at the Party was a sort of lit-fit versions of the 80s kids comics where only one person survives the apocalypse. Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac was a cosy book-tour diary that should not have worked, but was a good book companion and got me excited about second hand bookshops again. Keiron Gillen’s Immortal X-Men was fun, but much of the wider plot was inscrutable. I think current Marvel continuity is very much aimed at people who want to be reading the whole X-Men franchise. I don’t really have the attention or the funds to keep up with plots across several ongoing series.

I agreed with most of the points in Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women, but sometimes the journalistic/sensational tone did not work for me. The issues Bates discusses are indeed sensational and horrifying, but I would have liked some deeper analysis. For example, while the men described are awful, there’s an odd tension between the sympathy for the boys and young men who are being radicalised, and how those embedded within the communities that were described as evil and irredeemable. Quibbles aside, it was an important book, and a brave one too, given the viciousness of the communities Bates wrote about. Violence and misogyny have been normalised in our culture, and sadly Bates’ book is not making the impact it should.

One Man and His Bog was an account of walking the Pennine Way in the 1980s. I found the humour a little forced, but the Goodreads reviews suggest many people disagree with me. Also disappointing was Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger 3, where Wilson had drifted from multi-model agnosticism to gammony opinions about feminism and PC. I also published a blog post listing my favourite books of 2022.

I watched the rest of The Peripheral, but never felt as gripped as I wanted to. Inspector Lowbeer stole the limelight once she turned up, making me wish she’d been the show’s focus. I watched a little of Netflix’s Turkish linguistics dystopia Hot Skull, which was interesting but didn’t quite take for me. Star Wars prequel-prequel Andor was mostly relegated to background watching. It was exquisitely made, but I wasn’t sure what aspect of the story required it to be set in the Star Wars universe. I did love much enjoyed seeing Cleveley’s seafront repurposed as the resort world Niamos. Just after Christmas, Disney Plus finally dropped the new season of Atlanta. I’m enjoying how disinterested this feels in being a regular show.

I watched 7 films in December, with highlights being Norwegian kaiju flick Troll, and star-filled drama Cop Land. X was a surprisingly good slasher film, with some editing that was so weird and disconcerting that I fell in love with the film. Saint Maud was a slow movie with a surprisingly strong payoff. Silent Night was a very dark Christmas movie that surprised me with how grim it was prepared to get. Even more than the film itself, I loved the reviews by outraged viewers who felt it went Too Far.

Some odds and ends:

• After getting some awful headaches at the start of the month, I’ve been completely off coffee. However, I do have cravings for decaf most mornings.
• Last December we had the log4shell issue, and this year we had the disasters at Lastpass. I’ve closed that account and updated all the passwords I had stored in that manager. Very frustrating.
• Tim Harford hosted a podcast episode called The Conspiracy Theorist Who Changed his Mind which had some interesting discussion of how people do not change their views from argument, but rather from community. Some interesting lessons there.

November has been a busy month, dominated by the excitement of a new job. The remote onboarding was incredibly efficient, and it’s great to be part of a company with such energy and enthusiasm around technology. I’ve been enjoying dropping into the office in Leeds once a week, and made a trip to Newcastle at the end of the month. The role itself offers some big challenges, but I’m starting to get up to speed.

My free time has also been fairly busy. I visited the Thought Bubble Convention in Harrogate where I met El Sandifer and Penn; had my covid and flu jabs; went out dancing for the first time since the pandemic, at the Golden Lion in Todmorden; had a number of visitors in Hebden Bridge; and went to an epic bonfire in the midlands. At the start of the month I visited Leeds Trinity University to talk to a transmedia class about ARGs, Digital Folklore and how they can go wrong. The research for this was fascinating, and it was an opportunity to think deeply about a lot of things which was valuable in itself, even if I might not use the material for another talk.

I walked 307,702 steps in November, an average of just 10,256 a day, with the highest daily total for a walk around Withens Clough reservoir with a friend from Cragg Vale. I got soaked feet on this trek, which has been a problem a few times recently. Walking about the valleys in winter will require more robust footwear. I sneaked on a couple of pounds of weight, mostly through poor diet and snacking in the workday. It’s not a huge problem, but is something I need to keep an eye on.

I did a fair bit of writing during the month. I started out the month with FlashNano, a November writing challenge, but abandoned that after 10 days – trying to write a story a day wasn’t feasible while starting a new job. It was a good experiment, and useful to see that I could turn out a decent story in 30-90 minutes, with a few of them good enough to submit. I’ve been trying to send out more new work, submitting four new stories – Cinnamon, The Things We Don’t Talk About, Something in the Way and The End of the Second Hand Bookshop. I also published A Wedding Like Mariah’s on my blog. As we come towards the end of the year, my stats are 55 submitted, 6 accepted, 35 rejected.

I had a couple of new stories published. I’m delighted to have another story in the Horror Zine, who have printed Still Alive at the End of the Summer. I’ve also had Stragglers published by Flash Fiction Magazine.

I’ve continued reading lots of books. A Likely Lad by Peter Doherty is an autobiography where the subject comes off very badly. It was interesting to see how unrepentant Doherty was about the degradation of his addiction. I’d always seen him as someone who threw his talent away – but reading this book, I began to wonder if it had thrived because of his drug use, and he simply took it as far as he could. Our Wives Under the Sea was an excellent literary novel that tended towards cosmic horror. Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up was an clever twist on zombie movies. It was notable how short the book was, given its inventiveness. It also featured some great jokes about looting supermarkets in video games. I finished Grant Morrison’s Luda mainly through perseverance, forcing myself to finish it. Morrison is a great writer, but I find his longform prose unengaging.

Meet me in the Bathroom was an oral history of New York music in the noughties. It starts in the period when I was living in Hoboken (the Strokes’ first gig was in September 1999). I did see one of the bands mentioned in the book, the Mooney Suzuki, who were bottom of the bill for the Donnas and were one the greatest live acts I’ve seen. Sadly they never quite took off. One of the most interesting things was how new technologies influenced the scene – the people with the first digital cameras became important, and blogs became influential, the first stages of making a paparazzi-life lifestyle universal. Changing technology was also used by TV on the Radio, who hid CDR-s in “furniture stores or bookstores”. The book also included a great theory that new musical movement depends on having their own particular style of trouser.

Harry Cole and James Heale’s quick-turnaround biography of Liz Truss was mocked when her premiership was over before the manuscript was submitted. The book is a good summary of Truss, and goes beyond the disastrous time as PM and the gaffes that made her famous. It was a good political book in that it was well-written, often gossipy, and explained the events in such a way that they made more sense. Hopefully I’ll write a proper review in the next few days.

I made it through November without watching any movies. I watched most of The Peripheral, which was beautifully made but somewhat unengaging. Netflix’s 1899 was fantastic, a mystery box show that delivered on a lot of its strangeness. I was slightly thrown by the ending, being unsure if 1899 was a single season or not. It was also announced that Westworld will not be getting a fifth season, which actually feels like a relief. The show has never returned to the heights of the first season. I would have watched another season, but it has mostly been disappointing.

I started playing Dying Light 2 on the PS4. In many ways this is a remarkable game, and I couldn’t believe they’d packed such a detailed open world onto a BlueRay. The parkour movement system was stunning, and I loved navigating between rooftops. But, ultimately, playing was a banal experience, with too much bad acting and fetch quests, so I stopped. While playing the game was compulsive, it also felt like I was switching myself off for an hour or too.

With the new job, I’ve been paying less attention to parliamentary politics recently. I’ve been ignoring the World Cup, an event I normally love and watch as much as I can. I don’t think a boycott of Qatar’s hosting achieves much, but the events around this World Cup have made it feel uncomfortable rather than fun.

A quick miscellany:

• Cat Vincent’s post on 1000 days of covid is essential reading about the coronavirus and how those still sheltering have been neglected. I wrote a brief response.
• A great joy of Radio 4 is interesting documentaries about subjects you’d never thought about. A drive down the M1 was enlived by Exit Game, a ‘drama documentary’ about the professional men’s football youth system, where the odds seem even harder than on creative writing courses.
• Sharp Things, Killing Things was a very good horror short story
• I subscribed to Sam Kriss’s substack as I love his writing and cannot bear to miss his occasional subscriber-only post. An example: “The American novelist is standing in the middle of a charnel house, with blood dripping off the walls, writing little autofictions about the time someone was rude to them in their MFA.“
• Twitter is so far surviving a difficult transition period, but I have set up an account on Mastodon – @orbific. This is a very different social network to Twitter, but I am growing excited about its potential.
• I’m back to the occasional caffeinated coffee, which is not good for me, and resulted in an awful sleepless night while in Newcastle. I’ve also developed a bit of a decaf habit, which seems to be driven by my longing for proper coffee.
• The year is starting to turn colder, which the current energy crisis is making particularly noticeable.
• I’ve set up a Google alert on my own name. Not so much for vanity, but because I like reading obituaries, record releases and corporate announcements by other people with my name – they’re little alternate universes. I was delighted to learn that there is a James Burt Parkway in Auburn, Alabama:

November felt like it flew by at points. But, in writing these monthnotes, I realise how much I made of those thirty days. That’s a definite benefit to writing monthnotes.