Category: Writing

Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve been working on a novella, airgap.txt. I produced 20,000 words of text and I’ve decided to stop. There’s nothing wrong with putting aside a project, as long as there is some reflection.

I’ve been thinking recently about writing longer, deeper work. airgap.txt was a first-person story about a woman running a blog about internet ghosts who investigates an incursion of fairyland into the real world. It was inspired by Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, egregores and NPC theory.

What I learned from this:

• The narrative was too linear to maintain my interest. I like reading both conventional and ergodic novels, but writing a linear narrative doesn’t excite me. I’ve used linear forms in a few novels, and the interesting bits were where I pushed and broke the format.
• One particular problem of writing a linear narrative was that there were no vignettes or sections that stood independently. Chuck Palahniuk has spoken about the fun of breaking off sections to try out, and I didn’t have the opportunity for that. I’m someone who loves the fragment, and anything I do should support that.
• I intentionally set out to write about an isolated character. This is incredibly difficult to get right, and I had a good try. The text was discursive, bringing in other perspectives; but it’s hard to write about an alienated character without alienating the reader. Some level of character conflict is more engaging to write.
• I started writing airgap.txt playfully, and built a good structure. But it would have been better to start with a clearer idea of where I might go.
• It’s easy for a discipline around writing to eradicate the playfulness, which is something that happened here.

What I enjoyed:

• Most of my writing has been for the weekly substack and the Wednesday Writers group, and I enjoyed trying to work on a larger scale.
• It was fun to explore the character, even if I’d not given her much space to express herself. I should have allowed more space for play – when I did, I loved it.

Warren Ellis recently posted The Internet Favours Light Mode. He summarises a debate about ‘light mode vs heavy mode’, pointing to the original post by Anu about how the Internet prefers ‘light mode’:

It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production… It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter… Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.

Increasingly, the Internet dictates the rhythms for creators. Algorithms reward regular posting above well-crafted irregular work. In the post, Anu talks about the desire to produce things in heavy mode. They also suggest that Substack is a sort of mid-point, avoiding the full ephemerality of light mode, but still missing some heft. This is something I’ve been feeling a lot lately.

Ellis points out that it is possible to work in light mode, and gather something more substantial from that:

fragmentary writing can in fact assemble into something weightier. I’ve written about several objects like that in the recent past – Kathleen Jamie’s CAIRN comes immediately to mind. It’s about intent.

For almost 20 years I’ve been fascinated by the way ephemerality can build into greater things – how fragments can make something wonderful. The Pillow Book can be seen as an ancient blog. The work of the beats played with this – Howl is a series of sentences that build on each other.

I enjoy writing for the substack, but I am find myself straining against it. I want to build things with more heft, that escape the Internet. It’s one of the reasons for the zines – to say that I thought a set of words was worth printing. And I still want to create something heavy. Something that captures what the world has felt like to me.

Something John Higgs said about writing a book has stuck in my head. It was in an interview for the Wind-Thieved Hat podcast that was published on my birthday last year:

“How it works in my head is the book already exists in the future, and you’re just trying to reveal it. You’re just trying to find out what it is. And when you’re at the editing stage, you look at something and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s not what it is in the in the future, that’s not quite what it should be’. And then you tweak it. And the moment it’s right and chimes with the book that will be on shelves in a couple of years, you know, you just know that that’s good. And it’s a very satisfying moment.”

I love that idea; writing, not as improving the text but rather bringing into being a potential object.

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:

• The 4th Film
• Skin Fever
• Ghosts, Driving
• Boet (from Swedish Pizza)
• The Bleak Stag

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I spent the last week at a writing retreat, which felt indulgent but has been very useful. Firstly, the place I went was fully-catered, which meant I was able to focus on my writing throughout.

I’d expected to produce lots of new pieces. Instead I deleted tens of thousands of words of old notes. There are ideas for stories that I’ve been carrying around for years without ever finishing – particularly ideas for longer projects. I’d sometimes work on these without getting anywhere, so they were a distraction. I also took the time to finally clear the stacked documents on my Desktop.

By the last day, my head felt clearer, and I was able to focus better. I’m hopeful that the retreat will produce a permanent change – working with how I write rather than how I wished I wrote.

Too often, I come up with concepts I’d like to work on, but never manage to fill in any actual sentences. I also tend to work best quickly – trying lots of things and seeing which produces a viable story. That’s difficult, as you’re always starting from nothing, but it always eventually works out.

By the last day of the retreat I felt as if I was taking advantage of my new clarity. I wrote a couple of blog posts in a single sitting, and they as good as the ones I’ve tinkered with for weeks (some of which would get discarded as they went stale).

Spending a week on a writing retreat has taken up a lot of time, but I think it’s been good for me. The question is whether writing will be less frustrating in future.