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.
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’.
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.
- An Atlantic article (archive) introduced me to Tiktok star Savannah Moss and her amazing shortform videos.
- That AI-generated podcast where the hosts learn that they are AIs is genuinely unsettling
- I had a message from Ellen de Vries, reminding me of my first visit to Hebden Bridge, when we came here to run a writing workshop.
