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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I will start to work towards writing a novel in the next couple of years. There are many bad reasons for working on a novel, but I’m taken by Joseph Matheny’s suggestion that you should focus on an audience of 65 people.
Towards the end of 2024, I talked to a couple of groups about immediatism – how art needs to be as unmediated as possible. I have become very comfortable sitting at home writing – particularly as work has taken more of my energy. So, I want to spend more time with in-person writing groups. I also did a single performance last year, and I’d like to do more.
It’s not about the size of the audience. This was one of my favourite ever performances
At the end of 2023, I wondered if writing was worth the effort I put into it, when I could be putting that energy into my career. In 2024, my career has become more important to me, but so has the writing. Things are still not quite right – some of my creative projects drained more energy than they should have done – but I am getting there.
Julie Mcdowall’s history of British preparations for nuclear war, Attack Warning Red, was one of two incredibly disturbing books I read about the subject this year. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of nuclear war has receded but it’s still there. The world has around 12,500 nuclear weapons, 2,000 on high alert (source).
Attack Warning Red discussed the often-futile measures taken in readiness for nuclear war with Russia. Britain is a small, densely packed country and the fallout from even a small number of strikes would have affected most people. Much of the preparations and planning was a sham. In the 1980s, journalist Duncan Campbell calculated that the sandbagging requirements of Hull alone would exhaust the entire national supply of sand.
Mcdowall discusses the plans for forced labour crews to clear corpses from the streets and how hospitals could mercifully end lives when there was no medicine. In one health authority, it was suggested that medical staff forage for folk remedies. Toilet facilities in large bunkers were designed without doors or were too few in number to reduce the risk of suicides.
Reading this book gave me a few nightmares and left me wrestling with the horror of a world in which we casually allow an existential threat to linger. There is little comfort. I read the Wikipedia list of nuclear tests in attempts to reassure myself – we’ve exploded over a thousand of these without the world ending. I read the essay collapse won’t reset society which looked at the black death and the fall of Nazi Berlin to show how bureaucracy endures even the worst disaster. Towards the end:
U.S. government estimates predict a death toll of between 13 to 34 million people for a nuclear exchange involving 3,000 warheads, with substantial additional fatalities that would result from a lack of medical care, lack of utilities, and ensuing food shortage. But even at a final death toll of 10 to 20 percent of the total population, and infrastructure destruction similar to the situation in Germany after the Second World War, the total shock of nuclear war could likely fall within the range historically absorbed by modern economies and governments.
I don’t understand how the world’s political leaders are not thinking about nuclear war all the time, and it horrifies me that nobody is trying to fix this. Wikipedia also lists military nuclear accidents and some of these are horrifying. In 1983, an order was given for a nuclear strike and refused. Eventually we are going to be very unlucky.
These weapons are so obscene that it’s hard to justify owning them, even in a defensive capacity. Trident is solely designed for retaliatory strikes, and I’m not sure it’s worth killing millions of civilians in revenge if the Trident deterrent fails.
This is the third time I’ve produced the Parish News with my friend Dan Sumption of Peakrill Press. The Mycelium Parish News is a collection of strange and interesting culture and events from over the last year, including podcasts, books, albums and more. This year’s text is significantly longer than the previous two issues.
We’re pleased that we’ve kept the price down to £2.30 – including postage and packing – as we want to get this into as many people’s hands as possible. As with last year, we have a print run of 300 copies, after which this edition will be posted online. You can see our previous issues at the Internet Archive.
The 2025 edition is already underway (a mere 270 words so far) – get in touch if there’s anything you think we should add!
Earlier this year, I thought it would be cool to make an advent calendar featuring a short horror story for each day. This turned out to be a lot more work than expected, but well worth the stupid amount of time it took.
Image from @jennifer_allanson on instagram
Each week during the spring and summer I wrote a new Christmas story. I finished 22, added a couple of other things (thanks, @muffichka!), gave them to my friend Emma to do the make look good, and sent everything to a printer.
When the box first arrived, I was convinced that the printers had made a mistake. But no, that’s what over 1,500 A5 sheets look like. And I had to fold and sticker each one.
In some ways, this whole project was an example of the sunk cost fallacy. I’d not considered all the costs and I’d not estimated how much time it would take. But I was too far in. Nothing else to do but set to folding-up a couple of calendars each day.
The stories made it out in good time for December 1st, and it’s been delightful to see people opening and enjoying them. Everyone seems happy – although they’ve not reached the more unpleasant stories yet.
Image from @sophystar on instagram
This was a stupid, ambitious project, but I’m glad I did it. Some ideas are so infeasible that you look for a way to make them happen.
The worst thing is, I’m doing this next year. I’ve got prompts for over 60 more potential stories, some of which I’ll be working on this month. Some things are so ridiculous, they’re worth doing more than once.
November has been very much over-committed, but I just about kept up with everything. In the second half of the month I flirted with burnout. The combination of running a training course at work and my personal deadlines put me under too much pressure. I slowed down enough to get through, but that’s something to be careful about.
November in the valley has featured a lot of weather
Despite the hard work, November was good for getting things done. The Secret Project – a horror advent calendar – went out after a few months of work (and a lot of folding). The text of the 3rd Mycelium Parish News zine was completed. I spoke at an event in London. And, best of all, after 13 years work, True Clown Stories has been published. It looks really good!
Photo by Dan Sumption
November was cold, made a little more frustrating by the fact I was supposed to be in Spain for part of it, but my business trip was cancelled. We had snow in the valley followed by an abrupt rise in temperature that melted it all, overwhelming the drainage. The town was almost flooded, with disaster averted by inches.
Amidst all November’s chaos, I struggled to keep up with training. My weight lurched upwards and concerted effort was needed to keep it on track for an overall gain of just 0.1 pounds over the month. The steps continued despite the dark and cold for a total of 358,596, averaging 11,953 a day. The highest was a mere 19,948 on my trip to London. It’s been a struggle, but I’m pleased that I mostly adhered to training.
The big world news was the US election. I was awake most of that night, watching the results. I gave up around dawn and went for a walk on the moors, which gave me a little perspective. As bad as the result feels, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m annoyed that the news sources I’d read gave me no idea of the size of the victory, which suggested that I was not as well-informed by them as I had thought. Like many people, I had no idea why anyone would vote for Trump against Harris, despite half the electorate thinking he was a sensible choice. I felt that the media had flattered my prejudices rather than explaining the world to me.
I immediately cut down my social media use and filtered terms related to the election. The noise on some platforms was insufferable with a large number of people stoking fear with their takes. The three weeks or so I’ve spent without reading the news is the longest I’ve done in my life, but I’m feeling better for it. I have considered using Wikipedia’s current events portal to keep up with things.
Fending off burnout has meant a few very early nights in November (as in 6pm early) and making more time to read. I enjoyed Andrew Michael Hurley’s Barrowbeck, a collection of linked short stories about a fictional valley-town located near Hebden Bridge. Nicholas Royle’s book on second-hand books, Shadow Lines was a fun light read, which mentioned John Shire and Colin Lyall, my favourite booksellers.
2-Tone comics, my local shop, recommended Beneath the Tree, Where Nobody Sees, a book about a serial killer in a town of cute anthropomorphic animals. This took the concept to some clever, uncomfortable places. I also enjoyed Kieron Gillen’s We Called Them Giants. In the middle of the month, Muffy and I went to the Thought Bubble convention. This was mostly overwhelming, but I picked up some interesting things to read. Meanwhile, Keiron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy has justified the cost of reading it in single issues with some excellent cliff-hangers.
I watched a few movies this month, but Maxxxine was the only one I loved, mainly because Mia Goth is so engaging. I enjoyed how Love Lies Bleeding joyfully went too far. While I didn’t love The Substance it was an amazing cinema experience. The audience perceptibly reacted to some of the unpleasantness, and a few people walked out near the end, which amazed me, given what they’d made it through to that point. But I guess that ending was A Lot.
My main project at work came to an abrupt end, and it was sad to say farewell to an excellent team. After running a training course, I’ve started my new project which promises some exciting challenges. I was also pleased to be chosen as ’employee of the month’ in my local office. After so many years of hating work, I love my current job, even after two years. I’m not sure if the twenty-something me would be pleased or scornful, but I’m happy.
Piss Flowers
I spent a lovely afternoon in the Tate Modern with Kate Shields. I was delighted to see Piss Flowers by the Helen Chadwick. I’ve always remembered this appearing in Private Eye‘s Pseuds Corner, and being unsettled by this mockery of her artist’s statement. I hadn’t realised it was a major piece of work, so I was amazed to encounter it all those years later. We also visited Anthony McCall’s Solid Light exhibition. The display gave it little context and it’s hard not to take it as an example of ‘instagrammable art’.
Solid Light – good visuals though
As well as all my other writing, I worked on NaNoGenMo, where you use November to try writing software to produce a novel. My attempt was producing an oral history. The resulting text has the blandness of much LLM output and is not engaging enough to read in itself – although it’s still remarkable how easily LLMs produce plausible text. It was good to think about how LLMs work, and I very much enjoyed tinkering with a software project.
I headed into London for the opening of an exhibition at the All Good Bookshop, the final act of a collective I’ve been involved in since 2019. Due to reasons I couldn’t stay for the full event, but I did give an introductory speech. It’s been an interesting project to be involved with, and its dissolution had me thinking more about the importance of Immediatism.
Shrine to Donnie
As pleased as I am with my work in November, I did take on more than I should have done. I want to do NaNoGenMo, the Mycelium Parish News and an advent calendar again next year, so I need to reduce their overlap. I’m also looking forward to mid-January, when I’ve cleared my last deadline and I can simply focus on playing with my writing.
So, that’s November. It was a tough month, but I’m pleased with everything I achieved. I’m also glad that I managed to handle the deadlines sensibly, and rested as much as I needed to. December has some hectic commuting, but I’m excited about my (mandatory) vacation over Christmas and getting some rest.
At the start of the month, I visited an amazing event which included Justin Hopper’s talk The Great Satanic Swindle. Getting the last train home meant missing the last 10 minutes, so hopefully I can catch it again.
October was a tough month, for various reasons. for a start, I’ve not been sleeping well. Maybe that’s middle age, or maybe I’m just being sloppy about sleep hygiene. I’ve also felt overwhelmed by the modern world’s deluge of information and I’ve battened down the hatches a little. With everything going on I’ve not had much spare energy, and missed a few events I’d booked tickets for. But, as rough as I feel, I’ve kept moving and it’s not been too bad overall.
It’s felt like I’ve been travelling a lot, to Liverpool, Buxton and London. The second Spirits of Place event was superb, and well worth a tricky trip to the Wirral. I made a quick dash to London for work, where it was lovely to see my colleagues, even if I ended up staying out in Docklands.
Amidst all the chaos, my diet and exercise have been somewhat all over the place. I did however manage a couple of days of the Couch-to-5k – nothing consistent yet, but it’s good to know that my hip can stand more exercise than it used to. I walked 406,606 steps, an average of 13,116 a day, with the highest total being 20,339 for a day in Buxton. Despite a very poor diet, I still managed to lose a pound overall.
Whenever I see happy looking cows, I always want to warn them not to trust people.
I only finished a few books in October. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo was a flawed but impressive horror novel. Uncommon People was a brisk retelling of Britpop which was perfect for a slow Saturday. Movies were also thin on the ground, but I saw The Outrun at my local cinema, featuring a Q&A by Amy Liptrot. It was very strange to watch a biographical movie and then see the film’s subject in person.
Work was hard this month. Despite all my efforts with my current project, it was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. I was a little nervous about having to find a new role, but made some progress.
Last month, I realised that I was a little over-committed with my writing until January. I’ve continued working through these obligations and none of them have felt like a chore. I also did a few new substack pieces that I’m very happy with: The Bleak Stag, When Dad got the Bomb, Copthwaite’s Amusement Park. The short stories continue to flow and surprise me, which I love, but I’m also thinking about how I can do perhaps start doing something more with my writing.
A jail for trains
True Clown Stories is at the proofing stage. Reading it once more, I found that most of the stories still work for me. Hopefully this will be published in November. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people make of these pieces.
I can’t believe that a plastic dinosaur is £39.99.
At one point in October, I found myself waiting somewhere with no phone battery. I had no idea how long I would be there and had nothing to do but sit and think quietly. It’s the first moment of quiet I’ve had in a long time. I let my thoughts wander, tried to remember bits of poetry. I realised there’s a whole state of mind that technology and lifestyle has eliminated for me. It’s something I’d like more of. I think I might be happier in a life without messaging apps, but I can’t see myself getting rid of WhatsApp. But more quiet time would be good.
Filming for the new Sally Wainwright show
Ryan Broderick has started a new podcast called Panic World. I particularly enjoyed the episode where he interviewed Caroline Calloway.
The new Indelicates album, Avenue QAnon is now on Spotify.
I had the latest covid and flu jabs, which wiped me out so much I ended up taking a day off work.
The house has been covered in scaffolding for much of the past month, but the good news is that the roof has been completely redone.
I found a new writing group in Hebden Bridge and went along to a meeting. Hoping to make some more in the near future.
The new bread shop in town, which is only open for a few hours a week. Good bread though.
I like that some of my zines are currently in a university library
September has been an odd month, not standing out as any particular thing. That’s not to say it’s been bad: work was engaging, I caught up with some friends, and I visited London and Alton Towers. But the weather has turned, with the cold waking me at night a few times. I’ve been having incredible, intense dreams. I’m trying to do too much. Life has felt unsettled. Good, but unsettled.
London was fun – I saw the Indelicates perform their new record Avenue QAnon, then went to Borough Market with Emma. Later in the month I visited Alton Towers for my sister’s birthday. At the start of September, Katharine visited for a few days, which was lovely. Rosy has been away much of the month, but our friend Kate has been staying instead.
My walking continues at 10,000 steps a day, which is a little too much for doing the same routes in the valley, but I’m keeping the target high for my training. The total was 362,270 steps, with an average of 12,076 and a peak of 20,302 from walking around Alton Towers. I’m slowly shedding weight from the personal training, with another 3 pounds gone over September. I’m happy with this gradual pace. The training sessions have loosened my shoulders and I’m making progress with fixing my years-long hip injury. I should be running again in October.
Over the past few months, I’ve accumulated too many books, so in September I aimed to read more than I acquired. A highlight was Hit So Hard, the biography of Patty Schemel, drummer from Hole. This was a terrifying portrait of addiction, and it took me a while to realise what made this so stark. I’ve read very few women writing about addiction and I think the difference here was having no trace of boastfulness alongside the regrets. I also read several graphic novels, including some Astro City compilations. Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn was an impressive but sometimes difficult novel that starts with the Twin Towers re-appearing in the Dakota Badlands.
I’m not sure if it’s the reading, but I only watched three movies this month, and all of them in the cinema. Alien: Romulus was another disappointing sequel and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice seemed surprisingly good in comparison – mainly because it wasn’t obvious what would happen at any particular point. The best thing I saw was Hollywoodgate, a documentary about the Taliban airforce which alternated between hilarity and horror.
I continue to love my job more than any other one I’ve held – it’s challenging, but at just the right level, and I’m working as part of an excellent team. I am a little worried by the rumours of a return-to-office edict. I don’t think I can do more than two days a week commuting, And it would be ridiculous to travel to an office just to spend the day on calls to my distributed team.
Among all the other things I’ve been doing, I found a little time to play with embeddings and vector databases. I also wrote a review of I Am Code, a book that had some interesting ideas around generating literature with LLMs. I wish I had more time to learn about technology. But I guess it’s good that I am discovering so many things through work that I want to spend time on.
Hebden Bridge rainbows do not fuck around
I continued writing on the substack, with my favourite new stories being A Shrine to Light Entertainment and How to Write Cosmic Horror. The substack gives me an energy around my writing that I’ve not had since around 2010 (although I am missing the opportunities I had to perform back then). The most exciting thing is how I seem to be getting better at tuning into stories and finishing them; and I like the new pieces I’m writing.
At the start of the month, I tallied up how many projects I have in progress between now and January 23rd, and was shocked to find 10 of them:
December: a talk and event to launch the Mycelium Parish News
January: a new walking zine (my Horkos pledge)
Obviously, this a A Lot, but should be fine as long as I’m organised. I’m making sure to do regular small bits of work on each of these.
I received some worrying news recently, that my sister’s dog was going blind. It explained a few things, like why she couldn’t catch. It was very sad but there was apparently nothing to be done, although a last ditch referral to an opthalmologist was suggested. After a brief examination, the canine ophthalmologist said that Rosie is not going blind as the vet had suggested, but rather she is just ‘fucking clumsy’.
I don’t know what these things are, but they look cool. Since moving up here, I’ve come to appreciate moss
At the start of the month, I had some surprise dental work. I calmed myself during this by thinking through routes from Death Stranding. It made me long to revisit the game, but playing it didn’t feel all that fun. It was the same with returning to Days Gone – the memories of these games are great, but spending time on them felt dull. I’d like to enjoy video games more than I do.
I’m continuing to love being on mastodon. It seems to have that early twitter vibe of friendly people having positive conversations. My theory is that it’s because nobody uses algorithmic feeds, reducing the incentives for attention-at-any-cost. I also seem to be get more interaction on mastodon than I do on Bluesky or Twitter, which is surprising given my smaller audience. The other social networks keep me coming back to click aimlessly when I’m tired, but maybe I just need to log out for a while.
The new Indelicates album Avenue QAnon is one of the best records I’ve listened to in years. Part of this was the slow release of information in the run-up, which felt like the growing expectation I had about records in the 90s. The new songs are catchy, bleak and funny, with Live, Laugh, Love in particular sticking in my head. I’m hoping this record gets the attention it deserves – I think this is an important album I recently found myself comparing it to The Holy Bible.
I used to put the Nine Inch Nails instrumental A Warm Place on repeat as I fell asleep and I love this new orchestral version.
Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy is one of the best comics launches I’ve read in years, and is worth the outrageous cost of single issues nowadays. Superheroes as nuclear war allegory.
The NYT’s article on The Prince We Never Knew reminded me how remarkable Prince was, while being open-eyed about his flaws. I hope we do one day get to see this documentary.
My parents celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary this year. Wow.
I’m usually scornful of any adaptations that cling to close to earlier versions, but the new The Last of Us trailer has me desperate to see the new season – even if nostalgia is death
Warren Ellis’s Department of Midnight podcast has finished an excellent first season. I’m not a fan of narrative podcasts, but this was gripping. Good enough to listen to at 1x speed.
Dan Sumption and I have started work on the 3rd issue of the Mycelium Parish News. This will cover weird, strange and wonderful events and creative projects from 2024. We mostly focus on people we know through our networks, but we’re interested in anything counter-cultural from the past year.
The cut-off for your submissions is November 16th – but the sooner you can send things the better.
We’re want to hear about: counter-culture, Discordianism, mushrooms, folk horror, magick, ritual, zines, high strangeness and the like. We want to include books, events, podcasts, celebrations, records and gatherings. Our typical listing is 50-100 words, but we can go longer if needs be. If you’re able to type your entry up for us, great, otherwise send us a link and we’ll sort something out. We can’t guarantee to list everything, but we will do our best.
If you’d like a look at last year’s edition to see what it looks like, you can download the previous year’s edition.
As with last year, we’re going to produce a lo-fi printed edition, one that is light enough to be sent by standard post. Given the price rises in our privatised mail services, we’re unlikely to keep prices as low as last year (which was £2.30 including postage), but we won’t be far off. We’re aiming to send this out by Christmas, so you can read it over the Christmas/New Year break. A PDF copy will be released once we have distributed all the physical copies.
We’re also doing an in-person event on Saturday December 14th, and we’ll announce details of this soon. But if you’re up for coming, let me know.
For me, fragmented fiction does a better job of describing the world that we live in than the traditional novel. Social media is the most popular form of narrative today, and it breaks the world into small pieces of text that do not always sit comfortably beside each other.
Edmonds feels the same frustration as me with the idea of linear narative, preferring “fiction that has shattered during construction. They don’t follow a linear narrative, but instead consist of scene-scraps and thought-splinters patched haphazardly together to tell a story”. She proposes three things that fragmented fiction relies upon:
Seeming randomness (which is actually patterned)
Plot
Metafictionality
The second of these items is particularly interesting – for Edmonds there should be a familiar plot which, in Offili’s Dept. of Speculation, is the story of a woman catching her husband cheating, with all the scenes one would expect in an ‘infidelity novel’. “The story doesn’t attempt to do anything game-changing regarding the standard relationship plot; it’s already attempting to experiment in other areas (like form).” This plot makes the book more accessible.
In writing about metafictionality, Edmonds quotes David Shields, writer of Reality Hunger: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.”
August was another month of catching up with myself. Rosy was mostly away, so the house was very quiet – althought I did have Rosie the puppy to stay for a week. It’s been an odd month – I was doing admin on my own life which feels like a waste of time – but I am on a more even keel. August just didn’t feel as exciting as it should have done.
I spent a week at a writing retreat. Spending my leave messing around with old notes rather than adventuring was a waste of time – but I feel better for clearing that clutter. Being looked after for a week and not having to worry about meals freed up a lot of time. It’s become obvious that my writing has bogged down in big ideas when I work better by building things up from sentences, so I deleted a lot of notes. So, I’m glad I did it, but I’d rather not do it again. The danger with having a writing practise is turning your entire life into homework.
But then, reading through some old blog posts, I see this isn’t the first time I’ve done this: in November 2008 I was also struggling with too many accumulated notes. This is why journals like this blog are so valuable – you can see where you’ve failed to change, where you are lying to yourself. So the question I need to ask myself is: how will things be different this time?
Scheduling two gym visits a week continues to be stressful, but the exercise routine is paying off. I’m more flexible after a few months of feeling achy and decrepit. Calorie deduction is helping me lose weight. While the weight loss is slow (5 pounds in August) I’m happy with the gentle but consistent pace. As part of getting fit, I’ve been doing at least 10,000 steps a day, managing 404,323 over the month for an average of 13,040 a day. My highest total was 27,390 on a day where I walked from Todmorden to Hebden Bridge. I’m still feeling unengaged with walking and would be doing less if the steps were not in my training plan.
Hebden Bridge rainbows to celebrate the screening of I Saw the TV Glow
I went to the cinema a few times over the month. catching up with a couple of movies I had missed – Longlegs was interesting and creepy (review) and I Saw the TV Glow was one of the best films I’ve seen this year (review). Muffy took the train from Blackpool to Hebden for the evening to watch the latter with me. I ended the month watching Midsommar at the cinema with Rosy and our friend Jay. I was delighted that Rosy liked it as much as I did.
Cinema decorations for Midsommar. There were also a couple of women who’d dressed up in costume. I love my local cinema.
I find it rewarding to write my movie reviews on Letterboxd – the way it builds a record of what I’ve experienced – but I’m also aware of how mundane many of my reviews are. I’m not as interesting as I think I am. Or, rather, these accounts fail as criticism as I don’t have a critical point of view – some movies are dull or fail to work for me, and I have little to respond to on those. But overall, I enjoy keeping that journal.
I feel so lucky to be able to take my morning walks here.
Work has been dominated by preparations for the annual performance reviews, which involve an incredible amount of paperwork. I’m always convinced that I am doing terrbily – which objectively cannot be true – and I feel a sense of dread about the whole thing. I know it’s not justified, but I will be glad when this is over. That said, I am still loving this job as I come towards the two-year mark, which has not happened before.
I use my kindle for reading articles, which means it’s been clogged up for a while, but I finally cleared everything (more admin!). I abandoned Stephen King’s Fairy Tale halfway through – the mundane plot was incredible, but the fantasy bit bored me to tears. In Esquire’s ranking of all 77 books, this book came 14th, which surprised me. Maybe I’ll try again some time – I’ve read almost all of King’s works, but I’m apparently not a completist.
Otherwise, I’ve been enjoying some comic books. Keiron Gillen’s Power Fantasy is superheroes as nuclear diplomacy, and the first issue was good enough that I’m paying to read it as a monthly. I’ve also been re-reading Nailbiter through the compendium. I finished the first nine volumes of Saga which I’d picked up cheap. It was entertaining but a little too much melodrama and ‘edgy’ language for me to continue.
I saw Alabama 3 for the first time in years and they were amazing
We had a tech conference in Hebden Bridge. I enjoyed my day at Wuthering Bytes (write-up here) and saw some great talks. My favourite was Libby Miller’s Poking holes in reality with prototypes. It got me thinking about the opportunities for doing more with my writing and being more playful.
Dr Michelle Kasprzak gives the closing keynote at Wuthering Bytes
I am very lucky to live near a wonderful second-hand bookshop. Jay and I went to Lyall’s in Todmorden, and both came out with a pile of weird and wonderful books. I filled a rucksack with my haul, which included books on Antarctic art, mazes, sock puppets and more. I then had to carry eight kilograms of books on the four-mile hike that followed. But it was worth it.
I’ve accumulated a lot of tarot decks, so it’s finally time I learned to read from them
News seems to be happening so fast right now. It’s hard to believe that August started with a series of riots.
Warren Ellis’s new podcast Department of Midnight has launched, and the first two episodes were superb. I find audio drama difficult to get into, but these stories were compelling.
I finally tidied the garden enought to want to sit out there (just before the weather turned).
That’s August done, which means another summer over. I feel like I’ve been a little complacent with this one. Next year, I think should be more ambitious with my planning. I’ve also promised to provide myself with more space to play, keeping fewer tasks on my todo list app. The days where I float a little, seeing what I’m in the mood for, are days that take me by surprise and where I do interesting things. I want my life to feel less like a job.
