Writing in 2024

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.