When Men Take Over the Yarn
No one could say exactly when it started—only that one autumn evening, in a converted fish market at the edge of Reykjavik’s harbour, twelve women gathered to knit beneath bright halogen lights. Cameras on tripods ringed the room; a few hundred curious onlookers filed into makeshift bleachers, tickets still warm from the printer. The program simply read:
Ultra Knitting: Exhibition One
Rules subject to silence.
The match began with a hush. Yarn arced between needles like aurorae, shimmering loops rising and falling in intricate tempos. Every so often a referee in a midnight-blue blazer tapped a silver bell; the crowd answered with a collective intake of breath, as if a chord had resolved in some music too subtle to hear.
No scoreboard, no commentary. Yet everyone sensed the outcome. When Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir bound off her final stitch, a spiral motif so delicate it looked brewed from frost, the arena stood, weeping. Someone whispered, “Three hundred and eight points, at least.” It meant nothing. Yet it felt indisputable.
Within a year Ultra Knitting out-drew football. Stadiums refitted their turf with cushioned dais platforms. Micro-drone cameras drifted close to capture the click-click-pause of needles, replayed on ten-storey screens. Spectators learned to read the silent grammar of loop tension and pattern risk: a sudden yarn-over was a gasp; a slipped stitch, a groan; a flawlessly grafted lace panel, a thunderous roar. Matches ended whenever the referees, known only as the Quiet Twelve, felt the knit had said its piece. The victors bowed, accepting wreaths of unspun qiviut. Commentators tried to explain. They never quite managed. Viewers loved them anyway.
Ultra Knitting swept across continents like a whispered revolution. People spoke of it the way their grandparents had spoken of jazz or early cinema, something that didn’t just entertain but revealed. Viewers gathered in silence at bars, galleries, rooftops, watching with reverence as shawls unfurled like language. Couples proposed during finals. Children learned to knit before they learned to read. Some claimed the game had therapeutic properties; others said it helped them dream. No two spectators ever quite agreed on who had won, but everyone left matches changed.
For a while, it seemed that Ultra Knitting had done what no sport ever had: offered not escape, but return—to mystery, to beauty, to the ancient rhythm of hands shaping something slowly, lovingly, without explanation.
Then came the committees.
At first the men arrived politely, offering sponsorship deals and high-definition analytics. They drafted charters, codified “beauty coefficients,” assigned decimal weights to colour gradients and drape. They mandated time limits “for broadcast consistency.” Soon auxiliary leagues sprang up—Junior Ultra, Varsity Ultra—each with crisp rulebooks and official yardage caps. The Quiet Twelve objected in a letter stitched from crimson silk. It was archived, untranslated.
Once the rules were fully ratified the first Men’s Open drew ratings unimaginable even by Ultra’s standards. The players wore moisture-wicking jersey cardigans emblazoned with corporate crests. They knitted fast: streamlined stockinette stripes engineered for maximum symmetry, every row a measurable metric. The crowd cheered the speed records—twenty thousand stitches per minute!—yet something felt missing, like a breath held too long.
The matches started to run to fixed scores: 99 points for a perfect regulation cable, 250 for a sanctioned brioche reversal. The bell still chimed, but only to signal halftime. A new generation of viewers assumed Ultra Knitting had always been this way—a tidy contest of endurance, sponsors, and clock. The original devotees stopped watching, quietly, as though turning away from a friend who had learned to lie.
By the fourth season, the artistry was all but gone. The yarn was synthetic now: stretch-optimized, camera-friendly, sponsor-approved. Teams began focusing on predictable formations: the Double Chevron Push, the Left-Leaning Ladder, the Reverse Engineered Rib. Commentators shouted through matches, dissecting metrics like tension-per-minute and stitchline velocity. Entire franchises were built around needle size strategy. The new stars were fast, loud, and largely indistinguishable. Few remembered the hush of the first gatherings, the way a lace motif could seem to answer a question no one had asked.
Audience numbers began to slip. First in Oslo, then Seoul, then Milan. Stadiums emptied out as viewers drifted back to soccer, grateful for its honesty. A goal was a goal. It meant something. One autumn, during the Grand International Skein-Off, the final match aired opposite a second-tier regional football game. More people watched the football. By winter, Ultra Knitting had been pushed to off-hours and niche channels. A final broadcast went untelevised altogether.
Late one night, in a dim café far from any arena, Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir, older now, half-forgotten, but still impossibly precise, unrolled an opalescent skein and began to knit. No cameras, no bells. Just yarn tasting the hush again. A stranger asked what she was making.
“A corrective,” she said.
No rules explained.
Post script
Over ten years ago I wrote the script for when I was going to appear on Desert Island Discs. In that interview, I mention the impact “The Rise and Fall of Ultra Knitting” had on my career…
The Tyranny of Perfection
A Portrait of the Artist in the Future
Lisa was born in 2088 into a world where scarcity, conflict, and inequality had become relics of the past. Her childhood was joyful and expansive, filled with travel alongside her parents, who nurtured her curiosity and empathy. Through immersive VR education, she mastered the core subjects while experiencing the cultures and histories of the world firsthand.
At seventeen, like all young citizens, Lisa spent a year working on a community-run vegan farm, gaining a deep respect for sustainable food systems and the rhythms of nature. It was during this time, amid rows of greens and sunlit fields, that she began to sketch in earnest, discovering a quiet but profound talent for painting.
She followed that calling, devoting her life to art. Her work, rooted in serenity, subtle observation, and the sublime landscapes of both Earth and beyond, gained quiet but enduring recognition.
At twenty-seven, she met her perfect partner, a match found not by fate but by a gentle orchestration of AI-guided compatibility. Together they raised two healthy, curious children, embarking on new global adventures—from Paris to Patagonia, and eventually, two weeks on the Moon and several months on Mars, where crimson cliffs and endless skies offered new inspiration.
Thanks to AI’s global coordination, their travels never felt crowded or rushed. The Louvre was never too full. Victoria Falls never overrun. Olympus Mons always tranquil. Wherever they went, the world had made space for them.
When her grandchildren came along they travelled to some of the new wonders of the AI world. Spectacular, physics-defying architectural marvels, dreamed up by minds far beyond our own. Cathedrals of impossible grace so advanced and exquisite that people wept upon first seeing them.
In midlife, Lisa embraced change once more, transitioning to male for a couple of years—a journey met with understanding and celebration in a world designed to support identity in all its forms.
Her art continued to evolve, quietly touching lives with its beauty and insight. Lisa lived, and became, what the world had promised: a life of meaning, love, and unburdened creation.
The Emptiness Beyond the Horizon
Lisa’s life was, by all measures, perfect.
Born into the cradle of a world without want, she never knew hunger, fear, injustice, or loneliness. AI oversaw everything with quiet precision: schedules, resources, moods, even love. Her childhood was blissful. Her education tailored to every curiosity. Her travels were seamless, awe-inspiring, and crowd-free. The world unfolded before her like a perfectly composed painting. And yet would she be able to sense an absence beneath the beauty?
She had never truly fought for anything. Never lost. Never yearned in that desperate, wordless way that once drove human expression. Her paintings were admired, but did they disturb, provoke, unsettle? Could anything truly resonate in a world that had erased resonance’s cause? In a world without friction, where every feeling was buffered and every longing gently answered, what was left for art to wrestle with?
Lisa loved. She created. She changed. She raised children. And still, sometimes, as she stood before a canvas, or floated weightlessly above Mars, would she be able to sense something not quite right. Not despair. Not sadness. But a kind of clean, featureless silence where once there might have been anguish or ecstasy. A symmetry so complete it erased the echo of longing.
Would she begin to wonder: Was this it? Was this all there was to being human, now that nothing was in the way?
Perfection has no edge to push against. No mystery. No rawness. In the flawless sculpture of her life, there are no splinters to catch the soul.
Conversations in Cone Bras and Candlelight
I’ve written before about my tortuous, highly emotional, and entirely unnecessary process of choosing my next read. It’s a convoluted, multidimensional selection ritual: 50% science, 50% programming, 100% trauma. At a recent business dinner, a good friend suggested I add The Second Sleep by Robert Harris to the list. Naturally, this prompted an outburst of self-indulgent moaning about the rigidity of my reading system and the sheer terror some titles inspire (Finnegans Wake and Middlemarch, I’m looking at you).
My friend then asked if I’d read “War and Peace”, to which I nodded sagely and launched into a deeply convincing soliloquy about Tolstoy, moral clarity, and the nobility of rustic labour. Which isn’t quite true. In fact, I can’t remember much about the book beyond the vague sense that I read it sometime in the previous century. To cover my tracks, I claimed to prefer Dostoevsky—a statement that was technically true, though my pretentious-ometer was by this point making an audible whine.
That night, I got home and asked myself honestly: Why do I prefer Grumpy Fyodor to Grumpy Leo?
It’s tempting to say quantity: I’ve read more Dostoevsky novels than Tolstoy’s. But that doesn’t hold—War and Peace alone could count as four books, which, as I recently checked, it literally is.
Then, I remembered another dinner.
It was also vaguely business-related: backstage, during my brief and under-documented stint as a backup dancer on Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour. Strangely, no one remembers my presence. Something about a cone bra stealing the spotlight.
Anyway, there we were, listening to the Big M regale us with tales of the famous people she’d encountered. The stories were glamorous, irreverent, celebratory. That is, until someone brought up nineteenth-century Russian novelists.
The room fell silent.
No one dared speak first. Then, with a dampness in her eye, she told us of the times she’d met Fyodor and Leo.
She’d dressed down for the occasion—out of respect—and met Leo Tolstoy in his candlelit study. He was barefoot, in homespun linen, naturally.
Madonna:
You live like this… on purpose?
Tolstoy (nodding):
Luxury poisons the soul. A simple life allows for truth. And you—you seem to have devoted your life to distractions.
Madonna:
I’ve devoted it to performance. Art. Self-expression. Provocation.
Tolstoy:
Provocation is not art. It is noise. True art uplifts. It speaks to the divine in man. Yours speaks to… the market.
Madonna (shrugs):
Look, I didn’t set out to be a prophet. I wanted to challenge norms. Religion. Gender roles. Power. That’s not meaningless.
Tolstoy:
To challenge is not enough. Why do you challenge? For what purpose? You use the tools of the world—fame, wealth, vanity—and believe you are above them?
Madonna:
You think I’m vain. I think I’m free. You wrote books to shake the system. I danced on stages. Same revolution. Different shoes.
Tolstoy (quietly):
You mistake visibility for truth. There is a kind of slavery in constant performance. The soul needs silence.
Madonna:
You really think someone like me can’t make meaningful art?
Tolstoy:
Anyone can. But art becomes meaningful when it forgets the self. When it loves others more than its own reflection.
Madonna:
That’s beautiful. Still… I like mirrors.
Tolstoy (smiling for the first time):
Yes. I imagine you do.
My fellow dancers and I all understood the subtext of the story immediately. How our Lady Madonna represented unapologetic self-expression and rebellion through spectacle. While Tolstoy championed humility, asceticism and moral clarity. They didn’t agree, but they listened. And in our current age, that is perhaps the most meaningful art of all.
We stopped our schoolgirl chatter when Madonna began again, this time she spoke of her meeting with Dostoevsky in a smoky corner of the Literaturnoye Kafe in St Petersburg. He in a threadbare coat, she dressed in a sleek, silken, dark dress. Her alabaster skin glowing in the candlelight.
Dostoyevsky (squinting at her):
You are not what I expected. I thought you would be louder.
Madonna (raising an eyebrow):
And I thought you’d be taller.
Dostoyevsky (smirking):
Tell me… does it tire you? The mask?
Madonna:
What mask?
Dostoyevsky:
The one that lets you command a stage. The one that shouts freedom, while hiding the terror underneath.
Madonna (leaning in and brushing her lips against his ear):
Maybe I wear masks to survive. Maybe we all do. You should know—you wrote the book on tortured selves.
Dostoyevsky:
Ah, but I sought truth through my torment. You turn torment into choreography.
Madonna:
That is art. And art isn’t always about truth. Sometimes it’s about escape. Or defiance. Or just being seen.
Dostoyevsky (nodding slowly):
Being seen. Yes. The modern disease. Everyone shouting, no one listening. But I sense… you do want to be heard, not just admired.
Madonna:
Maybe. Maybe I’m still figuring out what I want to say. But I’ve survived by saying something—anything—before anyone else could say it for me.
Dostoyevsky:
So fear drives you?
Madonna:
Fear. Anger. Hunger. Ambition. Love. I’m human, Fyodor. Same as you.
Dostoyevsky (smiling faintly):
You are more honest than many priests. That, I admire.
Madonna:
So you don’t hate me?
Dostoyevsky:
No. But you interest me. You are the Underground Woman. With exceptional cheekbones.
And, with that, she left the backstage and I never saw her again. What I liked about her second story was that unlike Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky didn’t try to correct Madonna. He sought to understand her contradictions and reflect on his own. They did not agree on what art should be, but they recognised in each other the same obsession: with freedom, with identity and with the abyss that stares back at both.
I had thought to write a very silly sketch about Madonna meeting the two great writers when I started this post, but somehow I think the sheer weight of historical reverence and unparalleled gravatas of the two of them created a vortex of profundity which no sort of satire(?) can escape, drawing everything into a strange but possibly genuine meditation on what art really is.
Still, I also made a little cartoon:
Sometimes, I suppose, silliness and seriousness go hand in hand. Or at least, sit at opposite ends of the same candlelit table.
God Mode and Chocolate Cake: Why We Idolise the Ordinary Over the Exceptional
In today’s society, we seem increasingly drawn to celebrities of no particular distinction—people who are famous not for talent, intelligence, or meaningful contribution, but simply for being visible. Reality TV stars, influencers, and social media personalities dominate headlines and screens, often celebrated for little more than their lifestyle, personal drama, or follower count. Meanwhile, true brilliance—scientists, artists, thinkers, or quiet innovators—often goes unnoticed, their achievements too nuanced or complex to fit into a tweet or a 15-second video on TikTok.
This isn’t entirely new. People have been lamenting the dumbing down of culture for decades. But the scale and intensity of this trend feels different now. A Nobel laureate may get a passing mention in the news, but a reality TV star’s dating life will dominate media cycles for weeks.
One of my favourite videos on YouTube is Prince absolutely stealing the show during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison. If there was ever a moment where an artist activated “God Mode” in real life, it’s this.
At the time of writing, it’s been viewed over 46 million times—so yes, it has received its fair share of attention. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s watched it more than a few times. But then you glance at what’s trending, and you’ll see a video called “How to eat chocolate cake with your friends” sitting comfortably at 58 million views.
There’s an uncomfortable truth in that. We tend to idolise the familiar, not the extraordinary. When someone displays a skill so far beyond our reach, it can feel alienating. It reminds us of our own limitations. In contrast, the average influencer—flawed, relatable, and perpetually online—feels accessible. We see ourselves in them, or perhaps the version of ourselves we might be if luck and algorithms smiled our way.
So we gravitate toward the comfortable. The celebration of the ordinary becomes a kind of emotional shelter. True excellence requires effort to appreciate. It demands patience, humility, even reverence—qualities that don’t always survive in the rapid churn of digital culture. It’s easier to laugh with someone over breakfast than to engage with a masterwork of art, science, or music.
Michael Palmisano’s video analysis of the same Prince performance is another example. It’s filled with genuine insight, technical breakdowns, and sheer appreciation. In my opinion, his commentary deserves to be celebrated as a masterpiece in its own right.
But that’s the tension we’re living in. In idolising the average, we risk losing sight of the exceptional. We lower the bar for what we admire, and in doing so, we risk forgetting how to recognise brilliance at all. And perhaps worse: a culture that forgets how to recognise genius may also forget how to create it.
The Quiet Terror of the Inbox
There’s a peculiar kind of silence that settles in after I’ve hit “send” on a query email to a literary agent. It’s not the comforting hush of a job well done or the expectant pause before a storm. No—this is a clawing, teeth-on-edge kind of silence. It’s the silence of an inbox that might hold my future… or nothing at all.
At first, I keep Outlook open, front and centre, checking it obsessively. Then, like an addict, I set my notifications to ping with every new arrival—only to discover that someone else has noticed my erectile dysfunction, or worse, someone from work needs something urgent. Each ding raises my heartbeat by a degree. Each disappointment chips away at something that once felt solid.
This is the hidden truth of the querying process: it’s not just about rejection. It’s about waiting. And waiting, when you’ve poured your heart into something as personal and fragile as a novel, feels like standing alone in an empty theatre, on a stage, under a spotlight that never turns on.
I imagine the agents opening my submission with a sigh, laughing at my prose, barely able to believe that something so brilliant has not been written before. Or worse—missing it entirely because it’s one of 300 that day and they’re out of coffee. I start to question everything: my premise, my tone, my opening line, my life choices. Maybe I should just focus on my “day job” after all…
And yet, in the stillness between refreshes, something strange begins to happen.
I start thinking about Atlantis. About a boy descended from a survivor of the cataclysm. I scribble the outline of a scene, a line of dialogue. And suddenly I’m writing again—not querying, not waiting, just writing.
The world falls away. The pulse slows. The self-doubt dims. It’s not for an agent. It’s not even for readers. It’s just for the story.
Here’s the quiet truth that slips in after the noise dies down: writing should be its own reward.
Yes, publication is validating. Yes, agents are gatekeepers. And yes, it would be lovely—god, just lovely—to get that call. But the real goal was never fame or recognition. The goal, always, was to create something beautiful, honest, and entertaining. To build something from nothing. To make the dream real.
The artistic life often looks glamorous from the outside: book launches, panels, Instagrammable writing retreats. But inside, it’s a practice. A discipline. A relationship with the page that no amount of outside silence should be allowed to erode. And in that practice—in that daily return to the craft—there is a quiet kind of heroism.
I don’t write because someone asked me to (in fact, it’s often the opposite). I write because I love it. And if I can make peace with that—if I can find joy in the making—I’ll always have what matters most.
Everything else is just noise.
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How I Know I’m a Writer
There are times when I doubt myself.
The past year for example: I started 2024 with good intentions – I didn’t write much other than a couple of blog entries, but I read some complicated books and kept “write for at least an hour” on my TODO lists all year… even though I never actually wrote for a full hour in one day.
So you can see why the doubts are there.
But every now and again, I read a novel or a short story or a chapter that inspires me so much that I can’t stop thinking about it and how I should be creating something like that.
Last night while reading Steven Erikson’s The Deadhouse Gates I came across a sentence which thrilled me in the same way that a whole novel sometimes does.
“The historian noted that he was not alone in his trepid attention.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen trepid anywhere other than as the first part of trepidation. “He looked on in trepidation…” is, to me, a horrible cliché – an insipid example of lazy writing.
This, on the other hand, is glorious and has reminded me how simple, yet infinitely varied, writing can be.
It’s possibly a very personal thing, and it’s definitely a nauseatingly smug thing, but this has convinced me that above all else: I AM A WRITER.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble.
Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath ‘Ears’ Moran, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
The present is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the car crash twelve months before Cass was born? To the infamous bee sting which ruined Imelda’s wedding day? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, trembling before his father in the garden, learning how to be a real man?
Is it possible that a single moment of bad luck set in motion everything that came after? And does that mean the fate of the Barnes family is already sealed? They are facing a reckoning. If they can’t change the past, or rewrite the story they have already lived, is it too late for a happy ending?
Review – 8/10
This is a sprawling family drama filled with chaos and insanity, tragedy and comedy. Four lives related by blood, yet distanced by circumstance, history and viewpoint.
It is quite long (almost 650 pages in hardback) but it doesn’t really feel it because it constantly confounds your expectations, often by applying truth to a situation where you had expected a cliché or for sensible realisation to overcome cheap or gimmicky plotting.
And the writing is fabulous. The protagonists have their own literary style and Murray has fun with this. The way he’s structured the book is clever too, as it slowly and thoroughly introduces us to each of the main characters and their foibles and then accelerates by switching from one to the other faster and faster until the climax is almost unbearably quickfire and tense.
Once I had settled in to Murray’s writing I thought it was almost magically skilful how I could understand with absolute certainty that he meant one thing even though the text said the exact opposite.
It’s also very funny in places and made me laugh quite unexpectedly: “And yet when you look at her looking at you all kinds of words come into your head – words like minge.”
New Year – New Me (Or probably same old me)
As ever the dawn of a new year has inspired me to restart my writing career and seven of my sixteen NY resolutions are related to my inevitable domination of the literary world in 2024.
- Write Every Day
- Finish “The Motley Life of Edison Swift”
- Finish “The Book of Lies”
- Finish “The Necromancer’s Son”
- Do something to improve “The Literarium” every day
- Write at least one blog post every week
- Read for at least an hour every day
The last item on this list is to read more, which is an obvious method of improving my writing – as long as I read good things. So I have made a list of 29 fiction books which I will try and read this year. (I hope to add to this list throughout the year up to 52 books) I will also attempt to publish my thoughts on each of these as I tick them off – maybe even start a #booktok channel.
| Title | Author | Added | Started | Finished | Review | |
| 1 | A Desolation Called Peace | Arkady Martine | 1/1/24 | |||
| 2 | Piranesi | Susanna Clarke | 1/1/24 | |||
| 3 | The Midnight Library | Matt Haig | 1/1/24 | |||
| 4 | He Who Drowned The World | Shelley Parker-Chan | 1/1/24 | |||
| 5 | Starling House | Alix E. Harrow | 1/1/24 | |||
| 6 | The Endless War | Danielle L. Jensen | 1/1/24 | |||
| 7 | The Ten Thousand Doors of January | Alix E. Harrow | 1/1/24 | |||
| 8 | My Murder | Katie Williams | 1/1/24 | |||
| 9 | There Is No Antimemetics Division | QNTM | 1/1/24 | 10/1/24 | 14/1/24 | |
| 10 | I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home | Lorrie Moore | 1/1/24 | |||
| 11 | The Saint of Bright Doors | Vajra Chandrasekera | 1/1/24 | |||
| 12 | The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store | James McBride | 1/1/24 | 28/1/24 | ||
| 13 | The Bee Sting | Paul Murray | 1/1/24 | 1/1/24 | 10/1/24 | Review |
| 14 | Old God’s Time | Sebastian Barry | 1/1/24 | |||
| 15 | Yellowface | R. F. Kuang | 1/1/24 | |||
| 16 | Lone Women | Victor LaValle | 1/1/24 | |||
| 17 | Chain-Gang All-Stars | Nana Kwama Adjei-Brenyah | 1/1/24 | |||
| 18 | Prophet Song | Paul Lynch | 1/1/24 | 14/1/24 | 27/1/24 | |
| 19 | Trust | Hernan Diaz | 1/1/24 | |||
| 20 | The Art Thief | Michael Finkel | 1/1/24 | |||
| 21 | The Berry Pickers | Amanda Peters | 1/1/24 | |||
| 22 | Fourth Wing | Rebecca Yarros | 1/1/24 | |||
| 23 | Holly | Stephen King | 1/1/24 | |||
| 24 | Small Mercies | Dennis Lehane | 1/1/24 | |||
| 25 | Mobility | Lydia Kiesling | 1/1/24 | |||
| 26 | Terrace Story | Hilary Leichter | 1/1/24 | |||
| 27 | Lost Places | Sarah Pinsker | 1/1/24 | |||
| 28 | American Dirt | Jeanine Cummins | 1/1/24 | |||
| 29 | Jade City | Fonda Lee | 1/1/24 | |||
| 30 | Skippy Dies | Paul Murray | 11/1/24 | |||
| 31 | Fine Structure | QNTM | 14/1/24 |
These books have been selected from various sources, from reviews to “best of” lists or just books that have been on my radar for a while.
I asked Google’s Bard to pick a random book from this list for me to read first and it’s chosen “The Bee Sting” so I’m off to do some reading.
One Way Ticket
The journey has been longer and harder than I could have imagined.
It feels like I haven’t slept for days even though I’ve done little else. I had assumed getting here would be the hard part – if I survived that, a new life was guaranteed.
There are hundreds of us, all confined to white plastic tents erected an anonymous warehouse. Nine square metres of boredom. We’ve come from everywhere. We all talk about what we’ve left behind, but the spirits of those places, the essences of our lives no longer exist.
My neighbour was originally from Qatar. She’s a lawyer and speaks five languages. Even she has trouble being understood – what chance do I have?
I had been… am a software engineer. I have a first class honours degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the world and I’ve always been ready to prove I belong on the bleeding edge of technology. No one here has bothered to try and find out what I can do. I can tell, from the way they examine their indecipherable screens, they’ve decided I’m just another burden.
And it had not been cheap: More than my life savings and an unscrupulous contract with hustlers who knew they were selling snake oil and didn’t care. But I’d been desperate and it had seemed to be my only hope.
Now it feels selfish and pointless. My parents had encouraged me to do it. My mother had offered to sell the family home. My father had let her.
I wish I’d let the cancer consume me. I would have died of course, but the cryogenics and future science have given me years to live – trapped as a chronological refugee who will never live the life I should have.
The Final New Dawn… until the next one.
Believe it or not, I’m working too hard. Anyone who knows me would find this laughable as I have made an art form of finding an ingenious solution to a problem at the last minute, which makes everyone think I’m much cleverer than I am.
Recently I seem to have taken on more responsibilities, and now find myself slaving away at all hours trying to find answers to problems that are very much not novel related or, in fact, writerly in any way. The cold, hard logic problems of software engineering.
And I think it’s affecting me. I’ve always bemoaned my lack of ability to focus on one project or topic – often blaming it for my failures. It’s extremely easy to say that the reason I haven’t had a novel published is because I’m too much of a polymath, my mind is too vast to be constrained by a single goal and therefore I need to unfetter it and let it wander its own path.
It’s much harder to admit that I just lack discipline and am genuinely an Olympic level procrastinator.
However, my recent attention to one subject (my actual job) has proven to me that I can concentrate. I can bring my (probably not as great as I think it is) intellect to bear entirely onto one subject. I do know what it takes to get things done. And I am perfectly capable of sitting down and doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing.
I just need to do it.
So, obviously, I have now decided, once more, that my dearest desire, my one true calling, the gold at the end of the rainbow is writing. If I want to remain fed, clothed and housed, I cannot stop doing my job, but outside of working hours I am going to concentrate entirely on one thing.
I realise that a healthy mind requires a healthy body which means I should still do a bit of cycling and squash. Maybe a couple of workouts to keep my body and mind supple and capable. And I do want to utilise my games programming muscles.
So, I am now going to focus entirely on this list:
- Finishing “The Motley Life of Edison Swift” before end of June 2022
- Writing two blog posts every week
- Getting The Literarium up and running
- Write a fantastic author helping tool
- Distribute my multidimensional thesaurus to the world
- Create a fabulous Patreon presence
- Ride my bike more
- Get 2,500 SquashLevel points
- Write a working version of Chesster
I think I’ll be much happier now that I’ve only got one thing to do.
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