Reading: Ex Utero by Charles Forsman (The Mansion Press)

This brilliant new look at disaffected loner teenagers thrust into weird genre conventions is excellent. You can either, like me, grab the serialised chapters off Forsman’s Patreon, or you can buy the collected volumes 1 and 2 from cool French publisher, The Mansion Press. It’s a graphic novel about a grieving lonely teenager called Josh, who is grieving the sudden, tragic death of his mum and dealing with his desperate-to-be-loved-a-bit-too-much little brother, and his drunk my-grief-is-higher-priority-than-yours father. Oh and being bullied at school and living in a deadend town. When his dad drunkenly kills the cat, Josh buries it in their backyard, and discovers, the book of the dead. Showing it to a girl he fancies at school, hoping it’ll make her fancy him back, Josh discovers a necromancy spell, and uses it to bring his mum back. What happens next is slow-burn hilarious teenage horror, in the vein of Eerie, Indiana. Nothing is ever as it seems, and the creepiness builds and builds. It’s so very funny and also so very truthful about being a loner loser teenager.

But Ex Utero volume #1 here

Reading: Yesterdays by Harold Sonny Ladoo (Coach House)

This lost classic by the tragically killed before his time Ladoo (his dead body was found with a battered head in sinister, mysterious, and horrific circumstances. He was 28), is a hilarious look at the Hindu community of Trinidad. After years of suffering at the hands of white missionaries trying to convert Trinidadians to Christianity, Poonwa has decided, as payback, to go to Canada and start a Hindu mission. What follows in this short, sharp satire about village life, money and power is a hilarious study of sexual liberation, colonialism and self-delusion. It is so very funny and surprising at every turn and certainly makes the reader question their own sense of self, of morality throughout. While his career was cut so very tragically short, this book, with an introduction by the awesome Kevin Jared Hosein, proves that he was going to be one of the best of us.

Buy Yesterdays here

Watching: Task

A new addition to the MoECU (Mare Of Easttown Cinematic Universe), this cops and robbers show does its best to be a panoramic Heat-esque study of right and wrong, morality and corruption, revenge and faith. And like Heat, it’s elevated by some standout performances, from Mark Ruffalo as the head of an FBI taskforce, a former priest who is dealing with problems in his family home, and from Tom Pelphrey, as the guy robbing a dangerous biker gang, for reasons other than money and opportunity. And it’s Pelphrey’s tragic Robbie’s bonkers decision at the end of episode 1 that pulls this into something incredible. I won’t spoil that decision for you but it gives the show some real heft. Everyone in this show is working hard and the show is unafraid of spending as much time in the family home as it is in the dark backstreets of New Jersey suburbs. As it builds to a tense conclusion, it also manages to say something interesting about fate and revenge that borders on profound.

Watching: The Lowdown

I’ve only seen the first two episodes of this but Ethan Hawke, playing Lee, a ‘truth-storian’ for a local radical newspaper, who has uncovered some dangerous truths about one of the richest families in Tulsa, and their connections to a housing project and other mysterious goings on. It’s Ethan Hawke playing a great dirtbag detective, written by Sterlin Harjo of Reservation Dogs fame, based on a real-life Tulsa character and very rooted in Jim Thompson’s bleak vision of America’s criminal fringes. I don’t quite know where this is going yet but I am very very in for the ride, with Hawke turning in another astonishing performance and Harjo’s hilarious take on the PI genre.

Okay, that’s it… Thanks for continuing to subscribe. I do appreciate it, especially when I took off more time than I thought. I will endeavour to keep this going. While I appreciate the paid subscriptions, because they do help to keep funding this thing, I will make every single piece on here free for everyone. If that means you want to stop your paid subscription and access everything for free, no worries, I understand. Mick Hucknall said it best. Money’s too tight to mention. If you want to continue to fund this, I appreciate you. Other ways to fund this are to sling me a coffee through this site or buy one of my books. Or any book. If you’re looking for a reputable online retailer, here is a link to my affiliate page on bookshop.org, which does redistribute money to independent bookshops.

Things I would rather be doing on this sunny Saturday: helping with my kids’ football coaching, shouting things like ‘you’re all clustering in the middle’, ‘look for the pass’, ‘wings!’, ‘mark up’. Maybe cook an elaborate lunch, one of those all-hands-on-deck ones that takes way too long to make, and you’re all hungry and grouchy just before it’s served, and then it’s hoovered up in a tenth of the time it took to make, everyone making appreciative noises as the food hits their gullet. Calling my dad back. Reading, or playing my kid at chess, seeing as she’s discovered she loves it and I can build her confidence by losing cos I am rubbish at chess. Anything else. Just absolutely anything other than standing here in the freezing cold, chanting the chants, eyeballing racists who have sliced their fingers across their necks at me, defending our city and ignoring texts asking what time I’ll be home.

Two popular far-right streamers are wearing the V mask from ‘V For Vendetta’, probably because they are disguising the remigration angle of this protest by leading with a condemnation of digital IDs. I think they think they’re being like Anonymous. I don’t think they know the Guy Fawkes mask is actually what the main character in ‘V For Vendetta’ is wearing. Cos if they did, they’d realise that the vendetta is against fascism and state of oppression from freedom fighters. Unless that’s the new disguise for their racism. Oh. Wait. Maybe they’re being clever. Maybe they think that by saying they hate Starmer, they’re channelling V, and they’re going to bring down a fascist government. But aren’t they proposing to replace it with more fascism, worse, more hardline fascism? Have I given their choice of mask more thought than they have. They probably just think they look cool.

Reasons friends I have texted, because our counter-protest desperately needs numbers, have given for not coming: they’re coaching their kids’ football teams. They’re cooking an elaborate lunch. They’re hanging out with their dad. They’re writing, reading, playing. They’re doing anything else other than standing here in the freezing cold. One of them tells me they’re scared. I reply that I too am scared. I swiftly delete it because god forbid, I challenge a white person’s fears about any of this stuff with my own fears. Mine have been minimised for years. Later, they ask what I deleted. I don’t reply. I have better things to do, things I could be doing, and yet, I am exactly where I need to be.

When I told my kids where I was going, my youngest daughter patted me on the head and said, ‘good boy’. My eldest said, ‘you are representing the family’.

The route for the far-right march takes them up Broad Street. I cannot see the logic for this. The march takes the far-right past the Palestine Cultural Museum. A friend and I run in, as soon as we realise, to warn the owners that they’re coming. Earlier the far-right had been chanting anti-Palestine chants. Despite the police presence, I can’t see this going well. Police line the other side of the street as they approach. Not many on our side of the street. My friend and I stand in the doorway, arms folded, almost a last line of defence as insults are thrown towards the building, the Palestinian people, Islam. We watch them all pass, flooding the doorway with our bodies, making ourselves as tall and as wide as we can. They shall not pass, etc.

These people do not like being called racist. Even when they say racist things.

I get into an argument with two men who think that by protesting racists I am against worker’s rights. They say that the protest is about digital IDs and the government. I say, that’s just some of what it’s about. They tell me that we should be joining them to protest about the things we agree on. I tell them I’m not marching with racists. They tell me that only some of those men are racist and I should be reaching across the aisle. I tell them that some is too many. I ask if they have canvassed all of the fifty or so far-righters about their feelings towards ethnics. They tell me again, that we should be uniting on the things we agree about. I tell them that we can all agree that while ‘Slow Horses’ is a great show, season 4 wasn’t its best and season 5 is much better, but if you’re a racist, I’m not going to sit in a café with you and talk about ‘Slow Horses’. We walk away from each other. Neither side convinced. Another classic example of how debate works.

People, carrying on their Saturdays, are perplexed by the scene. They all chose their own lives and I don’t know what’s going on for them, so I can’t really be angry with them for doing that, or maybe people don’t care or maybe they think, that’s not me, I don’t need to stand in the streets and say so. Or maybe this is not a material part of their lives. Maybe they didn’t hear about it. Maybe they had better things to do with their Saturday. I don’t know how to make people care. I sound pissed off all the time. Like I’m scolding my friends for not being there when I chose to be. I cancelled a fun, paid overseas work trip to protest. I missed a football tournament my kid played in to protest. I didn’t see my dad one week to protest. This feels so live for me. I don’t even want to be writing this in the first place.

I decided on New Year’s Day to live this year like it was my last. What would be my legacy if I had twelve months to make a difference? How much urgency does a ticking clock give my work? And I realised, this is my big project this year. It’s not a novel, a script, a commission for a fancy bit of IP. It’s chasing the racists out of my city. I don’t have the patience or compromise within me to try and convince them that racism is bad. Or that their actions are harmful. We’ve tried that. It didn’t work. I can help to shame them and run them off the block. We did that months ago. During my lunch break in an online writer’s room, I mobilised with some people to run some racists off the block when they were leafletting near a school.

Recently, I attended an antiracist benefit concert in the city I live in. As I arrived, I saw more than twenty men draped in Union Jack flags and balaclavas all shouting, jeering and taunting people in front of the venue. It was an aggressive act harking back to the 80s. I haven’t witnessed that level of ‘them stepping into our space’ aggression in all my years of activism. But here they were, like skinheads in the 70s, right outside our door, waiting for us. The fascists coming to our space, chillingly, felt like an emboldening, a change in tactics.

My dear comedian friend Josie Long was recently talking about making work that has been accused of preaching to the choir. Something I’ve definitely been accused of when it comes to my own work. We don’t, the criticism goes, do enough to reach across the aisle. Instead, we stay in our echo chambers, we preach to the choir. ‘The thing is,’ Josie said. ‘You have to preach to the choir. Preaching to the choir makes the choir sing more beautifully.’

That’s the project for this year. I’m going to continue showing up, organising, doing actions, doing activism. And I am going to write to you, to help us all sing more beautifully. Maybe in there, somewhere, something can shift. Some change can happen in the next twelve months.

Okay, that’s it… Thanks for continuing to subscribe. While I appreciate the paid subscriptions, because they do help to keep funding this thing, I will make every single piece on here free for everyone. If that means you want to stop your paid subscription and access everything for free, no worries, I understand. Mick Hucknall said it best. Money’s too tight to mention. If you want to continue to fund this, I appreciate you. Other ways to fund this are to sling me a coffee through this site or buy one of my books. Or any book. If you’re looking for a reputable online retailer, here is a link to my affiliate page on bookshop.org, which does redistribute money to independent bookshops.

Reading: A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Scribner)

Megha Majumdar’s first book was a thrilling courtroom drama about nationalism, Islamophobia, truth in a country steeped in rising fascism and opportunism and women. It was such a brilliant scalpel of a novel. This, her follow up, is just as sharp. This time tackling climate change and poverty, the impact of rising temperatures in India and what people will do to escape, to protect their families and survive. It follows Ma, who, in a Kolkata where fresh food is scarce and the temperature has become untenable, is days away from taking her son and father to be with her husband in America. Their passports, their visas, their most precious possessions are accidentally stolen one night by a thief, who breaks in to their home to feed himself. This kickstarts a ticking clock to find the thief and the missing visas before it’s too late. The book follows both Ma and the thief, Boomba, newly arrived in Kolkata to create a home for his family. The book is short, devastating and sharp about the cost of being alive today.

Buy the book here

Reading: Equator Magazine

Equator is a new politics and culture magazine set up by Pankaj Mishra, Nesrine Malik, Jonathan Shainin and others. It is a response to the crisis in Gaza, to the crisis in newsrooms and the crisis of West-centric media. It’s worth a membership as the articles are excellent. Recently this article, by David Velasco, the former editor of ArtForum, reflects on how Gaza affected the arts world, and in particular, his own position as editor of a magazine. It’s a chilling story that I’ve heard comparable versions of in other media organisations…

Subscribe here

Application Deadline Approaching For My Next Faber Academy Writing A Novel Course

I teach a six month Writing A Novel course for Faber Academy twice a year. The next evening iteration starts at the end of this month and applications close shortly. If you want to write a novel and want a super practical course, which comprises of a weekly craft seminar and workshopping of work, where we cover all the basics of writing a novel as well as all the industry stuff you need to know, this may be the course for you. You even get your work published in an anthology and meet agents, writers, editors along the way. Also, I’ll be teaching you. I’m a friendly critical friend. You know your novel better than I do and I can help you get it to where you need it to be. Previous students I’ve had on this course include Nicola Dinan and Sarah Harman and there have been some great success stories from Faber Academy. You can find more details here…

Watching: The Voice Of Hind Rajab

This is a powerful movie that I haven’t quite recovered from. It’s a docudrama, feasturing real recordings and tapes and reconstructions, written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania. It follows the Red Crescent response to the murder of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl, by the Israeli army a few years into its genocide of the Palestinian people. Hind was trapped in a car, by herself, next to the slaughtered bodies of her entire family, for hours, talking to the Red Crescent response team as emergency workers on the ground tried to save her. Three hundred and fifty five bullets later, she was dead, alongside two emergency workers. A waste of a precious life. This film tells the story of her murder and gives her a voice in amongst so much horror. It’s hard to watch and impossible to look away from. We must bear witness.

Watching: Sentimental Value

My other favourite watch this week was about an egomaniacal film director’s dysfunctional relationship with his estranged daughters as he tries to make a new piece of art in order to represent himself to them, to the world, as a genius hero. Starring Renate Reinsve in a stunning performance as Nora, the actor daughter of Stellan Skarsgård’s pompous yet charmismatic Gustav, who refuses to be in the film, which is to be shot in her family home. When Gustav hires a naïve and well-meaning American actress, Rachel Kemp, played excellently by Elle Fanning, to be in the film, all the family secrets and lies, the dysfunction and the honest spills out in a compelling, tragicomic way. A joy of a film, a sad, stoic film, that is shot beautifully and tells us why broken people turn to art either as catharsis, reckoning or reframing. Just brilliant.

Okay, that’s it… Thanks for continuing to subscribe. I do appreciate it, especially when I took off more time than I thought. I will endeavour to keep this going. While I appreciate the paid subscriptions, because they do help to keep funding this thing, I will make every single piece on here free for everyone. If that means you want to stop your paid subscription and access everything for free, no worries, I understand. Mick Hucknall said it best. Money’s too tight to mention. If you want to continue to fund this, I appreciate you. Other ways to fund this are to sling me a coffee through this site or buy one of my books. Or any book. If you’re looking for a reputable online retailer, here is a link to my affiliate page on bookshop.org, which does redistribute money to independent bookshops.

I guess the overwhelming question I face most days when I sit at my desk is, does any of this make a difference? I know not every writer wants to change the world, not many pieces of writing do change the world, and not often do we see directly or immediately the change we make. I know all that.

I spent a lot of last year wishing I was a different sort of writer. An agnostic one who could stare at the wall and conjure up takes on just about anything. I remember early in my career an editor’s reaction to my first novel being ‘the market for this work is way too niche but I love your writing; I’m just wondering if you could turn your verve and energy towards a story about a rural detective’. I found the suggestion kinda ridiculous. At the time, rural detectives were du jour. I have a feeling this was around the time ‘Midsomer Murders’ was being flamed online for never having any brown or black actors in it. (Aside: having lived in Bristol for nearly fifteen years and regularly ventured out into flagshagaramic Somerset, I’d say, entirely accurate for a reality-based show about Somerset. However, this was ‘Midsomer Murders’, not ‘Midsomer Flagshaggers’). The point is, I thought long and hard about whether I could do it. Did I have a verve-some and energetic rural detective in me?

Reader, I did not.

Last year, I hustled hard for screen work. Not an uncommon story for any screenwriter working at the moment. The combination of the strikes, the contraction of the industry following the strikes, the turn towards a conservative type of show (many rural detectives due on our screens shortly, I’m sure) all meant I found myself in January without much work on. Two projects disappeared within a week, both results of the desire to not work on anything political in these Trumpy times, a few of my simmering projects slowed down and everyone kept saying ‘fix in 26’ (having said ‘survive till 25’ the year before, without much plan of what might happen once we got to 25). Look, my screenwriting story is very common. Every writer I spoke to was going through in it in various ways. What I want to talk about is whether writing is useful to change the world, and I’m taking my sweet, damn time to get to the bloody point here, so let’s just move it along.

I hustled hard. I did many general meetings. I read many books that I knew people were taking pitches on (books I wouldn’t normally read; books that could generate work; books I wasn’t reading for enjoyment, curiosity or learning, books I was tearing apart in my head so I could pitch a take on them). I found myself down to the last few in a bunch of situations. Occasionally I was passed over for more experienced and illustrious people, who were, I found out, going up for the same writer’s room jobs as me. Occasionally I was passed over because my take, though good and very me, wasn’t what they were looking for. It was never personal. That didn’t stop me getting sad, annoyed and bitter and disappointed when I didn’t book any work.

However, in the background, I was still writing my own stuff. A novel, a couple of feature ideas, a show I was incredibly invested in. And they weren’t happening particularly quickly either. So it was a toss-up between feeling frustrated about the lack of momentum in my personal projects and the lack of ability to land myself on someone else’s projects. And it resulted in me not having the best year, not feeling like a particularly good writer, not feeling able to keep things like this substack up to date. How could I instruct you how to write when I was having such a terrible time myself?

Everything was poured into a bland yet bitter soup in my head. Meanwhile, there were live-streamed genocides, and racist attacks on children on the streets barely a mile away from me, and asylum seekers being tormented by the far right and the news the news the news always the news. And I kept telling myself, my work stuff is unimportant next to the news.

At some point during the year, I started up volunteering again, doing some direct action stuff in my community and things started to look up. I was working with young people again, I was organising movements, protests, events, community projects, I was involved. It felt like a bifurcation in a way. That writing was a thing I did and it was separate to the way I moved through the world. The way I moved through the world, the voluntary work, the community action work, that felt important, like it was making a difference.

Eventually, that work on the streets and in my community fed into my writing and I started to feel like the things I was working on mattered again. I could access my social conscience, my progressive ideologies and find a way to present them in my work without feeling like I was being didactic, preachy or like an op-ed piece. I started to feel inspired to write again, mostly because the work I was doing that wasn’t writing, was so inspiring. The people I was meeting. The situations I was finding myself in. The work I was doing. The tangible difference I was making.

Ugh, I still haven’t still gotten to the point yet.

Okay, here is the point, and it’s somewhat of a writing tip, and a promise to keep this substack going. If I hadn’t been living and doing stuff, I wouldn’t be able to write. I forgot, last year, that writing is living, and reflecting that world on the page. It’s not sitting at my computer and trying to find pithy ways to fix everything. It’s doing, being, caring, making, in person or on the streets, or even online. It’s then taking that feeling and putting it on the page. I spent too much of last year trying to be a writer for other people, trying to come up with my rural detective idea. And I forgot that being a writer involves looking up from the confines of this document, meeting the world where it is and engaging with it. And then taking that back on to the page. It may sound simplistic, but isn’t that what a New Year, New Writer piece is supposed to be? Vaguely simplistically inspirational? It’s stuff I forgot. Stuff I knew intellectually. But because I was so invested in the struggle, I forgot to do the work. The work is not writing. Writing is a reflection of the work done. Because the thinking happens once the work is done and then the thoughts emerge on the page. I had a static, inert year. I don’t know what will happen this year. All I know is, writing cannot make a difference. All it can do is reflect the difference made out there, in the world, away from the blinking cursor on an empty page. For me at least. That’s the type of writer I want to be. And that’s why what I do can be of use.

Now… what type of writer do you want to be?

Okay, that’s it… Thanks for continuing to subscribe. I do appreciate it, especially when I took off more time than I thought. I will endeavour to keep this going. While I appreciate the paid subscriptions, because they do help to keep funding this thing, I will make every single piece on here free for everyone. If that means you want to stop your paid subscription and access everything for free, no worries, I understand. Mick Hucknall said it best. Money’s too tight to mention. If you want to continue to fund this, I appreciate you. Other ways to fund this are to sling me a coffee through this site or buy one of my books. Or any book. If you’re looking for a reputable online retailer, here is a link to my affiliate page on bookshop.org, which does redistribute money to independent bookshops.