May 30 2026, 19:18

Free play

I’ve been reading a lot of books about the psychological aspects of making art:

• How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
• Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
• Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
• Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman

There’s a tremendous amount of practical wisdom distilled into all these books.

This spurt of May research was triggered by a few things. In March, I split my one (true) notebook out into four—for creative writing, songwriting, art, and life in general. A parental voice in my head was telling me to “just fucking pick one or you won’t get anywhere”, but I know now that’s fighting my nature and simply doesn’t work.

With a new songwriting notebook, it became clear my guitar lessons weren’t taking me in the direction I wanted, so I decided to take a break. My writing brain wanted to write songs, even though I was still a beginner on guitar—guitar technique didn’t interest me, not yet anyway, and I’d learned enough to explore songs on my own for a bit.

I got into a good groove with the creative writing notebook. The art notebook remained empty. At the same time, I was watching YouTube channels on learning languages, learning multiple skills in parallel, software engineering, guitar, piano, singing, and yes, starting a YouTube channel. As a technician, I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes.

This is a known pattern I fall into. Being thought-scattered without a project(s) to practice on feeds my discontent. It feels like procrastination, even though I’m not working on anything. The year wasn’t going how I wanted. Old patterns were returning. Whenever I’m looking to find some clarity and coherence, I turn to books.

Jeff Tweedy, in the intriguingly-named How to Write One Song, writes like a wise, kind friend, and his advice is backed up by musical success with the band Wilco. There are lots of specific techniques in the second half about writing songs, but my main takeaway is the importance of both treating songwriting lightly—to play like a child, for the fun of it, because it’s joyful to do—and being serious enough to do it often, with attention, care and craft.

In Free Play, Stephen Nachmanovitch, as a professional improvising violinist, has a wealth of wisdom to share on the improvisation part of making art. He brings a more spiritual, slightly philosophical perspective, but the book is still an easy read. He stresses the importance of listening to the unconscious while making. Pre-conscious material can be channelled through the body and fingers. Improvising is a practice of moment-by-moment micro-experiments where things are tried, they work as expected or don’t, and so on. There are no mistakes, just an endless conversation in whatever medium the artist is working in, continually spinning raw material into existence.

I went to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance next because this was one of the books from my mid-twenties that got me into software engineering, and I sensed it might have something to say about my current problems with “art engineering”. It’s a philosophical enquiry into the experience of doing technical work, and through the concept of Quality, teases out the role of intuition in understanding and solving problems. Pirsig doesn’t talk about generating art, but instead states that doing work well is the bridge between technology and the arts.

I picked up Art & Fear because I wanted to be thorough, and it’s a slim book, another one from my soul-searching twenties. It lists the blocks, both internal and external, that an artist can experience, and offers advice on getting around them. Like Tweedy, it strongly advocates for art to be something ordinary, daily, normal, and not tied too tightly to identity and being successful. To create from inside yourself is to be vulnerable, and that’s the difference between making art and making crafts. Artists have to find a way to bare their souls while not taking the response of the world too seriously. That one hit home.

Finally, Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, cleansed my palate nicely, taking a down-to-earth look at what it’s like to live in today’s always-on, everything’s-available, anything’s-possible culture. It makes people unhappy, and he says that by facing up to our (often grim) reality we can relax and do what’s actually important to us.

Those were five books about being creative that look at different aspects of making things in a world that can feel overwhelming. I recommend them all (with a caveat on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it was least impactful to me now and took a lot of energy—and I skipped some of the history of philosophy sections this time!).

What did I learn? What was I made to remember?

• Finish small projects often, and learn while making things. Write songs on guitar when still crap at guitar.
• Forget external validation, be ambitious to make good stuff that could only come from you.
• Separate improvising from editing. Get material into the world, then work on it. Create systems that make this easy.
• The best raw material comes from listening to what’s bubbling up from the unconscious.
• Be joyful, playful, relaxed, and lose yourself in making things.
• Playing as kids was pure art-making, self-making. It was ordinary. It was a daily thing. Collaboration was easy. Knowing what you liked was easy. Losing yourself in doing something was easy. That’s the state to get into.
• Let the ideas and feelings flow, and express yourself in play.

May 24 2026, 22:43

Authority

Author: Jeff Vandermeer

First published: 2014

I read this in 2018 and thought I didn’t finish it. After the joys of Annihilation, I gave it another try, and what do you know, not only had I actually finished it last time, but instead of the dismissive frustration I remember, it was good. Really good. My brain tricked me. Memory cannot be relied on.

A new director of the Southern Reach, calling himself Control, arrives at the border of Area X tasked with investigating what happened to the twelfth expedition. The staff are wary, bordering on hostile, and the assistant director makes his life difficult from the outset. Control reports to a voice-camouflaged superior who directs him in his probing of the building and the previous director’s many decades of notes and reports. We also learn Control’s mother is a high-ranking leader in government who got him the role as a favour and a ‘last chance’.

I don’t know what my problem was in 2018, because I loved Authority in 2026, gulping it down over a few days. It must be something to do with my changing taste. All of the set pieces I remembered, that I was convinced were in the first half of the story, were spread evenly and effectively over the whole. Perhaps the final fifty pages could have been twenty, but hell, that’s nitpicking.

Where Annihilation was a report by the Biologist from inside Area X, Authority is more like an uncanny spy novel, with corporate intrigue, interrogations and weird science. It isn’t as pure perhaps—there’s a unique hit that comes with a reader’s first experience of the world of Area X—but it is fascinating in a satisfyingly different way. I'm going to wait a while before trying the last book in the trilogy (although it's hard to read Anita Brookner again after this).

May 09 2026, 14:28

She Who Remains

Author: Rene Karabash

First published: 2018

It starts confusingly with word definitions, quotes, and a rush of thoughts about the death of a father. Bekija is the daughter of Murash who has been shot in the head. They live in the “Accursed Mountains” somewhere in Albania with her unnamed mother and her brother, Sále. The villagers live under the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, a set of ancient Albanian laws passed down through families. Murash was killed because Bekija turned down the offer of arranged marriage to become a sworn virgin.

Men rule the villages, and women have little agency. The night before her unexpected wedding, Bekija loses her virginity, and she knows if that is discovered her father will be shot. To avoid this, she renounces her female identity and takes a vow of chastity so she can begin a life as a man. She changes her name to Matija. However, this unleashes a series of brutal decisions and actions under the archaic laws of the Kanun.

I read She Who Remains in one sitting. It’s short, 35,000 words or so, and the stream of consciousness style, short chapters and changing formats kept me reading. The story rushes along, told to a “Mrs Journalist”, possibly the author, with details of Albanian life dropped unexplained into the lyrical prose. The fact that Matija can’t read sets up the second half of the book, which has surprising twists and a satisfyingly emotional ending.

Translated by Izidora Angel.

April 30 2026, 21:30

The Palm House

Author: Gwendoline Riley

First published: 2026

Laura Miller has been friends with Edmund Putnam since university, and Putnam has worked for the same magazine, Sequence, most of his working life. A new editor arrives and upsets the established dynamics, leading to Putnam handing in his resignation. Laura naturally falls into her role of appeasing Putnam’s increasingly miserable and angry moods, leading her to reflect on how she came to be where she is in her life.

Laura remembers the humiliations of her family growing up, and her rocky relationships with various narcissistic men, including a truly horrible semi-famous standup comedian, and later a desperate-for-attention theatre actor. Laura’s mother is cut from the same cloth as the mother in Riley’s last book, My Phantoms, which was brilliant, but so unpleasant in the mother-daughter dynamic that I was glad to finish it.

The Palm House is a gentler read than that, more amusing and whimsical in places, but still isn’t afraid to go for the jugular. The dialogue is exquisitely structured to feel both natural and layered with the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Riley’s knack for finding the telling detail is exemplary.

April 25 2026, 11:25

A Start in Life

Author: Anita Brookner

First published: 1981

I first heard about Anita Brookner as a literary personality through Andy Miller's love of her on the Backlisted podcast, even though I had read Hotel du Lac many years before. Until then, she was a name, but no more than that. His enthusiasm stuck in my brain, and over the last five years I’ve found myself buying her novels in second-hand bookshops. Whenever I dust and move my books around, I notice the growing Brookner list, and because my brain loves (the idea of) a project, I thought I should read her novels from first to last. I spotted a first edition hardback of A Start in Life on Amazon for less than fiver, and here we are. (That cover is glorious.)

Dr Ruth Weiss is a forty-year-old academic remembering her middle class childhood in a London flat with her eccentric parents. The family is looked after by Ruth’s grandmother, and when she dies, they employ a housekeeper, Mrs Cutler. Ruth's mother Helen, an actress, and father George, who owns a book business, create a ruinously decadent threesome with Mrs Cutler, who cleverly makes herself essential, supplying alcohol and a sympathetic ear to both while doing as little as possible for her money.

Ruth escapes the quietly poisonous threesome through her tenacious love of literature. She wins a place studying at a Paris university and begins to blossom, even as she harbours serious doubts about her own self worth and place in the world, especially in relationships with men. Her parents don’t give her much thought until their grimly bohemian setup begins to fall apart.

Brookner writes wonderfully about the psychological games people play, especially narcissists who can’t bear to think about other people beyond what they need from them. Her descriptions are cuttingly precise, and the deep melancholy of Ruth’s inner life is explored gently, obliquely, but is clear all the same.

This is her first novel, which was published when she was fifty-three years old, and she wrote over twenty more after it, but her talent is clear immediately. She describes A Start in Life as an investigation of her early years, and she was making up her style as she went along to help with that self-analysis, but it’s also not autobiographical, or at least not literally so. There are strong parallels to her own parents, but Ruth Weiss is not Anita Brookner, and because she was such a private person, we'll never know the overlap. It’s creative writing as a type of therapy, and I love it.

April 13 2026, 15:37

Diary of an Oxygen Thief

Author: Anonymous

First published: 2006

The question of whether it is fiction, autofiction, or autobiography colours the experience of reading this book from the start. The opening line is, 'I liked hurting girls'. The author is anonymous. And for the next fifteen pages he describes in malicious detail how he manipulates a woman into falling in love with him before dismantling her emotionally just because he enjoys seeing her in pain. I had to make a decision at that point if I wanted to continue.

It's written well. The voice is narcissistic, amusing in places (but nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is), self-aware, and dripping with self-loathing. He foreshadows a comeuppance at the end to try to make the details of his emotional abuse worth reading, as if it's all okay because revenge was had, and this is also an attempt to manipulate the reader. It worked on me, because I finished it.

The drawn out and complicated plot to professionally undo our anonymous voice is woefully inadequate compared with the many women he abused before he became sober. It's a strange story, and it comes back to the central conceit. There is art, there is the artist, but what to make of something whose origin is deliberately obscured? It could be an artfully constructed fiction. That's impressive. It could be a narcissistic damage limitation exercise by a terrible person. That's something else altogether. It seems to me that the Anonymous moniker only serves the commercial interests of the publisher.

April 05 2026, 16:13

Annihilation

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

First published: 2014

I don’t reread books in general, just as I don’t rewatch films. It’s not an impulse I have. I'm not a comfort reader. There are far too many things in the world that I’m yet to read or watch, and the older I get the more I feel that time is speeding up, so it needs to be a strong gut feeling for me to go back.

With Annihilation, I remembered reading it in 2017, before the film came out, and I remembered the excitement and awe I felt in the details of Area X, and how the story’s central mystery captivated me. I wanted to read it again as a writer. I wanted to understand the techniques that made it work.

Five people are chosen by the Southern Reach, a secretive government agency, to travel to Area X, a mysterious coastal land somewhere in the United States sealed off from the outside world. Each has an area of expertise—biologist, psychologist, surveyor, anthropologist and linguist. In their training, they are told not to reveal their names to each other, and the secret mission is to find a previously established basecamp and investigate the area with their various skills. It quickly dawns on them that they have been deceived about the nature of Area X.

The first thing I noticed was how rich the description was. It’s written in first person from the perspective of the biologist, so she knows the names of all the vegetation and spots the patterns in nature, and she is the first to be suspicious of what’s happening biologically in Area X. The mystery is deepened further by her backstory, which she reveals gradually, and the weird power dynamics playing out in her team. VanderMeer’s economy of storytelling is exemplary. Major events are described matter-of-factly through the biologist’s studious gaze. She is the purest scientist in the team, and her ability to see clearly the group’s dramas makes for a lean, fast-paced read.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot. It’s become on second reading one of may all-time favourite novels. It’s inspirational how so little prose can communicate so much about a character’s inner life while they undergo cataclysmic events in their outer environment. There are many ingenious plot seeds that flower into weighty moments later in the story—the journals each character is asked to write in, the tower going into the ground—if you read it, you’ll know. Read it!

March 15 2026, 18:04

The King in Yellow

Author: Robert W. Chambers

First published: 1895

Five short stories. A book in the Penguin Weird Fiction collection. The original has ten stories, so I’m guessing an editor at Penguin chose the “most weird”. The King in Yellow is also the name of a book referenced in some of the stories reputed to send whoever reads it insane—it describes an ancient city called Carcosa, shone down on by black stars, near the Lake of Hali, and mentions a symbol called the Yellow Sign.

Chambers’ stories are thought to have been an inspiration and reference for later writers like H.P. Lovecraft and George R.R. Martin, and I can certainly see how that could be true. He spins the ideas of other worlds with just enough detail to make them feel tantalisingly real, but the stories are mostly tied down with realistic detail and strong character voices.

The opening story is the longest, The Repairer of Reputations. It follows Hildred, a wealthy man in a future version of New York where the United States has conquered the western hemisphere while Russia controls the east. Hildred reads The King in Yellow and comes to believe he has royal blood from the kings of the land of Carcosa. A mysteriously knowledgable Mr Wilde stokes the madness in Hildred and contrives a conflict between Hildred, an armourer friend, Hawberk, and Hildred’s cousin Louis, who is fresh back from military service. Things spiral marvellously out of control. It’s a fascinating descent into madness.

In contrast, The Mask is a gothic love story with an unexpectedly emotional ending, showing the range of Chambers’ talents. I think that was my favourite. The Yellow Sign takes us back into horror, but also revels in the daily life of an artist and painter, Mr Scott, and his favourite model, Tessie. I loved how rich and full of life these stories felt.

The last story that feels like a story is The Demoiselle d’Ys, a time travel love tale, because the final one, The Prophets’ Paradise, is more a collection of snippets—strange looping puzzles that are hard to make meaning of, almost as if they were taken from the pages of The King in Yellow.

February 26 2026, 21:08

Scanners

I’m learning acoustic versions of pop songs on guitar. I asked my teacher to help me get better at picking out chords and keys and rhythmic patterns. Music has my attention.

UltraSky, Alison Goldfrapp (composed by Alison Goldfrapp, Richard X & Stefan Storm—are these real people?). New Rules, Dua Lipa (composed by Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren & Ian Kirkpatrick). Songs are written. It’s an art I haven’t thought much about, although I did buy Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting, by Jimmy Webb, when it came out twenty years ago, and I went through a few half-hearted periods of buying music paper and sharp pencils.

I’ve always had these bursts of enthusiasm, but I thought I had to choose one thing, so I’d let these hobbies burn out. Looking back, there are repeating enthusiasms. Music is a foundation interest. Creative writing. Then there’s cooking, languages (mostly German), films (film-making? why not!) and tennis... I’ve rotated between them all several times.

Coding brings home the bacon, and I think I’ve taken creative writing the furthest outside of work, probably even further than tennis, and I was an excellent club player. (I stopped for Covid, the arthritis caught up with me, and I could probably play again, but I also know my physio is right, I should stick to the gym and bike.)

Barbara Sher wrote a wonderful book called Refuse to Choose. It’s about a group she calls scanners, people with multiple interests and a need to try different things, whether one thing after another (sequential scanners), or several things at the same time (cyclical scanners). She proposes tools, life models and strategies to help scanners feel fulfilled in a world that traditionally expects you to do one thing well.

Ambition is tricky to manage when you are someone who wants to do multiple things. Everything takes more time. People are less likely to take you seriously. There’s a danger you don’t take yourself seriously. And if you’re older, the life clock is loudly ticking. Validation through some sort of external success can feel essential.

But there’s a great prize in going wide and less deep. A personality that is energised working in many areas will feel stifled if they don’t. One of may favourite ideas in the book is of a scanner finding the nectar in a project, like a bee with a flower. Once you’ve got what you need, move on. Celebrate the nectar. Find another flower. Maybe a different type of flower, maybe the same type, but follow intuition.

Okay, this might sound kooky to some, but if you’re like me, this could be music to your ears. With patience and faith in your unique creative process, you can connect different art forms in interesting ways, and they will feed on each other, intertwine their roots, and create something unlike anything else.

Your work will be unlike anyone else’s, nuanced and complex and interesting through your unique approach. It might be unsuccessful commercially. It might take a long time. There will undoubtedly be periods when it doesn’t make much sense. But I’m coming to realise that’s the work I want to do. That’s the fun bit.

February 21 2026, 17:26

HORRORSTÖR

Author: Grady Hendrix

First published: 2014

Sucked into a purchase by the ingenious cover design and the way it’s laid out like an IKEA catalogue, even though I’ve tried two other Grady Hendrix novels and not liked either of them, I was hopeful this one would be different. Tonally, his voice is the same, which is light, snarky and unafraid of a joke, but in HORRORSTÖR I’m more forgiving of it. I think it’s because of his likeable/relatable protagonist, Amy, and his heartfelt criticism of corporate consumer culture.

Amy works at ORSK, an American version of IKEA, but she isn’t earning enough money to pay her way in the world. She thinks her officious manager, Basil, is looking to fire her, but one night he asks her, along with older co-worker Anne-Marie, to stay overnight to catch someone who is making a mess of the store. Two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, sneak in with camera equipment because they think the store is haunted. They discover a sixth person, Alan, who is homeless and sleeps there, and think they’ve found the culprit, but this ORSK outlet was built on the same location as the destroyed Cuyahoga Panopticon, a controversial nineteenth century prison that tortured its inmates to death in the name of salvation.

The warden of the prison, Josiah Worth, built a basement with an array of truly awful torture devices, and when his “penitents” surface at night, the past and present merge into a disorientating new reality. Each chapter is opened with an illustration of a piece of ORSK furniture, and by the time the torture starts, the chairs and beds match the gruesome designs of the Warden who thinks working (to death) is the only way to cleanse the soul.

It’s cleverly done, and there are plenty of amusing comparisons with modern working conditions spelled out, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Hendrix’s voice, even if I thought HORRORSTÖR was pretty good. The torture descriptions are nasty. Sometimes the scenes of characters moving through the store at night feel like the Silent Hill video game. The true horror seems to the temptation Amy feels to give in to the cult of corporate work and become a zombie worker. I think most people can relate to that.