On Tour - September 2025
Well, dear reader, this email’s coming a day late due to a minor issue with buttondown. But all sorted. Everything that follows was written yesterday!
I’m writing this the afternoon it needs to head to your inbox. This is because I only arrived home yesterday evening from two weeks in Rome! And I have a lot to get on with into October. So, this roundup will cover the pre-Rome adventures.
That eternal city wasn’t built in a day, and I don’t have the time, or space in your inbox, to ever properly cover those breathtaking days around the well-known sights and museums, and some lesser known sites. For now, that adventure will just live in my memory until everything I experienced and learned makes it into some fiction!
Things I did
As promised, though, I’m starting by covering my last few August days at North Leigh, volunteering first at an exciting archaeological dig I can’t talk about, then at the villa, battling wind and rain.
But when the sun was out, and whole families visited to explore and sketch and learn about the site because of the Minecraft competition I’m now judging entries for, with English Heritage and Blenheim Palace, it made the weekend special. To think an idea I put forward influenced so many weekend plans! I also saw a Romanised version of The Mikado at Sutton Courtenay’s All Saints Church.
It was a really fun time. All the Opera Anywhere performers were fantastic! Before the show began, though, I headed into the yard to find a special grave. A big sign starting with ‘Sorry George…’ on the back of the headstone helped.
It was quite thought provoking seeing (and reading about in a little display in the church) the simple grave the writer we know as George Orwell wanted. Animal Farm was the first of his books I read for school, then later 1984. As well as the rose, other flowers and even a few drinks had been placed there, small notes on his huge legacy and I suppose the (sadly) continued timeliness of his works.
September begun, and I visited the Natural History Museum with a friend for the first time in a long time (I remember being so scared by the big animatronic T. Rex…). But we were there for the space exhibition.
There were many other interesting meteorites, including part of someone’s driveway hit by one! I also touched a piece of the moon and Mars!
On the tech-side of the exhibition, there were these cute hopping rovers, and a dragonfly-like drone ready to explore Titan in the near future!
The exhibition ended with some potential alien lifeforms, but not before seeing some incredible extremophiles from our planet! I snapped these ones due to the relevance the music I saw recently, the Pompeii worm (which can survive 80 degrees Celsius) and the Scaly-foot snail (which has iron in its shell and foot to armour it). (Check last month’s antics if you’re confused.)
While at the museum, I had to check out the human evolution section, but it may mean less to you if I show several skeletons and say it’s Lucy, it’s Cheddar Man, it’s a reconstructed homo florensis face! There were some familiar archaeologist faces, and recent finds from Rising Star Cave, where George Nash (again, see last month!) worked!
That evening, it was another excelent Screen Players Film Club, with Sir Roger and James Deakins as guests! The Man Who Wasn't There is a brilliant film, and the Q&A afterwards was my favourite so far, so inspirational.
On the 8th, I attended a special early listening party for twenty one pilot’s latest album, Breach. I had a great day in Brighton, down the lanes, on the seafront, with some fellow fans, and sitting in the shop amongst many of them as we heard new music for the first time together was special. Plus, freebies:
I took that photo of the poster and record sleeve as soon as a I received them, and an exclusive wristband. Breach is special, because it ends the story the band have been telling through albums, music videos and lots of supplementary material on line and at events, for over ten years. If you’d like to know what the fuss is about, you can watch the entire (fourteen video) story playlist here.
I’d actually start that playlist with heavydirtysoul, then watch until The Outside, then watched I Am Clancy, then continue till The Contract and watch I Am Torchbearer before City Walls. That’s how we experienced it.
The album came out on the 12th, just three days before I went to Rome (and also on the seven year anniversary of my first pilots show!). So amongst all that excitement I was packing, reading and notetaking.
I took 4000 photos in those two weeks…
I’ll be sharing some daily themed highlight posts on my instagram. There’ll be at the start of October’s roundup for you newsletter gang!
Things I wrote
This newsletter…
While I wondered around the space exhibition mentioned above, I was receiving all sorts of good news for the video game on which I’m lead writer, The Diamond Adventures.
We heard back from the BBC and DanTDM’s team, confirming he is aware of the game and is A-okay with its release, or at least, hasn’t told us to stop! But, due the nebulous copyright of his tour, we’re re-working that level. Hence the title of this newsletter (though it worked for Rome too), as I’ve been pitching how to alter DanTDM On Tour to retain the soul and story if not the details, which has been great fun so far and something I need to get back to.
As well as notes for Rome and Ostia (ah, Ostia was brilliant, running around a whole Roman town, full with mosaics…), I did apply for a few things and send off some short fiction in the first half of the month. Here’s hoping!
Things I gained
Another great continuation of Star Wars comics series this month! Mina-Rau from Andor, tying threads together in Star Wars, a classic twisty Aphra and Han tale and a brilliant exploration of Kylo with an Order 66 survivor!
I celebrated my birthday a week earlier as I was in Rome (and Ostia for most of the actual day!), so this lovely stack of books are all thoughtful presents!
A lot to unpack here, as they say. Apart from a shocking lack of Star Wars, this is a pretty representative stack.
Like temple builders, we’ll work from the bottom up. Some brilliant rock art books, including (finally) Genevieve von Petzinger’s book, the content of which she TED talked about, which immensely inspired my fiction, led me to George Nash, my first Star Wars Insider article and archaeology adventure! You may remember Genevieve’s appearance on my A Long Time Ago… series, which is still on hiatus but not forgotten about!
The sprayed edge book is one I just bought for myself - the Waterstone exclusive edition of Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro’s The Court of the Dead.
Above that, a veritable Romano-British feast, The Host, which in some ways is a good comp for my novel Children of Shadows, and a book of short stories set in English Heritage sites.
Simone Weil is a philosopher who influenced twenty one pilots, and Stephen King is a writer who’s influenced many. It’ll be good to finally get his thoughts on writing. That classic book on mythology is a cherry on top.
Aren’t I lucky?
I am if you read this far!
Thank you so much for your support!