INTRO

Greetings from March, the month that is March. Outside, the afternoon sun occasionally escapes the grey, and the walls of the tenements light up in blotches of warm gold. It isn't really spring yet, but it's thinking about it. I might have another go at growing herbs on the balcony soon.

February was a quiet month that still felt rushed. In March, though, I have booked myself a little holiday. I'm going to take a notebook and stay in a very cheap hotel near the sea for three days, and see what I can write while staring at the sea. I think it'll be nice.

THE NEWS

This month, I experienced a new-to-me facet of The Author Life. As you're probably all too well aware, being a writer involves a lot of vital tasks that are not writing, such as “promo” and “chasing invoices” and “deleting yet more AI-written scam emails about book clubs”. The latest of these to get in the way of writing new words was “recording a video in which I introduce myself and my work, for an audience of teenagers”.

Now, I can talk to teenagers; I've been a teacher. I can get up on stage and talk about my work; I've done that before. What I can't do, as it turns out, is sit down in front of my laptop and talk into the camera for five minutes.

I tried: I made notes. I sat down in front of the camera. I wanted to turn myself inside out and run away. I tried all afternoon, and by the end of it I had almost no usable footage at all, and a level of anxiety I haven't felt in… I don't know how long. It broke me. It fully broke me.

In the end, my lovely local booksellers saved me. Niamh at Argonaut Books sat me down on their comfortable sofa and asked me some questions on camera, and in under an hour we had a usable video. Thanks, Niamh.

I am weak and bad at videos. Booksellers are strong and powerful and know exactly how to handle authors in the middle of anxiety crises. You should buy a copy of my book from Argonaut Books. That would be a nice thing to do.

WHAT AM I WRITING?

In February, Project V went to its first reader, who I trust to tell me if I have written a book that can be edited into something good or if I have in fact gone mad and written 90,000 words of nothing. Hopefully I'll get notes back on that very soon.

A slightly terrifying step, but a good one. At some point I will also send it to people to whom I am not married, but that's for after another round of edits.

Project RS is in the process of a heavy rewrite, refocusing from comics to prose, and I am having fun. Voice-driven prose for children is an absolute joy to wrote, and I'm finding myself playing with rhythm and sound to a whole new level. Words can be beautiful and can tumble along with joyful cadence even in a first draft! I wrote four pages this morning; this manuscript will almost certainly be about two months ahead of schedule.

After one very efficient round of revisions, I finished the short comic for [redacted]! It is wet and nasty and soaked with dread, and I can't wait to see the art for it. I would very much like to write more horror please.

WHAT AM I WATCHING?

I went to see Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights” last week and: Emerald Fennell is the Garth Marenghi of romance.

I think we all knew this would be bad. Over the last couple of years it has become apparent that pretty much all the good stuff in Saltburn was accidental, and that Fennell is simply not very good at movies. But hey, it should be the fun kind of bad, right?

Right?

This is the thing about Emerald Fennell: nobody has ever told her “no”. At every turn, “Wuthering Heights” shoots for transgression and flair, without ever pausing to think about what that means. Fennell cannot be transgressive, as she comes from too much privilege to ever even understand what it means. In her film, Linton (played with surprising humanity by Shazad Latif, who will always be Clem Fandango to me) lives in a walled manor: perfectly manicured lawns and square rooms; unnaturally shaped fishbowls; dollhouses within dollhouses, all positioned behind high, solid walls to separate him from the moors outside. Linton is noveau riche, moving to the old, wild moors only to live in a walled compound to isolate him from the world outside and the messy humanity of it. This is a metaphor.

The first hour of the film is a beautifully shot and lit music video to Charli xcx's new album of the same name. The album is very, very good. It is also under an hour long. The film is over two hours long. Half way through, Charli xcx simply gives up and goes home, leaving the rest of the film to be scored by someone far less interesting. This, too, is a metaphor.

This is the other thing about Emerald Fennell: it seems that she has never had to try. She's been able to finance films, to make what she wants self indulgently, seemingly without ever having to struggle. I'm not going to romanticise the hard work of art: it's tough out there and it shouldn't have to be. But she has never had to work on making something basic good. As such, she seems to have never actually learned the basic grammar of film. “Wuthering Heights” presents a succession of images with no meaning, no metaphor, no basic articulation of anything. In Linton's house, Cathy sleeps in a room patterned to look like her own skin. What does this mean? Nothing. The film is full of sexual iconography. What does it mean? Nothing. It opens on a hanging, framed as a sexual act. Does Fennell have anything to say about the connection between sex and death? No, of course not. Why does Linton have a fireplace made of plaster human hands? Why does Cathy wear a latex dress? Images are presented because they look cool (and they often do), but with no meaning. There is no “why” to this film at all.

I am all for self-indulgent art. One of my favourite films ever is Clive Barker's Nightbreed, which is absurdly self-indulgent and idiosyncratic. Some selves, however, have nothing to indulge except their own emptiness. Emerald Fennell makes art in a room patterned to look like her own skin, allowing in nothing from outside herself. Meaning and logic and storytelling and basic media literacy wait outside her walled compound, and she will never engage them.

Go and listen to the soundtrack album instead. It's much better.

WHAT AM I LISTENING TO?

In February, we went to see Florence and the Machine play in Glasgow (supported by the always-excellent Paris Paloma), so it’s been a lot of Florence and the Machine playing in our house this month.

The live show itself was a remarkable thing, shifting back and forth between commanding religious authority and human vulnerability, but somehow remaining cohesive. It opened, however, with a sort of giant glowing bag full of backing dancers flailing and screaming, while Goblin’s soundtrack to Suspriria played.

So that’s my listening rec for this month. Go and listen to the soundtrack to Suspiria, as loudly as you can get away with. Maybe do some screaming and flailing too.

WHAT AM I PLAYING?

As I write this, I am neck deep in Resident Evil: Requiem.¹ It's mostly a very good game, but it's making me think about storytelling and pacing in ways I haven’treally tried before.

Let me expand on this. RE9 has two protagonists: Grace, who is leading a first-person horror game filled with slow tension, big scares, and brain-twisting puzzles. And Leon, who can parry rockets and once had a dedicated button just for suplexes. Leon is leading a high-camp action thriller. The game switches you between the two at fixed points; you, the player, do not have agency over who you play as at any given time. Where it shines is the pacing. Grace's chapters are long, slow, and terrifying. They're an endless ramping up of anxiety and dread, and often start to feel unbearable. It's tiring to play a game like that, and there's only so much of it you can take before wanting to turn the game off at the next save point. But, every time you reach that feeling of “that's enough, time to stop”, the game shifts over to Leon and lets you explode zombies with a shotgun and kick monsters in the head for an hour. And just when you're starting to feel like you might be going to stop enjoying that so much, it's back to Grace. The cadence is perfectly engineered for both mood and storytelling, and the whole thing is beautifully executed.²

I think many of us could learn a lot about pacing like this for other media. When is a chapter break an opportunity for the reader to put the book down? When is it a hook that compels them to keep going? How much can you shift back and forth between wildly different tones and still benefit reader enjoyment? I'm going to be thinking on this for a while.

I would also like to note that I love Resident Evil in all its many mutant forms, from high camp to grim nightmare. If anyone wants a writer for anything related to or just vaguely a bit like Resi, I will kill whoever I have to in order to work on that. Just sayin’.

¹ _{For those of you not keeping track, that's Resident Evil 9, or the 10th numbered game in the series. The 11th mainline one. The 13th currently available on modern consoles. You know, normal numbers.}

² _{Well, it is for the first half. The second is a lot of fun too, but it's nowhere near as sharp.}

FRIENDS MAKING THINGS

Friends of the show (and creative collaborators) Brandt & Stein are at it again. Their first solo graphic novel, Worst Man, is up for preorder at the moment.

Have a little look at the preview pages. I’ll wait.

I’ve known Ted and Ro for years, and one of the biggest privileges of that time has been watching them find ways to make their work more and more them.

I’ve been lucky enough to see various stages of this book, from the initial concept screamed over a video call, through various increasingly absurd and complex outline drafts, to the pitch pages. It started out great, and has only got better. Trust me when I say that I think this is going to be the best comic of 2026.

Worst Man is sharp, funny, absurdly ambitious, plotted with a sort of ruthless mechanical precision that defies understanding, and shows what happens when two creators at the top of their game make something unapologetically, fiercely them. It’s the smartest stupid book you’ll read this year, with cartooning so good it might make you actively angry.

Go. Preorder. If you don't want a clever, vicious, intricately plotted queer romcom with teeth and purpose and the world’s worst dog: yes you do, stop pretending you don't.

OUTRO

Here, have an oral history of the production of The Emperor's New Groove to read, as a treat.

Stay safe out there. The horrors are many, but so are we.

• Ollie, Edinburgh, March 2026

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