#4. New Year, new...
lays head on desk sighing. Really? Again?
We spent Christmas in Scotland so that our daughter, Iris, could travel back and forth to Glasgow for work shifts. It rained almost continuously and there was a huge storm, but that didn’t matter as we were mainly eating, playing cards, reading and sitting by the fire. I read two books I thought were terrific: Patrick Radden Keefe’s work of non-fiction about people smugglers from China working in New York City, The Snakeheads, and a novel called Red Clocks, by Leni Zumas, which is set in Oregon in the near future when increasingly harsh restrictions on reproductive rights including abortion as well as IVF and adoption are making women’s lives that much more difficult. Both are recommended. The Keefe is an eye-opener when it comes to understanding more about the way people migrate across the world, the perilous journeys, and the huge sums of money involved. And I’m hoping that Leni Zumas, whom I’ve never met, will come on board with a research grant on creative writing and large language models (LLMs) and maybe even small language models (SLMs, though I don’t think that acronym is an actual thing) I’m involved in developing with a colleague of hers from Portland State University. More on that another day.
When the sun shines in Scotland, it makes all the other weather fade away. Even if the view includes forestry shenanigans.
One of the things I’m most excited about for 2024 in my role as Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University is our new initiative, a micro-finance project aimed at freelancers, micro-businesses and small organisations who aren’t able to provide the kind of upfront investment that many funders require before they will release funding. For instance, it’s not uncommon for grant awardees to be expected to start their activity, buy equipment, and contract people months before their first grant payment arrives. Our initiative will, essentially, help with cash flow, with the University acting in a non-profit partnership capacity. We’ve got a pilot project underway currently with Little Lost Robot, an arts organisation whose founder, Ruby Sant, now works with us at the uni, and whose idea this project was initially. My main contribution so far is to have come up with the Dickensian name, Counting House, though of course we hope to be more like Christmas Day Scrooge as opposed to Scrooge on Christmas Eve when he embarks on his terrifying journey.
Speaking of names, I’m having trouble with the title of the novel-in-waiting. When I handed in my draft to my agent I called it NUMBER ONE LONDON. But one of my first readers, my daughter Iris who mainly read the novel while lying on the sofa in between card games this Christmas, gave me some valuable feedback, including the suggestion that I return to the original title of this novel, JELLYBONE. Jellybone is obscure rhyming slang for ‘telephone’; it is also the title I used for the first iteration of this project, which was a smartphone story written for a start-up that went bust six weeks after launch back in 2018. The novel-in-waiting resembles the smartphone story only insofar as the main character and the primary plot are the same, but it has grown and developed hugely over the past four years that I’ve been working on it, doubling in size and scope. It is also the first in what I hope will be a series of novels - but we’ll see about that.
Lastly, I’m getting started with two new mentees in the next few weeks, two young writers whose projects I’m excited about. I’m mentoring via Gold Dust these days.
Here’s to a new year, everyone, may it be better in all ways than the last. Thank you for reading.