2025-01-20

This is an experiment. Usually, Development Hell pieces are ABOUT something, but I'm wondering if there's a place for something a little less formal and more stream-of-consciousness, in the manner of a daily (it won't be daily, who are we kidding?) journal...

Every morning, I select an image for my daily journal; either a picture I've taken or something interesting that I've found. Sometimes the image chimes in some way with the day, other times it is completely random. This morning I dug out this image of St Paul's Cathedral in London, which I took in 2022. I THOUGHT I was choosing a random image but then, when I posted it to Substack, someone asked if it was the Capitol building in Washington and then I remembered it was Inauguration Day and so maybe my subconscious did have a hand in my "random" choice.

So it's Inauguration Day, which is probably best ignored if at all possible.

Unseen connections between people and events are very much an underlying theme of "The Bone Clocks" by David Mitchell, which I'm reading at the moment. This is my first David Mitchell novel, but it certainly won't be the last - I bought a stack of his books when I was no more than a hundred or so pages into this one. It's always brilliant when you discover a novelist, with a healthy back-catalogue, who seems to be writing exactly the kind of thing you like but which you had assumed did not exist. I had a similar experience with Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London books and, before that, with Charles Stross's Laundry Files series. (I was once hired to develop the Laundry Files for television, which might have worked out had the development people had any interest in making a show about a government department battling cosmic horrors, rather than a ho-hum detective procedural with a vaguely supernatural flavour).

2025 is refusing, so far, to get less weird, so I am just riding it out. Normal service on the Pleasant Green blog will be resumed soon, the crowdfunding campaign for more Lovecraft Investigations is being put together, and there will be much more from Development Hell over the next few weeks (especially if just typing out nonsense like this gets some traction).

Running three websites simultaneously, while maintaining a decent output of my regular writing work, is a stretch. But I'm persevering because, when I get in the zone of writing prose, I really enjoy it.

Speaking of which, as of 8am this morning, I am 27,889 words into my first novel (I've actually written more than that but those 27,889 words are the good ones, in more or less the right order). I'm not kidding myself that I am on the threshold of becoming a bestselling novelist, or even a published one, but prose fiction and stage plays are two areas I have not yet tackled and it seemed like I should at least take a shot at one of them. Luckily I'm really enjoying the process, so I'm less concerned for the outcome.

I'm also noodling with a Development Hell piece about what to do when you get stuck. Getting stuck for me is usually not about running out of ideas, so much as being presented with too many and not knowing which route through a story to take, or else it is a function of losing total faith in what I'm writing and wanting to run away from it as fast as possible. If anyone else has versions of getting stuck they'd like me to discuss, I am all ears.

That's the state of my world as at 10.50AM on Monday 20 January 2025. America is still asleep, so we can enjoy these last few hours of liminal calm before all the crazy starts to happen. Strap in.