2024 – What Just Happened
It has been a long time since I wrote on this site, but here we are bimbling towards the end of the year, so let’s catch up ….
Firstly, the good!
Publication of the Songs of Penelope trilogy continued with the release of The Last Song of Penelope in hardback over summer, with paperback out on February 4th 2025. Wrapping up a trilogy feels a touch intimidating – so many things that have been building over literal years, expectations to carry etc.. This was the more so given how much of the last book is directly affected by events in the Odyssey that however icky, cannot be avoided. Thankfully large swathes of The Last Song are also dealing with stuff that Homer hand-waved in 400 words or less, (quick civil war, anyone?) so there’s plenty of room to play around with the stories beneath the stories in that way which brings me – and hopefully the reader – joy! I am hugely grateful and relieved that thus far the response seems to have been positive, and to everyone who has taken the time to come to an event, leave a kind review, drop me a nice email or simply buy the book – thank you!!
The next *top secret project* is written and ready, although I don’t think it’s yet been announced and thus remains an official????? Meanwhile I’m working on the thing after that, and while I am having a blast, I also have a file of (sob) 66,000 dead words that are never going to see the light of day. I do gently rock myself to sleep and night with the mantra ‘they’re not dead words, they were part of the process’ but that’s still most of a novel lying unloved in a sad, limp word file. Hopefully this means the actual finished project will be extra delightful…?
Elsewhere, I have had the extraordinary privilege of being able to travel a bit for books and do events with wonderful people in excellent places. Special shout outs must go to Jennifer Saint and Laura Shepperson for being just incredibly generous, lovely humans who it has been a joy to do events with. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention my French publishers – Bragelonne and Le Belial – for their combined excellence and awesome in moving me around the country and keeping me topped up on cake, especially Lydie and Erwann, masters of words, wisdom and the TGV. It was also a treat to be invited to TBCCon in Bedford, Intergalactiques in Lyon, and Hispacon in San Fernando. All these conventions are run by incredibly kind, dedicated volunteers and made possible by the support of fans, and the result is a warm and welcoming good time that makes even an incredibly awkward stranger feel wonderfully at home. I’d also be remiss not to shout out Ana Roux at Hispacon, who not only helped organise my getting to and from Spain, but is also an incredibly talented writer, full time doctor and all-round excellent human. To everyone who makes these things possible – thank you!
2024 marked my first foray into writing a bit of non-fiction for another, regrettably, still quite secret project. I’m not sure when it’ll be published, but my initial dread of ‘oh no, can I remember how to do this?’ quickly dissolved into pure history-geek joy, and I am quietly proud of the end result. It was a relief to discover that my LSE library card still works, and I did feel a bit like an 18-year-old again, sat on the floor between rows of bookshelves as the lights automatically kept turning themselves off, smelling that old-book smell.
Lighting! According to my notes – and you bet I love a notebook – this year I have lit around 70 gigs. Some were incredibly stressful and hard, replete with the usual quiet background hum of bad instructions (“no haze! Only red!”) or visiting engineers who do a less-than-stellar job while I stand there biting my lip and trying not to autistically blurt, “have you considered studying lighting a bit… at all…?” Some were a delight. Grace Petrie continues to be a great big queer barnstorm of a show; the Shires were an unexpected treat, Bôa were just cracking and Maribou State will live in my memory chiefly for how much the viola player was having the time of his psychedelic life. Extra shout-outs also go to Orlando Weeks (he came with video, which is a lighting engineer’s nemesis, but was very nice about it), Amy Wadge (made the venue thrum with sheer vocal awesome), Katherine Priddy (when the lighting and the music fuse together, it is a delight) and in a not-gig-at-all anomaly, the absurdly delightful podcast, Mom Can’t Cook. Lighting podcasts is incredibly boring – however this podcast is my secret long-run delight of pure daftness, and did not disappoint.
I also got to do a bit of teaching, which while frequently stressful (ladders + electricity + students who know how to use neither) it is an absolute joy to see someone who was anxious about touching the lighting desk finally start to get it, find their confidence and maybe even have a banging good time.
However. While being paid to listen to live music remains one of the absolute privileges of my life, an absurd gift of a career… the reality is also that in 2025 I’m going to do less lighting. I am now the unimaginable age of 38, and at the point in my career where I either plateau… or I need to go do more touring or become a head of lighting. Now, while being a head of lighting is an interesting proposition, it would also be a full time job, and I have avoided that my entire life for the reason that it would prevent me from writing books. Writing is the vast majority of my income, as well as a source of extraordinary pleasure, and it is therefore daft that in many ways it’s also an after-thought in terms of scheduling.
I am also at the point where I find it harder and harder to recover from the long days and late nights that gigs entail. Increasingly, for every show I work I lose a day after to fatigue and physical pain, and that’s… no longer sustainable, let alone sensible. Thus my goal for 2025 is to be significantly more selective – and limited – in the shows I do, and try to pick my dates instead of just letting the circumstance pick me. Receiving an autism diagnosis in 2023 changed absolutely nothing about who I am – but it has allowed me to understand a little more clearly just how the constant fatigue, sleep disruption, overload and side-dose of affable chronic pain that has been a theme of my existence works, and empowered me to start thinking about the astonishing question: is there someit I can do about all this? I remain profoundly uncomfortable with thinking about myself in relationship to the word ‘disability’, but that’s my stupid dumb-ass hang-up to overcome, and believe me, I’m working on it.
There are also other pressures on my time, ranging from exciting domestic upheavals through to my family increasingly getting old and needing more support and care. (2024 was the year I learned what sepsis looks like, and it was not a fun time.) I would also like to have more headspace to throw at activism and volunteering, and have the privilege that my writing career should, in theory, enable me to do so.
2024 was a geo-political shit-show, and 2025 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better. The government of Netanyahu continues to commit genocide in Palestine, building on decades of displacement and human rights violations. Seeing what’s happening, I am almost relieved that my Gran – a German Jewish refugee, who desperately wanted Israel to be a place of hope and despaired to find it an apartheid state – is no longer with us to witness it, or the cowardice of the international community in standing by. Meanwhile, Putin continues to make gains in Ukraine, and will have been emboldened by the election of a racist, sexist, wannabe dictator in the USA. Billionaires like Musk and Murdoch use their wealth to buy political power and spread their right-wing, dog-whistle bigotry across the world, interfering in democracies wherever they can, and it all feels pretty flipping bleak.
However, action is more hopeful than despair, and to stay sane you gotta focus not on the pain of now, but on the future you want to make. While it is very easy to feel powerless, I try to remember that every change was built, not on the back of one or two heroes, but on the unnamed thousands who had their backs. I’m absolutely fine being one of the unnamed mass who turned up in any way I could – and I know that on a strictly selfish level, doing so will give me hope, where otherwise there could just be sorrow. When I am knackered – and 2024 has been knackering – turning up is often as limited as making sure I vote, signing every petition I can, speaking up and voting with my wallet for charities and companies that uphold my ideals and, when I can, volunteering at my local Repair Cafe. I am hoping that in 2025, I will be a bit less knackered, and can get more involved in causes that matter to me.
To finish on some positive fluff – 2024 has also been a year in which I kept on running at my slow, bimbling pace and carried on learning escrima whenever I could between all the gigs. I continue to GM a Dungeons and Dragons game for a group of mates, whose main trick appears to be spreading socialism to every kobold and cave troll they encounter, and continue to seek to learn from the far more experienced repairers at the Repair Café, fixing lights and helping to give second life to electronics and small appliances as part of the right to repair movement.
Lastly, though I am going to link to this post on Twitter, I have also largely abandoned Twitter and moved over to Instagram, owing to the ownership of the former by another wannabe billionaire fascist. If you wanna enjoy some daft doodles about life, lighting and adventures, please come find me there! And to everyone out there: thank you for sticking with me for 2024, and let’s get rocking in 2025….
