I have 454 drafts for potential posts here on Substack. Many are complete, whilst some others are just lines, or just titles. Others might be old duplicates of published posts. And, as I trudge through them and delete the weaklings, I am reminded of why I started here in the first place.
I wanted to write comedic, science-inspired articles (and of course, to have you enjoy these enough you might one day buy one of my full fiction books).
But lately the world has grown dark around me. I have friends who don’t feel safe in the UK any more. There’s a lot happening, and as an author I am not ignorant to it, I just dislike opining unless I am convinced I have a new, previously unheard angle to share, a new light to shed on things. Otherwise I’m just harmonising with a mob.
For this reason I tend to only get around to talking publicly about real-life topics I feel more attached to. So, what topics do I care about? Well, as an ex Young Carer, I am all too familiar with organisations not noticing, or covering up, abusive behaviour, so I am comfortable noticing this and pointing it out. Having grown up with a narcissist, I find I am uniquely positioned to notice them in Arts spaces before anyone else (Poetry is riddled with them). Beyond that, I have a passing interest in world religions and spirituality because I have on occasion had ‘paranormal’ experiences. I am particularly interested in how cultures mix because I have always enjoyed anthropology, and as a science fiction author most of my character work comes from two distinct ideas (often contained in the metaphors of two distinct bodies) coming into contact and finding the truth is somewhere between their two worldviews. It bothers me that many people seem to lack the capacity to entertain ideas without accepting them, or, as Aristotle put it.
‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’
I am also interested in censorship, as I find it a particularly disturbing poison for modern societies. If we cannot speak freely, we cannot describe reality, and if we cannot describe reality, we cannot design a new one. If we cannot design new things and ideas and systems, they will never come to pass. We will be stuck in a repressive and eternal present. But it gets worse, if we cannot describe nor understand nor communicate anything about reality, we leave ourselves open to angrier, more violent ideas pushed by angrier, louder people. We become weak, unable to defend reality in the face of delusion and myth.
Censorship is an existential threat.
New words can be censorship, too. Redefining old words and sneaking in new ones makes for a linguistic landscape that even native speakers cannot hope to keep up with. It reduces the quality of the data transfer when we communicate, and that break down in quality means reality itself cannot be properly tackled. There is a storm outside, a fire inside, and nobody has time to deal with them because they are too busy arguing about what a raindrop should be called and if this is really a cave we’re all living in or actually a sort of really deep dent in the world. Maybe it’s a sideways puddle? Let’s talk about that forever. Is anyone else a bit on fire?
I also care about game and toy design, because I believe our purpose as creators is to entertain our audiences, and that this purpose should be at the front of all creative projects. My LegoIdeas designs always contain play features, and it bothers me when I pick up a Lego set that is fragile, designed seemingly so it looked good in the adverts, but is ultimately impossible to play with. This is not what toys should be.
Toys should be fun.
All I want is for my spaceship toys to be fun.
So, those are some of the things I care about.
Who we are dictates, to some extent, what we care about and what we feel equipped to talk about. This is why I find it easy to forgive people arguing online when they only care about their ‘side’ or their ‘people’. I get it, humans are simple creatures, not designed for ‘tribes’ of millions all sharing one shopping centre. It freaks us out, and it should be okay to admit to that, so we can work through it.
We live in increasingly unnatural times.
It’s also true that in the current social atmosphere, many of us feel unofficially forbidden from discussing anything unless we are personally involved, otherwise people accuse you of being a bot, a spy, or a spybot.
I’d love to be Spybot Gigamesh G60. It was a wonderful year when I got this bad boy and drove him up and down a small hill of cardboard and pillows. The online game was great too (more on that later).
Brain vs myth
So how do we defeat the new waves of insanity? How do we usher in a new world where we can talk about the horrible thing that happened without being called horrible names? And can we talk about how horrible things are so frequent that nowadays, you all just imagined a different horrible thing to the one I was actually referring to?
I have considered scheduling this post for a random day in the future, in order to avoid horrible things, but chances are a horrible thing would be happening then, too.
Is the world more or less horrible than the past? Has the internet opened our eyes to evils we would otherwise have never known?
I am not so sure. But what I am sure of, is that we should all talk more.
New projects
Lately I have been writing numerous satire articles, and going viral for my Minecraft and Lego builds. I’ve nearly finished WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? and I’ve been booked for a comedy show. Life is going okay for me, but there is a point as a multifaceted creator where you’re sort of in competition with yourself. I realised I don’t have enough ‘channels’ to publish things on.
So, I have started a new comedy podcast. You’ll hear about it soon.
It’s a comedy thing.
I’ve also been polishing up this Substack. There’s going to be a few new sections, and the closure of some old ones, to make it easier to navigate. You’ll be navigating by genre now, rather than by story.
Book news
Who Killed The Humans? just entered its final round of edits
Ripples In Space (the Samak Press anthology I am in) is currently in the best science fiction books category on Reedsy!
I have been invited into another book which parodies a very recent, real, ridiculous crime story
New paperbacks for both 52 weeks of scifi and 52 weeks of horror, are now in development
I have a new signup form website, and soon will have a small video game hosted on it, too (I designed the game)
Still working on the automated newsletter for serialised stories. It’s quite complex. I am enjoying it, however
There is one final point: I write a lot. I wrote 48,000 words about Neurodiversity with my friend Emily just on wattsap alone last year, and we may one day put that somewhere. And I’ve written so much on Substack (comedy, articles, etc) that I realise quite a lot of my writing time goes here. So posts here are going to become less frequent, higher quality, and you can expect an uptick in the rate of finished eBooks on the way.
I wrote this post because I want to bring some more science into proceedings here. Like the good old days.
I think we should all chill out sometimes and listen to some fun, calm science.
My favourite calm science man is Brian Cox.
I’ve seen him doing live radio last year. He really stands out, even among other presenters (who often talk over each other and say nothing of consequence). He mentions his hero being Carl Sagan here, and you can see the influence. I hope when aliens land, they meet Brian first.
If you click this within the hour of me sending it, then we are watching this together. I am going to put a candle on (weird phrase) and imagine I am a big planet or something.
Also, I just posted an update to the WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? crowdfundr.