Chart / October

And then a year went by just like that.

I could have sworn I wrote an entry here earlier this year, but apparently not. So many updates, so little time to do them all justice.

Let’s start at the end and work backwards and give every milestone its moment in the sun:

NOVEL NEWS: Rather surprisingly (to me, at least), everyone’s favourite post-apoc cli-fi road novel By the Feet of Men has roared back from out-of-print obscurity, popping up on a list of best dystopian novels of the past 10 years over at Horror DNA. Not something I ever expected to happen, but I’m grateful. With each passing year, the fiction I spun across 343 pages is sadly becoming reality: This year’s Super El Niño event is delivering flooding, drought, wildfires, rainfall and extreme unseasonable temperatures on a scale we humans simply aren’t equipped to combat. When I started writing By the Feet of Men back in 2017, I’d imagined the events taking place 50 years from now; today, I wouldn’t rule out experiencing them first hand by the end of the decade. Also, and I’m not really sure why, but my book’s listed on Simon & Schuster now, too. Does that mean I should go around saying they’re my distributor? I don’t see that I have any other choice.

NON-FICTION NEWS: I’ve been quietly updating the ‘NON-FICTION’ section of the site to include publications on which I have a writing, editing or translation credit. Entries for this year include:

The Global Hunger Index, published by Welthungerhilfe

Primavera, a forthcoming photobook by Tim Gassauer and Manu Gruber with a 10-page essay translated by me.

Art Basel, a special issue of NZZ Art, the arts and culture section of Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Centurion Magazine, a lifestyle quarterly featuring interviews with rich and famous celebs pretending to be interior designers.

Du Magazin, the venerated Swiss culture journal.

More to come, hopefully, including an all-new sustainable aviation magazine conceived by me that I’m desperately hoping will receive funding in the near future.

PROJECTS NEWS: I’m working on a collection of loosely connected short stories about a down-on-his-luck Englishman in Greece (write what you know, etc.) called Nisiá. I’m in talks with a small independent publisher in Athens to do a limited publishing run, but it’s far too soon to start celebrating. Elsewhere, the old autobiographical novel has had its third pass and is waiting patiently for me to actually do something with it. And I will…at some point. It just needs to be perfect. More likely, it’ll end up being what Don Quixote was to Terry Gilliam, chipping away at my sanity for the next 29 years until I finally turn to Adam Driver and release a barely coherent facsimile of what could have been. Then there’s the screenplay for Searchlight, which is in its own mini development hell, primarily because I’m finding it exceptionally difficult to write a farily tight, serviceable script. The first version was a dud, heavy with prose and light on character. The second version? We’ll see. Finally, my publisher Black Rose has asked for a third instalment in the Sundown series (following on from Reality Testing and Pacific State), and I will surely oblige.

MILESTONE NEWS: Speaking of Reality Testing, I celebrated a milestone of sorts back in July: it is my first novel to reach 100 reviews/ratings on both Amazon and Goodreads. All it took was 5 years, 6,000 sales, countless promotions and a smidgen of begging. Perhaps one of those readers will be brave enough to buy a copy of Pacific State and discover the superior yarn within. I’ll wait; I’m a patient guy.

That’s it for now. Play me off, Johnny.

1 Kelela - linknb

2 Rose Gray - Club To Your Arms

3 Trance Wax - Rhythm of the Night

4 Soul Wun - Blue Light

5 Imad - On Top

6 Feral - Court of Light

ch00n

Chart / July

Time for a chart. Here in Athens, the city has been gripped by a heatwave for the better part of two weeks, which means that even thinking about writing causes me to break out in a Rocky-II-final-fight sweat. As a result, I haven’t done much. Ideas aplenty, but the ability to rise above this heat-induced malaise and tap away at the keyboard has thus far eluded me. I didn’t read anything about this in The War of Art. Perhaps it’s time for Steven Pressfield to add a new chapter: Conquering Your Resistance in the Climate Crisis (answer: put the air conditioning on full blast and accelerate change even further).

Publication news: The trad-publisher Quillkeepers Press has seen fit to include one of my essays, titled ‘Shrouds’, in its forthcoming anthology on grief. It’s a highly personal essay penned during a period of heightened emotion, and I’m over the moon that someone wants to put it in print. I’m unsure when the publication date will be, but suffice to say I’ll make a big song and dance about it.

Book of the month: I will pick Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, simply because the first few chapters are a whirlwind of climate adaptation and mitigation measures observed through the lens of parody. While the story is little more than a series of side quests and the payoff falls flat for me, the idea of companies being able to buy excinction credits so they can safely eliminate animal species in pursuit of capitalist expansion is both a bold and terrifying idea (and one I wish I’d come up with).

Film of the month: Under Therapy, a Spanish comedy-drama from the heady days of 2024. It moseys along for a while, doing that European film thing where a handful of character actors are confined to a single location and act their hearts out in the form of quickfire dialogue and meaty swipes against the conventions of modern society when WAPAW it shifts into high gear and the comedy drains away and you’re left feeling both hollow (because of the climax) and satisfied (that you didn’t just spend 90 minutes watching a guy take great pleasure in blowing a bugle in other people’s faces).

Album of the month: I guess it’s Fantasy Noises & Perfect Delusions by Deathbrain (yep) simply because everything else I’ve listened to this month has been hot trash. The album is outsider house, so it reminds me a little of AL90 or Kedr Livansky, albeit nowhere near as good because it all just kind of melts together. Good for when you’re melting, though.

40-degree playlist:

1 Deep Purple - Burn

2 Van Halen- On Fire

3 Disclosure - When A Fire Starts To Burn

4 C&C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat

5 King Krule - A Lizard State

6 Talking Heads - Burning Down the House

on a steel horse i ride

By the Feet of Men is out today

Three years, three months and eleven days: this is how long it has taken for By the Feet of Men to go from the initial planning stage (a 10,000-word document detailing every chapter in the book) to its official release today in bookstores around the world.

Here is the synopsis in all its 70s B-movie glory:

WANTED: Men and women willing to drive through the valley of the shadow of death.

The world’s population has been decimated by the Change, a chain reaction of events triggered by global warming. In Europe, governments have fallen, cities have crumbled and the wheels of production have ground to a halt. The Alps region, containing most of the continent’s remaining fresh water, has become a closed state with heavily fortified borders. Survivors cling on by trading through the Runners, truck drivers who deliver cargo and take a percentage.

Amid the ruins of central Germany, two Runners, Cassady and Ghazi, are called on to deliver medical supplies to a research base deep in the Italian desert, where scientists claim to be building a machine that could reverse the effects of the Change. Joining the pair is a ragtag collection of drivers, all of whom have something to prove. Standing in their way are starving nomads, crumbling cities, hostile weather and a rogue state hell-bent on the convoy's destruction. And there's another problem:

A whole lot of reviews for the novel are available here.

If you would like to buy the book (I do hope so), it is available from most bookstores, many of which can be found via this link. It is also available from Waterstones, WH Smith, Barnes & Noble, Target and elsewhere.

It has been a long process full of beatific moments and frustration, and I am glad to have experienced every minute of it. I know how lucky I am. I have counted on the support of so many people, and I would not have been able to reach this day without them. Thank you all.

Now on to the next novel.

FIRE.