Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

In January 2023 I started blogging regularly again, initially spurred by my concerns about AI in writing. You can read them here and here, and see how my concerns match up to where we are three short years later. I haven’t re-read them as I write this column, TBH.

At the end of January 2023 I decided to embrace weekly blogging. For the last three years, I have maintained a weekly output with very occasional breaks.

And here we are three years later, end of January 2026. I have decided to stop blogging weekly as of this week. I’d rather be spending the time I’ve spent blogging, writing my books. This takes hours I’d rather spend elsewhere, if you include the time I spend thinking “Man, I need to come up with a blog. Which piece of lint in my navel will I consider today? What subject or writing-related obsession will I go over, again, for the nth time, in slightly different language?” Even lightly editing these for typos and commas takes too much time.

I’m going to continue to talk here when powerfully moved to do so, as I was back in 2023 about AI.

I thank you, the frequent bestowers of likes and views. I appreciate you very much. I have not reciprocated as I should have. My apologies. I am not going to start a podcast, though I should as that would be on brand for my late adoption of blogging in 2013. Yes, I’ve been doing this for that long. I’d currently be late to the You Tube party too.

But no, fuck that, I just want to write. Fiction. So that’s what I’m going to do. My pool diary will continue, irregularly, as I find that keeps me playing, which is fun, and there is zero expectation over there about ‘brand building’, or ‘finding an audience’. Ugh.

Doing this blog has been great in many ways, and very useful. I have learned a lot. But it has become endless variations on old themes, and you guys don’t need to read retreads. When I write something here in future, it will be a meaningful retread, written with intention as a fantastic variation on one of my old themes!

I’d like to offer a few bullets on what I’ve learned, and what I will continue to do going forward. No particular order.

1. Doubt never leaves you as a creative. I’ve told it to fuck off quite a few times on this very blog, but it returns. I have grown older, and a little bit wiser, and it does not bite as hard as it used to, nor does it stop me from doing what I want in the way I want to do it. An absence of doubt would be far more concerning to me than its presence. Delusion or megalomania are not good looks.
2. My writing journey, the Long Road of my blog’s subtitle, will wend on until the day I lay down my pen. This is the truth. I will continue to learn, to try to be better. I will continue to experiment in and with my writing, and accept failures as well as successes. Writing for me is growth and self-expression, it is health, and a route to calm. If the Long Road leads me to green pastures where I can lay down and write no more, so be it.
3. I genuinely do not crave success anymore. Writing for its own sake is my success now. This isn’t just not achieving fame, which I would regard as a horror, it now extends to even making money. I just don’t give a fuck about that anymore. Putting the words on the page, then pushing the book out into the world, a tiny raft on a huge digital ocean, is enough. If my raft is ever found, and people clamber aboard it, like it, and start building it into a boat, then a ship, great, but that is up to them, not me. I wrote the raft, maybe a dingy with a flimsy mast and single sail at most. The rest is for the fates to decide, because fuck marketing and spending my time begging for attention. I am completely and utterly over even the idea of doing that. Regular readers, all five of you, will know that over the years I have kept on promising to start marketing properly, to start advertising properly, blah blah blah. I cannot be arsed with it, and I don’t want to pay anyone else to do it either. As I’ve said elsewhere, obscurity is its own superpower, and allows me to write what the hell I want, without fear of repercussion. Why still publish then? Good question. Because even though this is largely for me, writing without potential readers, or the consideration of potential readers, is empty of purpose. So as part of my pact with myself to write the best I can, I must also write the best I can for a reader who is not me, because writing is about communication, and communication implies another being with whom you communicate. Writing to be understood by another imposes discipline, the need for clarity, to carefully consider how best to convey your ideas, your story, to someone else. I may be obscure, but my desire is to be high-quality obscure.
4. AI is a fucking menace and will destroy artists and creatives if allowed unchecked influence. I recently discovered pro-writing aid uses AI. I haven’t used it for a few years, but will never use it again, and regret ever interacting with it.
5. Speak, draw, sculpt, sing and play your truth. Or weave, carve, dance and craft it. Write it if you must, haha!Creative expression is a gift, and a form of self-care.
6. Ego is a clear and present danger to the artist. Please try to avoid being driven by it, it will take you down roads you would be better off not travelling. Don’t be a dick. In life, in general, it is better if you avoid being a dick.
7. I’m going to keep writing. I have more book ideas than years left to live. (I have no idea how many years I have, btw – I hope it’s a lot!) I’m going to try to write the most interesting of those after getting to the stage where I feel I am reasonably accomplished at the basics. A book or two from now. One day I will finish the World Belt saga, which is now violently unrealistic as the secret oligarchic cabal controlling that world are actual geniuses, with plans and foresight. Not so in the less-fictional universe, it seems. Sigh.

That’ll do. There’s more, I’m sure. Earlier today, when I was standing in my kitchen thinking about the need to make some sort of rich vegetable dish because I’ve eaten far too much pizza this weekend and desperately need some fibre in my life, there were a few other bullets I wanted to add, but in writing these I’ve forgotten them. That’s fine. If they come back to me like an insistent cat circling around my ankles, I’ll share them.

I find this song soothing and uplifting, so I’ll finish with a link to it here. Or just embed it below!

I’ll be back. Until then, I’ll be writing. Be safe out there.