It’s the end of March. No, I don’t know how that happened either. I spent the first five weeks of the year polishing up one novel, and the intervening time deep in revisions for another. It’s been hard going: I’ve managed two (longish, but out of fifteen) chapters in two months. Not the most sustainable pace! I keep telling myself it’ll be easier from the end of April, when I can go back to my usual technique of sitting in cafes with it.

A couple of months ago, a friend asked me, “How often do you get a new idea for a story?” and the truthful answer - because there is one! - is “About every 200 miles I walk”. Many writers have had it hard this last year, but I can absolutely pinpoint the reasons for my lack of output: either it’s been a boom period in my very boom-and-bust freelance working year (the month before exam season is usually an absolute bust for creative output, for example), or it’s because I’ve not been able to walk for 45 minutes to a place, sit in that place for three hours, go like the clappers at something, and then walk 45 minutes home. Going “for a walk” between home and home, I have discovered, isn’t the same.

Also, this book was emotionally taxing enough when I wrote it. Fixing it is turning out to be harder. I’m being kept aloft at the moment only by the thought that if I pull off the trick of it, and it’s a big if, then it’ll be worth the effort. It’s a big ask, and it’s taking everything in the toolkit right now, but I’m hopeful.

So much for output; let’s talk about input. My film-watching is far less exciting at the times I’m not spending three nights a week at my pet cinema. Last year in lockdown, we subsisted on the collected films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the last few months, the household’s comfort cinema has expanded in a few directions: Bill and Ted, Studio Ghibli, Disney animation circa 1980-1990 (love the Rescuers, will never not love the Rescuers), and tentatively beginning a loose Impromptu Vampire Season.

If you get, by the way, the chance to see Francis Lee’s Ammonite, do. I loved it. The biopic-lovers I know didn’t enjoy it so much, because it’s not a biopic. Essentially, Francis Lee has somehow convinced the BFI to fund, and Kate Winslet/Saiorse Ronan to star in, his Mary Anning real person fic. Everyone’s going in, expecting the man behind God’s Own Country to have made a biopic rather than a proper queer romance, without understanding what a delight genre romance is when you approach it on its own terms. If you go in expecting RPF, which you should, then you’ll have an absolute blast. Trust me, I’m an expert. I know what it means when there’s only one bed, and so quite clearly does Francis Lee, and if the marketing is anything to go by then the BFI decidedly doesn’t. Joke’s on them.

In terms of TV, we’ve worked our way through both series of The Mandalorian (which even this Star Wars agnostic enjoyed); both series of His Dark Materials; and a whole lot of Time Team. There’s a ton of Time Team on Youtube - it was formative for me growing up in history-heavy Hampshire, and coming back to it is exactly as joyous as I’d hoped it would be.

And then, books. I’ve been reading them. It’s been eclectic, and there’s been a lot of it. A biography of Isabella Bird - I still find biography uncomfortable to read, because it’s such an intense look at a person. Imagine being on the receiving end of that! Especially if there’s editorialising, or skipping over parts, or… I just overthink biography a lot. I don’t read it often. More romance, of all stripes - a long-ago remembrance that I just didn’t really get on with Georgette Heyer is newly reconfirmed, but Mary Stewart can decidedly stay. Mansfield Park is another one with a famously passive protagonist - take a moment to be thankful you live in the twenty-first century; if Fanny Price had been able to leave home and spend three years at uni rather than spending her entire life with the same six people, she might have been a lot happier. John Langan’s The Fisherman - it’s Lovecraftian horror, very good for all that I found it a bit structurally lopsided; Stark Holborn’s Nunslinger which was a riot start to finish. The ending of Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti seemed to me at first to be anticlimactic and too pat, but now I think it’s far braver than the ending I would have tried to replace it with. On Holocaust Memorial Day, I read Elie Wiesel’s Night (trans. Marion Wiesel) in a day, shut up in my office, lying on the floor. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room wrung me out - it’s the kind of book where you can’t possibly write for a few days after you read it, because you’ll spend the entire time being acutely aware of not being James Baldwin. The same is true of Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, although for very different reasons: Chiang writes like a blueprint, and after reading him everything I do feels like a pencil sketch. It takes a while to remember pencil sketches can be aesthetically pleasing too. Sometimes.

Right now I am stuck decidedly in the 1910s: wading slowly through a reread of Pat Barker’s Regeneration, and biographies again of a few Scottish modernists. It’s the closest I’ve been to being able to settle on a genre, an era, a style for a while - I’ve been hopping about all over the place the last few months, so much that I think where I really want to be is anywhere but here.