In 2023 I barely published anything on this site, which is why I decided to publish regularly on every other Monday this year. From the middle of January I succeeded in doing this, but now after six months I have decided to stop for a number of reasons. The most important of these is just that I am looking after an ill father now and dealing with all of the financial trouble that comes with that, so regularly publishing is a stress I would rather do without. The other reason is related to why I barely published in 2023: I am in the middle of some more longform writing projects. Working on short things for this site, while sometimes helpful to my creative process, seems more often to interfere with my ability to work on longer pieces.
The biggest and most important of these projects is my first novel, which will be called Aftermath Campaign. The book is about a group of roleplayers who, over the course of a decade from the mid 00s to the mid 10s, play a single longform fantasy roleplaying game over internet forums. The book loosely follows their campaign, but is structured as a set of freeform essays which use the substance of this game and these players to discuss philosophy, history, the nature of storytelling and the disintegration of the kinds of online space that they knew. I expect the book to be finished in late 2025, but could easily be sooner or later given the unpredictable nature of writing experimental fiction, not to mention my circumstances in the real world.
I have two other longform projects on the go, neither of which are a priority but which I am constantly planning. The first is the book about dance music which I described in Forty-Four UK Dance Tunes From the Noughties. The book is no longer about those forty four tracks and it is no longer limited to that time period or that country, but everything I have written so far will probably appear in some form. The other is a book of short stories. I don’t have any idea what I will call the collection, but some of the working titles for stories I plan to include are Villa of the Deaf One, The Gorilla Herders, and Dialogue Unearthed in the Aswan Geniza Between Kesta Wahed and Alexandrian Dhimmi Theologians Concerning Divine Mind.
As for this site, I don’t expect to publish any new writing here for a long while. This shouldn’t bother anyone because there is plenty of old material to look at. With that in mind, I plan on adding an index to help sort through these pieces since a list of titles isn’t very inviting. I am also going to update the charts page soon, both by improving readability and by adding more to it.
I'm currently thinking that I will avoid posting new essays until 2025, but when I finish any of my current works in progress I may decide to publish them instead of sitting on them until then.