Weekly Round-up: 2025 Week 6

Researching & Planning

Indulged in Saturday lunch at a favourite café, over which I discussed at length with the BdR Editor ideas for a conference paper (am currently planning an abstract).

Read two articles about archives and archivists in the popular imagination.

Writing

Drafted reviews for Seb Doubinsky’s The Sum of All Things and Stephen Oram’s We Are Not Anonymous.

Working on two pieces of non-fiction: one on archives and one on smallholding.

Finished first, rough draft of a short story about Samuel Beckett and Josephine Baker (part of my self-imposed a-piece-a-month challenge)

Began revision of cosy-mystery-in-progress Death at Hallowtide, now that the beady eye of the editor has indicated some high-level corrections to make.

Finished re-proofing And the Wildness (an eagle-eyed reader noticed a plot-hole last year: fortunately minor and easily fixable; also an opportunity to correct a few typos that had somehow snuck through).

Reconsidering Hollowmen with a view to seeing if the polyphony of voices can be made a little less obscure. But only a little… It might also benefit from being reformatted and reissued in a bigger book size, to accommodate the more experimental aspects of text layout and help them work in a less cramped setting.

Reading

Have just finished Mervyn Wall’s Leaves for the Burning; still plugging away at Thomas Pynchon’s V, and also re-reading Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin when too tired and grumpy to face into the Pynchon. 

Also re-read Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing to participate in an on-line book group that is discussing A Dance to the Music of Time over the course of the year.

Other

Sketched two dawn skies.

What I meant to do: watch an Improving Film. What I did: watched first three episodes of Series 7 of Midsomer Murders… Research, innit? Also watched two episodes of the TV adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which was much better than I had feared.

Went for a walk and saw, among other pleasant outdoor features, this ruined tower. It has the look of something that might well be made to serve the purposes of fiction one at some stage…

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