A Newsletter Where I Write In A Fairly Chaotic Way About Several Ostensibly Unrelated Things, Some Of Which Are Depressing And Worrying, Some Of Which Are Thankfully Not

A December scene by my parents, which they have called ‘Phoning Grandma’

As (to say the least) an unfestive sort of person, who would ideally prefer to be temporarily deactivated, C-3PO-style, during this darkest, most spiteful chunk of winter, I place what might seen as a curious amount of importance on New Year’s resolutions. December might be my least favourite month, by approximately a billion miles, but what I do like about it is the period just after Christmas when I can feel the year turning over and, as nature’s big strong arms begin to pick me up and twist me back in a more hopeful direction, I feel a sense that lines can be drawn and there are new projects to look forward to. Already I am amassing a large number of resolutions, and no doubt, as usual, I’ll only manage to abide by two or three of them, but one I’d like to stick to is that I want to do less writing about the actual business of writing in these newsletters.

That said, before I use today’s missive to discuss a few things I’ve felt enthused about lately, I have decided I do need to say this, largely for the good of my own health:

Publishing is a tough world. Anyone who’s written books knows that. I went the conventional way for many years: putting books out via mainstream publishers, doing what I thought I was supposed to do, while placing the books that I really wanted to write on the back burner. Then eight years ago I took a risk: I decided to crowdfund an unconventional book - a mixture of wildlife, social history, landscape, family memoir and humour - with an independent publisher called Unbound. It funded astonishingly quickly, sold well, albeit to a niche audience, and I’ve since written six more books for the same publisher, all of which I’m massively proud of. But right now I find myself in a difficult position. I have now been waiting for money Unbound have owed me - money they are contractually obliged to pay me - for half a year. Meanwhile, additional payments due have failed to materialise, and I know of other Unbound authors who are in the same position. On several occasions the money has been promised and on each of these occasions it has not come through. As of the time of writing I am being told to be patient, but being given no date for when I’ll be paid. This is becoming an especially painful situation when I remember the vast sums I have raised singlehandedly on Unbound’s behalf (i.e. seven 100% percent funding totals, all of which goes directly to the publisher, not the writer, for production costs). My agent is trying his best to chase for the money but the situation has put a strain on our relationship, breeding doubt and misunderstanding, which I feel additionally awful about. I believe in Unbound and what they stand for, I like the people who work there and their passion, and I love what they’ve done with my books, but I don’t believe authors and artists should be punished for failed business deals that aren’t actually any of any artist’s business. I honestly didn’t realise something like this could happen - I assumed a publishers’ number one priority would be paying their authors the money that is owed to them - and it’s had a seriously negative impact on my health: mental and physical. The impact has been larger owing to how especially exhaustingly hard I’ve worked on my latest two books. I’m supporting a disabled partner who is currently too ill to work and it is only because of the income I have from Substack that we are able to cover our rent. In short, I have never been more thankful for this site. No, it’s not perfect (what is?) but at this point it would not be going too far to say it’s my salvation.

The other day I was asked by a family member what I wanted for Christmas.

“For my publisher to finally pay me,” I replied.

I had ransacked my brain but honestly couldn’t think of anything else I wanted more than that.

Where do I go from here? I really want people to buy my books - as many of them as possible, in truth - and I trust I will get the money I’m owed, one day. But I’m also quite scared about the future, and the fate of years of work that I put my heart and soul into, sometimes pushing myself close to breaking point in the process: the best work I’ve ever done, and which I’d pinned all my hopes and plans to.

I have felt a little nervous about saying all this here. I love so much about my publishers. But staying silent on what precisely is going on is another cause of the pain I’ve been feeling recently. I am aware that some people will read this who have no interested in my current difficulties. After all, they don’t amount to a hill of beans in the generally terrifying global landscape of late 2024. But I feel like I owe it to you, my readers, to clarify the situation. I also don’t think it can hurt for this to be heard by the many other writers and artists who I know populate this site, bravely trying to forge their own independent paths.

To anyone who supports my work here, I can’t thank you enough. You are what’s getting me through this at present. As it stands, I don’t know exactly what my writing future will be, but I know I’ve never felt more creative and inspired, and I know it begins right here.

Tom

• Books, once again, have been my method of escape from my troubles this month, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each of the half dozen I’ve read: A Month In The Country by JL Carr, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Fluke by

  Brian Klaas
  , The Mouse And His Child by Russell Hoban, and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and - to a less mindbending extent - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I don’t reread novels often but I’m currently making an exception for Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell. Like all my favourite books, its theme is unpitchable to any sales-hungry publisher: 193 pages detailing, loosely, theme by theme, the small goings on in the life of India Bridge, a conventional upper-middle-class housewife bringing up three children in 1950s America in a neatly ordered home her work-obsessed husband seems to have only a passing acquaintance with. India is small-minded, patient, polite, addicted to order, judgemental, fearful of and confused by socialists, rebels and liberals, possibly even a bit racist (“Some Italians must live there,” she says, seeing a house decked with garish Christmas decorations, and lightly discourages her eldest child from playing with her black gardener’s daughter) but always extremely human. The book’s levels of perception seem even more breathtaking second time around. It can be discussing napkin and towel etiquette one moment, then knock you to the floor with an observation of time’s cruelty. "Thirty, thirty five, forty, all had come to visit her like admonitory relatives," Connell writes, "and all had slipped away without a trace, without a sound, and now, once again, she was waiting."

  

• You don’t need me to tell you how great the third, fourth and fifth Talking Heads albums are because 40 years is long enough for the whole universe to know it. Still, sometimes I’m so busy rooting around for new musical discoveries I forget how great Brian Eno era Talking Heads are and the same revelation I had at eight or nine years old, hearing this ferociously weird, nervous, danceable music for the first time, happens all over again. I am especially enjoying this one right now, because sometimes the absolute best thing for the human spirit is to listen to a bunch of socially awkward, African music-obsessed big city weirdos throw a party inside a giant early computer.

• When I click on the Audible app, Audible immediately tells me what to listen to, which are the same seven books everyone else is listening to - none of which, typically, I ever seem to want to listen to. You have to really dig before you find, say, Justin Avoth’s scintillating, virtuoso reading of Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis’ biography of Elizabeth Burton, or Eyewitness, Joanna Bourke’s unforgettable, haunting social history of the 20th Century told via BBC archive recordings. It’s the same on BBC iPlayer: everything is directed, repeatedly, towards the top layer. But if you go to the A-Z of the ‘From The Archive’ section, that’s where the true gold is. It’s here you’ll find Borrowed Pasture, a documentary - narrated by a pre-Hollywood, pre-Taylor Burton - about two Polish prisoner of war camp survivors who have settled in rural Wales and, despite barely speaking a word of English, managed to farm the land for many years with their many cows (including the only “English one”, who is called Queen Victoria). It is here also that you will find Nairn Across Britain, Ian Nairn’s 1972 series about the architectural change being foisted on the country during that period. The brilliantly acerbic and uncompromising presenter and writer Jonathan Meades said that, when he met Nairn just before the older man’s death, “his lunch was 14 pints of beer”. He only lived to 52, and his demise was a deeply sad one, but to see his work is to witness the antidote to the bullet montage, precap-obsessed, chop-cut edit documentary so in vogue at the BBC right now, where insincere prats keep saying “Join me!” to the camera and talking to us as if we’ve never read a book. Nairn wasn’t concerned about losing the wrong kind of viewer during his eloquent rants about town planning; he only cared about speaking to hearts and minds of the right kind, and he did so with the utmost passion. Like Meades, his wittier spiritual descendent, he didn’t care if you joined him where he was going or not. It was clear he was going there regardless.

  

• I wrote, edited and produced six issues of my fanzine between late 1993 and early 1996. Increasingly, I have been realising what a special time of my life it was and will undoubtedly be writing about it in more detail here soon. I had thought I only had two issues of the zine left, since most of my remaining copies were eaten by mice in my old garage, but while I was at my parents’ house last week I found an extra copy, which included the above interview with the band Morphine. Looking back, I remember this being quite a formative moment in my writing career. I was 19. The previous night had been my first night in London, alone. I’d been spat on by some tough looking lads in Hackney while trying unsuccessfully to find my way back to the flat of a friend of a friend, then having finally found the place, ended up in the middle of a coke-fuelled party, where people were singing along to that 4 Non-Blondes song, and waited politely for the living room floor to clear so I could sleep in my allotted spot on it. I turned up the following lunchtime with a sheet of interview notes to meet the even more sleep-deprived Morphine frontman Mark Sandman in the bar of a hotel in Notting Hill. He immediately grabbed my sheet of questions, whizzed grumpily through them, then said, "Right, now let's talk about you!" He clearly realised how overawed I was and how much I loved his music. I never brought questions into an interview again and was a better interviewer for it. Only four years later, I’d be writing Sandman’s obituary for a newspaper, and I wish I’d had a chance to tell him what an impact his crabiness - and the goodwill so obviously underlying it - had on me. What a band, what a talent, and what a gentleman.

• Ian Nairn often talked about the “man-hating car” and lamented the closing of the branch lines of Britain’s railways by Dr Beeching and the politically related rise of the motorways. I can’t think of many good things motorways have done but here might be one: at Langford Lowfields on the north east border of Nottinghamshire, the clearing of a sand and gravel quarry for material for major arterial roads has created a vast, thriving wetland haven. On a dull, bitterly cold day last week I visited it with my parents, hoping - though with low expectations, due to the dishwater sky - to see some starling murmurations. The birds left it until the last possible minute to appear but put on a wonderful show, as herons and Canada geese went about their business above and below. Amongst other shapes, I clearly saw a starling serpent and a starling fish: most probably a plaice, although it could just as easily have been a sea bass. “DON’T TELL YOUR MUM,” said my dad. “BUT FOR VALENTINE’S DAY I’M GOING TO TRAIN THEM TO MAKE A GIANT LOVE HEART IN THE SKY.”

  

  How utterly pointless. Wildlife can’t read!

  • 21st-Century Yokel

    Help The Witch

    Ring The Hill

    Notebook

    Villager

    1983

    Everything Will Swallow You