A Slightly Different End-Of-Year Top Five

I just realised that, before long, it will be spring again: How exciting is that?

I noticed a few people have been marking the year’s conclusion by reposting their most-read pieces on Substack. I debated doing the same thing, then, in customarily contrary fashion, decided I’d post my least-read pieces instead. But I thought about it a bit more and remembered one of my New Year’s Resolutions, which is to keep the focus on fun, and not be afraid to define fun entirely on my own terms, so I decided a more apt approach would be to repost the five pieces I’ve had most fun putting together. I notice that the most fun I have when I’m writing is when the driving force is less to tell people what I think about something and more to find out what I think about it. I don’t know if the pieces below are officially my best, and some of them weren’t as widely read as others, but I associate each with new ideas and thoughts and ways of telling stories. All of them have been behind the paywall for a while but I’ve decided to lift it for the next five days, in case anybody who missed them would like to catch up.

2024 has not been a bad year for me, but it has felt like more of a battle than most. I have definitely never worked as hard - not only on writing, but on the clutter that can surround writing. Some of the latter has become more tricky, partly due to the choices I have made in the kind of work I do and what needs to be done to get it seen and read. I’m still waiting for my publishers to pay me some long-owed money - which I wrote about here - therefore Substack has only grown in importance for me in terms of my changing definition of what trying to make a living full-time from writing is, a quarter way through the 21st Century. I’ve also decided to sell a few more books direct to help tide myself over during January. So if you’d like a signed Villager and Notebook hardback direct from me, please drop me an email via the Contact form on my website (I've got about 20 left of each, and some of my mum’s handmade bookmarks for the first handful of people to message - please note that they’re very expensive to send outside the UK, so if that’s where you are you might find it cheaper to order from Blackwells). I’ll leave it to you to choose what the combined price of the books is.

After a little phase of feeling quite burned out in late autumn, I’ve felt recharged recently and written a lot of new fiction over the last three weeks. I posted some of it yesterday for paid subscribers and I’m salivating to get back to it to such an extent that, if I’m being completely honest, I’m even finding the distraction of posting this end of year round-up a little frustrating. In short, I have relearned what I often learn after hitting a little rocky patch in my career: deliberation and strategy translates mostly as just counterproductive procrastination and truly there is no more effective solution than going off and doing some writing. And if that writing is being done for the sheer hell of it, all the better.

Happy New Year, and thank you for all the wonderful support you have given my nonsense in 2024!

Tom

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