When the first day of a year falls on a Sunday, I suspect it’s a good idea to look back on the previous year. A yearnote, if you will.

I could look back at the year’s posts and pick out highlights, but as it’s about a year, I think it’s better to look at the key themes that defined 2022. Obviously, these are things I can talk about — so there’s nothing about work here — and I’ve chosen to look at the positives rather than the negatives, which I will save for my journal.

With that context, the year has three themes: rediscovering writing, focusing more on my health, and reading. A lot of reading.

Rediscovering writing

I’ve been a journalist for (as of two days from now) 28 years. That seems fantastical to me as I still think of myself as the new kid on the block. This year forced me to accept that wasn’t true, and I realised that what I do now in journalism is managing, mentoring and advising. I don’t really write much.

And one thing that’s been consistent throughout my career and life is that I love writing. I got a typewriter as a teenager because I liked writing stories which turned into Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and my handwriting was… not great (it still isn’t). I learned to touch type at 16 at further education college because you had to do a Wednesday afternoon activity, and sport bored me. After that, I was a student and wrote, and then I was a journalist and wrote. So writing has always been there.

I needed an outlet for my writing. And importantly, I didn’t want to just do more blogging about technology. One thing I hadn’t done was a lot of creative writing because I’ve always believed I don’t have the imagination to make stories up. So I decided I wanted to give it a go.

First, I took a small weekly course based in a pub with a lovely writing tutor and a friendly group of people. I can’t think of a better introduction to creative writing than doing it in a summer pub’s garden, and we have continued meeting since.

That led to doing a five-day fiction introduction down at Arvon in Totleigh Barton. Tutored by the wonderful pairing of Charlene Teo and Michael Donkor, it was enormous fun and super-helpful in terms of my writing. But, most importantly, I think I found my voice: I had been writing how I felt I should note, and now I write how I want to write. And again, our group has stayed in touch. I don’t think I had realised quite how social writing can be.

One of the lovely moments was talking through a story idea I had been working on with Michael, which I had always envisaged as a short story. I had struggled a lot with it because I had to write short — and Michael said, “this isn’t a short story. It sounds like a novel to me”. I had always veered away from writing a novel, and it started me thinking about why. I realised two things: first, that I lacked the confidence to complete it, and second, that I have so many friends who have written novels that I think I’ve been intimidated by the idea. Michael helped me get over that, and if I ever finish a book, it will be down to the help and encouragement they gave me.

Focusing on my health

The big revelation about my health this year was that post-COVID, I need to take regular care of myself. Getting COVID the first time coincided with increased blood pressure and, because of less activity, putting on weight. Going from 10,000 plus steps per day when I was in the office to less than 5,000 working from home was always going to have an impact.

But this year, I started making some positive steps. For the first time in my life, I’ve been a regular attendee at our local GP for everything from booster vaccinations to blood tests to check that I’m not developing anything more serious. I’ve started taking medication to reduce my blood pressure (now at a decent level), and I’ve been looking after my vision with more regular check-ups at the opticians.

In 2023 this will continue as I develop more healthy eating and exercise habits, where simple changes will make a lot more difference.

Doing more reading

I was pretty surprised to find that I read 27 books in 2022. That’s the most I had read since the internet happened when all my reading shifted to computers. And it’s also been a wide range of books, not just trash science fiction (there’s been some good science fiction).

I’m really pleased with this. Reading and writing go hand in hand. The biggest thing you can do to improve your writing is to read more. So it’s probably not surprising that rediscovering my love of writing has also prompted much reading.

What’s also helped is using a new Kindle, the Scribe. I have always wanted a bigger Kindle. While the Paperwhite I have is excellent, it’s always felt just a little too small. And being able to write on the Scribe with little notes is also a fun way to add commentary, even if the comments don’t show up in my Readwise notes. It’s always interesting to me how a shift in a device can also shift your interest in a process.

I feel like in the past week I’ve travelled the country — and that’s mainly because I almost have. Last Saturday I travelled back from Devon to Kent, then on Thursday we drove up from Kent to Cumbria, where I am at the moment. We’re staying in lovely Ambleside, at a friend’s place (on our own).

Of course I love it and have a bunch of memories of the Lake District. It was a place where we went on family holidays a lot when I was a kid: here, along with Devon, Cornwall and the Cotswolds. My parents discovered country cottage rentals when I was young and after that pretty-much every holiday involved a drive to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a small rented house and a lot of fun.

These parts of the world are very evocative for me, and I’ve always loved the countryside since. We arrived after dark and in the rain (of course), and so didn’t see the view at the back till the next morning. It was quite a view to wake up to:

I would, of course, quite happily live somewhere like this. The irony that we have better internet here than where we normally live (2Mb “broad”band FTW) is not lost on me.

Christmas presents were, of course, opened this morning: Art supplies for Kim, and a lovely replacement Lamy Studio pen plus one-off notebook for me. We had agreed a price limit: Kim cheated. Fortunately so did I.

Now it’s Radio 3 till the King’s Christmas Message, then there will be dinner making the and some TV watching, then probably reading books. Kim is even darning. We appear to have become domestic, rather than feral.

Writing

I’ve been working a little on the Alice and God project this week. This is a maybe-novel length story about a woman who meets God (as you do) and goes on an adventure. It doesn’t quite feel YA territory, but it’s fun and light. One of the things I’ve been working on is using humour to counterpoint seriousness and threat, and there’s a lot of that here. It has to be a serious story, with danger for the characters (and maybe, just maybe, one of them doesn’t make it), but the humour which is intrinsic to my writing style is there.

One of the resolutions for next year is to establish more of a rhythm to my writing. I like the idea of two blog posts a week, one piece of micro-fiction, and some work on bigger projects, but that feels like a lot when I’m also holding down a full time job. We’ll see.

Reading and watching

I finished Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I really like her writing, but there are definitely parts of the book where you can see that it was published in chunks, with some of the chapters almost being short stories in their own right. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but it means that the overall plot is a bit in the background (and there’s not much to it). But i still enjoyed it a lot and now I’m on to A Closed and Common Orbit, the second in the Wayfarer series.

Because we’re away we (OK, I) have got out of the habit of just putting “the telly” on, which means I haven’t watched that much of anything. Being more intentional about what I watch is definitely a theme for the new year!

Thursday saw the arrival of my Kindle Scribe, which I pre-ordered on the day it was announced. I’ve long wanted a bigger Kindle because the smaller ones just aren’t that great for reading on, and although my iPad is huge, it’s also got a lot of distractions on it, which make it less suitable for reading. The ability to write on it is a bonus, but I’m surprised how effective adding comments using the pen is. It’s like adding little Post-Its, which is exactly how I work with paper books.

Big trip to that there London yesterday, when we caught up with a lovely friend over from New York in the Royal Festival Hall bar, then headed to see Stereolab with another lovely friend. There was dancing — well more shuffling around from me — and this morning, an inevitable plethora of aches. Kids, if you’re under 40, look after your body. Do yoga or something. Don’t eat so many pies.

All that means today involved a greasy spoon breakfast — well, 1pm breakfast — plus many cups of reviving tea and a sofa.

One other thing today has been winding down my Twitter account. I finally downloaded the 1.4Gb archive of all my content from it, and used the Twitter Archive Parser on it. This does four things:

1. It converts tweets to Markdown with embedded images
2. It replaces the t.co links with the originals
3. It copies all the images into a single folder, useful for importing them elsewhere
4. If an image is a low-resolution version, it download the original
   Once that was done I used ByeByeTweets to do three more things:
5. Unfollow everyone I was following
6. Remove all the likes I had put on other people’s content
7. Delete all my tweets
   ByeByeTweets costs a few dollars if you want to delete all tweets (it will do a limited amount for free) but I highly recommend it. I ran into a bug uploading my archive, which you need to do if you’re deleting all of them, and emailed them. They responded within a couple of hours and had fixed the error.

So that’s pretty much it with Twitter and me! You can find me on Mastodon.

Writing

I’ve written a lot of notes on how to improve a story I’ve been struggling with, along with an outline of how to move it forward.

Reading and watching

I’m reading Harry Turtledove’s Three Miles Down which is, so far, an enjoyably frothy alternate history novel. It’s really interesting that I’m starting to look at books like this with a more technical writers eye, spotting elements of foreshadowing and the odd McGuffin.

My notebook, like my week, is blank. This is not a good sign: when there’s nothing scrawled there other than work notes, it indicates my life is moving slightly out of kilter.

That truth is piled all around me in books unread, mugs unwashed, and food left uncooked. It’s there in the MacBook Pro near me, still lurking on the to-do list as “fix MacBook Pro” a good month after it first gave me a random “cryptographic error”. Thank you, Apple, for making things stupidly easy when they go well and stupidly complex when they go wrong.

I keep reminding myself that my inability to fix it isn’t due to age finally stopping me from taking in new information and understanding fresh technology. It’s simply that Apple, and most other companies, have put people being able to fix their own technology at the bottom of a long list of priorities. I suspect it’s just underneath “Make sure Tim’s latte is on his desk at 7 am precisely”. And why would anyone want to fix their own Macs? Just visit a Genius Bar, where a friendly blue-shirted barely-trained youth will try and use you to fill his quota of upsell opportunities.

As you may have noticed. I’m slightly out of love with Apple. Less so with the company’s products. I still love my iPad Pro (and wish I could make it my only machine), and I have yet to find an Android phone which didn’t make me want to run back to an iPhone.

But I wish Apple the company would stop acting like greedy assholes and start reading the room. No, Tim, you cannot sustain a 30% cut of app revenue for the rest of the time. No, Tim, you cannot keep building your devices in a way which makes them hard to repair and then pay sneering lip service to making parts available for them. Those days are over, and if you want to preserve the things which are good for customers about the App Store and your products, you need to accept that sooner rather than clinging on till a regulator changes things for you. Call Bill Gates and ask him how long a company takes to recover after regulators take things out of your hands.

Ah, capitalism.

Things I’ve been reading and watching

The final episode of Andor wasn’t quite the finale I had been hoping for, but it was good. The whole series was excellent, and although it’s a cliché to call it “Star Wars for grown-ups”, it is still the best description. It’s a thriller and a spy story rather than a space opera and an excellent example of what happens when you apply a different genre’s set of rules to a world built for another kind of writing.

Things I’ve been writing

I started a new blog just for creative writing. The first was a piece about a child’s Christmas — OK, my Christmas — and the second was about a couple of early memories and my family. The third piece was just something super-short about a sound you don’t hear much anymore: the ticking of a clock.

I like writing fragments like this (I have a tag in Obsidian, where I do most of my short writing, called “fragments”, just for this). Of course, it comes relatively easy to me, unlike plotting which makes me feel like I am pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete up a hill while the wind and rain come straight down on my face.

This week has mostly revolved around the trapped nerve in my shoulder, which came on last Sunday evening. It took me almost completely out of action on Monday and Tuesday, as I just couldn’t sit at a computer and work – sitting up for too long was just painful.

I think that a lot of it is to do with posture, not so much when I’m sitting and typing but when I’m in the endless parade of online meetings on Teams which forms quite a chunk of my work. When I’m in meetings I tend to slump a bit to my left, usually with my hand supporting my chin, which probably isn’t the best position to be sat for a long while.

That’s exacerbated by my chair, which is lovely to look at but not ideal for spending a great deal of time sitting in and typing. The height of it isn’t adjustable, and it’s a little low with a back support which is OK at the bottom but not quite at the right sort of angle for my daily use. To compensate, I’ve raised the height of my monitor so that it’s higher, which forces me to sit more upright when I’m using it.

Of course, this was also the week when the long-awaited Muskapocalypse basically happened on Twitter, which led to some reflection on the state and development of social media. I should, of course, write something up properly about this, but it’s made me understand that the difference between social media now and in 2006 is that the news we think requires immediate delivery to our followers is no longer personal, it’s political.

When Twitter started, it was one of a slew of services which aimed to decouple the “Status” field from instant messaging apps like AIM to a third party which could then provide a brief message about what you were doing to all your friends. My first tweet on December 3rd 2006 was “going for a dump”, and in a scatological way that summed up what Twitter was there for.

It became that, but on a much larger scale: a method of delivering “vital” information in a timely fashion to large groups of people. News breaks on Twitter now, even before it hits the (already fast) 24-hour news services. I doubt that’s a good thing, for reasons which would take a whole post to define.

Weeks which start with being off or sick often don’t turn into particularly productive times, but this one was a little different. We’re at the end point of a phase in the project I’ve been focused on at work, and the beginning of planning for the next phase. That means there’s some breathing room, although there’s still a lot of wrapping up to do (and there will be until the end of the year).

We also went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever on Friday (more on that below) and I booked my train ticket for the weeklong writing retreat that I’m going on in December. I’m really looking forward to this, not only because it’s a week of writing, but also because it’s a week with no internet. Yes, that’s right: there’s no Wi-Fi (thanks to the building being ridiculously old and so hard to get connected) and virtually no mobile signal (5G? Forget it). I can’t wait.

Things I’ve been reading and watching

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was good. It wasn’t as good as the first film, but given the awful death of Chadwick Boseman, how could it be? The way it handled his passing and made it a part of the movie was brilliant: sensitive, emotional, everything you could have asked. I think I counted four or five times that had me sobbing, from the opening Marvel logo (which forsook the usual montage of many heroes to be all Chadwick) through to the credits which start with “For our friend, Chadwick Boseman”.

I have no idea why his death has affected me so much – I can’t remember an actor’s death making me feel like this – but I think it is something to do with the impact of the first film and the realisation of how a black movie made me feel. Or maybe how having a movie which attracts a young black audience makes me feel: as with the first film, the majority of the audience at our showing was young and black and very much not the kind of audience you see at most Marvel films. It’s huge, and feels important.

Meanwhile, Andor continues to be the best Star Wars ever made. It’s lazy to call it “Star Wars for grown-ups” but it’s a proper adult thriller set in the universe, and has some absolutely terrific acting in it. Even if you don’t like Star Wars, I would recommend it.

Things I’ve been writing

Not much, is the quick answer. Those two days spent mostly flat on my back meant that I couldn’t write so much – this is easily the longest piece that I’ve written since last weekend – and what writing I did was mostly “manually, in a notebook” which barely counts.