What's New

This week, I read my own novel for the first time in twelve years.

On the importance of continuing to Howl.

Can we call a book great literature if not everyone can read it?

In which the author continues to be plagued by that stupid shacket.

Building a website is just easy enough that anyone can do it with the help of AI or a bit of googling. But if you don't actually understand what's happening under the hood, you might be creating serious problems you don't even know about.

It's rerun time.

It's easier than ever to have a computer create a foreign-language version of your complete website for you. I took a more targeted approach.

What Ends is getting translated into Italian.

One of the last things I expected to read in an essay about 16th century bookmaking was a description of the standard process for designing a new website. But it turns out we haven't come so far since the Middle Ages after all.

In which the author has an epiphany about what other people think about him. (They don't.)

I returned to The Stage's Future of Theatre conference this year, to present the award to 2025's winning Big Idea.

In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor unpicks the odd things we do to show we're "being serious" — and what can happen when we do them without thinking.

I've attended the Ticketing Professionals Conference for the last 3 years in a row. In 2025, I'm (sadly) sitting it out, but here's what I'd be doing if I were there.

It's hard to get your own work published, but helping others with theirs costs you nothing.

After ten years, I decided to resurrect a web comic I wrote in the early 2000s. What did I need to change to make it work for today's audiences?

After a ten-year hiatus, Marx is back.

I decided I wanted to be a writer in the late 90s. Would I still make the same decision now?

I sat down to write about what I learned from building a website with my 9-year-old. Then I realised that was beside the point.

It's been ten years since I published my novel. What have I been doing ever since?

It's been half a year or so since I launched this website of mine, and I thought it might be interesting to share some of the thinking that went into it. Why is this website the way it is? What's the digital strategy behind it?

I recently bought a copy of The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube, and I can’t remember the last time a book blew my mind quite so completely.

At The Stage's Future of Theatre Conference 2024, I won the Big Ideas vote with my pitch for theatres to share their sales figures the same way the publishing industry does.

My friend Joe self-published a book this year, which made me question a lot of my assumptions about the purpose of publishing.

Some shameless SEO bait in case anyone is googling me after seeing my name somewhere at a conference.

Are we just keeping conventional publishing around for the status?

I wrote a silly little article last month about what pasta packaging can teach you about user experience design — and people loved it.

Even if — God willing! — it turns out that humans are still The Sustainable Choice, do we really want to invite that sort of calculation into evaluating creative work?

Ah, the starving artist, that beautiful, romantic, cultural icon: a person so devoted to their creative vision that they'd sooner go hungry than pursue anything else. I hate the stupid starving artist.

Funny thing about day jobs: when you do something forty hours a week, every week for ten years, you can't help but start to identify with it.

Is this the start of a new, prolific period of blogging?