It's been a wild two weeks again. My aim to finish two short stories before the end of the year is well on track, but real life is trying to have the last word.

Some kind of sleep regression (there's never a definitive reason) has meant Florence has been getting up at all hours the evening (and very early morning) and taking an age to get back to sleep.

I stubbed my little toe on a door frame and somehow broke said toe (the door frame still stands, despite my verbal barrage). Despite that I've managed to be consistent with a whole bunch of habits and practices which all has a knock on effect. Small wins often trumps big wins sporadically every time.

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Apologies, it's a small one this week. It has been an eventful fortnight. We got our first real bout of 'toddlers being disease vectors'. Flo had a round of Norovirus that had her vomiting for 4-6 hours straight two weekends ago.

She had mostly recovered by the end of the weekend, but the week had other plans. I was falling asleep that Sunday evening before hearing an almighty crash. I had no idea what was going on. My better half straight away said she thought it was a car.

Lo and behold, I poke my head out of the window, only to see a 2010 model BMW firmly planted in the hedge of the next door neighbour's garden. The car had come off the road at speed (we live on a slight corner), taken out a wall, and a lamppost, then careened across our front garden before finding purchase in aforementioned hedge. All of the occupants scarpered, leaving their untaxed vehicle behind.

It missed our house by a few feet and next door's gas main by even less. As disruptive as it was getting the car recovered and the detritus of the lamppost being cut down it could have been a lot worse. Flo, somehow, slept through it all.

A short one this week as the week has slowly derailed through Flo bringing home another illness.

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The situation in Gaza is rapidly evolving. It almost feels moot sharing links about it here as whatever I post or link to will inevitably be out of date by the time it's read. The caveat to that is deeper reading, background, context, etc. To that end I thoroughly recommend taking advantage of the many books on the subject that Verso books are currently making free to everyone. Click here to see the offerings. If I could recommend just one it would be Ilan Pappe's book.

So, this was announced during the week on Twitter:

Not too many links this week as I've been trying to conquer a TBR pile that I've allowed to get quite out of hand and make headway on two writing projects I want to complete by the end of the year.

Oh, that and the first bout of nursery-induced illness for Florence means I've barely had time to do much else beyond read and write.

Links

Martin Scorsese: “I Have To Find Out Who The Hell I Am.”

It's a bit of an odd one this week as I started this entry way before the allotted Sunday release time. The plan was for me to run a 10K this weekend, the first I've done in quite a while. Training time has been severely limited by Florence's arrival and also getting Covid. Twice.

Florence has recently started nursery and, lo and behold, the first major illness caught from there has manifested itself in the form of a wonderful bout of sickness and diarrhea. Not only that, but there's a chance she may have passed it on to me. So it's touch and go whether I run that 10K after all. Best laid plans and all that.

Moving on, the aforementioned The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood that I have a story in releases on October 1st.

Updates

It was recently announced that I will have a story in the upcoming "The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood" from French Press. The TOC (Table of Contents) was announced via livestream a few days ago. Alas, it was scheduled for 10pm EST, so I was unable to make it. It was a bit of an unusual submission call as the story had to take place in the universe of Stephen Kozeniewski and Wile E. Young's novel, The Perfectly Fine House.

It feels utterly bizarre to feature on the same table of contents as horror luminaries such as Brian Keene, Jeff Strand and Candace Nola. It was also completely gnarly to have Wile. E. Young describe my story as "very dark". If the story perturbs someone who has won a Splatterpunk award, I'll take that as a win. I don't want to say too much about my story until release. All I will say is that it involves ghosts (obviously), home invasion and a thorough mistrust of the rich and powerful (naturally).

The release is (fairly) imminent and no doubt I will post more as I know more. For now, here's that unbelievable TOC in full.

It's a short one this week I'm afraid as I've had a hell of a week. Nursery starts in a few weeks for Flo, but until then we're having to plug the stopgap with my annual leave. So I may be a little terse from here until then.

Readers, she is into everything at this point, and is incredibly mobile considering she only crawls. I've not been this exhausted since the week she was born.

That said, I did manage to get some reading in and some writing, with the first draft of a story meant for a submission window towards the end of the year.

Anyway, enjoy the links!

Still no word on the submission alluded to in the last edition. This is how the wheels of progress turn in the writing game a lot of the time. Slowly, greased with the blood, sweat and tears of all those who came before. No news is good news, right?

Links

Substack triples down

https://theracket.news/p/substack-triples-down

Apologies for the errors that have plagued this newsletter for the last few editions. Worryingly, I have no idea what went wrong. Buttondown is usually so reliable as well. Apologies also for the last edition that I did manage to resend going out several times. Ugh.

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Still waiting to hear back on that story I mentioned in the last issue of the newsletter. I guess they had a lot of submissions. Fingers crossed!

===

Apparently the last three editions of this newsletter have not gone out. This is the one that was supposed to have gone out on the Sunday just gone.

Reading/Watching/Listening

• I finished The Five, mentioned in the last newsletter. One point that stuck out is the fact that the first two victims of the Ripper were not sex workers as is the long held view. Instead, due to their lower economic standing, they were just assumed to be. The book artfully deconstructs many myths about women in the Victorian Age as well as giving the victims a voice, depth and baggage. Most of them went through absolutely awful experiences in their lives which led to alcohol abuse and spiraling into further addiction and destitution. Poverty killed, and continues to kill, far more than Jack ever did.

• I am currently about halfway through the first season of Netflix's Ganglands, a very stripped back and visceral crime thriller. The French have a good track record of no-frills action/crime entertainment (Sentinelle, the Lost Bullet movies, etc.) As expected the action and set pieces in this are spot on.

• I am also, finally, working my way through two older shows The Americans and Babylon Berlin. Both are great and I am savouring every episode.

• Listening-wise, I am loving the recent Srsly Wrong podcast's two part episode on AI.

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Reading/Watching/Listening

• I am currently reading The Five, which unearths the lives of the five (canonical) victims of Jack the Ripper. It swims against the usual ‘true crime’ tide of concentrating on the killer. Instead, the book looks at the victim’s lives, treating each of them as a human being with all of the intricacies and contradictions that entails. Its portrait of life for working class women of the Victorian era is very bleak but is also punctuated with moments of poignancy.

• I recently finished the second series of The Patriot, an Amazon Original from 2015. It has such a wholly specific voice and tone, a kind of existential riff on the spy genre with Coen-esque characters and scenarios. Highly, highly recommended and the kind of TV that looks to disappear in the current spate of cost cutting. Weep that this show never got a third season. Count your lucky stars it managed two.

• I also just started listening to Shelved By Genre from the guys at Ranged Touch which bills itself as a media criticism podcast. The first ‘season’ will be covering Gene Wolfe’s ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’. I’ve never ready any Wolfe at all so diving right into his intricate and dense prose has been quite a ride.

Links

Attack of the zeros and ones

To the links!

DOOM and the horror of gameplay memory

https://write.as/kybard/doom-and-gameplay-memory

A write up on an interesting mod for the original Doom, playing and subverting player’s exepectations and muscle memory.

Why Are We in Ukraine?

<https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/>

Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Lane in Harpers ask the question. It's a lengthy 30-40 minute read, but well worth it in my opinion.

"The U.S. permanent representative to NATO explicitly identified “Russia and the malign activities of Russia” as NATO’s “major” target. The United States justified these moves as necessary responses to Russian hostilities in Ukraine and to the need, as the New York Times editorial board declared in a revival of Cold War rhetoric in 2018, to “contain” the “Russian threat.” And what made the Russians a threat? According to a 2018 report by the Pentagon, it was their intention to “shatter” NATO, the military pact arrayed against them."

A 23-year-old Snapchat influencer used OpenAI’s technology to create an A.I. version of herself that will be your girlfriend for $1 per minute

https://fortune.com/2023/05/09/snapchat-influencer-launches-carynai-virtual-girlfriend-bot-openai-gpt4/

Well, we had a good run, didn’t we?

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It’s a very short set of links this time around. I read quite a few longer pieces during the last fortnight, rather than a lot of shorter pieces.

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Overdue Impartiality: GB News & the Voice of the Octopus

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/04/17/overdue-impartiality-gb-news-and-the-voice-of-the-octopus/

I've thought a lot recently about making these newsletters into blog posts instead. They would, I think, allow a great degree of flexibility and also allow me to add more personal commentary when I see fit, rather than feeling constrained or pressured to add it every week.

Plus, I'm always wary of platforms now. A blog, in theory, allows me to just up and take the posts with me if a host, service, etc. goes under or becomes a 'bad actor'.

Food for thought.

The last fortnight has been writing a story for a submission call set in the pre-existing world of a horror novel that came out last year. It's been a lot of fun trying to cook up a scenario that 'fits' into a world with its distinct set of rules and then extrapolating outward into all of the ramifications.

Top Gun: Maverick

https://www.patreon.com/posts/top-gun-maverick-80420500

Priscilla Page does it again, this time with a great read on the blockbuster sequel. This deep dive on the movie touches on fatherhood, grief and legacy.

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Alas, no newsletter this week due to a series of cascading indigents, including losing an earlier draft. This week has conspired against me.

Normal service shall resume in two.

So many links! Apologies for the formatting of this issue. Buttondown seems to have changed up the formatting options/layout and everything in between. No longer can I just paste Markdown into an empty box. Simplicity be damned!

Phoenix Nights: A Tribute to a Vanishing British Institution

Phoenix Nights: A Tribute to a Vanishing British Institution

Two decades after it first aired, Phoenix Nights' wry portrayal of a northern working men’s club remains a vital celebration of a vanishing working-class culture too often ignored on screen.

This one is probably going to be a bit of a tough sell for anyone outside the U.K. This Tribune article though points out the dearth of working class voices working in modern comedic circles on broadcast TV.

Nowt but the links this week.

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How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

The last two weeks have seemed like someone has shoved six months into a fortnight. We’ve had illnesses, late night hospital visits, missed gigs we’ve been looking forward to, and everything in between. Hopefully the next two weeks will bring a period of relative calm.

Links

The Digital Workplace Is Designed to Bring You Down

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-newport-interview.html Archive.ph link here

A pocket-sized edition this week.

Links

Universal Soldier? The Emersonian Combat Experience of Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/the-thin-red-line/

Books

My book reading took a hit this year. I tended to favour physical books this year over eBooks. All that said, it’s hard to read a physical book (heck, any book) with a newborn in your hand and a bottle in the other. So, the memorable books from this year for me were:

Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac by Jarrett Kobek

I devoured this book and it’s sequel How to Find Zodiac. Motor Spirit takes a look at America in the late sixties, specifically California and the souring of ‘The American Dream’ - focusing primarily on the Zodiac, but also bringing in the Manson family and the dark underside of hippie culture in such places as San Francisco. Kobek’s skill comes in tying all of these disparate, evil and chaotic events together to show something sinister and insidious at the heart of American culture as the seventies dawned.

Not much up top this week. The plan for doing my usual 'Faves of the Year' is to include it in the next edition of the newsletter as there are still some movies I'm hoping to catch between now and then.

Links

You don't know Jack Reacher: How Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise defied expectations and paved the way for Top Gun: Maverick

https://www.avclub.com/christopher-mcquarrie-interview-jack-reacher-anniversar-1849801144

It’s not a huge edition this week as I’m prepping to drive down south for a family gathering. North Devon in December, of all places.

Time off at the day job will give me enough space to hopefully pull together something more substantial for the next edition (and the last of 2022).

Links

I’ll kick things off with two interviews.

The newsletter has been decimated this week due to two factors:

• I tested positive for Covid on Friday. I felt rough, figured it was a seasonal flu and then tested.

• On top of that, Florence has obviously caught something as well, griping and crying throughout the night. Operating on about an hour’s shared sleep across the household is not conducive to doing anything. It’s shattered the hopes of making deadline on something I have been working on for about a month or so. But sometimes all you can do is roll with the punches.

See you all.in two.

Everything is in increments now. My head still hasn’t fully switched from writing before baby to the current reality. It’s getting there though.

As ever, the keyword I’m focusing on is consistency. If I can get a little forward traction each day with a project that’s a win. Concentrating on volume is a fool’s errand at this point. I have learned this the hard way. If my head can remain in the world and narrative I’m creating, and the story can be inched forward, that’s a win.

Links

“Don’t Shoot Too Many Takes”: Walter Hill on Dead for a Dollar

Apologies for another curtailed edition this week. I'm typing the last parts of this out entirely on my phone as I am sans computer whilst visiting family. Anyway, enjoy!

Links

Video Games

Acronym casts a long shadow over cyberpunk fashion

Peter Thiel’s Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-30/palantir-had-plan-to-crack-uk-health-system-buying-our-way-in

The 'frog slowly boiling' approach to the demolition of the NHS continues apace.

I’m still getting used to having another living thing be entirely dependent on me/us to live. As mentioned previously I have been attending a writing sprint Zoom call most Thursday nights. I find these sessions incredibly productive and my wife is an absolute saint to let me just go off into a room for an hour or so to take part in these sessions.

One shortcoming, however, is the old habit of comparing myself to others rearing its head. Most of the other writers involved are able to make progress with their respective projects between sessions. Meanwhile, I scrabble throughout the week to try and get some words (any words) added to the current project (a short story for a submission call based around horror and the sea) whenever I can. It really is about gathering those slivers of time and hoping they add up to something substantial as the end of the week nears.

I still haven’t quite perfected the best way to do this. A phone works well. A pocket notebook may work better.

If anyone has any tips, advice, etc. about how best to get some steady progress down whilst dealing with a demanding newborn feel free to shoot me a reply. I shall be forever grateful.

This was supposed to go out two weeks ago, and for some reason has been sat in drafts instead. Which means you will be getting two newsletters from me this week.

So, I’m back (kind of). This newsletter, writing in general, household tasks and everything else are now performed in the brief snatches of time between feeds, nappy changes and attempting to get an (over)tired baby to sleep.

If anything, it has shown me how good I had it before in terms of free time. But it also caused me to really use those snatches of time to do the things that need doing. In the past week or so I’ve written a flash story and submitted it and I’m currently in the early stages of another short story for a separate submission call.

If the writing, or anything else, isn’t done in these brief flashes of time then it doesn’t get done at all.

Apologies, but no newsletter again this week.

My reading input the last few weeks, as you can imagine, has essentially been zero.

However, now there is something approaching a routine in the Hill household again I have started to be able to snatch a few moments to read articles again (mostly between feeds and endless bouts of washing up).

So, all that said, you should expect things to return to some kind of normality with the next edition of the newsletter.

Florence Aletta Hill, born 29th July at 0100 after a very chaotic birth. She and mother are both doing well.

Needless to say there won't be a newsletter this week as I'm currently doing about 4-5 miles in steps alone per day (why do we live in a house with three flights of stairs?).

She is worth every step and then some.

This newsletter, like everything else at the moment, is stuck in a kind of limbo.

Baby is imminent. The day job is a relentless maelstrom, prone to pangs of chaos and crumbling infrastructure.

The weather veers from record-breaking to mundane in the blink of an eye. Amid the madness I have managed to finish up another short story, previously mentioned here. As stated, this one deals with body horror, running and the notion of legacy in one hope-shattering bundle. I figure one or two more passes to bring out some elements that remain unclear and this will be good to go.

During this week’s writing sprint sessions via Zoom I started the ball rolling on a new story/concept. Currently, I’m not entirely sure what it is I have, or whether it may need to longer than a short story.

Updates & Fuel for the tank

There’s not a lot of links this week I’m afraid. My reading has mostly been of the book variety the past few weeks, namely the second book in Joseph Knox’s Aidan Waits series, The Smiling Man. The books follow the (mis)fortunes of DC Aidan Waits as he becomes embroiled in the darker underbelly of modern-day Manchester.

The Smiling Man has a classic ‘locked room’ setup with the titular male being found in a high-rise hotel long since closed. The central mystery also draws elements from the real life Somerton Man case.

Waits as a character is always teetering on self-implosion, par for the course in a detective series. However, there is a weight to his actions. As the novel begins Waits finds himself relegated to the grave yard shift with no chance of promotion or salvation due to his actions in the first book.

I seemed to gain a handful of new subscribers last week. I have no idea where they came from, but welcome! As the copy says, it's mostly links!

Shall we?

Links

Shop Talk: Jordan Harper Pulls Down the Blinds, Turns Up the Heat, and Writes Novels on Hotel Stationery

We ended up losing Corky, our guinea pig referenced in the last newsletter. Between the infection and her gut not seeming to kick-start itself again I think, in the end, we were fighting a losing battle. It was a sad end to a dreary fortnight. But we all tried, including her.

She was a little bundle of sunshine, happiness and sass who never ceased to brighten our day with her constant chattering and shenanigans.

I miss her terribly.

What an exhausting two weeks. We are currently having to syringe feed a very sick Guinea Pig every 3-4 hours throughout the day. It has been an ordeal. On top of that we continue to prep for the arrival of baby. Furniture is now all assembled. Her room is painted.

The day job continues to test me with a perfect storm of illness and holidays meaning I am doing 2-3 people’s jobs whilst still trying to do my own.

My ToDo list, as a consequence, has taken a hit. I have, instead, defaulted back to a habit tracker most days to ensure I end the day feeling sane - exercise every day, write every day, that sort of thing. It’s held my in good stead. Notes and lists are living as scribbles in a pocket notebook that I carry everywhere. I go on about them all the time, but pocket notebooks are great.

Links

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind. Antenatal classes, MOT tests, baby worries (false alarm!), and a hellish perfect storm of events that means my workload at the day job has increased exponentially.

There is light on the horizon though (including meeting the tiny person who has given us both buckets of worry and anxiety recently).

Also, I've been reading a lot about habit formation recently. Given I am about to have a hell of a lot less free time I've come to the conclusion that concentrating on a core set of habits every day, rather than being overwhelmed by traditional To Do lists (which still have their place) is going to be key.

The theory seems to ring true. We shall see if it holds once it's tested in the field.

A wedding to attend. Walls to pain. Words to write. So it’s straight into things this week.

Links

# 20 years ago, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind changed everything

https://www.polygon.com/23037370/elder-scrolls-3-morrowind-open-world-rpg-elden-ring-botw

News

I'm now free of COVID after being plagued for about a week and a half. The first few days were the worst, with the mother of all headaches along with a plethora of flu-like symptoms. At time I was verging on hallucination as tiredness and exhaustion seeped in too.

Thankfully, the only real fallout has been the fact I missed the submission window for an anthology I very much wanted to try my hand at. Many more than me have not been so lucky.

Apologies for the lack of newsletter this weekend. I have finally gone and gotten Covid after almost two years of slipping through it’s grasp.

I’m over the worst of it now, the low point being towards the start of the week where I was running a high fever and suffering a horrendous headache.

It knocked me for six and also meant I missed a submission deadline, the first one I’ve missed.

It also means I haven’t been to the day job in over a week whilst also trying not to infect my (thankfully Covid-free) pregnant wife.

Another short one I'm afraid. I'm up against a deadline for a story submission window and I have a million and one tasks to do to prep for the little one's arrival in July.

Links

The War in Ukraine Shows That Europe Could Help Refugees if It Really Wanted To

Not much up top this week. A lot of this week’s issue is about the invasion of Ukraine. Given the saturated and overwhelming coverage and the very real prospect of things spiralling even further, then I would not be upset if this edition remains unread.

Links

What You Should Really Know About Ukraine

The last few weeks have been marred by chaotic periods at the day job, jumbled sleep patterns and every other obstacle you can think of for being productive. I'm seeing it as good prep for when the baby arrives. Onto the links? Absolutely.

Links

Telegram: The Social Network Where Conspiracies Meet

https://www.logically.ai/articles/telegram-where-conspiracies-meet

Some quick housekeeping to begin with. The URL for this newsletter now lives at:

https://buttondown.email/aph/

It’s been like this a while but I’d completely forgotten to point it out. The URL obviously stands for the name of the newsletter which, I think, is more representative of this whole endeavour.

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My second short story to see the light of day, Fissure, features on the latest episode of The Other Stories podcast as part of their Doppelgangers season.

'A couple with a strained relationship find a crack in their hallway wall. Unknown to them, something resides within the crack and it will say anything, or become anyone, to be free.'

Fissure is written by me (as D.C Hill) narrated by Jasmine Arch, edited by Karl Hughes and music by Andrew KN and Thom Robson.

This is the first time I've ever heard someone else read my work out loud, or produced using an audio-only format. Jasmine did an excellent job with the narration and the music and sound effects really add a whole other layer to the experience. I'm incredibly happy with how it turned out.

A short entry to start the year off. No fuss, no muss, just the links.

Links

The Web is Fucked

https://thewebisfucked.com/

I am sending this one out slightly earlier then usual. I will only forget in the post Christmas haze. So here it is. Enjoy!

There are not too many links this week as I mostly spend this time of year either venturing to see various relatives or watching the movies I missed out on the first time around. The former is, obviously, severely limited in its scope this year (as last year), so it’s mostly been a whole lot of movies (and to a lesser extent this year TV).

At the time of writing, here are the movies I enjoyed the most this year (all were released in some form this year, either via cinema or streaming) in the tried and tested Top 10 format. I’ve been fairly spoiler-free in my thoughts one each movie so I haven’t been able to go in depth on some of them as I’d like.

10. Copshop