You can tell the book got released because my emails went from 'weekly’ to ‘absent’. Sorry about that! Or, perhaps, ‘you’re welcome’?

Did you know my new book was out? It is out. I’ve been doing some fun things - including a behind-the-scenes visit to the London Library for CONTENT. (Some of which is already out, and was very fun to make. Gold star if you recognise the shirt.)

It looks like there will be multiple events in November, plus another fun CONTENT opportunity in October.

I’ve been contributing DARK ACADEMIC WISDOM to various bookshop mailing lists, Instagrams, and such and, as of yesterday evening, I am finally caught up! If you need a DARK ACADEMIC HOT TAKE (or simply some reading or viewing recommendations), for your mailing list / newsletter / leaflet / carousel / whatever, let me know, as now is the time to strike.

Back before Twitter was a Nazi bar, it was still social media, and therefore, inherently annoying.

Twitter was a machine gun of people’s opinions, and, given that kind of speed and volume, there was always something deeply irritating ricocheting around my feed. Initially, like many other people, I believed my moral and ethical duty was to contribute to all discussions. Someone has an opinion on this topic? I should too! There’s a pile-on? Make room for one more! But, very swiftly, it turns out that being as annoying as the annoying people is not actually a solution to being annoyed. Moreover, the obligation to be annoying is, in and of itself, annoying.

I developed an alternative solution. If someone annoyed me, I’d give money to charity. If someone had a stupid take about, I dunno, women writing fiction - I’d give to RAINN. If they were on a tear about teh libtardz - I’d give to Planned Parenthood. If someone was just being a dumbass about something random and it GOT MY GOAT… I’d give to a cat shelter or something. Anne, who gets very annoyed at a lot of things (although not yet me) adopted this really quickly, and probably clicked herself bankrupt within a week.

What was the point of this?

First, it moved me off the goddamn site. It was a behaviour that made me change screens and close Twitter. Just breaking eye contact with the void is a great baby step.

Second, the positive dopamine hit of ‘doing good’ was an excellent replacement for the negative dopamine hit of ‘typing an angry reply’. Still a buzz, but not one that reinforced a harmful behaviour.

Third, I won. Let’s be honest, I wasn’t giving money because I was a nice person. I just wanted a sense of ‘winning the argument’ without actually having to engage. And knowing that I had subverted the troll: that I had done something ‘meaningful’ that went against their online ranting? That felt like a win. Or, at the very least, a loss for them. I had the moral victory. While they were arguing over why women can’t rite gud, I was enacting change. (Or, at the very least, giving change to those who actually enact change.) I escaped the swamp of internet discourse for the moral high ground of charitable action! Did I really win? Really, really? Probably not. But it was enough to break the loop, and free me from participating further.

Even a few dollars at a time, it was an expensive way to change behaviour. And, to be completely fair, I didn’t stop getting angry at people on Twitter until I left it entirely. (And even now, I harbour resentment as a sort of broad concept.)

There’s a lesson here beyond my nostalgia for the simpler feuds-of-yore. ‘Micro-impacts’ are those little things we do to feel a sense of accomplishment. Bullet journals. Putting laundry away. The adage about fighting depression by making your bed every morning. Patting a cat until it purrs. Feeding crows, for that matter! I love my crow bros! A huge part of the pleasure is knowing that, whatever else I’ve done (or not done), I’ve fractionally-but-tangibly improved the lives of a lot of birds.

Any task that you can start and complete in a short amount of time and gives you an immediate tangible and/or emotional reward. In an omnishambles world packed with systemic problems, these little wins are increasingly important.

Do you have any little patterns or hobbies that work for you?

Imagine being called out by Paul “Showgirls” Verhoeven for missing the point of a movie.

This week’s Shelfie is a peek at the bookcase of Andrew Liptak. If you like science fiction, like, science fiction science fiction, you’re going to want to read this.

Damian Bradfield’s Any Given Sunday on horror and why it is having a moment. Amongst his other arguments, he suggests that “unlike most of the things we're actually frightened of, horror has rules”.

Speaking of being annoyed: I have a lot of thoughts about the Nick Clegg redemption tour and so do the notorious hellions of (checks) Chiswick.

Another good Garbage Day on… what is the point of an AI assistant anyway? There’s all the usual insight into how terrifying (and kind of terrible) they are, but he also lands the insight: I’m just not convinced the general public wants to be a manager. This really resonated with me. I like doing things! ‘Managing people’ is an important part of life and work, but it is the part of life and work that is not actually, me, myself, either living or doing work. There’s a sort of… Baby Boomer Life Path / Silicon Valley Feudalism Mentality here, where you win at life by managing the most people / lording over the most peasants.

Should it even count as a win if the peasants aren’t real?

And finally, speaking of CONTENT:

Helen Graves is one of my favourite writers in any genre - food and beyond. Her latest Flavour Nuggets talks about her experience of plagarism: One writer in particular used to lift viral posts from my old blog and publish the exact same pieces in a national newspaper without so much as a nod.... I often wonder if they think about it, but the answer, I’m sure, is: no. I think about it.

This annoys me too!

People used to plagiarise stuff from Pornokitsch fairly routinely, which is a bit silly because, c’mon, how sad do you have to be to steal someone else’s opinion about a sexy dragon book?! But Helen’s ‘content’ is her actual work, and moreover (unlike my thoughts on sexy dragon books) adds something new and useful to the world. Repurposing a hot take is pathetic. Stealing original work is a dick move.

I finished The Rouse and even filed the review. Link to come.

Somewhat belatedly, I read Pat Kirwin’s Take Your Eye Off the Ball, which is about how to really understand what’s happening in (American) football. It is great. A lot of the nuance will continue to fly over my head, but there are lots of relatively simple tips and tricks about how to watch things like blocking, or how cornerbacks stand. It also emphasises how much mental work football is: how much players need to recognise, memorise and react to at high speed. This is, Kirwin points out, why a lot of gifted athletic specimans don’t work out in the NFL. It isn’t the ‘speed of the players’ (e.g. they are fast enough), it is the ‘speed of the game’ (e.g. they can’t process all the decisions quickly enough). There’s a ‘2.0’ version of this book which, I suspect, is even more useful, as the general strategic ‘meta’ of the game has moved on quite a bit since 2010.

Ruth Ware’s The It Girl was on my Dark Academia TBR. It is… fine? There wasn’t a lot surprising, and, like many thrillers, it feels more ‘cinematic’ than ‘literary’ - culminating in a big splashy ending that would look better on screen than on the page. For a book about a ‘it girl’, the titular ‘it girl’ was less of a character than I would’ve assumed. She’s iconic, but absent, and although Ware posits that she is (was) the center of everything, that never really comes across. Still, good fun.

I don’t know why I keep reading Liz Tomforde’s books. They’re sports romances and the romances are fine, but the sports are terrible? In Her Own League is set in baseball, and I was cranky from the first pages when the book introduced the first female owner of an MLB team (LYING); the only MLB team in Chicago (LYING). I think my challenge here is… why is it MLB? Make up a new league! If it were the World Baseball Association or something wholly invented, I wouldn’t have cared. But randomly ignoring basic facts about a real league is batshit.

I know this seems like a petty bugbear, but imagine, I dunno, you’re a massive Star Wars fan, and you read a book and one of the romantic interests is the ‘sexy young woman who played Darth Vader’ or the ‘famous director of The Empire Strikes First’ or something like that. These are such overtly weird malapropisms that you wonder if the author is trying to introduce some sort of Philip K Dick style alternate timeline… or if they just actually hate their own source material.

Finally, finally read Margo’s Got Money Troubles and I absolutely loved it. I was laughing all the way through, which is amazing given how horrendously emotionally hard-hitting it is, and deeply anxiety provoking. I have very ill-formulated thoughts about Margo and, of all things, Yesteryear, in that they both address the lives (and bodies) of women online, and the ways that women can (or are forced to) find security for themselves. I don’t want to fall into the trap of pitting two women against one another, but they make a very interesting paired read.

Paul and I journeyed to wildest Devon to visit Smoke on the Waters and judge BBQ. It was a fantastic weekend. Smoke on the Waters is the closest I’ve seen to an American style smokehouse. It is a … structure in the middle of rural nowhere (sorry, Devon)… with a massive BBQ kitchen in the middle of it. Lots of benches, no table service. They cook every weekend, and when the food is gone: its gone. Occasional live music and a total absence of social media. It smelled, looked and felt right. Smoke on the Waters is about a two hour drive from Bristol, and we’re already planning our return.

The competition food was also exceptional. Some superstar teams were competing, and it showed in the results. It was a KCBS competition. KCBS is about a very specific flavour profile, presentation, and technique. It is undeniably tasty - especially done to the high standards we encountered - but it is also restrictive. Probably the best BBQ, that is, the BBQ that I enjoyed most, was the food that the cooks didn’t submit, but had whipped up for their own pleasure. It is, as you imagine, a pretty good metaphor for the awards process more broadly.

Stephanie Feldman is brilliant. Her new collection, The Night Parade, is out now.