What Good Is

I was back in Kansas City briefly, and although a whirlwind trip, I did manage to sneak in visits to three different BBQ joints: Jack Stack (twice), Q39 and Joe’s Kansas City.

Jack Stack is not my favorite - my sister really likes it, because she swears by the sides. I had a rib-related disappointment there on my last visit, so I don’t trust them for those any more, and stick to the sandwiches. Given that I rate ribs above all other forms of BBQ, that’s the equivalent of the scene in a cop drama where the homicide detective is sent off to write parking tickets. All that said, they do a good sandwich, and their lamb ribs, although ‘exotic’, are great. I’m neutral on the sides, but my sister has very strong feelings about the cheesy corn and beans, and her endorsement is important.

Q39 is famous for the brisket, and, yup. That’s a great brisket. I also really liked the fries. (We sound very sides-obsessed as a family, which, I suppose, we are?) I also highly recommend the burnt ends.

And Joe’s is, well, Joe’s. Anecdote within anecdote: years ago, we did a blind taste test. My whole family split up and crawled over the city, bringing back from each one a) ribs, b) a pound of meat and c) a bottle of sauce. Anne and my sister-in-law (non KC natives, and therefore unbiased) then unpacked everything and set it out as a blind taste test. After a long afternoon of gorging and scoring, we discovered that there was a clear champion: Joe’s. This is backed up by, well, everyone else’s opinion.

Which is to say, last week, we ate the hell out of Joe’s. Sandwiches, ribs and one of every side (side obsessed!). We were there at a weird, midafternoon, surprisingly-empty time, and got to linger over the table - even going back for a tray of burnt ends. It was great.

And that - to land this particular anecdotal helicopter - is the point here. It was great. Capital-G-Great. The UK has an influx of BBQ places, because the arc of history bends towards tasty justice. Personally, I’ve also gotten pretty good at making my own BBQ over the past few years. Low and slow and smoked and hickory-scented is, although still not ubiquitous, at least not uncommon. I can now say that the BBQ available to me in London, whether that’s in a restaurant or off my own smoker is Good.

But… the BBQ I ate in KC? It was Great.

Apologies, as I use this example a lot but… Back when I was judging the Kitschies (pours rum in remembrance), I had to read a lot of books, very, very quickly. What I found is that, at the start, I was a harsher critic. But as time went on, I’d be tagging more things as ‘maybes’ or passing them to other judges as possibilities. The more I read, the more my standards gravitated to the mean. I don’t want to use the word ‘lowered’, but, ‘normalised’ perhaps. My qualitative taste was, ultimately, susceptible to context.

I wasn’t the only one facing this - and all the other judges over the years experienced a similar challenge. That’s why you have a panel, after all. We all had our own coping mechanisms, ways of dealing with the Creeping Mediocrity. For me, it was a reset; taking a break for some sort of external reminder. For the Kitschies, time-constrained or not, I would take a break and revisit a book that I truly found Great. The Hobbit, Perdido Street Station, The Crystal Cave, whatever. Or even a previous winner: A Monster Calls is a quick read and serves as a qualitative North Star. An award like the Kitschies wasn’t about celebrating the norm of goodness (that’s what prizes using popular votes mechanics do), it is about discovering the outlier of greatness. The best way of doing that is to remind yourself, occasionally, what greatness actually looks like. If you’re just starting at the good all day, you celebrate incremental improvements - that’s not bad, by any means, and there’s value to it. But the great lurks miles away, squatting on the mountaintop.

(I’ve also had the honour of judging prizes, where to be honest, I needed an external reminder of ‘goodness’. I don’t say this [solely] to be snarky, but to warn that the, uh, ‘contextual quality normalisation’ can slide into the negative as well. What’s the fiction equivalent of the Overton Window? The Overton Kindle? The Goodkind Door?!)

Incremental improvement is important! We should strive to be better every day. The arc of history is slow, after all, and there’s we should make things a little bit better, whenever and wherever we can. But… it is also worth taking that occasional step back from the context we’re in; getting the perspective we need to reset our standards. Remind ourselves not only what good looks like, but also that the great is possible. Whether that’s A Monster Calls or Joe’s ribs, these things exist in our world to inspire us to achieve the extraordinary.

The best part, of course, is that I had placed an order with my butcher before I even got on the plane back to KC. I want to make great BBQ. I am now fully, freshly aware of how far I have to go, and I’m excited to get there.

what I’m doing

I am now a TED speaker. Mostly! We’ll see how it looks on video. I think there will be something to watch in early 2026, so, watch this space. Thanks to everyone that turned up. Doing my extremism x BBQ x unintentional stand-up routine in front of two hundred people would’ve been a lot more awkward if everyone weren’t absolutely lovely. I made some amazing new friends as well.

Kindling is in the wild! There’s a website now, but, more importantly, I’ve already run through the initial print run. The next three Big Questions are briefed out to various experts, and I’ll be doing another print run in January.

Worlds of Wonder is out! For real now. A collection of essays on children’s literature. It has two essays by yours truly on some classic fantasy stories: “The Dark is Rising” and “The Sword in the Stone”.

Given the time of year, I should probably mention that The Big Book of Cyberpunk makes a REALLY GOOD GIFT for the reader / gamer / film buff / computer nerd / political activist / best friend / in your life. There's the floppy US edition or the stately two volume hardcover UK edition. Both look ravishing in a very large stocking.

My latest anthology is 95% delivered. All the authors and stories are in, and I’m just ‘tidying up’ (e.g. ‘writing’) the editorial matter. As I write this, I realise that it hasn’t actually been announced yet, so, uh, that’s all you get to now for know.

I have two (2) book pitches out on sub - one fiction, one nonfiction. In a perfect world, I’m always working on two (2) books at a time, one at the admin/rights/organisational stage and one at the writing/editing stage. This would, conceptually, mean I have exactly one book out every year. In our actual world: ROFL.

what I’m reading

We go to the library every week - both to Teach The Child and also make a tiny, worthy concession to the cost of living crisis (85% of our discretionary spending is on books; fun fact: going to the library has not cut that down at all). Our local library has a very cool thing, which is an entire bookcase full of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. I’ve been trying to get a different one every week, and have learned about topics as diverse as Clausewitz and Citizenship. They’re not all brilliant books, but even the less-than-great ones generally contain one or two interesting notions that stick with me.

I’ll try to do a pre-holidays list of reading recommendations, but here are some books I didn’t enjoy for various reasons:

Ali Hazelwood’s Problematic Summer Romance was, indeed, problematic. No false advertising there. It was also very slight: it felt like bonus content for the rest of her series. I suspect you need to be much more emotionally invested to find the romantic silver lining in a story about grooming. That necessary connection between reader and character isn’t there when it reads like an author’s fanfic of her own minor characters.

I think Hazelwood is a lightning rod for criticism, possibly because she’s one of the pioneering - and most visible - modern romance authors. Generally speaking, I think that criticism is unfounded. Her works - goofy, silly, filthy, over the top - are compulsively readable, and invariably good-natured fun. In this case, that good-natured niceness was a varnish over something so deeply, intentionally problematic and the resulting bon-bon of ickiness felt all the more troublesome for it. A thought experiment, maybe? I applaud her commitment to dancing across all possible tropes across the body of her work, but I think mining this particular one was a mistake.

I made a start on the Artefacts of Ouranos series. I enjoyed Trial of the Sun Queen a lot: it is by the numbers, but, by gum, I like those numbers. Rule of the Aurora King, however, lost me. The format was different - it changed perspectives and tenses - which was already a bit off. Then, by the second chapter, the author was feverishly ret-conning events and adding new ‘secrets’ and ‘powers’ that the character apparently knew all along but had forgotten to tell us and and and… It had undeniable momentum and the joyous ‘throwing the sink at it’ vibe never tailed off, but I’m afraid I don’t have it in me for book three. I feel slightly hypocritical as, with Throne of Glass, for example, I was happy to perservere through several ok-ish books to get to the wonderfulness. But I don’t have it in me for this one.

The Chamber by Will Dean was another library book (thanks, libraries!). I really liked about 95% of this locked room mystery featuring underwater welders. The most locked of all rooms: six people trapped deep underwater in a pressurised tank. But then they start dying! Aaah! The book was a concatenation of diving-related horror stories and gruesome anecdotes (awesome), but the actual mystery was pretty lacklustre. When it came to the reveal! Or was it!? The real reveal!!! OR WAS IT?!?! sequence of twists at the end, I was left a little, well, high and dry. (Zing.)

One recommendation, just to counteract that swathe of negativity: Michael Twitty’s The American South is a new cookbook from Phaidon. It is gorgeous, Twitty’s voice is a blast, and the recipes look amazing. The only thing I miss in it is a steer on portion sizes, as yesterday I accidentally made two gallons of soup…