Category: Life and Culture

Writing Roundup 2025 (with a new publishing history)

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Cor, 2025 was a year. If I thought 2024 was the year of change, upheaval and new beginnings, 2025 has, without a doubt, said hold my beer. This isn’t the place I’ll be going into details about it, but I will say that all the change hasn’t (yet) affected my writing, and that’s what you’re here to read about, right? Write. From a writing POV, it’s been a flipping good year. Let me tell you about it. Let the 2025 writing roundup begin!

Pursuing Publication, a tragicomedy in five acts

I wrote my best gothic novel (imo), The House on Abaddon Square, back in 2021. Since then, the rejection letters have piled up. I vented about this in a poem called Another Slip for the Spike but, actually, it’s not all bad. I’ve had full manuscript requests and actual feedback from agents, which is more than many aspiring authors get. Sadly though, 2025 wasn’t the year to final get Abaddon Square over the line.

Back in March, I decided to switch focus. I write a lot of short stories and poems and, for the most part, they sit on my hard drive, edited and polished but stored away. Imagine a Raiders of the Lost Ark style warehouse full of literary flotsam and jetsam. Perhaps, mused I, these pieces deserve a shot at being read by someone other than me. I made myself a spreadsheet, researched journals and anthologies and competitions, and got submitting. And what do you know: I hooked some success!

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Is Draugveil AI? 

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Is it Draugveil AI? At this point, the Ukranian underground ‘band’ needs little introduction. Three weeks ago, that album cover dropped and magnetised the derision of kvltist and casj metalhead alike, as well memelords far outside the metalsphere. The brave and curious gave it a listen and found that, well, actually, there might be something meritious there after all. And then the real twist hit. The suggestion that Cruel World of Dreams and Fears, Draugveil’s rose-wreathed debut LP, was AI-generated. This one has hit hard for me, as we shall explore below. But first, we gotta get to the bottom of this. Is Draugveil AI? 

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2024: A Year of Writing

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2024 has been a funny old year for my writing. In fact, it’s been a year of so much upheaval and change that, looking back from the tail-end, I can’t believe it’s all happened in the space of twelve months. I look at my reading list and can’t believe I read The Goldfinch and books by Merisha Pessl and Katherine Min so recently. They feel like they belong to another chapter in my life. As does so much of my writing. Let me walk you through my 2024.

New Digs 2024

The Lady K and I made the decision to relocate early in 2024 and things moved at record speed – we moved from Brighton to Salisbury in April. I love Salisbury. I grew up on Salisbury Plain and I’m thrilled to be back. But there was a complication. We moved in April and the academic year finishes in July. I chose to teach at my Sussex-based school until the academic year was done. There were a few reasons. I didn’t want to have the extra pressure of joining a new school in the final term and I didn’t want extra change at a time of so much upheaval. Mostly, I really enjoyed my school and wanted to finish up properly with a class I’d really bonded with. Of course, for twelve weeks, I’d be living and working two hours apart.

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The Dragon and the Cross: A St. George’s Day Poem

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A couple of years ago, I started writing a St. George’s Day poem. I had this idea, see — well, more of an image, in my head. I’d seen a billboard with an England fan’s face on it. White greasepaint, red cross, as solemn as if his life depended on the match. Who knows, maybe it did. I don’t have much truck for football myself, but it did spark an idea in me. Rather than St. George a chivalrous knight, why not St. George a berserker, a raging, painted warrior fighting for his faith against his hellish opponent? I could write about that.

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Saltburn and the Gothic Tradition

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Okay, so Saltburn might not be as hot on everyone’s lips as it was when it dropped on Amazon just before Christmas, but I only just got to watching it because nobody told me it was a gothic film. A gothic film? If I’d known that, it would have earned an immediate Go-Straight-to-the-Top-of-my-Watchlist ticket without passing go. Unconvinced? Do the neon club scenes of the first five minutes have no place in the gothic canon? The almost-contemporary mid-00s setting? Ah, but what about the references to Shelley and Byron? What about that bloody scene on the garden bench, or that, ahem, penetrating scene on the fresh grave?

Let’s take a scalpel to Saltburn and see what tropes of the gothic tradition we can lay out on the slab.

Saltburn

In naming itself after an ancestral home, Saltburn joins itself with some familiar titles in the gothic tradition: Northanger Abbey, Gormenghast, Rawblood, Crimson Peak… It’s a kissing cousin to even more – The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udulpho, The Fall of the House of Usher – and joins Manderley and Bly Manor as the seat of a rich family and a corporeal symbol of their legacy. Like the aforementioned piles, naming the house makes Saltburn is a character in its own right: a warren of wealth standing above and untouched by the seductions and Machiavellian plots within it. It stands like a stone in a blood and tear-stained river.

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