A proof copy arrived of my book, Another Year Passes in Martin’s Life. It’s a satirical comedy in the style of Diary of a Nobody and Adrian Mole. It also owes a lot to A Confederacy of Dunces. The story focuses on Martin, a struggling filmmaker who turns to education to make money (sound familiar?) It follows a year in his life as he encounters various professional and personal challenges that need to be overcome. Writing it helped me through a strange period in my life. I don’t need to expand on that here, but it’s not autobiographical. I tried to write a different contribution to the diary on each Monday-Friday during most of 2024 and the start of 2025. Most of this month has been spent editing it. I’m proud to have finished it, but also happy to move on to something else. I think it shares a lot of the same themes and vibes that I had in my music recently (especially An Unreachable Peak and grief jars enigma, less so Hobbyist.)
The plan is to put it out into the world and get on with a different project. I don’t have any plans to push or promote it. I’m not trying to get into writing in a more professional capacity. It was very much a ‘bucket-list’ kind of thing, but I am sharing it because I can and I think some people may find it funny or curious. I didn’t even have an overarching structure for the project, beyond the format of a diary. I just wrote each day as it came and let the story unfold naturally. I had been inspired by Murakami’s Novelist As Vocation book, where he discussed finding the story while writing rather than planning it all before hand. I have to say that I found it quite liberating and I never really encountered doubts along the way of whether it would be completed or not. I just trusted the process and it got me there. I am experiencing something similar at the moment musically too. I am not planning or structuring songs, just making soundscapes that I hope will stitch together in some way. Trust the process!
It will hopefully be available on Amazon and Bandcamp soon.
