Resolution 26 (Update 2)

Let's say progress has been fitful

In January, I used this platform to make a reckless vow to complete three ongoing pieces of annoyingly unfinished business in the form of a short novel for children, which I later dubbed Project Z, and a short novel for grown-ups, since nicknamed Project V. The third piece of unfinished business continues to be known publicly only as Project Nuts or Project Foolish or Project Daft and I’ve been careful to disclose nothing about it.

The information above was conveyed in February in a piece called Resolution 26 (Update 1). And now it is June. Has anything of interest happened since? Has anything happened at all?

Well, yes. The most significant was that my Macintosh had a nervous breakdown, resulting in all of the work I had done on Project Z in the early weeks of this year disappearing and taking a long time to recover from Outer Space, or wherever it went.

That was quite a setback. It did, though, have the useful side effect of obliging me to again look back at the various versions of parts of Project Z I had previously written in the hope that I would remember how I had improved them to create the new versions that had vanished.

This resulted in my making further improvements, which are now being woven into the since-retrieved material composed in early 2026. Move along, please. Nothing complicated or hapless to see here. I also now have around 35,000 words of it in pretty good shape. So that’s progress, after a fashion. There is, by the way, a clue about the nature of Project Z in the paragraphs above.

Project V? Nothing doing, apart from scribbling a few new thoughts in my Project V notebook.

In some ways, the greatest progress has been made on Project Nuts/Foolish/Daft. I am though, remaining deeply secretive about it until there’s something substantial to report. Will that be in the next three months? How should I know?

I will end with two paragraphs from a short story by Paul Theroux called Lady Max, which apparently forms part of a 1996 sort-of autobiographical novel called My Other Life. It is relevant to point out that Theroux was from Boston, USA.

“I looked up through the window of my study. Outside, London in midwinter was dark, and the brick and stone of the old house backs looked crusty with neglect. The trees were brittle and black too, and the damp night air had left a slimy sheen on the slate roofs. Some windows were lit - you could see the pale bulbs - but the overall impression was of stillness and darkness, of daylight sleepily emerging and seeping out of the low sky.

The darkness was a comfort. I was learning to live here. The stillness, and even that tomb-like quality in the shapes of houses, the sense of being buried alive here, penetrated me: it kept me indoors and calmed me and helped me think. A blue sky would have turned my head and tempted me away, but this grey morning and the backs of these old houses with their brown bricks kept my reverie intact, because I was not dealing with them or anything like them. There was no distraction here.”

It may be June, but outside rain is pouring down. And soon it will be Christmas.