Today is November 18th, which is the official publication day of Slow Gods, whoop whoop!! And I am here with my famously refined marketting skills and notoriously nuanced copy-writing abilities, to tell you a bit about it.

So if you look real hard at the gorgeous cover by Nico Taylor, you might suspect that this one ain’t a Greek retelling. In a hard left turn from scandal and sandals, I went full space opera – pew pew!

Specifically, I asked the question: what would happen if a nearby binary star system was going to go supernova? Science provides some fairly quick, obvious answers. The resulting shockwave from two really big stars smashing into each other would spread out across the galaxy, resulting in a visible brightening in the sky which would be seen billions and billions of miles away – and more relevantly, the extinction of all life within say, 100 light years of that initial boom.

But of course a supernova doesn’t happen out of no where. You can see it coming for millenia in advance. This means that were a binary star in our local neighbourhood actually reach the point where it might be a threat, we’d potentially have a really long time to think about it, and maybe even try to do something about it.

Unless of course, we didn’t. Because if we have learned anything about people, it’s that we’re not always great at looking that far ahead…

So what does it mean to save a planet? How much can you save, how long does it take, how much will you sacrifice? And what if there isn’t just one planet caught in this blast, but many. Many, many worlds, each with different cultures, leaders, ambitions, ideals. Where do you go, when you know your world is doomed to die? How do you survive, in a galaxy that might not want to see you live?

This is page one of the book, essentially. Things get significantly more dramatic from there.

The hardback of Slow Gods is out now, and the audiobook (read by the wonderful Peter Kenny) is due to follow within a matter of weeks, with paperback out in 2026! If you’re in the UK and strike fast, you can also potentially pick up a signed hardback from your local indie bookshop… the perfect kinda-apocalyptic-but-maybe-it’s-fine gift perhaps….?

Meanwhile, in the rest of my life…

So the eagle-eyed will have spotted that I haven’t written in this blog for a while, and have been pretty quiet across a lot of social media. This is not for lack of enthusiasm – it’s cos I’m absolutely knackered, and in a totally different thing from pitching you Slow Gods I’m also now gonna do an update on roughly the last 12 months of my life.

Writing

My partner often says “darling, I am confident you will write forever – the only question is whether people will buy your books”. And of course… I’ve been writing. The next novel is with my publisher on the cusp of going to copy edits, presumably for publication sometime in 2026… and I can tell you basically nothing about it. Other than I had a blast writing it, and goodness it gets twisty-wisty really quite fast.

However, it is also important to try other things and slow down a bit so I’m not producing too many books a year, as frankly, that’d be bad business as well as dubious for my own creative noggin. Thus, I spent a large part of 2025 writing for a video game… about which I can also tell you absolutely nothing, for NDAs exist and will be honoured. What I will tell you is I learned loads, had a wonderful time working for genuinely lovely people, and actually being paid to think about this stuff did wonders for combatting a surprisingly thick blanket of shame that I’d been hiding under as someone who’s always loved video games but didn’t feel like I should talk about it in polite society. Guys: games are great.

I am now working on the next book, about which I can again tell you nothing. Sorry. I guess the headlines are: two novels and a video game are gonna appear at some point in the distant future, by which time I may well have forgotten some of the details of previous books and will have to remind myself of stuff like ‘characters’ and ‘plot’ before I dare to speak on them in public.

Thinking of having forgotten some details… I have had the privilege to spend time at various excellent festivals in Europe in 2025, largely in France, discussing the Gameshouse and Sweet Harmony, and in Spain talking about Penelope. And if you think I had to go back and speed-read some of my own stuff so that I could remember the basics, you are correct. But it has also been a joy to travel, especially since I’m starting to see people who I’ve met before and have the pleasure of hanging out with some incredible humans. Big shout outs to Audrey Pleynet and Floriane Soulas – they are both stunningly brilliant and if you read French, go check out their stuff immediately. It’s also worth once again acknowledging just how hard my publishers work, both in the UK and abroad, and particularly thanking Le Belial for organising so many adventures and tolerating my insistence on doing all of them by train.

That said, travel is fundamentally a bit tiring. I would never say no to the privilege of adventure, and the chance to meet and hopefully honour such many lovely fans – but keep in the back of your mind that I am starting to feel a little knackered around the edges….

Lighting

I continue to light gigs, because frankly being paid to listen to live music is a a joy. It also remains, I feel, important to get out of the house, meet people, maintain the technical side of my noggin, and remind myself that no ‘art’ be it music or book, is worth being an ass over.

There have been some real highs of 2025 – The Devil Makes Three, Macy Grey, Michael Rother, The Anchoress – and though not a lighting challenge, ‘cos podcast, I experienced an actual sense of fandom lighting a live show of Mom Can’t Cook, by far and away the daftest podcast in my feed but one that just brings the ridiculous joy.

There have also been a lot of stresses. The industry is still short of techs, so I’ve been doing more shifts than I planned on, which is always tiring. A lot of younger techs have been coming through as well with touring parties, and I have to bite my fist quietly as I watch confident kids who barely know how to use the kit do questionable jobs of dubious merit, while I, as the in-house tech, nod and smile and say ‘oh goodness, how nice’. I’ve also had a range of artists from the brand new to the very experienced. Some of older artists are an absolute joy to work with, and give you space to do your job and you are privileged to hear them live. Mavis Staples and Arrested Development stand out immediately in my memory as high points that you are just grateful to be watching. However a lot of the older artists came through venues back when our haze machines were made of lead and ashes and the rig was just blinding parcans flashing between red and blue, and as a result can give lighting notes that are… oppressive, shall we say. And of course they have been touring far too long for some random lampie in a venue to come up to them and argue that modern haze is hypo-allergenic and modern kit is nuanced and besides, you’re better than that one idiot in Southampton last month who just kept on running the strobe, honest, really…

… and thus, you end up doing a worse job than you could, hands tied behind your back. I’m not unsympathetic to their position at all, and feel that most legends have earned their legendary status through so much labour that frankly, fine. Let’s not argue. But it’s still hard to do what you know is a bad job, live in front of 900 people, night after night.

Then there are some young bands, who will come to you with unrealistic expectations, not know how to express them, point at random lights and say ‘what does that do’ and worst of all, not listen to your answers. I had a shocking gig a short while ago where at one point four members of an ensemble were stood around my desk arguing about whether a blue was blue enough, each one demanding that I make something closer to what they had in their head, which was of course different from what their colleague expected, while utterly refusing to listen to my very patient explanations of why and how we could do things better. It was a real reminder that to a lot of touring artists, technicians are merely extensions of their desks. We are a human-machine interface, there to poke some buttons, rather than humans possessed of skill and creativity who have spent literally decades learning and understanding their tools, their venues and their art. Guys: we are in fact a) humans and b) much better at designing/mixing than you. By all means give us a brief – we will honour it – but then let us damn well make you look and sound fantastic, which we can, if you just step back a little.

As the industry struggles with cashflow, technicians are consistently paid less than inflation while giant ticket companies like Ticketmaster make a mint, which is… frustrating. The lack of ready cash also means kit is starting to die to simple entropy, and you are constantly bodging fixes and re-running cables in an effort to squeeze a bit more life out of units that frankly, should have been taken out of circulation five years ago.

On the plus side, I have been applying some of my lampie skills to volunteering at my local Repair Cafe – at least, when I have the time. This is a free service whereby people can bring their broken electricals down to a community centre, and a bunch of volunteers will do their absolute best to fix it. It’s a good cause, highlighting repair and reuse in our economy rather than constant consumption, and it feels good to use some corner of my engineer’s brain to give back to my community, in whatever tiny way I can.

Anyway, all of which is to say… there have been some fabulous lighting moments, there have been a lot of needlessly stressful lighting moment. And as they progress, I just get a little bit more knackered…

Fighting

There is a running joke that my life is ‘lighting, writing, fighting’ because of my dominant hobby of learning (and helping these days to sometimes teach) escrima. However to be honest, I’ve attended far fewer classes this year than I’d like, which makes me incredibly sad, but there are reasons…

Most importantly, I’ve been moving house. I use the ongoing tense because technically, I’ve been moving house since September 2024, which is when we sold my flat. With an offer in place, there was then a flurry of activity as myself and my partner rushed to find somewhere new, with the twin ambitions of a little more space, and if possible, a tiny, tiny patch of garden. Eventually we found this unicorn in October 2024, made an offer, heard nothing for a month, then were told that our offer was rejected but there was a near-identical property two doors down, would we like to go for this? Which we did. Our offer was accepted at the beginning of November, and then various solicitors moved at a glacial pace, meaning we finally got the keys in March 2025.

So far, so wonderful! Except…

The house we bought has been empty for 7 years. The walls and wood are good, but there was no flushing toilet, no electricity, single-glazed windows that didn’t close, plaster exploding off the walls, no kitchen, no central heating system, no hot water. Nothing had been done to it since it was built in 1968. And so began 8 months of work.

During those 8 months we were extraordinarily lucky to be able to stay with my Mum back in my childhood home, which I am so, so grateful for, but also came with its own snags. (More on that anon.) In the intervening time we had to start from the bottom up with rewiring, replumbing, replastering (on day one our wonderful plasterer Jerry knocked a bit of plaster off and said ‘ah, your internal walls are tissue paper, that’ll be why’ and thus replastering became re-cementing too) re-everything, basically. We knew this when we took the job on. We knew it’d be a beast. But it has been 8 months of beast, and goodness, I’m shattered. We were able to do some bits and bobs – my partner installed the kitchen, I’ve been painting, at some point we’ll get round to sanding and oiling the floors etc. – but our every conversation since March has been logistics. Buying sockets, organising site visits, finding carpets, finding fitters, working out the logistics of who has to go first and next and last, constantly moving boxes up and down stairs to make room for the next thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an extraordinary privilege to have this problem and the fact it’s a ruin means we’ve had the chance to try and make as low-carbon a home as we humanly can… but it’s also been shatteringly hard, especially while living out of a suitcase in my Mum’s loft.

My Mum is a ridiculously generous human, who has told us we can stay as long as we like. But she is also old, and there’s a lot of things she’s struggled with in her racketty 1860s London house. Thus, when we moved in, though it wasn’t a demand, there was a gentle request that we try and sort out some stuff she hasn’t been able to deal with. Thus, while also doing all the stuff I’ve described above, I’ve also been fixing up Mum’s house one busted socket, mysterious cupboard that hasn’t been opened since 2002 and leaking toilet at a time. This climaxed a few months ago when Mum’s request of ‘I’d like to get the front of the house painted’ revealed that the front of the house was a whisper and a prayer from falling off, resulting in the arrival of a team of (remarkably excellent) brickies and the raising of a scaff that turned the house into a five-week building site.

Meaning that as I type this, to say ‘I’m a bit knackered’ doesn’t really begin to cover it…

Burnout

So I experienced burnout in 2018, and was incredibly grateful to my publisher then (as I am now) for giving me some time and space just to dribble. Since then I’ve been diagnosed as autistic, and the NHS is more interested in helping me sleep and manage the chronic pain from the medical condition known as ‘your face it not work good good’. (Also known as TMJ – I’m not gonna attempt to spell it.) As a result, when burnout came in 2025, I was initially slow to identify it, ‘cos of how I can now sleep and my face hurts a bit less. But eventually even I clocked on that someit dodgy was happening.

What do I mean by burnout? Everyone has different experiences, so I can only tell you mine. The first thing that happens is my body starts to go out of whack. Rosacea and ezcema flares, I get cold after cold, and finally my asthma goes into overdrive leaving me with a low-level chronic cough which starts to clear only for a period of intense work or stress to cause another hacking flare. Running gets harder resulting in a less resilient body, cooking takes too much energy and finally cognition goes out of the window. I won’t go to escrima if I think I’m tired enough to not have control and be a threat to my partners, so that joy is diminished. I can still just about write and answer emails, but everything takes three times longer than it should, and when I look at whatever I’ve done a few days later, I can see it’s bad. I start making mistakes when lighting or diagnosing faults, things I should do get pushed further and further down the list, and all of this is fairly scary, to be honest. Because as a freelancer, this is it. There is no sick leave, no sign-off. There’s just the things I need to do, and if I can’t do them… what the hell is next? And who the hell even am I?

In the final stage, I am non-verbal. The morning after working a long gig, I may be reduced to nothing but ‘quack’ sounds and a level of communication that is best summed up as ‘breakfast good good’. If I haven’t worked a gig, then by 4 p.m. I will be at that point anyway. I can push through when required, but the after-effect of pushing is that I can’t read, can’t speak, can barely move at more than a hand-through-sludge speed, even find watching TV or a film too damn hard. I overload at noise and movement; meltdown when getting home late at night, reduced to just lying on the floor with my legs in the air (a position I find quite nice, no idea why) until my brain can re-enter my body. The numb stripping away of thought, body, action – it is grim. And though there are good days and bad days, for every day when I do have a commitment (gig, meeting etc.) I often find that to get through it I need to go back to bed for a few hours in the day just to be able to achieve something resembling human speech.

And I chose this. When we decided to renovate a house while living out of a suitcase, we knew it would be tough. We knew 2025 was going to be a long, hard year. And I choose – with love and joy – to travel to festivals, and work on a game, and do what I can do to support my Mum. All of it, correct, often delightful choices. And at the end of it, there will be something wonderful, and I will be proud of what I’ve done. But right now, as of November 2025, I am also a dribbly mess, ping-ponging between days when I can type (hello!) and days where my fingers can’t even move across the keyboard. I have made my choices and don’t regret them, but my goodness I’m looking forward to January 2026, when everything might finally chill out and calm down, and I will rest.

To Conclude…

Thank you for getting this far!

It’s been a long 2025.

You know what would make it better…? Maybe buying my latest book….! Thanks!!!!!