Looming Void: May 13, 2025

Wrestling with the start of book production.

10,000 minutes

This past week churned and burned. I made progress on the book but what headway I achieved was swamped by newly arising book-related tasks (and when I say tasks, some feel more like humongous projects).

I should have expected all this. I’ve a day-by-day timetable to subject my fifteen chapters to one or two edits (structural/content edits but also stylistic/narrative edits), followed by one (but probably three) entire-book edits, all in time for a July deadline to send the manuscript to my copy editor (and behind her is queued my proofreader). This timetable is familiar, echoing work over the past months. But I’d forgotten my mystery novel experience: at some point book production becomes real and turns into a nuts-and-bolts process that looms as both interesting and tedious. And the mystery novels did not include vast complexities of copious end notes, a bibliography, photos, quotation permissions, and an index.

So what I’ve ended up sinking into over these last few days is stabbing at production tasks while squeezing in the editing impost/pleasure. I was going to list my grab bag of production necessities in this newsletter but frankly it’s all still a mess, so I include the result of today’s “dreaming” session (which is what I call my brainstorming efforts). Please don’t immediately categorise me as hopelessly disorganized: method and plans will emerge from this chaos, and I’ll be happy to share more coherent plans as they drop.

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This newsletter is not my life. I am me, far more than this newsletter portrays. But the newsletter’s title “Looming Void” makes clear that I’m talking about existential matters: this book, dread arising from the climate crisis, and the horrible grief of getting old. Right now, health and mortality anxieties have receded, leaving only that weepy sense that there’s not enough time left. Climate change fears keep geysering up from the depths but I’ve dampened them down by cutting down on news and social media. Today my existential fulcrum is the book (and of course family and friends, not a topic here). So it’s interesting to come across an instance of culture that cuts across my very being.

I did not wish to watch Adolescence, the recently released Netflix four-episode series co-written by esteemed screenwriter Jack Thorne and actor Stephen Graham (with exemplary direction by Philip Barantini). I told my wife that all I knew about it was its echo of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, an echo I did not wish to revisit (enough of teenage evil, trauma, unknowingness, right?). But she wisely insisted. Last night we watched the third episode. Each of the three hours so far has been starkly different, in terms of plot unwinding and filmic direction/cinematography. I have no idea what the final episode will say. All I know is the dream I had last night, horrific and violent and morally damning.

This morning I said, “no, no more, I won’t watch the finale.” Will I? Who knows? But something about the emotions this series engendered—emotions troubling and horrified and grieving—seems to hint at all my core terror. Perhaps it’s this: we want the world to be how we think it can be, but underneath it is incomprehension and a scream.

(Sorry for this waffly philosophizing. I’m no philosopher, indeed confusion is my ruling precept. I just need to type what I just typed.)

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Monsters

The kind of article Tess McClure has just written in The Guardian, “In the most untouched, pristine parts of the Amazon, birds are dying. Scientists may finally know why,” is the category that opens a vein in me. Ecologist John Blake has been in an amazingly remote 1.7 million hectares (I have to convert that, it’s about 130 kilometers x 130 kilometers) of Amazonian jungle for a quarter century. Over the most recent decade bird numbers have more than halved. Why, given the lack of the usual suspects of human degradation or habitat loss? It’s not disease or parasites. Now they have a culprit: the slow drip, drip of gradually increasing temperatures. Climate change. Global warming. says. “One thing I am becoming particularly tired of as a professional researcher,” Blake is quoted as saying, “is writing these obituaries for birds.” Do I know anyone else reading this and battling tears? No.

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Mortality

A holding pattern: the thicket of confusing work has meant I haven’t exercised diligently over the past week. My diet erodes and I drank a glass and a half of red wine every day. Familiarity with a minor heart issue has finally and inevitably led to complacency.

I know I need to do better, for my own sake and for the sake of others. But this is a time for work worries not bodily worries. Next week might pivot the other way.

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