Solstice Slate

The Creative Life, this Time Round the Sun

Today’s solstice marks time more meaningfully for many people than do either Christmas or New Year, neither of which occasion I’ve ever inwardly felt as vital, even when culture, convention and crowds have at times gamed my participation.

As we hang planetarily at furthest tilt away from the sun, it feels ripe to politely interrogate the past and the coming rotations, from the perspectives of the creative life just lived and the creative life intended during the immanent next cycle.

This go round, I certainly pushed at creative capacities.

To my surprise I wrote a novel, at full tilt, from March to June 2025. The story, significantly concerning Jan van Eyck, was written at the edge of my ability in terms of craft and meaning. A cussed stint at the desk was broken only by a short trip to Tarragona with my youngest for Easter. The novel is currently on submission to publishers via my staunch and supportive literary agent, Catherine Pellegrino of Marjacq Scripts, so please hold a small candle for that.

I worked in a brand-new medium - short film - and wrote, shot and released two zero budget, ‘slow and spurious’ works (Analogue Digital Dead Alive and The Library of Unwritten Books) which have been screened internationally, winning me my first and second international film festival awards. (The laurel presented as winner of Best Experimental Film at the Bangkok Movie Awards is below). Love me an elephant.

Another creative first was working in long-form non-fiction for the first time in which I am collaborating with a co-author and good friend, and this has been hugely stimulating and tightropey. News on this should emerge.

In addition, I’ve shoved, patted and cajoled the projects below, all of which are inherited from previous solar spins.

For Dead Man’s Wood, my co-written 1860s-set pastoral folk thriller, we finished up the script, scouted the locations, and appointed a casting agent and a BAFTA & Olivier-winning actor. Currently a screen agent is attaching a director and we’re looking to schedule a three week UK shoot between May and September 2026.

For a second movie, Phoney Ponies, a music-driven romantic comedy drama, my co-writer and I attached a producer, having previously attached the song-writer of a platinum-selling band to compose the film’s original music. Again, a screen agent is attaching a director and we’re looking to shoot in West Country, UK, between May and September 2027.

In terms of TV work, the adaptation of my 2018 novel Staying On is being developed with an Emmy-winning producer and events around that could unfold pretty quickly in the New Year. The same is also true of two other TV projects - an art heist comedy and an adaptation of my 2012 novel, Premiership Psycho.

My YA debut novel will be published sometime soon and I’ll talk about that when I can talk about that.

Also, there’s this Substack.

Now on to the juice in terms of brand new work currently in planning. The big one has the working title Love Story with Art Fraud and while I’m currently studiously agnostic as to if it’s a movie, or a novel, I’d better know by February because I plan to write it from March 2026

Researching this project led to reading much work about the contemporary art market, as well as making a study of the art of the portrait, and of the self portrait. The latter has occasioned many tender gallery assignations with Rembrandt van Rijn, as regular readers will know, and also led to a first eye-balling of Dürer’s messianic third self-portrait (1500, see top), with its soul-glow/Medusa hair, encountered in Munich’s Alte Pinakotheck in early August. The hell was he up to?

Laura Cumming’s excellent book A Face to the World has been super helpful on my tour around self-portraiture, talking of the ‘intensity about the eyes that even a child recognises as a self-portrait’, which is absurdly evident in LS Lowry’s illustrative, Mad Magazine-esque self portrait The Man with the Red Eyes, photographed below on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery in November.

While in portraiture, during that same visit to the NPG, honesty compelled me to finally lay down the cudgels of antipathy towards the aristocratic-bagging Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck and to accept his evident majesty, because really look at this 1620 Portrait of Cornelis van der Geest snapped in close up below. Jeez. Give over.

It is intended to write, shoot, edit and release another zero-budget ‘slow and spurious’ short film next year for which the locations need to be found.

Somewhat surprisingly, and with great enthusiasm, it seems highly likely that I am doing a PhD.

On top of this, it should be remembered, not least by myself, that I remain somewhat of a person, and that the work above has been done in the corners of a life whose main business is to be a breadwinner, husband, father to two teenagers, and a son to an elderly parent. My friends and myself may have been short-changed this year regarding time spent, though there’s been some magic days walking the byways, swimming the waters, and biking the paths with my dearly beloveds. God bless the Bavarian Lakes.

With risk of sounding like an Acknowledgements section, crucial to the creative life is teaching at Oxford International Centre for Publishing and Journalism, where I lecture on congruent subjects, and receive both research hours to work and support from colleagues.

While the year in truth has frigged me sideways in approximately fifty ways, with literally months’ of 5am starts at the desk, I do not seek otherwise, being here precisely to see what the capacities are.

But, enough. Sincere love to all brothers and sisters turning alike on this mysterious ball and seeking knowledge and nourishment.

Great orbit. 10/10. Would recommend.