Chrysalids

Hello Child of the Endless Tribulations, I hope you are managing to be like a slender coloured ribbon in the Great Winds of Circumstance … or at least feel on top of your admin.

This is just to say I have begun a new Substack. I have done this for two reasons and here are those reasons now.

Firstly, I want a place to preview new writings in 2026. Particularly the novel, Prodigiosa!, I’m working on. I’ll release chapters as they are written.

I suspect most people follow this current Substack for news about my projects and live poetic experiences and thoughts about language and magick rather than my actual literary endeavours, so I’m splitting those off elsewhere. The new Substack is free but private, so subscribe and I’ll approve.

Secondly, and perhaps of interest to those of you living a life of art and making, a couple of years ago I was really frustrated at my lack of success as a writer. No publisher or critic will touch me, despite me having enthusiastic readers across the world.

Then I realised that the problem was not that I couldn’t find the hidden doorway into the publishing castle … but rather that I didn’t actually know what I wanted. What on earth does ‘success’ mean? It’s a misty puff of vagueness and if you embark on a creative life without knowing what you want, well then, you’ll always be seeking something just out of your questing grasp.

So I thought to put a number on my writing career.

And so, by the time my body-of-work is complete (a polite way of saying by the time I die), my hope is to have thirty to fifty deep readers of my work. A figure which feels simultaneously easy to achieve and improbable.

The new Substack is a way of keeping score on my target.

Chrysalids will be a place for people who like my writing (and who might want to gamely volunteer to be one of the thirty to fifty) to read brand new work before anyone else – including my work-in-progress novel Prodigiosa!, receive exegeses of previous work, and be first in line to put their name down for my regularly released limited edition publications. Sometimes these are gifted in the Blakean tradition, sometimes they are sold. Either way, by subscribing to Chrysalids you’ll get first option.

The name Chrysalids is taken from my favourite book, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I’ve written a celebration of the cover of my favourite edition of that book here.

The logo of the new page (and colophon in my books) is my own inked hand, plus an extra digit, in tribute to that 1964 cover and the idea that runs through all of Wyndham’s writing – what makes us different is what makes us vital.

If you enjoy my writing I hope you’ll join me on Chrysalids. It may only be a handful of people for a while but who knows, it could be fifty by the time I hatch into the next world.