week 22 / 2025

“And as we wind on down the road / our WEEKNOTES taller than our souls…”

This has been a low energy sort of week, the back half of which I mostly spent reading for pleasure rather than for work. On one level, that was a necessary response to a whole bunch of workshop time, which is always exciting in the moment, but very draining in the aftermath—and perhaps particularly so after a couple of months of high-intensity focus.

On reflection, however, there seems to be a pretty clear positive correlation between energy levels and activity: that high-intensity period had a lot of beneficial momentum to it, and I feel like maybe I slowed down a little too much? The feast-or-famine dynamic of the freelance life is a tricky thing, and while I’m definitely better at handling the peaks than I used to be, I think that maybe I let the revs drop too low in the slow phases, which means I have to stir my way through the gearbox in order to get moving again.

(Setting aside the motoring metaphors, delivered by someone who never got around to finishing their driving lessons, this is as much a question of types of work as one of quantity: while it was a pleasure and a privilege to spend a whole week on my art, that sort of creative and self-indulgent work might be more evenly distributed, in order that its energising effects are less all-or-nothing.)

Anyway, let’s have look at the ledger…

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT VIENNETTA. (The last two days of the Media Evolution foresight cycle at the top of the week. I now have all the material I need to write up the stories… and perhaps on some level the slow phase at the end of the week has been me giving my back-brain time to ferment that material? I have thumbnails for all four pieces, ready to go in the week to come.)
• Six hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Mostly playing amanuensis in the final online workshop, plus some prep. There’ll be writing to do for PORTON once the VIENNETTA stories are done.)
• Four hours on PROJECT PONTIF. (Keeping this one on a low flame as best I can, but PORTON and VIENNETTA are competing for a similar sort of big-picture bandwidth, so I’ve not been able to dive in deep.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always—but also another ten hours or so of reading that sits somewhere between research and self-indulgence. (One of the great things about doing the sort of work that I do is that all reading is research, in a way, even when it’s just rereading much-loved fiction or comics—which is a fine thing, if reading is also the thing you love best to do. However, one must be careful to not let that become an excuse to sit on your arse and read comics for days on end, while telling yourself you’re working...)

kinmaking

I managed to get some unscheduled kinmaking in this week. Mikko Dufva of SITRA, the Finnish innovation agency, is in Malmö for a few weeks, and was involved in the workshops for VIENNETTA, where I got to meet him briefly. But by sheer happenstance, we both turned up at the Malmö Brewery Taproom at the same time on Thursday evening, which led to a good long ramblechat about futures theory and practice.

reading

We’re kinda spoiled for choice in this week’s reading section, as suggested above. The most substantial book in the stack is probably Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom, but other than noting that it’s both excellent and timely, I’m going to hold off talking about it in detail, because I think it deserves a full-scale write-up of its own.

Instead, I’ll extend the line from last week; reading Carey’s Lucifer run clearly put me in the mood for revisiting favourite turn-of-the-century graphic novels, but I’ve also been reading a few chunks per day of Elizabeth Sandifer’s Last War in Albion, which is her historical account of what she describes as the magickal war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, conducted principally through the medium of comics.

So I went back to Alan Moore’s Promethea, which is much beloved by me. I was reading Morrison’s The Invisibles not long after its original publication, borrowing them from an associate back in the early Noughties, and remain more than passing fond of it; despite the similar timing of its publication, I encountered Promethea much later, probably around the time I was doing my Masters in 2011-12 (on which, in hindsight, it had no small degree of influence).

Sandifer’s framing of the occult-epistemological struggle between Moore and Morrison is a bit overstated—purposefully so, I suspect—and, in its earlier stages, distinctly choppy/sloppy in quality, but it has nonetheless clarified for me why I fell much harder for Promethea than for Morrison’s chaotic mob. I say clarified, but I would be hard pressed to explain it briefly here; think of it as an emotional or even spiritual clarification, perhaps, rather than a (purely) intellectual one.

But at the root of it, I suspect, is my affinity for system: Promethea is a story, of course—indeed, the whole point of these books is that they declare themselves to be story incarnate—but it is also quite openly an exposition of Moore’s approach to magickal theory and practice, which is orderly and systematic where Morrison’s is instinctive and chaotic. I realise now, as I didn’t when I was doing my Masters, that structure and system are important to me in terms of my own creative work, and in how I see the world. Whether my affection for Promethea (both the books and the character) are a cause of that affinity, or simply a symptom, I guess I’ll never really know.

a clipping

I will direct your attention this week once again to friend-of-the-show Karl Schroeder, and his detailed exposition of a possible future for his native Canada, in the face of the ongoing political, economic and environmental turmoil of North America:

So, how do we prevent [being Trumpled by our neighbour to the south]? We don’t want to go our own way; we like Americans, as people, and their country has been the best imaginable neighbour for two hundred years. What we want is to get back to that cordial relationship, but without being over-reliant on it. There are several ways we can do this. Collectively realized, they could make Canada a strategic keystone of the emerging post-Trump economic order.

Hmm… We need a symbol for the grand plan. I know: let’s use ‘#.’

You might be surprised at first that I’ve recommended you read this scenario; be sure to stick around for the whole piece, and then you’ll understand why I did.

OK, that’s all for now—there’s housework to be done. Cheerio!

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 22 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!