week 47 / 2025

“Lost, here is nowhere / searching home still / turning past me, all are gone / time is now...”

The first snow of the season turned up this week, and with it that sense of nearing the end of the year. Sure, there’s still a month to go—but December is the month of winding down in expectation of the holiday season. I’m not much of one for the holiday season myself, but when the rest of your ecosystem is headed for a stint of hibernation, there’s not much you can do but roll with it.

Honestly, though, it will be nice to slow down a bit, even if it’s not exactly by choice! It’s been a busy year, which is (I assume) why it feels somewhat shocking to find the end of it looming so suddenly. I’ve still plenty to be getting on with—projects both commercial and personal—but the change of contextual pace means it’s time to reflect on what’s been happening, on what worked and what didn’t, and to make plans for the year ahead.

I’m starting that reflective process right now! I’ve been writing weeknotes here at W.A for over a year and a half now, and I introduced the leading mini-essay to the format at the start of July. This has been fun, and I think I’ve produced some good material in the process, but I’m starting to feel like they’re falling short of their potential. I’m rushing out material to fit the schedule—which, I recall, was exactly the sort of content-mill behaviour I set out wanting to avoid!—and the results are half-baked, the ideas underexplored. It takes more than a couple of hours to write something that really rewards the reader’s attention.

(Which is why you have this reflective material this week, in lieu of an essay: the one I started is a long way from being finished, and the topic deserves more sustained effort on my part.)

So I’m thinking it’s time to tweak the system again. Essays should be fully developed rather than hacked out, and as such need to be less frequent, and to stand alone. That in turn means that the weeknotes format will need something to replace the mini-essay, as I’m pretty sure that a lot of you aren’t tuning in for the bit where I tally up my work week!

I’ve had positive comments from some of you about the reading section, so I’m thinking it might be good to take that a little more seriously. A couple of hours isn’t really enough time to write an essay, but it is enough to write a handful hundred decent words about a book.

I’m also thinking that it might be good to revive the blogging-era practice of the link-dump. Back in the Noughties I did this pretty much daily—shout-out to anyone who had a del.icio.us account!—but there was more to link to back then, and more need for collecting it: prior to the rise of “the socials”, link-dumps were how we kept track of The Discourse. Those days are long gone, and unlikely to return, but various writers I admire still do something like it—friend-of-the-show Jay Springett’s “dipping the stacks” section is a reliable source of interesting things to read, for instance, and Adam Tooze goes so far as to keep his link round-ups in reserve for his paying punters.

I’m no Adam Tooze, of course—and I’m not about to start charging for access to these posts any time soon! But the click stats suggest that my selected clipping is one of the most popular parts of WA weeknotes, if we choose to measure by interaction… and I almost always read and clip a lot more than one piece a week. So maybe it’s time to start putting that reading to work, sharing more of it with you lot, and making better use of my writing time to produce fewer, better essays.

What do you think, dear readers? You do me the great honour of your attention; while the primary function of weeknotes is that of a personal discipline, I would be interested to know what those of you who listen in on my practice would like to see more (or less) of. Hit reply if you’re reading as email, or comment on the site itself. It would be lovely to hear from you.

reading

Over the years I have read rather too many books in the “how to be (more) creative” genre, to the point that I rarely bother with them any more—because they really are a genre, and after a while you become so familiar with the tropes that you’re not getting anything new out of them.

I made an exception for Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for two reasons: because I was curious to know whether a dancer and choreographer would have insights unique to her field of endeavour, and because I recall it being immensely well received when it was first published, which was back around the time I started working in libraries.

One of the joys of working in libraries is getting a real insight into which books people like, and why—and people really raved about this one. It didn’t do the same numbers as the better known business-bullshit books, by any means. We’d have to reorder half a dozen copies of Who Moved My Cheese and What Colour Is My Parachute every year, because they would invariably be borrowed by a freshly registered member, on the lam from his office during lunchbreak, and never returned; the sort of folk who read and returned them, meanwhile, never saw fit to tell us what they thought. But it seemed like everyone who borrowed the Tharp—which was, admittedly, a rather different demographic to the cheese-and-brollies boys—wanted to tell you how much they liked it.

It’s easy to see why: Tharp’s voice on the page is very engaging, self-assured and confident without ever veering into cockiness, nor into the sort of chip-on-shoulder routines that have become commonplace in recent years. You get a real sense of the person behind the advice, in other words.

And the advice is pretty good, too. Aware that few of her readers are going to be dancers of choreographers, Tharp makes the effort to distill more general principles from her own practice, but that unusual point of departure results in suggestions and habits that go beyond the usual homilies. I was particularly taken with the distinction she makes between the “spine” of a work and its theme or structure, and her list of creative skills includes a discussion of discernment and judgement that I found genuinely revelatory. It’s well worth the time.

a clipping

A practical clipping for the communicators among my audience. This piece brings together some recent findings on how word choice affects the way climate messaging is received.

Predicting the effects of climate change, just like any other events in the future, is inherently uncertain. Climate denialists often try to exploit that uncertainty to make it sound like there’s less scientific evidence or agreement about climate change than there really is. And the language climate scientists and communicators themselves use to convey scientific uncertainty may be helping to sow doubt and fuel climate skepticism, according to a new study.

It suffers somewhat from the narrow purview of psychology as discipline; the claim that “[i]n most climate change scenarios, the costs of inaction are likely greater than the risks of taking preventive action” is, given the increasing clamour in favour of poorly-thought-through geoengineering interventions—frequently sponsored by actors with a strong interest in justifying the continued exploitation of fossil fuels—naive at best. But the essential findings about positive and negative framings are well worth noting.

ticked off

• Fourteen hours on PROJECT FLATPACK. (This week ahs mostly been all about bringing this one in to land. Some bits and bobs still to do, but it’s pretty much in the bag now.)
• Eight hours of admyn.
• Six hours on PROJECT MORPHOSIS. (This one’s pretty much done, too. Might be some mop-up work further down the line, but the main show is over.)
• Four hours of kinmaking. (Some good chats with good people, including a trip up the coast to Helsingborg to meet the ThinkX mob at their inaugural show’n’tell.)
• Three hours of weeknotes work.
• One hour of strategy tarot! (First time in a long time dong a proper in-person reading for someone. I was worried I’d be a bit rusty, but it went really well.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, as always.

Not a bad week; having a cold didn’t slow me down as much as I thought it would!

OK, that’s all for now—do please let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in future weeknotes! In the meantime, I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 47 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!