Splosh! Time for an annual report to my imaginary shareholders.

But first an excerpt from last year’s report:

2024 will not be as fruitful as 2023 was. It can’t be.

Ahem. Well, that’s not what happened.

2024 was my hardest-working year since the beginning of recorded time.

I’m proud of it all but “maximum productivity” is hardly my mantra. It certainly isn’t the design for life I promote in New Escapologist, nor is it my personal one in reality.

2025 will be different. Now might be the right time to dump your imaginary shares in me, because next year — I have promised this to myself — will be a doss.

The cycle of four New Escapologist editions financed by 2023’s Kickstarter campaign was completed this year. Four new beautiful new editions have been published, Issues 16 and 17 being sweet fruits of 2024.

While most print editions sold out throughout the year (a few 16s remain), their contents are available forever in the new digital archive (PDF and EPUB).

For creative work beyond New Escapologist, I came out of performance retirement in March/April/May to do some gigs, most notably a new comedy festival show called The Annotated Audiobook for Glasgow and London.

In June I wrote half a novel (to be continued and then rewritten next year).

All year long, we did a tonne of shoots for our documentary film, plus two WIP incredible screenings in Edinburgh and Birmingham in August. The film work was so much fun, but the stand-out day for me was probably the London shoot at the Bill Murray Club where, as well as working on the actual film, we had a second unit to capture a full live comedy perfomance for a separate release.

I served as co-pilot and midwife on two other people’s books: John Dowie’s Before I Go and John Robinson’s Folktronics. Not all of my collaborators are called John.

I wrote a couple of items for magazines, notably a long reflection on twenty-odd parasocial years of reading Richard Herring’s blog (see p144 of this nice-looking PDF to read it), and at least one piece for the Idler.

I was interviewed about work culture for Hong Kong-based Appraisal magazine and briefly about our film for the Birmingham Dispatch.

Travel-wise, I wasn’t expecting to go anywhere ambitious, since gigs and the film already had me roving the UK, but I ended up seeing a lot. Samara and saw Lisbon in January, and more recently I trekked through Paris, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Belgrade, Zagreb, Athens, London, and Montreal. I’m writing this post from Montreal — our secret volcano lair — where we have hunkered down for the holidays.

Elsewhere, just for fun, I made my first ever ceramic pots and built a little website to document the process, met a few heroes including Ivor Dembina (and Momus and Neil Mullarkey and John Dowie and etc and etc), and wrote a poem. I could go on.

Online, I ignored social media completely and you can too. I blogged a fair bit at my personal site and used Substack to keep the New Escapologist community and my own small following informed and together.

My main health challenge in life (we all have one) is eczema. I can ignore it nine months out of the year, but it sometimes becomes a problem. 2024 was my worst year in a long time for eczema, and it took up a lot of headspace. I got phototherapy for it, which sort-of worked but didn’t last, but finally, here in Montreal, a dermatologist prescribed oral steroids, which are doing the trick. At the time of writing, I have the best skin in at least three years. Hopefully I can close that book for a good while now.

Speaking of books, I traditionally list the books I read here in the end-of-year roundup, but I have a separate blog for that purpose now. Here’s where to go if you’d like to know what I read in 2024. So many good reads this year, barely a duffer among them.

The eczema was a problem this year, I’m convinced, due to the stress of being too busy. I had more projects — creative and otherwise — on the go this year than ever before. I took out a Pro subscription on ToDoist for the first time (see New Escapologist 14) because the free version I’ve always used only allows for five projects. To explain how busy I’ve been this year, I had 14 projects open at one point. 14!

14 projects is completely insane and impractical. Every project was something I loved and wanted to do, but the cumulative effect of taking so much on conspired to create a negative. The last four months have been focussed on the ethic of CLOSING projects. I’ve been successful in this and I end the year with zero open projects for the first time ever, and just two “ajar” projects waiting for more lesiurely attention next year.

I end the year feeling accomplished and in charge, but also with a need to heal and to enjoy a deep dark rest. Which — with apologies to imaginary shareholders! — is precisely what I plan to do.