Beehiiv is the new place where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
7th April 2026
I meant to dash off a quick post today, something about the value of multiple touch points within any kind of practical process, and the consequences that has for the depth of your experience and knowledge and confidence in relation to whatever it is you’re doing.
But I couldn’t finish it. Could barely get started on it.
Because a little bit of panic has just welled up in me, has been welling up in me for rather a long time, and so at the risk of appearing (or being) self-indulgent, I might as well write about that for a bit. Not because I expect to have a revelation which will magically assuage all my anxiety. Just because writing it down, articulating my feelings in words, will be its own kind of temporary relief, or at least a temporary release.
If you don’t want to hear any of this from me, look away now. Unsubscribe, if you like, but I’d be sorry to see you go. Maybe crack open an Easter egg instead, if you haven’t eaten all your stash already.
But if you’re still with me, here goes.
I’m halfway through a substantial redraft of The Radiant City at the moment. I’m experimenting with restructuring the entire opening section, turning what were just two chapters into a new set of five. I’m trying to trim some fat off the book as a whole — not easy for a writer like me who inclines towards long sentences and glorious digressions. (In spite of this tendency, I have so far removed 10,000 words out of what was a 152,000-word draft, with eight chapters still to work through, and a pass through the whole thing still ahead of me.)
Part of the reason I’m doing this redraft is because I can no longer justify my avoidance of trying to get myself an agent and trying to get the book published. I want an agent; I want to get published. I’ve managed to justify not doing anything about it for three years now, though, and now I’ve finally run out of excuses.
Actually, the main excuse I’ve clung to this far still holds and is entirely unchanged.
Switching from theatre-making to novel writing came at a time when I was burned out, depressed, exhausted by decades on a treadmill where I was kept going by the belief/delusion that it would all come good one day, by which I now realise I meant a regular funding agreement would finally come our way, and all our problems would be solved.
Only, back in Autumn 2022, that long-hoped-for regular funding agreement did not come our way, just as it had not done in 2017, either, and for exactly the same reasons (which I won’t go into here, but which were nothing to do with our competence, our governance, our programme plans or the quality of our work, and which were, in fact, things about who we are as people, things that we could not change.)
I started writing the novel that has now become The Radiant City during the sabbatical we took after that funding rejection. The sabbatical was meant to last three months, by the end of which we’d have figured out a way forward. But three months turned into six, and then just became the new normal. Since then, I’ve been chumbling along in a strange pattern of existence without any real shape or structure, in a strange world of moving goalposts and abandoned plans and spinning plates and evaporating work relationships and near-permanent anxieties about money.
Writing has been how I rediscovered and retained my dignity during this weird, liberating, insecure, rewarding, exposing time in my life.The prospect of trying to get agents and publishers to take an interest in me and my work is threatening to obliterate that dignity which I’ve worked very, very hard to salvage from the rubble.
And to make matters worse, now I’m finally on the threshold of being ready to give it a go, the literary arena I’m trying to enter feels like a battlefield — the many ways AI is ravaging what it even means to write something, and the number of people using AI to “write” without any shame or compunction; horror stories about how few agents even bother to read many or any of the queries and submissions under whose weight their inboxes are groaning; plummeting rates of reading or even functional literacy amongst adults; book bans, including (but not limited to) LGBTQ+ writers and LGBTQ+ themes or subjects…
I do worry, as with so many things in my life, that I am yet again hopelessly behind the curve, that I’ve left it too late, that the career I want has already become obsolete, that I don’t have the thickness of skin or strength of character to cope with the criticism, the unkindness, or the silence of agents I contact.
I worry that I’m sitting on the edge of the shore, Canute-like, trying to assert myself as a writer — or maybe clinging to my perception of myself as a writer, because my dignity has become so intrinsically welded to that aspect of who I am — while the tide of indifference and illiteracy and AI slop is getting higher and higher and threatening to overwhelm me. Maybe it already has overwhelmed me. Maybe I am drowning, or have already drowned, and I don’t even know it yet.
I’m not going to stop, though. I’m going to keep writing. I’m going to finish this book edit. I’m going to put it, and myself, out there, despite the risk of rejection that I will have to invite by doing so. And then I’m going to write Draft 2 of my second novel, Obsolete Constellations. And I’m going to get outlines done for the two other novel ideas that keep nibbling away at my brain.
That might be as foolish as the band continuing to play while the Titanic sank. Or maybe, just maybe, writing might be the life preserve that helps to keep me afloat. Let’s see, shall we?