the outlier

is this interesting and palette cleanser

hello,

In case you missed this year’s Christmas Gift Guide, here it is!

Ben's Christmas Gift Guide 2024

I’ve already had a few messages about the gingerbread house so I’m pleased it’s been useful already. If I have any more bright ideas then maybe I’ll fire off a quick supplement in the next couple of weeks.

This week has generally been a little slower and more pleasant, even if the Christmas party season seems to have kicked off already, testing my constitution before I’d warmed up.

What does warm my aging heart are the continued pledges from paid subscribers and given hot water is intermittent in my lodgings right now, that warmth is more welcome than you realise!

the books📖

My various projects are pretty much on track before I head off to the Hay Festival Winter Weekend with TikTok. Then it’s back for the TikTok Awards before heading up to Manchester to run an athlete career day for UK Sport. I’ve made a bulk sale of Endgame for this event and even though the numbers aren’t enormous, it’s so satisfying to be paid again for work you’ve already done.

Then in very exciting news, I’m going to be recording my first fiction audiobooks in January for an award-winning children’s publisher! This is the kind of work the TikTok content aimed to attract so it’s brilliant to be asked to do a proper full-length project and I’ve been revising by listening to some audiobooks which I’ll recommend below.

The scope of all this stuff is growing outwards and while I don’t quite have time, soon I’ll be casting my mind back through the year to take stock of what’s happened and think about what’s next.

Something that has happened is that one of the drivers behind the boys’ literacy project I’ve been working on, Oli McVeigh, has won Secondary School Teacher of the Year at the National Teaching Awards. Oli and his colleague Deneen are great people and while they do great work, they keep their pupils first. So while they have and would do their work in the dark, it's wonderful and quite reassuring when someone so deserving gets the light shined on them. Congratulations Oli!

for your interest

is this interesting and palette cleanser

is this interesting

This week, in a group chat, we were discussing the news that a publisher was embarking on an ’innovative novel-writing project’ with a TikTok creator. The audience will be asked to pitch in and comment during the writing process with the eventual result being a romcom. My friend said,

Yeah, I kind of think it’s a case of publishers trying to do something interesting… either everyone and their mother will be doing this in the future or it’ll just be a dud and another headstone in the “bad idea” graveyard

On a more prosaic level, I don’t think this is a particularly innovative idea – James Clear wrote Atomic Habits in a similar back and forth with his newsletter audience – and there are lots of examples of people writing novels in public including on Substack. This author is also a first-time author and given how hard writing a book is anyway, writing one in this manner might suit someone more practised.

Last week I went to a brand event outside of London. We got out of the bus to discover a country house, illuminated by spotlights and the moon, speakers lining our path to the front door where we were greeted with mulled wine, pushing through entrances shrouded with drapes to find live music. There was a wonderful performance by a poet and harpist duo.

It was also freezing cold and the atmospheric smoke and low level lighting made getting good imagery impossible. It was also a little unclear what was to be done by us at the thing so rather than handwring over the point of it, instead we got to enjoying ourselves. I met a man who lives in a flat above Crisp Pizza. Then our coach back to London broke down and we found ourselves sat watching our breathy condensation at a commuter town train station looking at cancellations and trying to decide how to get home.

Despite the cold immersion therapy it was a fun evening, yet I found the existence of this entire initiative curious. It tried very hard to be interesting. This is happening. It’s different. You can come. To be fair, I am still thinking about it.

Another interesting event came up when my friend asked me to come with her to an evening of New Work. Writers stand up and read aloud something new they’ve brought with them. Hers was the best and you can read it here. The evening was lovely, with what felt like a supportive atmosphere in an austere little room in east London, and anyone who is trying to get people to care about writing is doing some good in my book, even if the writing wasn’t especially memorable.

I have come across some memorable writing recently but I will warn you, it’s quite unpleasant. That’s partly what’s thrilling about it. Writing like this almost has to be anonymous. You could probably get away with it if you were female but from a man, it would upset people and you’d never be welcome in polite society again. Bret Easton Ellis has been a dangerous pariah while Eliza Clark is a genius, even though she is downstream of he. I love them both.

The other reason it’s thrilling is because it’s so different. I can’t think of anything like it. Not now when so much writing online sounds similar and concerns itself with consumable culture rather than the results of actually doing anything. It’s brave to be so unpleasant, whether it’s true or not (he says it is), but it’s really the bravery to be different that makes it stand out. I don’t understand the tweet below but it also makes total sense.

There’s trying to be interesting and then there’s actually doing it. If I was a publisher looking for an innovative project, I’d probably DM Worst Boyfriend Ever. Yet another romcom needs a lot of fuss making over it for anyone to notice whereas good work just gets seen. Because it’s different.

palette cleanser

I’m soon to share a treehouse with a younger TikTok creator friend and as content inspiration, I sent him this classic clip.

He said,

Sometimes you make references that are so youthful. And other times it’s like I’m speaking to an 85 year old.

I can’t help being timeless.

a book

I got invited to a preview of the second BBC series of SAS: Rogue Heroes, based on the fantastically fun book (a good pick for lads and dads) by Ben Macintyre who excels at these military tales of derring do. The series is great fun too, a light twist on a serious history with enough darkness to ensure we don’t get to forget what we’re watching.

a listen

Most of my audiobook listening has been memoir-focussed so it’s been fun to branch out. I got told to listen to this fun romcom, where the main protagonists take it in turn to narrate their perspective chapters and then I stumbled across this Batman story which is essentially a well-produced superhero radio play. It’s funny when what’s old is new.

a quote

Ideally you need ‘to care and not to care’. You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a distance. Every important creative act has this duality: of giving everything and then of letting go, so that the created work can have a life of its own.

– Celia Paul

lastly

Thanks for reading! My work is made possible by you so if you’d like to support me you can buy my books, hire me to do something or you can become a paid subscriber using the button below.

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I’ll see you next time.

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