It’s just shy of ten years since I started this newsletter with the plan of disturbing words. In just over a month, the extent to which words ended up disturbing me will be clear, with the publication of Bad Language, my new book.

London pals, there are early copies at Burley Fisher in Haggerston and Ibraaz on Mortimer Street if you’re passing, or all UK and European friends can pre-order from Peninsula Press, or from your friendly local indie! North American pals, you can pre-order it from Asterism to avoid transatlantic shipping and also support an awesome indie distributor. 

Launching the book – throwing it into the world – is above all a great opportunity to have incredible conversations: at Burley Fisher Books on 12 Nov, with Sam Fisher; at No Alibis in Belfast on 18 Nov, with Stacey Gregg as part of Outburst Queer Arts Festival; at Bookhaus in Bristol on 26 Nov, with Noreen Masud; and at The Folkestone Bookshop on 29 Jan, with Ann Morgan. And with you, if you’re there.

29 Jan 2026! The future. Writing a book is a strange game of having to believe that there will be a future as the world is melting around your ears. ‘If you’re / we’re / I’m there’ was a persistent question with every word I wrote and rewrote. And now here we are.

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Bad Language is the book of the newsletter of the brain of the doomspiral of the thread. It’s been three years in the writing and rewriting, pulling in ideas from the early days of the newsletter and even earlier than that. It has dragons, candles, incantations, a Babylonian cure for holding emotional tension, and – thanks to close (in both senses) readers who worked through some of the darker drafts – more hope than despair, and a rage for more than a rage against. 

It's a bust card offering some wayward guidance on how to refind the free in the freeze (speech), and keep the going. I can’t wait for it to wind its thread into your hands, and be carried onwards from me by readers – because that onwards is the thing that I write towards. 

Writing is a project for me, something that ‘extends beyond a surface or edge’, to return to the original meaning of proiectus, a bit of a building that sticks out. In Romance vernaculars, words like projet and progetto come to mean ‘a plan’, something that extends beyond the surface or edge of the present, into the future. Behind them all are the senses associated with the verb iacere, of throwing or casting something outwards. 

It's true that writing takes place in an expanded present, a flow state, if I’m very lucky. But that flow state and its sense of being present is possible only because and if I have a sense of the future, a projection of time to come – not even necessarily time in which my words will be read, although that is a fond hope; but just of the ongoingness of lived time. It’s not always easy to feel that, to project a minute ahead, even, let alone to posterity, whatever that is. So it’s a trick and not-a-trick, like cinema being a whole world that springs to life from a beam of projected light, to lead myself into writing (and living) by projecting a world in which the book exists and is contributing to some kind of project, a hoping, a changing, a carrying-forward. 

What’s confusing is now being in that future, which was a projection, one that at times did not feel as if it could be real, and which arrives with the imperative to imagine yet another future. As so many people ask me, the least plan-having person ever: what are you working on next?

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When I was in my early teens, I was obsessed with astral projection — the YA novel version, rather than the storied, sacred ritual found in many cultures. 

I didn’t know then that the term was popularised by Theosophists and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century, the former an Orientalist fantasy that infused Christian esotericism with cherry-picked bits of Buddhism and Hinduism; and the latter a bunch of Freemasons who based their order and practices on a forgery while chasing links to the German Rosicrusians, and whose influence extends through a lot of the syncretic reinvention that became Wicca and contemporary European magic.

1980s YA novels weren’t that interested in the social history of occult practices: they were interested in evil twins and psycho killers and cultural appropriation. What I was interested in was the idea of leaving my body with an eye to keeping safe some part of myself so it could return to that body in the future, and that such an idea had a name. I had called it ceiling-feeling, because that’s where I ended up: not quite ad astra, more up among the Artex popcorn constellations that held my gaze so hard I could feel them stipple my skin.

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‘To my relief the sight of the mark interrupted…’, writes Virginia Woolf in 1917, in her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’, the word relief not just doubling but squaring its meaning: Woolf’s feeling of apprehension or anxiety about the war is interrupted (relieved) by the mark, which has caught her eye because it may be extending or projecting from a surface (in relief). The physical projection and the projected emotion fold back into each other. I am told that attention is the gentle answer to dissociation; that noticing is the way out of not-I-ing, its c turning the present into presence.

In her essay on Woolf’s story, ‘Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War’, published in 2000 in Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson wonders ‘Is it black, is it a hole, made by a nail or some round substance, in certain lights [the mark] does not seem to actually to project from the wall, “to cast a perceptible shadow”.’ A projection can seem like a depression ‘in certain lights’, it can lack weight or dimensionality.

At the end of the story three things happen simultaneously: someone interrupts the speaker’s train of thought; that someone announces that they’re going out to buy a newspaper despite acknowledging they’re ‘no good’; and they identify the mark as a snail. ‘You grasp at once without any mention of the fact that someone is a man… because he identifies the mark of the wall as what it is. A snail is a snail. Even in the off hours, men know marks’, concludes Carson. 

To have structural power is to see things only in the light of certainty, not in certain lights that cast doubt instead of the expected shadow – it’s to know, without question, what is a mark and what is a being, what is a hole and what is a shell, to say ‘mark my words’ and have them marked. You get the feeling that just after the end of the story, the someone flicks that snail off the wall, restoring a smooth, unbroken surface that offers no interruptions, no relief. 

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I run on project time, as a writer, freelancer and event programmer. Everything is hurry up and wait, a whole lot of crisis and very little management. This year I’ve spectacularly managed to get three projects to delivery more or less simultaneously: as well as Bad Language, I’ve co-edited The Word for Worlds: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin, an incredible anthology of Le Guin’s beautiful hand-drawn maps and many writers’ responses to them, which counter-intuitively involved more back-end spreadsheets than any book that I have ever worked on before; and I’ve edited the fifth issue of catflap, the uproarious magazine of Outburst Queer Arts Festival. 

In very serious ways that I’m not sure my editor for Bad Language would entirely agree with (apologies, Sam), these editorial projects are what ensured the delivery of the solo-authored book, on time (more or less) and on topic. Having meaningful, exciting, external work, linked thematically, creatively and politically to my own seemingly-impossible task at hand, kept me going even when it seemed to be getting in the way. In fact, by getting in the way, it got me out of my own way, shifting me sideways so that the strange I-not-I of intimate writing could take (my) place.

I call it ‘writing behind my own back’. It’s not ceiling-feeling. It’s maybe ambijected, a feeling of not-writing surrounding the act of writing, while importantly at the same time an act of writing surrounding the feeling of not-writing. It has to go both ways. There’s the intention of setting down to write, which both overcomes and produces the obstacle of not-writing, and then there’s the odd setting-aside of intention, or getting my self out of the way of myself, to write around and through and back, looping with an inner state that is externalised.

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There’s projection and there’s ambijection and then, after all of it, there’s… abjection, dejection, rejection. Iacere has many meanings that relate to being discarded, not just thrown but thrown away, or thrown in the sense of encountering the unexpected and not knowing how to react. 

So abject or deject or reject seem like the obvious opposites of project, and I’ve felt my fair share of them over the last couple of self-pitying months – but actually (to the great glee of the Freudian spectre that haunts me, rattling its chains and sniggering) I think it’s introject.

Because after you’ve done the project, you need to internalise it. You’ve poured all this material and thinking out, shaped it, reshaped it, held a future space for it – and now here it is, and it’s not what it was when it was material inside you. It’s become something else that I now need to absorb. 

That’s what readers are for, and also a pause. You’re making space for what happens next. Projecting begins, as Woolf knew, in introjecting, in small black hole, a little depression, an inward turn, a quantum tunnelling that reopens into the world. 

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At best, in its ideal form, this relation of introjection and projection, of going inward and sharing outward, is an infinity loop or Möbius strip without interruption. I imagine.

What I have instead is less smooth loop and more leap before I look. A jetty, let’s say. I’ve been thinking about the word jetty since I saw Helen Chadwick’s ‘Viral Landscapes’ (and a heron taking flight from a boat deck in the rain) at the Hepworth Wakefield, travelling with the sound of fascist gatherings in my ears, having left Kings Cross as many others were arriving for the Tommy Ten-Namesenburg rally in September. There are no jetties in any of the 'Viral Landscapes', made in 1989 in a rage at government and medical-industrial complex neglect of HIV/AIDS driving the epidemic. They are mixed-media large format works that in their long, narrow rectangles echo microscope slides. They build on photographs that Chadwick took of the Pembrokeshire coastline, with scans of her cultured cells superimposed. There are cliffs that shelter bays, and they’ve left me with the word jetty, not just for the panoramic spaces that your eye leaps into, but for Chadwick’s ferocious leap into a new way of working with her body, and the body – not representationally, but as a literal cultural medium. 

A jetty is a projection out into water or air, the platform for a jump, a take-off, an unmooring. It’s another word that comes from iacere, that capacious gesture of throwing out and off and up – of going beyond ourselves, our spheres, our medium, our element. In French, it is also one expert act of going beyond, a jeté, a leap in ballet in which the dancer throws one leg out to gain distance and height. The step is sometimes called the ‘essence of ballet’ for its expression of fluid, airy motion stemming from great muscular power and control. 

You have to practice and practice and practice to take such a leap — and yet, every time, it is still a leap. However many variables you have controlled for, however much you have prepared, you are still trusting your body to the air, to gravity, to the floor and to itself. 

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If a jetty is the leap between introjection and projection, between the inchoate and messy inside of thinking and the outside where it is a remark, marked, then perhaps project is also – like the I-not-I of writing – a way out of the vexed issue of both distance and hierarchical grammatical structure. Hear me out. Instead of subject [verb] object, with its explicit structural power of who is doing what to whom, what about project as a person of speech: a name for the risky shared space between us, in which things are being done and get done, not through power-over, but through the leap toward each other. 

A book is a project in this sense above all: that it occupies the space between being a subject and an object, or by a subject for an object. If I say that the book wrote me, I mean it. When I say that the book arose from conversations and collaboration, from the moment and from listening, from taking a leap toward readers real and imagined and hearing from them back through time, I mean it likewise. 

I mean: I couldn’t have done it without you.