Sunday Edition #11 - The First Ten to Fifty Pages

Also: Soft City, A-Corps Updates, Thoughts on Moving, and Lord Huron

Welcome to the Sunday Edition where I share interesting articles and links alongside what I’ve been up to!

Soft City

In 2018, this exact Twitter account posted images from Hariton Pushwagner’s visual novel, Soft City, and they recently reposted it. It remains one of the most striking depictions of dystopia.

It was the main inspiration for the city of Gridlock in my first novel (Hope Runners of Gridlock). I kept wondering how this could actually be real and with some creative liberty, I made it work.

New Comedy

I uninstalled TikTok when I went to walk the Camino Frances in April and haven’t re-installed it. But, I have felt that I’ve missed out on cultural trends. I’m still trying to figure out how to get it back into my day-to-day without it being too consuming. I’m glad that people Rina Nicolae are documenting parts of it so I can stay on top of what’s happening there. In particular, focusing on new forms of comedy. Seems all quite metamodern.

But, in my opinion, one of the most interesting developments unfolding on short-form video platforms is the proliferation of some genuinely great comedy. It’s often absurd, off-kilter, resisting easy interpretation, toeing the line between irony and sincerity, fact and fiction.

New art and culture emerges all the time, you just have to know where to look.

A complaint I often hear about the state of contemporary culture is that it’s just not good anymore. That we’ve lost the capacity to critically engage with complex and demanding work, and that this has diminished our civilizational capacity to produce Great Art.

And yet, comedy is not only thriving online, but is presenting millions of viewers with new and strange content that demands a level of comfort with the surreal and avant-garde, and requires them to navigate irony, discomfort and meaninglessness.

Artist Corporations Progress

I’m actively following Yancey Strickler’s foray with Artist Corporations. There’s a new Substack detailing the progress over at Artist Corporations.

The focus to date has been on two fronts: establishing political support for A-Corps in one U.S. state (we’ll say more about where soon) and listening to all the feedback that’s been coming from you.

Curious to see what will unfold. It’s all up my alley, being interested in new forms of coordination for creative works. I’ve also, over time, moved into exploring more legal forms of doing this work versus the more dark forest sybil-infested crypto economics world. It ties in with my belief that crypto-experimentation can and should move to legal infrastructures too.

Emergence in Others

Enjoyed this deep dive from maja on how people bring out different facets of us. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about this year, especially on the framework of permission and what people around us give us permission to become and not become.

We all carry endless hidden selves and latent worlds, waiting for the right gaze to bring them to the surface. I’ve felt this in my bones: relationships that have remade me, expanded me, taught me. Time and again, people have been the most transformative engine for becoming I’ve ever known.

What I’m Up To

Not much this week unfortunately. I’ve just mostly focused on moving and the admin revolved around that. I feel like I’m supposed to see something in this change, that there’s something to unpack besides the material things I’m moving from one place to another. Moving is like chapters in a book. They can be the end of a scene/s (ending some parts of your life and starting anew), a cliffhanger (a continuation of life without looking up), but sometimes they’re just a way for life to “aerate” itself.

What the chapter did for the novel was to aerate it: by encouraging us to pause, stop, and put the book down—a chapter before bed, say—the chapter-break helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life. The chapter openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses—for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion.

Some moves in my life were the end of scenes. Some moves were background noise that simply acted like a cliffhanger, catapulting me into the next phase. And some moves are aerations, an opportunity for reflection. This move feels like all of the above, but I feel like I’m suppose to see something I’m not seeing. But maybe there’s nothing more here. Sometimes that’s also true when one aerates life: you pause, you look up, you smile, and you realise that despite where you unexpectedly find yourself, you’re where you’re supposed to be.

📺 Watching - Superman (2025)

Very entertaining. DC films have usually been a miss for me as they all felt very grimdark. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a sucker for kindness as a power. It’s all a very James Gunn movie, though. He’s good at using shortcuts to make us care when a film only has an hour or two do so (krypto and metamorpho are the best). Most of all, it’s maximalist and magical, which is great for a time when things do feel a bit grimdark at home.

From a protestor here in DC (District of Columbia 😉) with the recent events:

I just want to live in a country where kindness isn’t a liability and cruelty doesn’t masquerade as law.

📚 Reading - A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

🕹 Gaming - DK Bananza

✍️ Writing - Querying Novel #2 + Thoughts on the First 10 Pages.

While I haven’t queried many agents yet (hoping to ramp that up soon), the majority of them want something more than just a query letter. Most often it’s the first 10 pages (followed by some agents wanting the first 50 pages).

While the entire book need to be good, along with more feedback coming in from beta readers, I’m re-evaluating exactly what those first 10 to 50 pages look like. So, I spent this week assessing it a bit. I’m not planning to change a lot since I haven’t received sufficient amount of rejections to warrant that, but I’m hoping to ensure the first 10 to 50 pages sets the story up appropriately. In some sense, I kind of like to see those first 10 to 50 pages as a short story, in that, the defining moment of moving to act 2 shouldn’t feel like an inevitability. Often, act 2 is already somewhat known because the book’s blurb need to explain the general arc of the story. So yes, the reader in some sense, knows what’s coming due to already having sold them the core tension (and context) of act 2. So, the struggle is still making it dramatic. White Lotus is always a good comparison, because in White Lotus, you know a murder happened, but you don’t know whom was murdered. So the dramatic tension of each season is about having conflict arise and play out. So, even if the reader knows what choice your protagonist will make that gets them to act 2, you can still focus on deepening the tension of the choice. So, yes, I’m asking whether the first few scenes do that sufficiently. I still ascribe to the belief that your story should start with its stakes asap, but the goal is then to explain to the reader why these stakes are so important to this particular protagonist such that the choice they make becomes inevitable and necessary despite the risks.

🎶 Listening - Lord Huron - Watch Me Go

Great new track from Lord Huron. Enjoy. :)

You've got a lot to tell me, but I'd rather not know

And I was glad to see you, but it's better I go

I'm gonna step outside and take the air

I'm getting far away from here, I don't care where

That’s all for this week folks. Hope you get to see a lovely sunset.

Simon