Our eldest two children were back in school this month, so the house is a little bit quieter (as quiet as it can be with a nine month old baby!). We also had a lovely long weekend at Bluestone in Pembrokeshire, about an hour and a half’s drive away, though we had to get back a day early to make sure we didn't miss school photos. They are always so cute and well done that we just couldn’t miss out on them, so it was no hardship to drive back early. The weather has turned more autumnal, and I’m glad to wave goodbye to the Mad Max-esque apocalyptic weather (for the UK) we endured over the summer, and I’ve already snuck in a few of my favourite seasonal drinks: pumpkin spiced lattes 🎃☕️🍁 👨‍🍳👌

The revisions and copy-edits etc. are all done and I’m delighted to say that “They Are Still Here”, which features my story, “Don’t Forget to Feed Barry”, will be published on 8 October 2026.

I’m really excited to see this anthology out in the world. I’ve got my hands on an advanced reader copy of the ebook and it really is fantastic. The stories all explore the continued endurance of Welsh communities, culture and identity (with the aid of Welsh mythological folk) and I’m super proud to be a part of it.

To whet your appetite (hopefully!), my story is about a group of elderly ladies who set out to thwart a corrupt local councillor from forcing through a planning application to destroy their library, who are aided by a brandy drinking, prank loving bwbach named Barry. If you haven’t guessed, it’s a lighthearted tale that I hope will bring a smile to your face.

And if that’s not all, I even had the most unlikely help from the Oxford English Dictionary in promoting this story. Check out the latest new addition to the OED, which I saw announced by Nation.Cymru this month. The news even made it onto the BBC.

This was just so extraordinarily well-timed, and you better believe I am trying to make the most of this as a promotional opportunity! Who says you don’t get nothing for free these days.

There are a few contests and anthology calls either opening or closing soon which I am hoping to submit to. In light of that, I’ve been working away on a few short story ideas this month, though nothing is finished to my liking just yet, and I’ve also sent out a few submissions too. I am hoping to announce some more short story good news soon but for the moment my lips are sealed.

…where I talk about the books I love and what I’m currently reading.

In the rather precarious times we find ourselves in, facing various existential threats, why not read something that may well predict the future for humanity of a world reduced to living in underground silos, eking out bleak existences in claustrophobic dungeons where the punishment for breaking society’s rules is the death sentence of being sent outside…

Only joking. Despite its premise, I think Wool is an exploration of the strength of the human spirit and the power of hope despite one’s miserable surroundings. It’s packed with great characters, constantly ratcheting up tension, a winding plot that’ll keep you guessing / hoping to the very end, and is just overall a fantastic read.

There’s also a great adaptation on Apple TV, called Silo, which is the name of the overall trilogy (Wool being the first instalment). You can read the full post on why I love this book as well as what lesson it taught me concerning charity shops.

I was a busy reader this month, reading not one, not two, but three long-form stories.

First up, I did a beta-read of a draft novella by T.R. Naus, who I met and got along with so well at the Writers of the Future workshops in Hollywood last year. This is the first time I have beta-read this long a story (around 60,000 words so not far off a novel), though I have provided critiques of many short stories over the last few years, so it was a new experience to read a longer form story with a more critical eye. It’s a terrific cyberpunk thriller that asks questions about the nature of technology and how it can be abused. I really enjoyed it and hope to see it out in the world one day. I’ll be sure to keep you updated on that front.

Next up was Five Camels for the Simplification, a novelette (around 60 pages) by Writers of the Future winner, Lance Robinson (Vol. 40, the year before me). This is a brilliant story and it draws on Lance’s former life as a social scientist specialising in the human dimensions of ecological stewardship, particularly peoples from rangeland ecologies (think the African savannah, or Arctic tundras, huge open spaces). The story is about a new data-modelling predicts an impending societal and economic collapse. But rather than following characters in New York or London or [insert any other Western metropolis usually featured], it is set in Northern Kenya. It follows a rangeland expert, Thomas, over the course of several decades as he tries to use and share traditional knowledge and ecological practices (pastoralism) to prepare and sustain the Northern Kenyan region against soil collapse, climate change and invasive plants wreaking havoc and the importance of this and its impact on the global market.

At its heart it’s a story about hope, working together and sharing ideas, knowledge and resources, in the face of looming disaster, and how doing so can (hopefully) sustain a people through hardship. I really loved this story, and I’d go so far as to say it’s one of my favourite reads of the year. It’s also a great new perspective (for me) on eco-fiction and a culture and area I knew very little about, and it was really refreshing to read sci-fi written from an ecological sciences perspective rather than technology driven. I can’t recommend this enough. I was actually intending to include this next month as I only started reading it on 28 September, but once I started reading it before I knew it I had read it all in one sitting; it’s been a long time since that’s happened! If you were interested in buying this story, you can follow the link to Lance’s website store below.

Finally, I read The Wager by David Grann, which was the first non-fiction book choice for my book club. It’s one of those stories where the saying, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ is incredibly apt. In fact, if you had written the tale as a work of fiction, I don’t think readers would find it believable. In 1740, the HMS Wager set sail as part of a small fleet on a secret mission to navigate around Cape Horn to raid a Spanish galleon containing hundreds of tonnes of silver from South America. During that voyage, the HMS Wager is shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia and thought lost. Then, in 1742, a makeshift raft stuffed with emaciated, malnourished and barely alive (and sane) survivors of the Wager, washes up on the coast of Brazil - some 2,500 miles from where it was shipwrecked. They are hailed as heroes.

However, six months later, another raft washes up on the coast of Chile, with allegations that the earlier survivors are not heroes, but murderous mutineers. This sets up for a court martial to determine the truth of what happened, and whose story prevails, with a hanging facing anyone convicted of mutiny.

This was a fantastic read and I was gripped from the get go. The conditions were unbelievably awful, and I was amazed at how the sailors managed to survive a few days at sea, let alone a shipwreck and aftermath, and just completely flabbergasted at how / why some of the survivors continued with naval careers afterwards. Putting the period in context, Commodore Anson (who led the fleet) was born in the 1600s, and the cure for scurvy was not yet known, nor was how to figure out how to work out one’s location longitudinally. It even preceded Robinson Crusoe. It’s just the most incredible story of human survival, ingenuity, stubbornness, and the depths we can sink to, and rise from. In an interesting quirk of fate, one of the protagonists was the poet Lord Byron’s grandfather. It is really well told and draws heavily from source material (including the meticulously well-kept log book of a gunner, John Bulkely, and others, including the Captain David Cheap, and Byron’s grandfather).

A while back I wondered in a blog post why an ancestor of mine jumped off a whaling vessel and swam ashore to Australia. Well, after reading The Wager, which presents the conditions on board old ships in much less romantic terms than how it is presented in Moby Dick, I can completely see why. It sounds like an awful experience: poorly resourced, cold, wet, dangerous, disease ridden, with an enormous death toll. I’m not sure I’d have lasted long (or at all), and that’s without trying to kill a whale in the process. I’d probably have tried to swim back ashore in Portsmouth, and never would have made it round the Cape Horn.

Disclosure: To cover some of my running costs, I have incorporated affiliate links from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. If you buy books linked to my site or newsletter (in this case, The Wager), I may earn a commission.

Until next time, keep dreaming.

Joel