Reading, thinking, doing October 2025

I’ve been reading about the end of the world, walking from Kings Cross to Wapping, and making zines.

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This particular post is the second in what might be an ongoing series inspired by a post in which someone said: “I don’t really want to read writing advice from authors… I just want to know what they are reading and thinking and doing.”

If you follow me on Bluesky, you already have a pretty good idea of what I’m reading, thinking and doing at all times.

These are, I suppose, some edited highlights.

Reading Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons

I’ve been struggling with reading again, if I’m completely honest. I started a new project at work and the process of onboarding is using most of my energy and brainpower. So, at bedtime, I’m only managing a few pages before conking out.

Having said that, on a week’s holiday in Belgium, I ripped through Thomas Ha’s new collection Uncertain Sons.

It presents a series of thematically linked stories, some of which also share mythologies and are perhaps hints of novels to come.

Those themes include the apocalypse, denial, family relationships, artificial intelligence (obliquely), alien forms, and mutation. They’re all defiantly weird, disorienting us and forcing us to learn on the fly new rules about how the world works.

Sentient zombie hot air balloons that only come at night. A mutant that lives in the roots of a tree and kills its sibling over and over again. A new disease that causes narcolepsy, and the sinister perverts who prey on those sleeping in public.

It’s bleak and bewildering, the latter balancing the former, and keeping our eyes locked on a world falling apart.

The standout for me was ‘Where the Old Neighbors Go’ which offers very slight respite from the climate change, pandemic, End Times vibes of the rest of the book. It’s about urban gentrification but overlaid with fairy folklore and enchanted animal imagery straight out of the darker end of Studio Ghibli.

You can read various of Ha’s stories online if you want a taster, or order the book from Undertow Publications. I actually ended up breaking my Amazon streak for this one, though, as I couldn’t find an easy way to buy it in the UK otherwise.

Thinking about creepy hotels, Krimi, delinquency and content design

I’ve written quite a few blog posts since I last produced one of these updates.

Here at Precast Reinforced Heart – that’s the blog’s rarely used official name, by the way – I wrote about how…

• “Hotels are fundamentally weird places and the sense of unease they prompt is powerful fuel for weird stories.” – Horror Hotels
• “I’ve found the Blu-ray box set Shadows in the Fog to be a great introduction to the West German Krimi genre despite, on paper, being a collection of also-rans.” – The German-accented phantoms of old London town
• “What happens when angry young men are more than angry? These three roughly contemporary books give us portraits of youths struggling with their own murderous instincts.” – Three pulp paperbacks about juvenile psychopaths

With my work hat on, I’ve been writing about design and content design on LinkedIn, of all places:

• Imagining meaningful ways to use AI in user-centred design
• The future of entertainment: reading the signals
• Content design is about making services better for human beings
• What I learned about user-centred design in hotels from two months on the road

A couple of my LinkedIn posts (not articles) also went, by my standards, gently viral, including this item about cognitive load.

I also wrote some press release material to support a new exhibition about Bristol’s brutalist architecture which prompted me to think pretty hard about brutalist car parks in particular. I now want to write something more substantial just about the giant Trenchard Street car park which was built in the 1930s, replaced and rebuilt in the 1960s, and which, Overlook Hotel style, has a somewhat dark history.

Walking, zines, photos

Last weekend, I went up to London to meet a couple of old university friends for our annual walk. This year, it came late, and wasn’t very adventurous. Logistics got the better of us.

Still, I arrived in London early and got to walk on my own in glorious sunshine from Paddington to the rendezvous point at Kings Cross.

I find London very soothing. Being surrounded by people (against loneliness) who don’t want to talk to me (introversion) is perfect – and there’s just so much to look at.

When I’m walking, I sometimes activate what I call Path Less Taken Mode (PLTM). It’s really easy to follow the route Google Maps suggests, or to lock into habits and routines. With PLTM, the idea is, at every decision point, to take the less familiar turn.

In London, PLTM took me past the Tyburn Convent and the former Oranjehaven where Dutch airmen hung out during World War II. It also led me to some remarkably tranquil streets one or two blocks behind Tottenham Court Road where, from the right angle, it might have been 1892.

Back home, I’ve been making zines somewhat compulsively. There’s generally no particular purpose to this although I might end up slipping them in with orders of my books.

Which reminds me: you can order copies of Municipal Gothic and Intervals of Darkness directly from me. They’re £13 each, including delivery, or it’s £25 for both.

Anyway, back to zines… What I’m particularly enjoying is trying to make a complete zine from (a) one sheet of A4 paper and (b) a single copy of a magazine, or several copies of the same magazine. This creates a pleasing consistency in style and typography and also challenges me to dig a little deeper.

I even made a zine at work, although that angered the Brooklyn Zine Police.

I’ve been taking photos too, of course, although the fading autumn light makes that harder.

I take most of my pictures on walks before or after work, and when it’s grey and/or dimpsy, it feels harder to find subjects.

There’s been the odd image I’ve been quite happy with, though.

A prize for making it this far

This is the first time I’m saying this publicly: my next collection is likely to be called Thin Places in Hard Concrete and this is a first sketch of the cover.

You can expect it at some point early in 2026.