“Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”
So writes Gabrielle Zevin in her novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. In this scene, Sadie has been asked how she became a brilliant computer game designer. She struggles to speak the unpleasant truth: her excellence came about because she was a “dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity”.
This raises an awkward question for anyone who wants to make games, books, paintings, podcasts or anything else: can you make art and be a happy person? The easy, comforting answer is: yes, of course! Making art is wonderful and will only make you happier.
But.
As I sit here writing this simple email, I stop every so often to agonise. Is this sentence good? What about this email, my newsletter in general, my last book, my next one? I once saw this expressed as the “four stages of creative projects”, which go like this: this is great, I am great, this is crap, I am crap.
Most people who have attempted a major creative project have reached stage four. During these moments, I tend to sit back in my chair and stare at the ceiling, wondering why I do this to myself.
Maybe this is good news. My creative process does involve some suffering. It’s a love-hate cycle – but there’s more love than hate. So, while art isn’t typically made by happy people, perhaps it’s possible to make something good with limited pain – struggling without becoming a dervish of resentment.
Comfort Fiction
After this month’s email, I promise to shut up about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. As you can tell, I get excited when I find a book I love – so I want to share one more snippet for this month’s Comfort Fiction.
The novel contains a character called Marx – the good-natured glue that holds Sadie and Sam’s tortured brilliance together. At one point, Marx buys a house and is delighted to discover a fruit-laden persimmon tree in the garden. He calls persimmons “my actual favourite fruit” – but Sadie questions this in the following extract:
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met – he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know – were persimmons his favourite fruit, or had they just now become his favourite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?
In the spirit of Marx, I feel grateful to live in a time when a little-known writer can send books and emails out into the world at minimal cost, just to see if they make people happy.
Dicing with Death
Dice Company seems to make a lot of people happy, and it’s certainly a major source of joy for me. After a Christmas break, we’re now well into recording the next section of our Small Embers D&D adventure. It’s great to have a dose of escapism and silliness every Tuesday night, when we record the show (and insult each other for two additional hours, just to give Tom some extra editing).
This week, we released out 200th episode (part four of Eat the Reich, with Adam Beltaine as GM), and we have another exciting year in store. Small Embers may reach a thrilling conclusion, and we’ve already got new Mothership and Call of Cthulhu one-shots locked and loaded – plus more projects in the pipeline.
Finally – as I did in 2025 – I hereby promise to publish my first novel this year. Stay tuned. But don’t hold your breath. Thanks for reading.