re:mote voices

I love to read. I love to talk about reading. Sharing what I read over the year, keeping note of it with my wee lists every year.

But at the end of 2022 I somewhat lost my way. Someone posted into my timeline that people who boasted about how much they read was problematic, and an attack on folk who don't read as much. Which is, clearly, fucking stupid. They may have had a point, in their own way, but it was a sweeping generalisation, and an attack.

Reading is part of my mental health. It is what keeps me going. Especially during the pandemic years. I know a lot of folk stopped reading or struggled to read. I read more. Which no doubt was reflected in other things I didn't do. But reading saw me through.

So, in 2023, I lost my way a little. I didn't stop reading. I kept going strong. I have to. But, I did spend less time talking about what I was reading, sharing what I was reading. And during the collapse of twitter, where every year I shared the best short stories I had read in a year, and tried to regularly promote what I was enjoying, then losing my way felt in a way significant.

This feeling, coupled with the current diffusion and general loss of confidence in social media, means that it is perhaps more important than ever to create our own wee spaces. For us to make an effort to say I read this! I enjoyed this! These people are doing good things and people doing good things are people that I want to share with people who enjoy good things.

Sure, yeah, a simplistic element in there. But kindness is punk, joy is life. The world is fucked up, but we can all be better, we can all embrace and share a sense of community that gets us through the day after day after day.

So, I'm planning to fill some of the gaps from the last few years. Going through my archives of notes. Which will give me some ready to go material for this remote resurection, while working out what 2023 was and where we go in 2024.

Hello world. This is the voice of remote. 2024. We will endeavour to resume broadcasting.

Our last post was 2017. The rise and fall of social medias and so many other things. Years of weird and isolation. We need to find ways through and back, to connect and converse. To share and embrace.

So, 2024. Let us see what we can do.

During the pandemic years writing was hard. In 2023 I wrote 3 stories, which is a lot by my standards. One of those has been accepted, and will be published in an anthology in August. Another is out on the wait and see. And the third is needing to be rewritten before I'm ready to share and explore options. I have plans for other stories, fragments always loiter, always wait to talk to me in the darkness, whispering - so how about dragons and witches and weird things?

The 82nd World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) will happen in Glasgow in 2024 – Gin24 – Thursday 8th of August to Monday 12th August. In the early 90s there were a handful of Glasgow Comicons, spun off from the London Comicon of the time, those were my first cons. But those were small scale, and different beasts compared to something like Worldcon. The last Glasgow Worldcon was 2005, which was my first con of this type. I'll be back at the SECC in 2024 for Gin24.

It'll be a big event. A big year. Hello world, a happy new year to you. From Glasgow.