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Home for Christmas; wonderful family news; the eternal in the everyday. Reading: 'Walking Home' (Merion West, 2025), by Joseph Hunter

J.W. Turner knew about the sun. Thoughts on anhedonia, and seeing the way out. The daily exercise of the mind; new YouTube follows. A new poem. An old play. Readings: speech from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; 'The Fighting Temeraire (1838), by Joseph Hunter (unpublished).

Learning the piano is a lesson in craft and art, and forces you to be humble. There is no writing/piano playing analogy, you imagined it. Reading: 'Dream piano' (unpublished), by Joseph Hunter

I visit baby-raising friends, am enchanted, reflect on child-rearing as a creative process and an exercise in the unreliability of time/perception, and re-read some Knausgård. Reading: extract from A Man in Love (2009), by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Marina Abramovitch reminds me that there is a fine line between 'real' life and performance art. And that, sometimes, going out and getting drunk with the one you love is what life is about. Reading: extract from The Birds that are Caught (unpublished), by Joseph Hunter.

New cat. Same writer. More positive? Trying. Reading: 'Her lost children', by Joseph Hunter.

Almost a year has passsed; I have published; I am older; no beauty without mortality; birthday DVD marathons; poetry. Reading: 'History Among the Rocks' (from Kentucky Mountain Farm), by Robert Penn Warren.

A dark night of the soul has me questioning many things: my life, my writing, and my output – but not necessarily in that order. Reading: 'WHITES WASTE PAPER' (unpublished), by Joseph Hunter

I remember the joys of creative collaboration from years gone by. Writing is an inherently solitary pursuit, but that doesn't mean there aren't consolations to be had within that solitude. Reading: Extracts from '10 Rules for Writing Fiction', The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/20/10-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-two)

Writing is habit-forming, which is the good news. The bad news is, that habit is a slippery thing that can be elusive and untrustworthy. Readings: Extracts from the journals of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Hero's Body (2016) by William Giraldi

I explore the relationship between the physicality in fiction, and the physicality of the actual flesh-and-blood reader engaging with that fiction. Sometimes the intensity of that relationship has made me want to devour things... Reading from: A Moveable Feast (1964), by Ernest Hemingway

A recent experience with music makes me reflect on the apparent impossiblity of trusting one's one judgement in relation to work you have created. The way it seems one day changes with the weather: something that seems to click now becomes discordant later. Reading: 'There are no essential differences between things' (unpublished), by Joseph Hunter.

Maybe specific words are only ever an attempt to fix a pattern in the mind that is originally formless. And then, too, this grey area between form and formlessness can be captured in writing. Reading from: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Following on from thinking about memoir, I explore the idea that 'story truth' in fiction is something beyond fact, a way of organising and even doing justice to the meaning that is usually buried in the messy stuff of real life. Reading: Tim O'Brien, 'Form', The Things They Carried (1990)

Having recently written a draft of a memoir, I compare writing fiction to creative non-fiction. In terms of drawing from your everyday life, are there perhaps similarities? Reading from Failure: A Memoir (unpublished, work in progress), by Joseph Hunter