It's Friday - What Can Possibly Go Wrong?

A weekly newsletter from Jodi Taylor

Jul 04, 2025

This week we have:

The second book in the next three-book contract is…
A David Sands Writing Competition entry: Reality Anew by Elle
Jodi Taylor discusses her emotional stuntedness with Caimh McDonnell
Jodi Taylor Book Recommendation: Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson💙📚
A short video about Lady Jane Grey
NEW BOOK! The Book of the Month is Hard Time by Jodi Taylor
There’s plenty to read this week and you can see everything new on the blog too. CLICK HERE for the blog.

The second book in the next three-book contract is…

(Message from Jodi written on 1st July during a UK heatwave)

Hello everyone.

I’m typing this as fast as I can because my laptop is definitely not happy. I don’t think it likes the heat. I’m blowing a fan on it rather than me and it’s repaying my sacrifice with wobbly screens and flickering. So I’d better crack on.

Thanks to everyone for your lovely response to Smallhope and Pennyroyal 2. It’s coming on and I hope to be able to type THE END quite soon now. It’s not really THE END, of course – I’ll be revising and polishing the manuscript until someone tears it from my grasp and sends it off to Headline. And then there will be edits and copy edits and proofing and so forth, but I’m on schedule.

And I’m excited to see Murder at Martingale Manor doing well, too. The Christmas story has become such a tradition but try writing a Christmas story in April. Not easy!

Also in the works – the next St Mary’s story, which I think will be St Mary’s 15. I have a couple of titles in mind – some more likely than others. I really fancy The Anals of History but I can’t see me getting away with that. Won’t stop me trying, of course. I’m also toying with The Shape of Time to Come and Well, That Could Have Gone Better.

The plot is written all over the wall in my sitting room, together with a quick sketch of my brother, the eminent author, doing something fairly bizarre even for him. More about that I will not say. Spoilers! Suffice to say it’s the usual catalogue of catastrophe for Max, Markham and Peterson. All the usual suspects will be there – and possibly some new ones as well. We’ll have to see.

Happy heatwave, everyone.

Reality Anew by Elle

20 February

They have asked me to write a diary. It’s for some researchers connected with the university and while it’s not the sort of thing I would normally do, it seems simple enough and maybe could help the cause of Science in some way. Of course, I’m not so narcissistic to think that my ramblings are important enough to anyone to actually read in the midst of the worst disaster the world has ever known. They’ll probably apply some robot tool to it, I would imagine.

And so I can write freely. They say writing is good for making sense of a chaotic environment and so maybe there will be some personal benefit too. A lot has changed in these last few weeks, but I and my partner have at least a home and a computer and a dodgy internet connection. We can watch broadcasts from around the world. We have food.

27 February

I suppose in a diary you should start with some context. How did we get here? I’m not ready for that yet. And anyway, as is so common these days, my memory is still quite fuzzy in places. So I’ll write about the here and now.

We get our food parcels every Tuesday. They are somewhat designed to account for individual tastes and needs – ours has peppers instead of tomatoes for instance - though there’s a fairly heavy reliance on dry staples, like flour and rice. There are confinement recipes online: suddenly irrelevant celebrities demonstrating how to make pasta bake for the first time in their lives. For many, it’s like cooking is a newly invented activity and they are now giddy with the prospect of making a Victoria sponge every day.

I used to go to work. But there’s no need for a Commuter like me to clog up the public transport system to act important in a soulless office block. So I stay at home with my partner, K, and we find ways to pass the day. The flat is very clean, though the intermittent electricity outages mean the floors don’t get vacuumed as much as I would like. We keep the windows shut as instructed. Sometimes my old colleagues share memes. And mostly we stare mindlessly at the devastation on our screens punctuated by automated broadcasts and reminders to stay indoors.

15 March

K thought he had a rash today. After some googling and panicking, we diagnosed him with hypochondria (and sunburn).

“How can you get sunburned from inside?” K marvelled. I looked it up and was able to report doubtfully that this could indeed be possible.

“Though it might not be a trustworthy source.” I do try to apply some sort of quality filter to things I read online, though it’s difficult when social media is your main source of connection to the world outside.

Social media has lots to say about life today. Lots of it is angry – with our government, with the system, with other people. Much of it is also well meaning, though often bordering on saccharine: poems in support of essential workers, pledges to check in virtually on older neighbours (all forgotten within a few short weeks), outpourings of support for homeless people, who were stepped over by the very same people just weeks ago who now celebrate them. “Healthy debate!” the press calls it, as they lazily extract opinions from social media and serve them up as the mood of the nation. I steer clear, but I am bored, truthfully, and a little light relief goes a long way in these times.

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