29/12/2024

It’s been a hell of a year in the F. household. I started 2024 unable to walk and uncertain that I ever would again due to the hit and run that I never shut up about. We had a one-year-old, my wife had not returned to work, and my job as a wax factory worker was looking untenable. I’d eventually get back on my feet with crutches in January, a walking stick in April, and unaided in June (except for the bad days). I returned to work in June, as well. Though I am currently off again since September due to mental health issues (the accident dramatically worsened my existing C-PTSD), I am certainly doing a lot better this year.

One of the big ticks in the plus column for EOY ’24 over ’23 is the fact that I’m writing again. I’d more or less stopped horror related activities after Jacob was born, unable to handle the combined stress of hard, physical shift work plus fatherhood plus my somewhat unhinged writing process. Returning has meant a lot to me. I think it took getting close enough to death to tickle the Grim Reaper’s taint for me to realise just how important my silly little stories are to me, even if nobody is reading them. In fact, processing the accident by writing horror and weird fiction inspired by it is one of the first and most frequent things I thought about while I was in the hospital, aside from thoughts of my wife and son.

So yeah, I’m back in the game with this new website. It looks very retro and amateurish, which is exactly the look I’m going for (honest!). I want it to feel very human and raw, which is also how I want my stories to feel. I want it to nod vaguely in the direction of the web idealism of the late ’90s and early 2000s rather than seamlessly blending in with the corporate web apps of 2024. A bit of a throwback. More Neocities than Squarespace (though I’m not using Neocities since I decided to spin up and manage an OpenBSD server myself. It’s going for that same vibe, though).

But I digress.

What I want to do tonight is write a little about what I’m planning for Ferenbrooke in the coming year. I’ll follow that up with a few paragraphs on what I’m happy about, and things I’m thankful for. It feels like a good and proper thing to do at the end of the year, and I’m sure my therapist would approve.

The Horrors Shall Persist

Firstly, I’ll be ending Nos Da, Tad with a new epilogue. This’ll set up a couple of things which I’ll be writing later in the year. That’s all I’ll say for now, but I think a couple of readers of the original version of Nos Da, Tad will be quite pleased if I’m remembering their comments correctly.

I’ve started loosely sketching out some ideas for the next serial, which I want to start posting in the Spring. It’s going to focus on a down-and-out bartender coming across an alternative internet protocol and slowly uncovering a mystery around the creator of said protocol. It’s inspired by Gopher and Gemini (not the Google thing, the Gemini protocol) and the phenomenon of paranoia and conspiracy culture. I’m still workshopping a name, but I’m looking forward to getting right into the story. As a way of celebrating this story, I’ll also be spinning up servers in Gopherspace and Geminispace and mirroring ferenbrooke.com there. I’m a big fan of these smaller, simpler protocols due to my old-man-esque feeling that the modern web is just too damn complex.

On the short story front, I’ve got a few recurring characters to introduce. One of them, a detective named Amy Russell, is also the protagonist of a novel I’m intermittently working on, so I’m quite keen to introduce her to the world outside my head. Another is Lucia Ivanova, the savvy mind behind the blog Freaky Ferenbrooke (mentioned in The Rail House). It’s likely the blog will come up again before she makes an appearance, but I do want to get her on the page soonish. Ethan, from Cat’s Eyes, might get another story. He sort of came out of nowhere. I wrote that story based on a recurring dream I’ve been having, so I was quite surprised to find myself getting such a strong sense of who Ethan is as a character quite quickly and I’m keen to see what happens if I throw some more strangeness his way.

My overall goal for Ferenbrooke is to have the stories largely work fine on their own, but also provide something extra for those who read more widely on the site. I’m trying to ensure that I don’t accidentally write one giant mosaic novel where the stories don’t individually work well without the larger context while also adding enough Easter eggs, references, and a sense of a larger narrative to make it rewarding to read the whole lot. It’s a nontrivial target, but hopefully I’ll hit it.

Ending The Year With Gratitude

Dr. Andrews, this bit is for you.

I’m glad my son is getting a little older, a little smarter, and developing a strong personality. I’m glad my wife is enjoying being back at work and I am glad she gets to have her endometriosis surgery soon to improve her quality of life. I’m glad my family is safe and happy. I’m glad I can walk.

I’m glad I managed to get this site up. I’m glad that I’ve written every line of HTML, CSS, and XML myself rather than generating it (well, more or less. The prose is written in markdown then I convert it to HTML and wrap it in a template I made). That might change as this site grows, but the ’90s style web dev experience is serving as a sort of mindfulness exercise right now. I’m glad I’m writing again, and glad that a few people are reading it.

I’m thankful for my wife and son, for their love and support, and for the continued understanding of my employer. I’m thankful, too, for the folks that have taken time out of their day to read the stuff I’m putting on this site. I’m thankful for my friends in the horror community and for all the cool indie authors and small presses that produced a tonne of new books for me to read now that I’m immersing myself in this little corner of the lit world again.

I’m thankful for the people that heard the crash at 4:45am on 23/11/2023 and left their houses to see what happened. I’m thankful that they spotted my twisted, broken body in the ditch ten metres from my motorbike and called emergency services. I’m thankful for the air ambulance that pumped 5 units of blood into me to stave of haemorrhagic shock. I’m thankful for all the doctors, nursing staff, and other NHS workers that put me back together over the course of a month and five surgeries. I’m thankful for the synthetic bone graft in my left knee and for the 34 titanium implants in my left leg, pelvis, back, and right arm. I’m thankful for the fellow patients I met in hospital who made me feel a little more human while I was wired up to a bunch of machines and had a bunch of tubes going in and out of me. I’m double thankful for the silly amount of morphine I was on the whole time I was in the hospital.

And finally, I’m thankful for my scars. The ones you can see and the ones you can’t. I might not like them, but they make me who I am, and that’s worth something.

Thanks for reading.

—Antony F.