December 2025
New writing, quantified validation, and a development in the publishing industry
I have had another productive year, with professional, creative and literary work that I am pleased with. These are some of the things I did in 2025’s final month.
Output
This video, which quotes multiple of The Kev’s Google Reviews, was released on YouTube:
Other activity on that YouTube channel has included this terrible joke on shorts. I kept up the habit of performing my own songs, but gigs that aren’t at grotty pubs in front of inattentive audiences are a rarity.
I also released this cover of a forgotten 90s pop classic. And I re-recorded this Chinese lesson, because of a minor translation error in the original.
And I finished another Substack rounding up this year’s media appearances.
Activities
In 2026 I am determined to bring this Substack up a level, in both quality and quantity of output. I will try to make posts weekly, rather than monthly, and so have already written and scheduled four Substack essays for January.
And I am welcoming all suggestions as to what to write about.
On top of this, I finished writing a new song, a duet. And I got well on the way to executing another idea, and both should be released in January.
Wider World
David Walliams, one of the world’s highest paid authors, was dropped by his publishers on December 20th for alleged inappropriate behaviour toward women. His books were, by all credible accounts, terrible. But his celebrity status helped sell them.
Dorothy Parker famously said “if you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” The same can surely be said of fame and social status.
Selling books is an odd process and something of a winner-takes-all lottery. In 2006, the year I finished my first novel, one of the best-selling books was ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne. Its publication must have been green-lit by unscrupulous scum who didn’t care how many lives they ruined with the terrible ‘self-help’ advice the book contained.
And publishing is far from the only industry in which victors are required to climb a pile of corpses to get to the top. Singer-songwriter turned lawyer Katie Waissel, who got to the business end of the X Factor in 2010, has broken her silence about her poor treatment by Simon Cowell, one of the most powerful figures in the entertainment industry.
If the music and publishing industries are dominated by social-climbing monsters, then why bother making music or writing stories at all? To be worth anything, art has to be treated like a calling, and not a career.
Anyone who makes art for any reason other than its own reward is asking to have their life ruined. One of the great poems on the subject is Marge Piercy’s ‘For the Young Who Want To’. The whole thing is great, but the last two lines are for the ages:
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.