So apparently there’s this new film, right, called “Young Washington”, and at the end of it, Kelsey Grammer talks directly to the audience. It’s not as if the film is breaking the fourth wall with a character suddenly turning to us, it’s more a separate advert that will presumably be ditched when this thing finally goes to streaming. But it’s Kelsey Grammer, he’s talking to the audience, and he’s asking them to buy more tickets to this film, whether or not they then go see it again.

“With your help, ‘Young Washington’ can be America’s #1 movie on the 250th anniversary of our nation’s birth,” he says, according to Slate magazine. He continues: “we can send a message loud and clear that America and the principles that helped shape her are still worth fighting for.”

There’s irony for you.

Follow. There’s a wonderful, I mean seriously wonderful episode of Grammer’s most famous sitcom, “Frasier”, called “The Candidate”. In it, psychiatrist Frasier rehearses filming a TV promo for a local politician, then not to spoil this, learns something that suggests this man might be mentally unfit for the job. Frasier now has to record the promo and every line that had seemed positive in rehearsal is now laden with extra meaning. Same speech, totally different meaning overall, it is a truly, enviably fine piece of writing by Chuck Ranberg and Anne Flett-Giordano.

I don’t think Grammer appreciates this, or would appreciate having it pointed out, but every word in that “Young Washington” speech of his is fine, yet its meaning is totally changed because of Grammer himself and the fact that he is a full-on Donald Trump fan. Kelsey Grammer is MAGA, even now, even after everything, and even as the US celebrates 245 years plus 5 under Trump.

Calm, William, calm. I started this today intending to write to you about this ancient business of whether you can like someone’s work if they themselves are problematic. I was going to tell you that someone once said my writing was worthy of Patricia Highsmith and, wow, did I feel great until I Googled her and read about her politics.

Actually, in the middle of the night I thought of a gag to do with this. I thought of how it’s a shame I wasn’t told this today, when Google is so poor that a search on Highsmith would only return sites to buy her books. I could’ve enjoyed the praise so much more.

Then of course there’s that Woody Allen line about “I just can’t listen to that much Wagner, I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.” And then there’s that Woody Allen. There was a long time when his “Hannah and Her Sisters” was my favourite film and maybe that naturally faded away over time, but recently I was in a conversation about it so I started to watch it again. Immediately, just immediately the music on the soundtrack, it’s so glorious and evocative, it slapped me back to when I first saw it, I was back relishing Allen’s and my memories of New York City.

I realised, though, that there was now so much going on in my head about this film that I wasn’t watching the film. I stopped it, thinking that it used to be that my only criticism was how Michael Caine isn’t great in this. Now I also question the journey I remember one woman’s character has where she eventually comes to see Allen’s character is right, that’s bothering me.

Just now, writing to you, I figured I’d compromise and listen to that brilliant soundtrack. I have it on vinyl somewhere but there’s only a tribute act version on Apple Music and checking Amazon, I learn that the CD is selling for £200 and up. The landscape film poster I used to have on my wall as a student is now available, with some digging, for £150.

I think I’d still rather pay that than go see “Young Washington” and spend the whole film dreading Grammer’s speech.

Grammar is fascinating, though, and yes, I’m trying to get my mind back onto the point. That point to me is about the wall between a person and their work, but it’s also specifically the way that he speaks of fighting for America’s principles when his avowed hero is fighting against them. You know this, it’s very definitely a right-wing thing where you must shout as loudly as you can in favour of the thing you are actually destroying.

I’m never going to see “Young Washington”, I’m safe. It doesn’t appeal and the one review I’ve seen says it’s pants, but even though it’s only a tiny chance that streamers will forget to remove that Grammer ad at the end, it doesn’t seem worth the risk.

Maybe I should go write more Highsmith-like prose. While, this is certainly true, that “Hannah and Her Sisters” soundtrack is playing for free in my head. God, it’s good.

I’ve had a good week — I signed a book contract — but there was one part of one conversation that was miserable and I keep thinking about it. A writer nearing the end of her university course asked me about joining the Writers’ Guild and at one point said that emerging writers who do not use AI are at a disadvantage, I think even that they are left behind.

Now, that reads as if she were arguing in favour of AI and she was not at all. She was asking about it because this is how the industry looks to her at the moment, how it’s being presented to her.

But what this looks to me is that she’s been listening to an AI evangelist. There are still a lot of these, and that’s not even including people who sell AI. There are so many people who have invested so much of themselves in this bullshit that they have to say it’s the way things are and that you’d better join in because otherwise you’re never going to get any work as a (insert job title here). It helps if these people are not writers because any time you can devalue something that you can’t do, there are people who like that.

I think you noticed that I slipped in a certain word there. You were reading quickly, so to save you skipping back up, I mean the word beginning with B and ending with “ullshit”.

I do use AI tools and actually more and more: I’ve used AI for transcribing every interview I’ve done in the past ten years. I’ve an AI shortcut that takes a list and converts it into the right HTML for that list to be seen on a website. The other day, the new Siri AI was able to tell me some names of sources of mine that I’d somehow blanked on.

The list goes on but the list will never include having AI write for me or, an example this writer said, product pitch deck visuals.

I could now trot out half a day’s worth of reasons but if you don’t happen to already have exactly the same opinions about it as me, you have at least heard all of this before.

So let me focus on that specific thing of new writers being left behind. Forgive me, this is quite a technical point: if you get AI to do your writing for you, why the fuck should I use you? Commission you? Publish you?

I mean it. There is nothing you can do with AI that cannot be done by absolutely every single person else on the planet. So you are demonstrating to me that you are entirely worthless.

There is this thing in writing that if you’re not a writer can sound very arty and detached from reality. It’s that you should write what you want. As in what you personally are interested in, not what the market demands. It is arty, but rather than being detached from reality, it is stone-cold pragmatism.

Like I said to this writer — who I really liked, by the way, I should say that — today the market is hot for gay sports stories. Great. But by the time you’ve written yours, the world will be onto something else. No one could seen what an impact Rachel Reid’s Game Changers tale Heated Rivalry would have, and today no one can see what the next thing that will have that excellent wallop will be.

Writing what you want to write is not arty or being up yourself, it is entirely pragmatic because you cannot predict the market, you can only write the best thing you can and see what happens when it’s done.

Don’t use AI for writing — well, do if you like but how is that writing? — and never try to write what readers and audiences like today.

Unless it’s zombies. For some reason zombie stories just will not die.

I did not know until one minute ago that this line was written by Ian Fleming, and I did not remember until one minute ago that it begins with the word “happenstance”. It’s a fine word. But the line is that “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

You know the line, even if you only half-remember it like me and just imagine writing a line that gets even half-remembered. I adore that I half-remembered it, went to check, and learnt all this. I cannot get enough of finding out anything, whether it’s because I want to say it to you, or just because.

But speaking of because.

The reason I half-remembered this is that something has now happened twice. Or near enough. This week someone asked me how old I was and did so specifically because they were surprised I was interested and enthusiastic about something. Not long ago, someone else of around my age — I’m 60 — was equally and vocally surprised that I wasn’t, as he put it, just circling the drain.

If I’m supposed to be glum and fixated and uninterested, but I’m not, then I think there has to be part of me that just wants to preen at you. Only, it’s also frightening. Just because it isn’t true now, maybe tomorrow I’ll be like that. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be all about how things were better in my day. I thought this was my day.

It’s frightening because being closed to anything and everything is such a ferocious waste. I grant you that we’re not living in the greatest of worlds at the moment, but there is still so much that is fantastic. Everyone is so interesting. Everything is so interesting, absolutely everything.

Except football.

But then while I do mean that, I am also conscious that the football part is a joke I’ve said a lot. It’s my line and I do have a few of those. Such as how if you and I even pass in the street for long enough, you will have heard me say that I do not expect to be remembered when I’ve left a room. But I don’t. Even I am a bit bored of my saying that I’d rather talk about you than me, I know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, but the thing is that yes, I would infinitely rather talk about you.

Says William as he rabbits on about himself yet again.

There is so much to learn, to relish, to just be really happy finding out, I don’t understand how anyone can think anything else. I am afraid of thinking it.

Mind you, now I’m afraid that I’m sounding like an arse. Look at me, I’m so wonderfully excited about everything, even as I myself actually do bugger-all. It would be so good to have a sentence now that began with but.

Yet, okay, let me give you an example of what excites me and you can see that it is preposterous, you can see that it’s not worth anything more than an uh-huh. I”m researching a TV show called “Lou Grant”, which is the show that made me want to be a writer so this is a very big deal for me, and as it happens, every episode had a one-word title. It’s like the way “Friends” named every episode as “The One With” or “Where” or whatever, it was a thing, and in the case of “Lou Grant”, no one ever mentioned it and certainly didn’t explain it.

I now know why the show did it.

It was a drama set around a newspaper and the one-word episode titles were a homage to what journalists refer to as a slug. To this day I write slugs constantly: it’s the one or maybe a few words that log the article you’re writing. So that you and your editor can say yes, yes, the crash story is in progress, or I’m waiting for a call back on the wolf article.

That’s it. That’s all. I do not think this has changed your day. Yet when I found out, when a producer on the show told me, I danced.

Don’t tell me we ever have to stop dancing.

Last Saturday, I had to wait 90 minutes at my barber’s. Obviously I’m not complaining, in fact it was good to see a local business being busy and especially so when I’ve often been there at times where my greying hair on the floor would be indistinguishable from tundra blowing by.

But this time I was in a hurry and there wasn’t anything I could do, so I had to sit there for that hour and a half. True, I worked on various things to do with a book I’m producing, and I read a bit of a novel, read a short script, played a game of sudoko, did my Duolingo Chess for the day and — I am quite pleased with this — also did a silent piano exercise.

Yet otherwise, nothing. Just sitting there. It wasn’t exactly peaceful, but it was still and I realise I’m not used to that. At the very least, if there are people around then I am talking to them. It’s exciting. New people. This time, I don’t know why, no. People came and went, there were probably six men at various stages, and they did all talk.

One guy made a new friend and got into a very detailed conversation about electric vehicles. (He doesn’t want one but is afraid he’s going to have to buy an EV soon. But it’s alright, because he charges the fuel cost to the company.) Then when that new friend left, it happened that someone else came in both to the barber’s and into that conversation, where he was told at length that the guy didn’t want to buy an electric vehicle but was afraid he was going to have to soon, although it’s okay because he charges it to the company.)

Okay, maybe at times it was irritating.

But being forced to sit there with comparatively nothing to do and definitely not enough time in which to do it, it seemed a bit unusually profound for a Saturday morning. I think I learned that there is a benefit to being still. I think I learned not to look in mirrors just after you’ve eaten.

I definitely learnt to go to the barber midweek.

I can’t claim to have known actor Michael Keating, who died this week, but I did interview him once and we did have at least one phone chat. And I want to tell you about that chat. Not because of what was said, I imagine now that it was just about arranging the time for the in-person interview, but because of precisely when it happened.

Please picture me taking notes as I watched an episode of Blake’s 7. Specifically, I’m sitting at the end of our couch, my MacBook is on the arm to my side, my iPhone is on the seat next to me. Maybe I should explain that I thought I wasn’t paying a lot of attention, because this was for work and the episode was not exactly one of the good ones. I was watching it for completeness, possibly to check some fact, I can’t remember, but this was a job and I would have sworn that my mind kept wandering.

Except there came this moment when Vila, played by Keating, has to exit the scene. From my perspective on my couch, he walks out of shot to the right of my MacBook’s screen —

— and calls the iPhone beside me.

It was precise, to the instant, as if the character had really gone off to do it. And I must’ve been a lot more into that episode than I thought because I was really thrown by the call.

Compare that to how the star of Blake’s 7, Gareth Thomas, clearly decided during a phone call that I was an idiot. He was right, actually, as I was trying all sorts of things to route that call through my Mac in order to record it, and with some exasperation he eventually suggested I just put it on speakerphone, turn up the volume, and record that.

I don’t think I ever phoned Paul Darrow, who played Avon, but I know when we met, he told me he was using me as an excuse for a fag break. We stood outside a studio, the wind making recording hard, the cold getting to me, and I can’t remember another word. Good thing I took notes.

Only, Gareth Thomas died in 2016, not more than a couple of years after I spoke to him. Paul Darrow died in 2019. Now Michael Keating has gone, too, and for some reason I’m most saddened by that. Nothing against Thomas or Darrow, but there was something so unassumingly likeable about Keating. And I can see his face lighting up as he told me that no, he didn’t mind talking about Blake’s 7 for the ten thousandth time, “I like talking about myself!”

There are interviewees you wish you’d never contacted, and there are ones where you have to grit your teeth to get through the recording, but then there are ones who are great for whatever you’re doing and there are ones who you just like. If you’ve interviewed actors, you know this: they are very good at being likeable because they’re very good at performing. Still, you can tell. And if Michael Keating was putting on a show for me that day all those years ago, he did it very well.

He wasn’t one of the Blake people I carried on talking to after the project was over, but now I rather wish he had been.

So I did this thing yesterday, I had a tune in my head, just ten notes or so, and for the first time in my life, I automatically went to my piano to try to work out what they were. Now, I failed, and now, I have not one thin clue how I thought I could do this since at present “Chopsticks” is beyond my grasp, but I tried. And most significantly to me, I went to the piano as automatically as I might to a keyboard to write on.

I concluded, briefly, that I am now a musician. I concluded, even more briefly, that I am a muso.

But clearly only a small one, so therefore a-muso-bouche.

Now, I thought of that phrase and I unquestionably hope to make you smile with it, but if it worked then I see that as a good line. If the gag didn’t amuse you, then I see it as a line I might work on. I promise you that I do not see it either way as being part of me, as your reaction being praise or criticism of me. The writing is the thing, the work is the thing, it isn’t me.

Yet two different people this week told me that I need praise and that shocked me. It upset me, actually, and I can’t really explain why since I don’t suppose there’s anyone who doesn’t like being praised. Need, though. Whyever this punched me, it was on that word. And two different people. Two independent sources, I can’t dismiss that.

I vow to you, as actually I vowed to them, that if you praise me, I do not believe you. I won’t call you a liar, I’ll just think you’re being nice. Whatever I do, I assume it’s either bad or it’s good enough, move on. I’ve had some incredible comments from people, even this week, but while I hope I take the compliments graciously, I recognise that I just know very kind people and I enjoy that I know them.

Need, though. Shook me. Felt like they don’t know me. Or maybe that I don’t.

So there’s this book idea, right, and I first pitched it in the 1990s but not only couldn’t get anywhere with it, someone else did. They got a book published on precisely the same non-fiction topic and all these years later, I still remember my first thought when I got it: they’ve queered the pitch for everyone else.

Flash forward to now and it’s not as if I’ve sold that book proposal, but I am close. Close enough that all reason and logic says the pitch is done and the contract should be on its way soon. But partly because of previous bruising, partly because an old friend taught me never to assume something is happening until it already has, I am not yet convinced.

But this means that for the first time I can remember, I’m in a rather detailed and protracted limbo. It’s not just waiting to see if this work happens, it is waiting to see if it happens but at the same time I’m already thirty hours into the research and I’m somewhere around 8,000 words into the book. That’s about 10% of what I expect the final count to be, so I’m in deep yet I’m also not.

At risk of jinxing this entire thing just by telling you, the reason I want to talk to you about this while completely neglecting to reveal what it’s all about, is this moment, this extended moment. This is now a real project, and it is not a real project yet, and I’m in this strange moment. All the writing I’ve done so far, all of the pitching, there is no difference between that and the writing I will do for the rest of the book, but it feels completely different because it’s become real.

Or possibly real. Do you know, it’s quite hard to type with crossed fingers?

I remember this from when I first got to write a “Doctor Who” for Big Finish: playtime is over, this is the real world now and people are waiting for you to write. If they ever doubted that you could or if they ever doubted your idea, they’re way beyond that now and there is the total and completely reasonable presumption that you will do it.

And you will. There’s no question about that. Whatever it takes, whether it’s hard or simple, you’re committed and you’re contracted, you will write what you said you will and you will deliver it when you said you would. So far on this book project I’ve been agreeing dates for various stages and then always delivering early, but it’s still that no one is questioning whether I can write this. They shouldn’t. We are now at the stage where it is not an issue of whether I can write, but whether what I’m writing about is worth reading.

But I do question it. That 10% I’ve done so far is easily the most fact-packed thing I have written in the last decade. It is saturated with detail and I do love this — the publisher called it skilfully done, so you tell me why I’m still not convinced this is going to happen — and not only wasn’t it hard, it was fantastic to do. So much of it was stuff I already knew so the job was wallowing in confirming all of that, then so much more involved an interview with a source which turned out to be such a treat. He told me a fact, right, that won’t come in until later in the book, and even then will only take exactly one single sentence to reveal, but it was something I did not know before and I am ecstatic to have found it out.

Yet I’ve hopefully got another 90% of that level of detail ahead of me. Well, around 90%: I went ahead and wrote another short chapter just for myself, just because I had the details, just because it meant if and when this really does go ahead the way I want, I will have something else already done, it will be already underway. Keeping going is easier than starting or restarting.

There is just such a cold-shower difference between writing when you want to sell something and then writing when you have sold it. I say this to you as someone who has been a full-time freelance writer since the 1990s, someone who tends to write and have published around two thirds of a million words per year. But I also say it to you as someone who has wanted to write this book since the 1970s.

Not even since the 1990s. The 1970s. Just about. This is tied tightly to the very reasons I became a writer at all.

Not that there’s ever been a project I didn’t care about. Even if it was something simple or even if it were something I didn’t really have any interest in but you’ve got to pay the mortgage, still I go through a little of all of this concern about it. But then there are just these few certain and very special projects that mean the world. Only to me, of course, I’d be telling you exactly what this one is if I could and if I thought you’d be as into it as I am. But still, it’s this big to me and right now it is this real.

Or it isn’t.

I’ll obviously be relieved when this goes ahead, but to be involved in something I thought of, I pitched, and which means so much to me that right this moment my stomach is in a bit of a knot, it’s wonderful. I hope you have the same thing, and I hope you have it all the time.

Nothing you ever learn is wasted, even if it’s originally trivia and over time becomes pointless. I’m not selling this very well. But I did a thing this week and without any conceivably connection to anything I happen to have picked up before, there was a connection and I’ve been fixating on it.

All I did was have a week off. Mostly. Actually, pretty close to entirely. And I quickly found myself having to check what day was which, I was quickly living at odd hours of the day. I had a bad night’s sleep early on in the week, so I just had a lie-in. Cooking for one is tedious and I’d keep putting that off, so I’d end up eating at even odder hours, which might have contributed to the sleeping.

But overall, I had this week, it was wide open, and the very first thing I thought of was a FAT table. That’s an example of RAS, the Redundant Acronym Syndrome, as the T in FAT is Table. Just as you don’t need to say “ISBN number” because the N is number. I only learned of RAS while thinking of how I wanted to talk to you about this, so thank you.

FAT is a File Allocation Table. I have not one thin clue whether this still exists, but back in the day, the FAT was an important part of storage. You’d get these spinning hard drives with their magnetic platters and they could store data, but they needed organising. If you know all this, you know that I’m either patronisingly simplifying everything or I’ve just plain forgotten most of it, but I thought of the FAT as a contents page, or maybe an index. Nobody cares. Except I found it interesting because of two aspects, starting with how if you erased an entire hard drives, you probably did no such thing. You erased the contents page.

This is how data can, or at least could, be recovered. It would all be still there, until it was overwritten, it’s just that without an entry in the FAT, you couldn’t find it.

Then, reaching further back into my head, there was a thing I thought about too much regarding how data was saved on these drives. Your documents were saved in blocks and there was a thing about the size of those blocks. If your documents was a single byte longer than the block, it was given two blocks. Which meant you can have a drive that was full, even though it wasn’t.

I do not know why that interests me so. Except this week, actually starting mid-morning last Friday, I had all this space ahead of me and while I’d plenty to do, it had no structure. And I floundered. It was nice floundering, I spent Saturday morning in a cinema entirely on my own — I saw the French film “Colours of Time” and relished it, but wish I’d had more Malteasers — and then wandering about in the sunshine, I liked not having to be anywhere.

But I had all these things to do and without a structure, I was worried that they wouldn’t get done. They didn’t get done. Not all of them, and not the various other things that came up as good things to get done at the same time. A lot did. A lot was good.

Yet so much wasn’t done. And I found that if I finished something but it took a minute or two over an hour, it was clearly now time for lunch.

I appear to need a FAT table in my life. And this is not a comment on how much pizza I ate.