Well this is the longest I think I've left it in between updates. I can't quite believe it's 2026. I've recently rediscovered this blog and have been fascinatedly and guiltily (because it's using time that I should be spending on reading my current manuscript) rereading. I wish I could go back to past Anna and tell her that it's going to be ok, that after 2020 your life is going to get better and better, and that by 2026 you are somehow the mother of two ridiculously beautiful children (Lil, three and a half, Henry, nine months), and still with Leonard Cohen, who turned out to be the kindest and cleverest man in the world. You're going to have a pretty awful year of returning to work after giving birth to Lil, involving a miscarriage, two members of staff on mental health leave and an enormous explosion in sales and pressure at work (hrrghh 2024), but then get offered a job from a very nice and much, much easier company, and leave L,B rather abruptly, using lots of extra holiday from your mat leave.
I do still feel guilty and somehow like I failed, but rereading this blog I think it is pretty clear that I'm not very good at letting things go, particularly if I feel like somehow I should have done better or that I didn't win. I now work mostly from home for a private editorial company, and though I'm not exactly helping to even out the literary playing field, I wasn't really doing that by making lots of money for the giant company that owned our giant company in my old job either, so... Some day I would so love to work for an independent publishing house and help to support and edit really talented authors, but for now I couldn't ask for a job that fits in better with two young children and wanting to spend as much time as I can with them and with Lenny. We moved out of London - the usual cliche of not being able to buy a house we wanted to live in because we aren't millionaires, and I'm back near where I grew up in a lovely but troubled town called Chesham, close to my brother and his kids. Currently writing from my mum's house, the actual place where I grew up. Life is astonishingly lovely, even if I'm tired literally all of the time, I also can't believe how lucky I am.
The world, however, is not in a great place. We're in a punishing drought owing to global warming, whereas lots of other places are suffering wildfires and floods. AI has been invented (it feels so bizaare to write this, I'd suggest it felt a bit cliched if I were editing!), and is swiftly trying to take over most creative industries/everything. In fact I suspect the current novel I'm trying to edit is at least a little AI-written. To be clear, AI itself isn't trying to take over (we're not at Matrix level yet), it's the billionaires who trained their AI bots on stolen books, and who seem to be excited about getting even more billions (congrats to Elon Musk for becoming the world's first trillionaire - what a moment for us all), eliminating the middle classes and our planet and building some sort of ludicrously evil escape bubble. Oh, and this man is back in control of America:
It feels odd raising children in this, and I'm aware that Lil is getting ever closer to the age when I have to turn off Bluey and say, 'btw, because lots of us in the West have been greedy and stupid, but particularly a group of (mostly) old, (mostly) white, (mostly) men, our planet is beginning to die, there aren't any jobs for you when you grow up and life as we currently know it is likely to change in a bad way - also you'll never get to go skiing because what even is snow, and it's up to you guys to sort everything out soz' (I'm still working on the specifics). It's not a conversation I'm looking forward to.
However, the headline here is that my particular life for now remains very, very lovely. I'm off for a team lunch in London today and absolutely must have finished this current novel before seeing them, so I'm going to go and carry on working now. Maybe I'll write again soon, or maybe it will be another five years and the next entry will be by a bot - who knows!
