Miscellany – Shady Characters

Miscellany № 101: back to our scheduled programming

June 16, 2024

And you’re back in the room!

I recently submitted the manuscript for my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: a Natural History of Emoji to my editor, Brendan Curry, at W. W. Norton. This one was a bit of a whirlwind: Empire of the Sum was published less than a year ago, so writing time has been short. Add in a recent relocation from Birmingham, England to Linlithgow, Scotland (the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots, no less), along with all of the attendant upheaval with jobs and schools and houses, and it has not been a restful few months 😅

Miscellany № 100: hitting the century

June 3, 2023

I never meant for the numbering of these posts to have any significance other than to tell them apart, but it’s still gratifying to have hit the century after (checks notes) a mere eleven years and six-ish months. For reference, here’s the first ever miscellany post, published way back in November 2011. Amusingly, it is unnumbered. Who’d have thought I’d have needed more than a single post to tie up some loose ends?

Miscellany № 99: minting the dollar

March 11, 2023

I was in St Andrews a couple of weeks ago with my wife Leigh to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. St Andrews is a picturesque, if slightly exposed town on the north coast of Fife, in Scotland, and is famous mostly for two things: the Old Course, being the oldest golf course in the world; and its university, which is the oldest in Scotland and the third oldest in the English speaking world.

Miscellany № 98: a novelistic conundrum

January 13, 2023

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks:

What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or “Going Postal”?

So far I’ve found “epigraph”, which is not specific enough, and “taster”, which possibly is not what book people would call it.

Read more →

Miscellany № 97: interrobang archaeology, part 2

November 21, 2022

As we head towards the holiday season, 2022 edition, good news for next year’s gift-giving conundrums: my esteemed editor, Mr Brendan Curry, has rubber-stamped the Empire of the Sum manuscript, which has now started its journey through the W. W. Norton publication pipeline. Between now and the summer of 2023 it will be copyedited, proofread, indexed, designed, typeset and many other things beside, and it will be much better for it.