Pete's May 2025 update

Counting vets, jobs, and stories.

It’s dry skin weather.

Over the past couple of weeks the trees have begun seriously shedding their leaves. The vibrant reds and oranges replaced by muted browns and bare twigs and limbs. The footpaths and streets are where the colour is, now, raked into piles or left to form a crunchy carpet. There are council notices that street sweepers will come on alternate Wednesdays, which is too infrequent judging from the blocked drains and meandering overflow in this morning’s heavy rain.

Nutmeg update

Nutmeg’s vet—her main vet, not the specialist or the physio—gave Nutmeg a treat-dispensing toy as a present. 😍

She also gave Nutmeg a clean bill of health on her recent back-end problems. Which is unfortunately just one of several interconnected issues. It’s been a rough month for Nutmeg, us, and our credit cards. 🙈 Possibly another rough month coming up as we test new medications. Nutmeg has always been sensitive and atypical when it comes to meds.

Also, she has a piece of dried coconut on her nose.

Work and startups update

I’ve almost always been able to say that I enjoy my work. Whether that’s good fortune in the jobs I’ve found myself in, or a good attitude and mindset, I’ve been unable to decide. I know it’s not the case for everyone.

I’m enjoying the work I’m doing now. I feel fortunate to be able to say so. I had somewhat abandoned the idea of a ‘portfolio career’ last year and assumed I’d end up taking a fulltime role. So I’m delighted with how things worked out: working with a few excellent teams, mostly on different days, playing in the areas I want to play: coaching, teaching, curating, designing, running operations. And learning new things, too.

Last month I coached 10 startups, ran one workshop, facilitated two leadership sessions, gave feedback on an entrepreneurship course, contributed to a UN proposal, wrote two newsletters, and curated thousands of resources.

(If I’m honest, that list surprises me; this is the benefit of reflecting. The list of things I didn’t do (yet) takes the focus day-to-day. But that there’s some hefty output. Also, funnily enough, the original purpose of this ‘monthly’ email.)

Fiction update

I have exciting news that I’ve been asked to “keep under wraps” until the announcement in August. Whatever news you think it is? It’s not that exciting. But it’s a milestone for me. :)

I have a story coming out in reprint later this month! (That’s not the secret news; this is more exciting than that.) It was the first story I sold, and the only story I’ve sold twice. When I entered it into my story database my comment on it was:

“Silly, not a story, and probably nobody will want this.”

It was bought by the first editor I sent it to, and bought as a reprint by the third editor I sent it to. So obviously I’m a good judge of my own work.

I wrote a new story for a writing group challenge, which was to write to a specific story guide/structure that came in at 2500-3000 words. My first draft was 4600 words. The story changed a LOT during the editing phase. It was a goofy, slapstick-riddle Red Dwarf-style story to begin with, and I ended up cutting a lot of the physical gags and Hitchhikers-style narrator asides to trim it down. But the major narrative points are still driven by farts and puns.

I’ve slowed down on the submissions front, but I’m on track to hit 50 subs by 30 June—on pace for my (arbitrary) goal of 100 submissions in a year. Last year I got to 71 submissions, with not much writing happening between January and October. This year is already better, quarter-by-quarter, though I have fewer new stories to send around.

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Read / watch / listen

• [Read: 3 minutes] “The good die young, but hateful bastards live forever.” John Devore with another wonderfully-written movie review; this time revisiting the mullet-infested 90s classic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

• [Read: 4 minutes] Musk v Trump analysed as a message board drama, with Elon Musk as “the extremely familiar persona of ‘forum mod’”.

• [Watch: 9 minutes] Wallace & Gromit contraption in real life. The first 2/3 of the video is behind the scenes, with the full version at the end.

• [Watch: 3 minutes] Nina Conti is hypnotised by her own ventriloquist dummy.

• [Watch: 10 minutes] Laufey, Dodie and Jacob Collier with orchestra + the audience! Worth watching the video (rather than just listening) from about 4:15 when the audience joins in. Wow.

“A sandwich has more regulation than AI.” — Yoshua Bengio, the most-cited computer scientist globally, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields.