Notebook
Working notes and fragments. Things I'm still thinking about.
“Crate #1”
A public playlist of 300+ songs that tell a story of my life
Music has been integral to my writing life for as long as I can remember. Sometimes directly, as it was when I was working with DJs and producers in Glasgow and London; more often as a private source of input, release, joy and stimulus. I don’t have so much time to make mixes at the moment, so I thought I’d share a playlist of the sort of music that gets played in my writing studio, my car, and occasionally out and about and at parties. This is a deliberately unsorted selection. Listen to it on random or in the order it comes. Most of the things I love are represented in some form here. The most noteworthy exception is that there is no classical music on here. The reason is that the recordings always sound too quiet in a playlist with pop and electronic music. At some point I may share separate “Crates” containing only classical music, or only Jamaican (and diaspora) music, folk, jazz, or whatever. Crate #1 will keep changing as I discover (or rediscover) tracks I love, or get tired of the ones on here, so if you like the current selection it’s worth checking back from time to time to see what’s new. I also welcome tips and alerts to things that I might not be aware of. Finally, the “no photos and videos” cover is a nod to the kinds of rooms that brought me to these sounds in many cases for the first time and which have given me so much joy and creative spark over the years.
Happy listening!
Stef, August 2026
Take Up Space
I think a lot about how people occupy space.
In life so much rests on our ability, and willingness, to take up space. How we occupy the spaces we encounter matters. Have you ever been in a busy club and fought your way onto the dance floor and wondered how you will ever find a space to dance? Thirty years ago I learned a principle that I still use today, whether I’m at a packed swimming pool, getting on a train, or at some kind of event: take space and people will make space! Nine times out of ten it really does work. But you have to do it in a non-aggressive, collaborative way. A big smile on your face and hands where people can see them. No sudden movements. Be predictable. Like when you drive a car. It works in physical spaces but it also works in other situations such as at a job interview or in a slightly hostile work meeting.
The appeal of a philosophy that says if you take up space people will give it to you is obvious. But away from trivial examples like the above, is it true?
Maybe. Sometimes.
I'm interested in spaces of all kinds, from the physical spaces of home, play, activity and culture, to conceptual territories in our minds, our perception and our imaginings. Some spaces are as ancient as the hills, the oceans and the stars. Others came into existence in response to how and by whom spaces were occupied and used at that moment. Over the last few centuries many of our most contested spaces have become heavily mediated and tied either directly or indirectly to capital and property (also spatial concepts).
A sentence is a unit in space as well as time. So is a beat.
Design involves the direction of space to create a sensation, a connection or a disconnect.
All art is a response to the spaces around it.
The ritual of a minute's silence is observed to give space in commemoration to some lives but not others.
**
From the moment we are born we take up space. In fact we take up increasing quantities of space throughout the nine months preceding birth, and for many parents and would-be parents the imaginative and cognitive space a baby occupies long predates conception.
As humans it is our birthright to take up space. How we go about this activity is what we call life.
As artists, as communities, as planners and public servants, as occupants of this planet, our existence is entirely dependent on the spaces available to us. A poisoned lake ceases to be a viable habitat for a fish or a bird that relies on that fish. A bombed out building was once a school, a theatre, a hospital, a workplace, a brothel, a data centre or a home.
These developments may or may not be reported or widely observed by a population and the attention given or attention-deficit is among the most contested space of our time. What those with influence decide is deserving of space feeds the value we give to certain ideas, individuals and groups. The algorithm is a spatial instrument that shapes your personal digital landscape, with or without your consent.
The question of who gets to access a particular space and the influence that space may hold occupies much of our politics, social and philosophical bandwidth. Migration debates take up considerable space within this as people displaced by war, ecological catastrophe or economic collapse and stagnation search for viable spaces to live. At the same time, static populations feel their space is ever more compromised and under constant threat of being taken from them. Meanwhile, Real Estate grabs have turned our most populated and congested spaces into commodities where the lives of current inhabitants are reduced to entries on a balance sheet or not even considered. Add to this the speed at which AI has entered into every space of human endeavour while governments and regulators cede more and more ground to big tech and its backers who colonise these emerging spaces in much the same way that previous generations colonised indigenous populations — and we have what i call a crisis of space.
Yet at the same time there are pockets of resistance and creativity. Space is being reclaimed and out of this new spaces are forming.
A working note, mid-project
I want to be a bit less prescriptive. I'm not really trying to sell the line — (client name) will have introduced it along with the magician positioning. What I want to add is a layer of nuance about the language: the warmth, the restraint, the magician's craft of appearing straightforward without getting drawn into explaining yourself. I want to allow them to make the links from the verbal language to the visual language so that they feel a sense of ownership rather than "here's a writer overstepping their remit and telling us how to do our jobs". It's opening the door to the collaboration, leading them in the direction I want them to go without drawing attention to the steer.
Existential dashes — grammar as a character trait
While developing a story about a copywriter wrestling with how to make their own (non-AI-generated) writing sound less like AI, this thought surfaced in relation to writing propulsive fiction.
I think that propulsion is in all my work — readers have commented on it, I've just never named it before. I love John Grisham but also I'm drawn to the Cusk register, as I am to the music of Steve Reich or Catherine Lamb, alongside rather than instead of, pop (dance music, daytime radio etc.). But it's the collision of these registers that makes me excited. In the literary world authors like Percival Everett and Colson Whitehead and maybe Kurt Vonnegut occupy this sort of territory. In music it’s far more common and accepted to collide registers in this way (Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, SOPHIE...). And it is the em dash — and not, as is commonly supposed, the hyphen — that best represents (grammatically) what these artists are doing with their multiple registers. The writer worrying about the em or en dash (as an AI tell) would become a comic metaphor for an existential question.