Some quick housekeeping and orientation: I started this substack and originally wrote more overtly about topics of the pressures of modern life, especially for neurodivergents, but also for everyone, how our economic policy choices, or rather the decisions impressed upon us, impact us as humans, and not always for the better. I will still touch on these topics, as I’m immensely curious about UBI, for example, but I am writing fiction, so you will see more of that type of content too, but just know the former ideas do still inform my work. So there you go, hopefully that explains things a little better. I look forward to writing on here more.

When people start thinking about writing a book, one of the most practical questions turns out to be surprisingly simple:

Where would this book actually sit in the world?

Quite literally, where might readers encounter it?

One way to explore this is through something the publishing world calls comp titles. I’ve never particularly liked that phrase because it suggests competition, as if books are somehow trying to defeat each other in a Battle Royale-style showdown. Modern Economic Policy gets into everything I find, and it can be exhausting sometimes when you want to make something.

In reality, it’s closer to finding your book’s neighbours, books that live in the same general space as the one you’re trying to write. These other books might share a genre, similar themes, or overlapping subject matter. The goal isn’t imitation, it’s orientation. Understanding the landscape your idea might eventually enter.

Step 1. Books Adjacent To Yours

A simple place to begin is with books published fairly recently, usually within the last one to five years. If you want to be stricter with yourself, you could narrow that to the last three years.

Then pick one book that feels adjacent to the one you’re imagining.

Look it up on Amazon, Goodreads, or your library catalogue. If you scroll down far enough, most platforms quietly reveal something useful: the section “Customers also bought”, showing what other readers bought alongside that book. What you’re seeing there is essentially a small map of that book’s neighbourhood. From there you can preview the first few pages and ask yourself:

Does this feel like the kind of space my book might live in?

If the answer is yes, add it to a list.

Over time, that list becomes something like a reading map for your project.

Step 2. Books With The Same Flavour As Yours

But there’s another category of books that can be just as useful. These aren’t necessarily adjacent books. They’re what I think of as flavour books. These are the books that shape the feel of your writing rather than the exact genre.

For example, you might find a book tackling a similar theme but for a different audience. Or a book that explains something complex in a way that suddenly makes the whole subject clearer. Sometimes the influence is stylistic rather than conceptual. You might admire how an author structures a story. Or how they simplify difficult ideas. Or how they hold attention across chapters.

These books become part of the creative ecosystem that feeds your work. The process for finding them is similar.

Start with one book that captures the flavour you’re drawn to. Look it up, scroll through the recommendations, preview the opening pages, and ask yourself:

Does this book help me think about how I want to write?

If the answer is yes, add it to the list.

Step 3. Reading!

Eventually, you’ll have two reading lists. One list of adjacent books: the neighbourhood your book might live in. And another list of flavour books: the influences shaping how you want your work to feel and the themes you like to explore.

At that point, something interesting becomes possible. You can turn those lists into a reading practice. For example, you might decide to read one book per month for a year, using a mixture from both lists. Twelve books that gradually sharpen your sense of the territory your book belongs to.

And it’s worth saying something important here. You don’t have to finish every book you start to read. If a book stops being interesting, that’s information. You’ve learned something about what draws you in, and what doesn’t. You can simply move on, to another one on the list.

I should say that this is something I’m experimenting with at the moment.

It’s still early days for me. I’m curious to see what patterns emerge after doing this for a while. My plan is to come back and write another piece once I’ve lived with the process a little longer and can see what it actually changes in my own writing.

So for now, think of this less as advice and more as a small working experiment.

Where did this idea come from?

The idea itself isn’t originally mine. I first came across this approach through Gabriela Pereira, who runs DIYMFA. Her book and podcast explore the idea that you can build something very close to a creative writing MFA (or in the UK, a creative master’s degree) without necessarily enrolling in an institution. Instead of paying for a formal programme, you build your own learning ecosystem through reading, writing, and engaging with creative work.

For some people, the community aspect of a formal programme is the real value. For others, the structure. For me personally, the autonomy matters more. As someone who is autistic and ADHD, the ability to study asynchronously and in environments that work for my sensory system makes a huge difference to the quality of my thinking.

Home works well.
Libraries work well.
Quiet hotel bars sometimes work surprisingly well.

Places where I can concentrate without constantly adjusting myself to the environment.

To be honest, I’ve rarely had a particularly good experience in traditional work or education spaces. The marketing around support for neurodivergent people often sounds much stronger than the reality I’ve encountered. I’m sure that isn’t true everywhere. And things have improved so much, with awareness rising year by year. But it’s not perfect, and there’s still work to be done there.

In the environments I’ve personally experienced, I’ve often found that I simply work better alone. Or I work better with body doubling, where I engage in a kind of parallel play in my work, with someone else there doing something separate to me. But library quiet study areas and quiet hotel bars can give me this.

If you’re different to me, DIYMFA does (or at least did) offer options to interact live with the founder and other writers if you enjoy learning in a group. If that kind of real-time community energises you, it might be worth exploring those options, or whether they are still available.

But the core idea doesn’t require any of that. You can quietly build your own creative education in whatever spaces allow you to think most clearly.

Which makes me curious about something. If you write, or if you’re trying to write, where do you actually work best? Inside institutions and structured programmes? Or in quieter, self directed spaces where you can think at your own pace? I suspect the answer varies more than we’re usually led to believe.

to be continued…

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Lying in the 1980s Italian Riviera, Call Me By Your Name tells the story of 17-year-old Elio Perlman over one sultry summer that transforms his life. Elio's intellectually oriented, sophisticated family takes in an American graduate student named Oliver, a young man in his mid-20s, to help Elio's father with research. A quiet, gradually developing attraction between Elio and Oliver is kindled over the course of the summer and forms a fiery, fleeting love affair.

The novel is told in Elio's reflective, passion-filled voice, sweeping through the steam of their illicit summer with each other and barely attending to the following years, during which the memory of all that remains shapes Elio's understanding of love, loss, and what he is.

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Renowned for dissolving fact from fiction, Carrère is a French writer whose books often explore the tenuous boundaries of imagination and reality, with special reference to psychological fragmentation. Class Trip is simple enough in premise, being about a small boy on a school skiing trip, but it soon becomes a heart-stopping portrait of childhood fear and isolation.

The protagonist, Nicolas, is a twelve-year-old boy whose head already bears a burden of anxiety, much of which he has picked up from his overprotective, paranoid father. The father fills the head of Nicolas with horror stories and danger lurking in every alley, and this fear gets anchored in the head of Nicolas until his imagination gets blurred with realism. One of the most affecting elements of the story is how Carrère doesn’t commit to the reality of the situation until late in the narrative.

The Alpine winter landscape is more than a setting, it's a metaphorical one of the emotional coldness and frailty of the protagonist. The whiteness of the landscape, the isolating chill, and the deadly beauty of the mountains mirror Nicolas's state of mind. It is as if nature and his fear have conspired together to tease the reader more. This ice landscape is not only pretty to behold, but also psychologically suggestive.

As a reader, you’re pulled into Nicolas’s distorted worldview, which reminded me of how people living under systemic precarity, particularly in today’s UK, are often forced to perceive the world as threatening, unstable, and unforgiving. Like Nicolas, such individuals lead lives in states of hyper-vigilance, internal anxiety, and perpetual fear that something might at any moment go extremely wrong. Unstable shelter, unstable income, and isolation create a basis of fear that conditions how the world is experienced. Carrère's description of a scared, isolated child is a grim metaphor for what it means to be vulnerable in a world that offers so little safety net.

Carrère doesn't offer closure or reassurance. Class Trip left me with questions and a residual sense of emotional chill. But there lies the power of the novella: it involves one in the inner world of fear and helplessness so that one can experience an enormous sympathy with all those individuals who live in ambiguity day in and day out. Carrère's work teaches us that vulnerability is not a question of fault of character but often the consequence of situations wherein one ends up.

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How One Vote Can Change Everything — The Secret to Power, Equity, and Freedom

What if everything you had ever been told about capitalism and democracy had been only one interpretation of reality? What if, in another now, the rules had been reimagined—not by revolution, but revelation? In Another Now, Yanis Varoufakis dares to do the unthinkable: to show us a world where power is shared, freedom is not for sale, and equity is not something spoken of in hushed tones.

But there is the question that hangs on every page: Why do we never get there?

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In the shadow of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, his story tells us that purpose can turn suffering into strength. Frankl's time in Auschwitz convinced him that individuals who found meaning in their suffering were most likely to survive. This view is comforting, but it has the unintended effect of placing the burden of trauma on the individual, with a perception that their ability to find meaning is what makes them resilient, their ability to choose how to respond in the face of difficulty and horror giving them a strength no one can take away. But this interpretation must be critically judged. Trauma, especially of the sort which has happened during the Holocaust, tends to leave scars that can hinder development rather than promote it.

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I am writing to you to express my concern over the government's proposal to give DWP investigators the right to access and scrutinise the bank accounts of those who claim benefits, including those who have disabilities.

I am one of over 25,000 Organise members who have signed a petition to put an end to this policy. You can see the petition here: https://the.organise.network/campaigns/network-prevent-the-dwp-scrutinising-disabled-people-s-bank-accounts-83484c04f5c4a649

The proposed policy is disproportionate and unnecessarily overreaching. The Government says there will be 'safeguarding measures' but no details about what these are, and it's a slippery slope - once these powers are granted, there's no going back.

How people spend their money is a private matter that shouldn’t need justifying to anyone. The Government mustn’t move forward with this plan to protect all benefit claimants' dignity and privacy.

Now the Bill is entering the Report stage, please will you make sure that these dangerous plans are removed from the Bill, and safeguards put in place, to protect sick and disabled people from this scrutiny?

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Kind regards,

LJ

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Let your eyes rest here.

There is a book — a quietly powerful one — by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. It is not shouty, no, but it doesn't need to be. Because if you've ever felt it — that insidious grasp of power consolidating, reshaping lives, turning you in a vice, warping democracy — then this book won't surprise you. It will validate what you always knew deep down.

I felt it myself in secondary school… maybe you did too. That moment when something didn't feel right. When the world around you began to whisper that the story you were told… wasn't the complete truth.

It's 2024 now. The budget says one thing. The increasing anger says another. And behind both of them? Quiet hands. Invisible patrons. Those who fund the think tanks, spin the headlines, and make policy without transparency.

The photos below? They're from a chapter that speaks plainly.

Not with rage, but with honesty.

Not with drama, but with fact.

If something stirs within you — a curiosity, a gentle tug — pursue it. The sources are listed below. Let them speak. Let them ripple through you.

And if the time is right, subscribe. Or don't. No pressure.

Just follow what feels right for you.

Have a beautiful day.

• “The men who sold the war”, 18 May 2004, UK Channel 4.

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Edward Bernays”, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Bernays.

• Tobacco Control, “Tobacco industry quotes on marketing to kids”, https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/10/1/e8.

• Big Tobacco funded 1980s think tanks: https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/docs/psny0120.

• “Myths and Facts about Koch Industries”, Koch Industries website.

• “Charles Koch and the Kochtopus”, SourceWatch.

• “Charles Koch's Biography”, Koch Industries website.

• Robert Draper, “Covert operations”, The New Yorker, 30 August 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations.

• Bill McKibben, “The Koch Brothers’ grim environmental legacy”, Yale Environment 360, 6 March 2016.

• “My life’s work has been to advance liberty”, Charles Koch, 2016, https://www.charleskochfoundation.org/news/my-lifes-work-has-been-to-advance-liberty.

• “The Koch brothers' political machine”, The Washington Post, 2014.

• “Top 10 recipients of Koch Industries campaign contributions”, OpenSecrets.org.

• “Charles Koch’s political networks”, Center for Responsive Politics.

• “Charles Koch’s biography”, Koch Industries website.

• “Kochland: The secret history of Koch Industries and corporate power in America”, Christopher Leonard (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

• Jane Mayer, “Dark money”, Doubleday, 2016.

• “The Heritage Foundation’s climate change denial”, DeSmog, https://www.desmogblog.com

• .

• Michael Gerson, “The conservative mind”, Washington Post, 27 April 2007.

• “Heartland Institute: About”, https://www.heartland.org/about-us/index.html.

• “Conservatives and climate change”, Yale Climate Connections.

• Lily Geismer, “What does the left get wrong about the right?”, The Washington Post, 2021.

• “The Data Challenge”, eds. Tom Cronin and Marc Hetherington, 2019.

• “The Heritage Foundation: Political influence”, InfluenceWatch.

• Lily Geismer, “Democrats and Neoliberalism”, Vox, 11 June 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/11/18660204/democrats-neoliberalism.

• Robert Draper, “Covert operations”, The New Yorker, 30 August 2010.

Best,

LJ

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Become a paid subscriber for £5/month and unlock exclusive essays, how-tos, toolkits, and intimate reflections to support your creative and neurodivergent self in a demanding world.

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