Resolutions for 2026

It's that time of year. I'm not usually big on resolutions, but I've been giving some thought to the things that bother me and the things I maybe want to look at or change in 2026, so here is a smattering of ideas...

Be Intolerant of Greed

I'm starting to get pretty bored of how we're treated by corporations these days. From delivery companies to water companies to airlines and on and on, it seems like creating profits for shareholders always trumps providing value. And I understand that profit is the core motive for capitalism, but I don't think I'm being too idealistic to think that maybe scorching the earth for money is not a useful long term goal for society.

I can't do much about how big corporations work, but I can be a pain in the ass when it affects me adversely, and I can pick and choose which companies I am going to pay money to. If you want me for a customer, act like you give a shit about that relationship or I will spend my money elsewhere. Zero tolerance for price gouging and bad service. I think that means I will pay a little more, likely to smaller companies, but I will feel better about it.

Explore, don't Escape

The idea of "getting away from it all" is always tempting, but I'm not sure it's healthy. I want to travel a lot more in 2026, but I want to be looking forward to where I'm going, rather than backward at what I'm escaping.

That probably translates to more than just travel, but I'll let you apply your own metaphors.

Go Analogue

This is pretty easy for me, because I enjoy it anyway, but there is going to be a lot more pen (or typewriter) and paper for me this coming year. From the Hobonichi Cousin planner to the Travelers and Dingbats notebooks, I'm going to leave a proper paper trail across the next twelve months.

Embrace Small Tech

I've written about this before, and it partly relates to the greed point earlier, but I want to cut as many of the big corporations out of my tech stack as possible. Smaller European companies are making great software now and there's really no need at all to be using Google, Microsoft, Adobe et al any more.

Craft, Capacities, Bear and Obsidian are all great notes apps. IA Writer, Ulysses and Scrivener are great for prose. Arc Studio is unbeatable for screenwriting. Timepage is a great calendar option. Lunatask and Things are great for tasks. DxO Photolab, and its related plugins, is better than anything else for photography. Artisan apps are where it's at.

Don't be Amenable

Looking back over the past 25 years as a writer and director, I'm struck by how many times I have not pushed for the thing I wanted to do because it would somehow inconvenience someone else. That consideration is not worthless in all cases, but there are numerous times when that consideration has not been reciprocated, either by individuals or, more often, companies.

Most people in this industry are familiar with the idea of not pissing off some particular company for fear that they won't want to work with you again, only for them to not work with you again anyway.

By any reasonable metric, I am past the halfway point in my career, and so from now on I am going to do whatever the hell I want and the feelings and foibles of some faceless corporation can, subject to contract, go fuck themselves.

Build Your Own Platform

In that spirit of independence, I also want to spend some time building out Cartoon Gravity and the Pleasant Green site. Both have been a little slow moving this year, which is a function of me being one person trying to do lots of different things. One thing I want to explore, therefore, is bringing more people on board so that not everything has to be dreamed up, developed and executed by me alone.

I don't know exactly what that looks like yet, but I'm open to ideas and suggestions.

Carve your own Path

I've talked here about the idea of "playing in the ruins", that whatever you had planned for your life will not be how it turned out and so you need to become comfortable with playing in the ruins of what you had wanted to build. Things don't work out how you planned, but how they do work out might be better.

I never had any interest in audio fiction, but when I started making it I remembered how much I had enjoyed listening to it as a kid, and that made me wonder if, somehow, I perhaps wasn't just realising a dream I didn't know I'd had.

I have boxes and hard-drives littered with half-finished stories, novels, screenplays, stage plays etc. Some were abandoned because they were shit, which is fine, others because they weren't "what people are looking for", which is less fine. I have spent a good portion of my career chasing things I didn't actually want because they were the things I was supposed to be aiming for (awards, a Marvel movie, a first-look deal etc.)

Now it's like I'm going through the contents of an old toy box, rediscovering all these things that I had discarded, and realising how cool they are. I want to play with the old toys, and find new things to do with them.

I got into this business because I thought it would be fun to make the kind of stuff I wanted to watch and read and listen to, but I very quickly got sidetracked into the idea of career advancement and financial gain. In the past few years, I have bee able to do my own thing again, and that has been great. It's always going to be an uphill battle, but it's one that is worth fighting.

It is not seen as reasonable to expect that you can make your own stuff, build your own platform, tell your own stories. Instead, we should be grateful for the opportunities we are given and not bite the hand that feeds, we should go with the flow, accept how things are, excuse shortcomings and failures and greed and incompetence. Because to do otherwise would be unreasonable.

And so I think that 2026 will be the year of being unreasonable.