Mostly the grind, which is less romantic than it sounds. Day to day that means submissions and revision: getting short stories and poems in front of editors, and writing the next ones while the last batch is still out waiting for a verdict. New work in the shorter forms, and a couple of longer things moving at their own stubborn pace in the background.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and I’ve stopped arguing with it. Most of what I send comes back a no. A smaller share comes back a yes. I keep both piles, and I keep sending.

In 2007 a man named Váradi Nagy Pál reviewed something I had put on the internet. He had also written a small Windows program that scanned Hungarian verse for classical metre, and I downloaded it and never found anything better. It stopped running somewhere around Windows XP.

This summer I took it apart in Ghidra, rebuilt the engine in Java, and then wrote to him. He said yes, put it up, just explain in the readme how it was made. It went public in August under both our names, and it runs in a browser now. He filed the first bug report the same day.

I also wrote a play this summer, which I had not done before. And in July a contributor copy reached me from Glasgow with a declared value of ten pounds. Hungarian customs charged me 4,750 forints to collect it — about eleven pounds.

In July a story of mine was read aloud on a stage in London. Liars’ League picked “The One-Man Republic of Stairwell B” for their Above and Below night, and an actor performed my Hungarian panel-block comedy for a room I have never seen. Three weeks later a sonnet called “Kindling” took the Laureates’ Choice at the Maria W. Faust contest in Winona, Minnesota, and was read out at the closing event by a Great River Shakespeare Festival actor while I sat at home in Pécs. I am beginning to suspect my work keeps a better travel schedule than I do. Around the same time the village paper back in Tar asked me for an interview, which is the first time anything I have written has come back around to where it started. Since then, “Racing My Charger” has become one of eight Writers of the Future finalists for the third quarter; two poems, “Soul-Wardrobe” and “A Flower for the Sun”, made the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize semifinal list; and “A Name for the Drowned” made the longlist of The Fifth Corner’s Dark Fiction Prize.

In September a story of mine went to Budapest without me again. “Vörös fény a hatvanason” came out of 176 entries into the top fifteen of the Andrássy 150 competition, and on the second of September an actor from the Radnóti Miklós Theatre read it aloud at Eötvös10 while a pianist filled the gaps between the pieces. I also wrote a tabletop roleplaying module set in the world of one of my own novellas, which turns out to be a strange way of testing a story: you hand it to strangers and let them break it. A poem of mine, “Dacmondások”, was taken for the Berzsenyi 250 jubilee anthology, which launches in Sopron in December, and the fee is ten copies, which feels about right. And an English story of mine was accepted into an anthology where Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki the Ghost-Finder share the same case files, which is not a sentence I expected to write this year.

I keep two private reading lists: a short course of seven novels chosen for craft, and a longer challenge of fifty-five science fiction novels. In July the craft course reached number five, Lem’s Solaris, with Ion Mihai Pacepa’s Red Horizons · the defector-general’s inside account of the Ceaușescu regime · running alongside it on audiobook. Since then both lists have been on pause.

It was an accidental double feature and a weirdly perfect one. Solaris is about an alien ocean that scans your mind, dredges up the person you feel most guilty about, and builds a living copy to keep you company. Red Horizons is about the Securitate, which ran roughly the same operation with worse production values and a bigger budget. Two intelligences you can’t negotiate with, both convinced the most interesting thing about you is whatever you’re trying to hide. Only one of them is fiction.

The lists start up again on 20 October, one book a week. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 goes first, then the Strugatskys’ Hard to Be a God and Asimov’s Foundation, on through Dick, Bester, Gibson, Le Guin and Lem’s Cyberiad, until Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus closes the craft course in the last week of December.