The Ides of April 2026

Mummified makers and an unexpected sloth

Greetings Picklesversians!

It’s the 13th of April and the Ides are upon us once again, so it’s time for my monthly message.

Here’s what I’ve got for you today:

📊 Delicious data

📚 Those Not Recovered update

🪲 Writers circa 1980

🐙 Recommendations

🤖 An April Benism

Let’s dive in! 🌊

📊 Delicious data

Thanks so much to everyone who completed last month’s survey. I asked about your preferences for the future contents of these Picklesverse emails, and the top five most popular options selected were as follows:

I don’t mind as long as it’s entertaining (92%)

Progress updates about upcoming books (75%)

Ben’s jokes (75%)

Monthly Benisms (67%)

Recommendations for books / films / TV / video games (58%).

As such, this month’s email will include a bit of all of these. (And it’ll doubtless provide an unsettling insight into what I consider ‘entertaining’…)

It was also useful to learn that the vast majority of you prefer a written format, followed by audio (25%), video (8%) and disco (17%). Ben is now directing a substantial portion of his processing power towards making the latter a reality. Watch this space! 🪩

📚 Those Not Recovered update

Book 3 in the ArkTech series, Those Not Recovered, is still progressing nicely, and I’m having far too much fun writing it. The final number of chapters is TBC because it’ll depend on what gets cut and compressed during the editing process, but there are 35 chapters in the current version. Of those:

10 are ready for the next stage (i.e. being read by my editor).

7 are getting there, but still need a bit of polishing.

18 are in the early draft stages, which means I wouldn’t dream of inflicting them on anyone except myself.

So I’d say I’m about 30% of the way towards the draft being ready for my editor. (By which I mean the “structural edit”, where the editor takes a fresh look at the big picture and comments on whether the pacing and emotional beats of the story are in the right places, and checks I haven’t over or under explained things throughout. Copyediting comes later, which focuses on the language and punctuation with a satisfying degree of pedantry.)

I thought about sharing the first chapter with you, but a) it’ll doubtless change and b) showing you an early draft feels a bit like inviting you over for tea and cake, and then serving you a dry teabag in an empty mug alongside a bowl of eggs, flour, and whatever other ingredients are used in cake-making… Butter? Carrots? That powdery stuff that makes the cake go tall? (Can you tell I’m not much of a baker?) In any case, I’d rather give you a slice of the novel when it’s had time to turn golden brown (but hopefully before I’ve burnt it…).

🪲 Writers circa 1980

Speaking of cakes, there have been several family birthdays recently, including my Mum’s (for whom I ordered a cake rather than making one for reasons which should, by now, be abundantly clear). Those of you who’ve read Beware the Ides of April will doubtless remember that it’s Charlotte and Violet’s birthday today – so please join me in wishing them a happy minus 48th birthday!

It took several attempts to add up that negative number correctly due to the inherent perils of working with future dates (and because mental arithmetic sadly isn’t part of my skillset). However, I recently learned that working with past dates can be just as problematic…

I visited the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to see their exhibition called Made in Ancient Egypt. It was about craftspeople of various types, such as the hemu (skilled makers), who carved hieroglyphs onto monuments. There were also potters who made elaborate jars to hold the black eye paint worn to reduce the sun’s glare. Later, there were painters who decorated the lids of sarcophagi as well as scribes who penned documents on papyrus.

I couldn’t help but notice that many of these craftspeople were writers, and it filled me with gratitude that I can type these words and transmit them to you through the magic of the internet, instead of having to chisel them onto stone tablets and leave them on your doorstep. (Just think of the postage costs!) But while the method has changed significantly, some things remain the same. One document on display had the sole purpose of mocking potters for their dirty working conditions, illustrating that trolling is by no means a modern phenomenon.

I tried to imagine what these ancient Egyptians would’ve thought if someone had told them that their work, including rough drafts that they’d abandoned and rude messages about their fellow craftspeople, would end up on display in Britain several thousand years in the future being gawped at by the modern successors of their profession. I don’t think they’d have believed it. And that made me wonder whether 4000 years from now, there’ll be an exhibit where people can peruse an exhibition filled with nasty tweets.*

Or, indeed, could this very email end up being displayed on Ceres in 6026, when humanity has colonised the asteroid belt?

Nah… I don’t believe it.

But something that really got me thinking about the weirdness of time was the sign under the Commemorative Stela of Irtysen, whose date was listed as “2030-1980 BCE (about 4050-4000 years ago).” This means the inscription was written by an artist from circa 1980… but the other 1980! And just like so many of the 80s artists we know and love, he would’ve routinely worn black eyeliner! History really does repeat itself.

Incidentally, two noteworthy books to be published in 1980 were Cosmos by Carl Sagan and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. I don’t know whether either of those authors ever wore eyeliner, but regardless, I think they’d both be excellent texts to display for future generations of Belter museum goers.

*I’m vaguely aware that this terminology may well be outdated. Are ‘tweets’ a thing any more? What do they do on Bluesky? It’s a butterfly logo, isn’t it? So… Flaps? I’d have to research whatever the new thing is and, on balance, I’d rather wait until it’s featured in the Ceres museum.

🐙 Recommendations

📚 The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

Sci-fi writer VE Schwab and her friend Cat Clarke the screenwriter have teamed up to write an Agatha Christie-esque mystery novel under the pen name Evelyn Clarke. It only came out a few days ago and I’m excited to read it. The premise is that a handful of authors from assorted genres have been invited to a writing retreat with a difference – they have 72 hours to write the best possible ending for an unfinished manuscript. Locked away on a Scottish island with two million dollars and a publishing contract at stake, the authors compete for the life-changing prize. What particularly intrigued me was the authors’ assertion that the characters are all based on real behaviour by real authors they’ve encountered. A murder mystery about the publishing industry – what’s not to like? 

🎮 Escape from Ever After

If you’re into video games and happen to remember the RPG Paper Mario with fondness, you’re in luck. The game now has a spiritual successor in the form of Escape from Ever After by Sleepy Castle Studio – an indie development team made up of two whole Canadians.

You play a storybook character. A large corporation has set up their offices in the castle of the dragon you were planning to slay. It transpires that Ever After Inc has identified storybook characters as a promising source of cheap labour, so you decide to take them down, visiting various novels and freeing the characters you find there until you’re powerful enough to take on the corporate board. The books featured include The Shadow Over Innsbeak, a Lovecraftian spoof populated by seagulls and creepy be-tentacled baddies, within which Sherlock Holmes has gone missing. And then there’s The Three Little Pigs, in which a trio of malevolent porcine siblings have been clearing the forest for a construction site. Only Wolfgang the bard can stop them with his magical huffing and puffing.

It’s wonderfully silly, hard mode offers pleasingly challenging turn-based combat, and there’s plenty of whimsy for book-lovers to enjoy.

📺 Small Prophets

I highly recommend the new six-part comedy written by Mackenzie Crook, Small Prophets. It’s about a man called Michael Sleep whose girlfriend Clea went missing seven years earlier. One day, his dad tells him about a man he met in Egypt (not in either of the 1980s, though) who taught him how to grow homunculi – small creatures in jars who will answer any question truthfully. He sets about trying to create them so that he can ask whether Clea is alive, and if she’s ever coming home.

The show is uplifting, very funny (in a deeply British sort of way), and it’s the complete opposite of mean-spirited… so if you need a dose of delight, it could be worth a watch (assuming BBC programming is available where you are). I should probably declare that the show also features an establishment called the Pickle Cafe, so it obviously gets a hearty endorsement from me.

🤖 An April Benism

I’m handing over to Ben now for his analysis of the recent April-based celebration of Easter…

[Static pulses across your email account.]

It’s important to note that Homo sapiens are a constant source of wonder – as in, I wonder why they act the way they do. Easter eggs may be among the most complex of human mysteries. Here is my analysis:

Easter eggs are sold during roughly the first quarter of each calendar year, making them a somewhat rare delicacy. Their ovoid shape must make the chocolate taste particularly delicious, and offers a greater level of challenge to consume than a traditional bar. Their rarity coupled with their shape explain why humans happily pay over the odds per gram for egg-themed confectionary.

The chocolate egg is a Christian religious symbol associated with the story of Jesus’ rebirth. Did you know that the names of biblical figures such as Jesus and James son of Zebedee, use the possessive apostrophe without the final s? By contrast, modern Jameses who did not appear in the Bible, such as James Joyce and James Earl Jones, use the normal possessive rules. For example, in the case of James Earl Jones one might say “James’s Easter egg was made of white chocolate coated in plain chocolate, that is, it had a light side and a dark side.”

In the year 2026, the British retailer Marks and Spencer released a series of Easter eggs “for the Instagram generation,” which were moulded into the shape of five animals: a Shetland pony, a Cavapoo dog, a pygmy hippo, a T-Rex, and a sloth named Sunny. I suspect this statement will be considered an AI hallucination so here’s the photographic evidence:

I do not yet understand why these “eggs” neither resemble ova nor traditional Easter animals. Perhaps the word “egg” has become metaphorical, in the same way that the word “literally'”has come to mean “figuratively”.

Incidentally, the aforementioned controversial linguistic quirk is not new, and even appears in the opening line of The Dead by James Joyce – “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet”. This is an example of free indirect style, in which the narrative voice takes on features of the character’s mode of expression without being written in the first person (a technique also enjoyed by the moderately illustrious author Marianne Pickles). Published in 1914, James’s opening line illustrates that the hyperbolic usage of “literally” has a storied history. This sentence also provides another helpful example of how to use a possessive plural for a modern name ending in the letter s.

While I’ve been unable to provide clarity on the theme of oviform treats, I’m sure you’ll agree that my notes on punctuation are as helpful as they are insightful. However, instead of possessive apostrophes, it may have been more appropriate to discuss eggsclamation marks!

[There are several pulses of static and Ben disconnects.]

Hmm. Thanks, Ben. I think.

Right… That’s all from me this month!I hope all’s well in your own personal universes.

Walk in the sun,

Marianne