Downgrade
This was written and published in June 2026
The In-Between is not a temporary address. It is the only address any of us ever really lives at.
22 days left in Singapore.
I've been sitting with that line for a while. It's why this publication is becoming Downgrade - The Koh Samui Letters - not because I'm in transition, but because I've stopped pretending transition is the exception. It's the condition. The rest is just furniture we arrange to make it feel more permanent than it is.
Downgrade is the fiction I'm writing alongside all of this. Nine characters in the gap between who they were measured to be and who they might actually become. The first story is out: June Hartley, Bangkok to Koh Samui, 2041, stepping off a ferry not knowing what she's stepping into. Which is, I think, the only honest way to step into anything that matters.
I'm working on the second story this weekend. Marcus, the still man in the corner of Résidu with the two-days-late newspaper and the laugh that takes its time.
And in 22 days I move to Koh Samui. Following my own characters. Writing the letters from the place the fiction is already pointing toward.
If any of this is landing somewhere - the exhaustion of being optimised, the strange relief of not knowing what comes next, the suspicion that the gap might be the point - the free subscription is there whenever you're ready.
