If you’ve found your way here, there’s a reasonable chance that something in the name caught your eye. That’s deliberate. A yarning room — the phrase carries a particular weight. Yarning, in the old sense, is what people have always done around fires, across kitchen tables, or in pubs. It’s the telling of tales. The passing on of things that matter. And things that don’t quite matter but are too good to lose (these are my favourite).

That’s what this is for.

The Yarning Room is a Substack for people who find themselves drawn to the edges of things. The ships that went down and the stories that survived them. The explorers who walked into the unknown and sometimes failed to walk back out. The civilisations that collapsed and left almost nothing behind but ruins and questions. The ghost stories told in English parishes for centuries before anyone thought to write them down. The curious, the eerie, the forgotten, and the frankly inexplicable. And alongside all of that — the craft of writing fiction about worlds where history, the uncanny, and the end of everything sit close together and lean on each other for warmth.

These are my interests. They have been for a long time. The Yarning Room is the place I’ve built to pursue them in public.

I hope you enjoy my efforts.

What you’ll find here

The newsletter runs across six pillars, and they are worth knowing about.

Shipwrecks & the Deep is the anchor. There are more than three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor, and every one of them is a compressed archive of the people who built and crewed it. We’ll examine the famous ones and the forgotten. The disasters, the mysteries, the vessels that have become reefs, legends, and obsessions.

Exploration & the Unknown turns to the land. And occasionally the ice, the jungle, the deep ocean, and the sky. The history of exploration is partly a history of extraordinary courage and partly a history of catastrophic overconfidence. Both are interesting.

Strange Tales is the monthly collection of the genuinely odd. British folklore, documented hauntings, creatures that have defied classification, events that the historical record struggles to explain. No melodrama, no sensationalism. Just the stories told straight, which usually makes them stranger.

After the End is the pillar for endings and what comes after. The Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome, the lost cities that vanished into jungle or desert and left only silence behind. But also the literature of aftermath: the post-apocalyptic imagination, from its earliest expressions to the genre as it stands today. I write in this space myself, and this pillar is where that fiction and its real historical counterparts sit together and talk.

The Story Forge is where fiction and research meet. I’ll talk about my own fiction, and pull back the curtain on how that work is made. The craft, the research rabbit holes (there are way too many of these!), the scenes that took three (or more) attempts to get right, and the real places and histories that appear throughout the books in various states of disguise.

The Commonplace Book is the catch-all. The Victorians kept commonplace books: personal anthologies of quotations, curiosities, observations, and fragments worth preserving. This pillar works the same way. A brief, unexpected item each week. The kind of thing you mention at dinner and watch the conversation change direction.

I’m starting from scratch, so it may take a few weeks for me to get into the rhythm. But I’m sure you will agree it was worth hanging around.

A note on tone. This will not be rushed. The posts here are meant to be read rather than scanned. If you’re looking for bullet points and quick takeaways, there are better places than this one. What I’m trying to build is something closer to a long read you’re glad you made time for — the kind of writing that sends you on a small investigation of your own.

That’s the hope, anyway.

Welcome to the room. Pull up a chair.

— Neil