Daynote - Mon 30 Mar 2026
In which I am shot in multiple places (with a camera).
Good morning! No walk this morning as the clocks changing left me feeling pretty dang tired, but a nice picture from my photoshoot on Friday. The photographer is a former colleague of mine called Jakub Iwanicki and he did an amazing job, including driving us around Edinburgh to some great locations. Here's a few of my favourites:
I'll be making a few downloadable zip files on my press kit page including different crops and file sizes. After five years using one (very good!) picture taken up against our garden shed, it feels great to have a few different options.
ON DECK: Decent progress this morning, though a bit slow on account of the sleep deprivation. I managed 995 words on Project VAULT and 404 words on the short story, for a total of 1,399.
TOOLS AND PROCESS: I had a really good crit session again with my group yesterday, but it's highlighted the changes I'll need to make on this book and they're going to be moderately hefty - ripping out a POV and reworking it, compressing the timeline so it makes more sense and overall doing a fair amount to up the tension in the first third of the book.
I had a similar moment during the drafting of SOLITARY AGENTS, so I'm not too worried, yet. I'm going to push forward and finish the draft though, so I can timeline everything out with a completed story to work with. But this is very much a direct result, I think, of experimenting with a fuzzier high-level outline. I think my micro-outlining approach (doing scene/chapter level outlining a week or two ahead) still works, but the high level outline does, I think, need to be a) complete and b) clearer. In this case I just got going because I was excited about the story, but because I didn't really know how I was getting from point A to point Z, there's a fair bit of stuff I now need to strip out. Ah well, live and learn.
LISTENING: I've been really enjoying working through the backlog of episodes on the What Went Wrong podcast, especially their three-part mini-series on the Lord Of The Rings. It's incredible those films ever got made, frankly. And that it was good, into the bargain.
WATCHING: More RESIDENT ALIEN over the weekend. We're approaching the end of Season 2 and it's mixture of wacky hijinks and genuine pathos is really quite excellent.
READING: Also more of NO WAY OUT by Max Connor (aka Neil Lancaster, Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) at the weekend as well. I'm taking this one with me on a work trip down to London and I anticipate it will make the train journeys fly past.
LINK: A good piece from The Honest Editor on what we mean when we use the term 'genre' - I have many thoughts about the Venn diagram of marketing category, reader identity, tropes, characters and themes, especially as I write in multiple genres.
As a bonus link, if you're in the US, A RELUCTANT SPY is on a Kindle Book Deal from now until Friday! Other platforms often price match, so if you're across the pond and fancy reading my award-winning debut novel before the sequel comes out in two months time, you can grab it for under a buck.
UP NEXT: Off to London tonight for the day job, then trying to get a whole bunch of words down and finish this book. I'm not sure I'll get it totally finished this week, but an extended Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK might offer me the chance to make a serious dent in the remaining word count.
Onward!