Daynote - Thu 27 Nov

Happy Thanksgiving to my American family, friends and readers!

A really excellent evening last night at Waterstones West End in Edinburgh for a Bloody Scotland reunion. We had a great turnout and a wonderful conversation with Susie Green, book blogger and host of the In My Good Books Podcast. It was lovely to see everyone (minus Natalie Jayne Clark, who was missed) from the Debut Prize shortlist. Book bloggers FranMcBookface and The First Eleven Minutes came along too and Matthew Land organised everything. A really cracking last event of the year. All topped off with a visit to the Oxford Bar afterwards with my family, who are looking forward to digging into my co-panelists books.

Yesterday was also a nice day for media coverage. The Falkirk Herald wrote a story about the Book Blether event that I was part of at Denny Library a couple of weeks ago. And Crime Fiction Lover wrote a great review of A RELUCTANT SPY. It's great to see reviewers and readers still finding the book, over a year after it came out.

ON DECK: Working on the outline again this morning. At various points in the narrative I need to have what I will loosely call 'shenanigans' happen, which the characters have to deal with while also tackling the core plot. So this morning I spent mostly coming up with a bullet point list of all the chaos-causing shenanigans that I could. Which was surprisingly fun. Now I need to figure out when and where they happen in the plot outline.

LISTENING: Speaking of In My Good Books, Susie let me know last night that she was posting an interview with m'friend and colleague (and fellow Bloody Scotland winner) Tariq Ashkanani. Tariq is always great to listen to in an interview, especially when he's being quizzed by someone like Susie.

WATCHING: Didn't watch anything last night as I was at my event. But I'm looking forward to this week's episode of PLURIBUS tomorrow.

READING: Also not a word read yesterday, between work and events and travel. I intend to rectify that this weekend.

LINK: Kate Heartfield shared a good thread for novices on how money works in publishing, prompted by a recent round of discourse about how many authors have day jobs, don't earn out their advances and so on. Always useful to review the basics because they're generally not well understood outside publishing obsessives like me and my writer friends.

UP NEXT: You guessed it! More outlining. And no more in-person events this year (though I've got at least one more podcast recording lined up). November's nearly done.

Onward!