It's the 5th of November, which means two things - here in the UK we'll be setting fire to things and letting off fireworks for monarchist historical reasons. And, specifically to me, it's UK release day for my second paperback!
I'll have a dedicated post on this topic coming out shortly, but for now I'm gazing at the shiny red spines on my author copies and looking forward to seeing them on shop shelves. I do hope you pick up a copy. Here's some purchase links!
No walk this morning, on account of being up late recording with Narrative Damage, the weather being a bit grey and meh and having to do all the promo for the above first thing this morning. I shall get out for a nice long walk tomorrow, hopefully.
ON DECK: As noted, promo, plus a little bit of proofing for A TRAITOR'S CALL once I've finished this post. I wanted to get the promo done first so I can dip in and out of the proofing for the rest of the day. Hopefully I'll dip under the mark of a hundred pages left to go. And I'm in the more, uh, propulsive part of the plot now, which definitely makes the pages slip past a little faster.
LISTENING: I greatly enjoyed this interview with Nick Harkaway about his second Smiley novel THE TAPER MAN, over at Spybrary. What a joy that there's new books in this particular canon coming out.
WATCHING: Got about halfway through the 'Free From' episode of BAKE OFF last night, which confirmed my opinion that that kind of baking is baking on hard mode, beaten only by baking at altitude.
READING: A tiny sliver of THE TRIALS OF EMPIRE by Richard Swan (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) before sleep, but I'm going to make some solid progress on it over the weekend.
LINK: An interesting thing about writing A TRAITOR'S CALL is that the plot is based around a broad-spectrum 'grey zone' warfare assault on the UK, which I came up with essentially by writing a big long list titled 'ways to really fuck up a country'. And it's slightly worrying to see actual real-world cyberattacks that are identical to those I came up with in my book. For the record, I wrote this book months ago, and I am absolutely not a spy.
UP NEXT: Tomorrow is Finish The Proofs Day, but also Do All The Meetings Day, so we'll see how that balances out.
And then, next week, my goodness, I will be writing new words. It's been a while, so I'm weirdly nervous about it. But I've done it before, so I'm reasonably sure I can do it again.
Onward!