Daynote - Thu 9 Apr 2026

Good morning from River The Dog, who I accompanied on his morning patrol today. He snuffled many tree trunks, lamp-posts and other dogs.

Yesterday Waterstones Edinburgh West End posted about the event I'm doing with Callum McSorley on 22nd May.

I really enjoyed his new book RAT RACE and I'm looking forward to chatting to him about it. Grab your ticket!

ON DECK: A solidly passable 998 words on VAULT this morning. Progress is a little slower because I'm doing on-the-fly research and also writing lots of short, intercut scenes, so I'm having to keep notes on timeline and other fiddly stuff. I've almost certainly still got things wrong. But I'm closing in on the 100k mark and the book is so nearly done. No work on the short today, but I will hopefully sprint to the finish on that tomorrow.

LISTENING: Still greatly enjoying the What Went Wrong podcast, as I work through their archives. The episode on Alien 3 is fascinating. It's wild that absolutely anything emerges from Hollywood full stop, never mind good.

WATCHING: I watched WAR MACHINE on Netflix last night (the recent Alan Ritchie 'robot Predator' one, not the Brad Pitt satire from a few years ago). Good, daft fun. Riddled with errors and silly dialogue, of course, but enjoyable popcorn nonsense. The ending was cheeseball on a level not seen since Independence Day back in the Nineties.

READING: Still reading NO WAY OUT by Max Connor (aka Neil Lancaster, Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) and an interesting character just showed up, so I suspect things are about to, as they say, kick off.

LINK: Oh hey it's eight weeks until my next book comes out! You should book a ticket for my launch event, which is at Waterstones West End in Edinburgh! I'll be in conversation with Nick Binge, and we'd love to see you there!

UP NEXT: More dog walks, a full day of writing tomorrow and, I think, I'll probably finish the book this weekend. I'm also going to go and see Project Hail Mary, which I'm rather looking forward to.

Onward!