What I'm up to - September 2024

I've been waiting for this month for about thirty years. And it was pretty much as amazing as I'd hoped it would be.

Quick housekeeping note

Before we get onto the fun stuff, a very quick bit of nerdy stuff - I'm in the middle of migrating both my website and my newsletter to a service called Ghost, which should allow me to do things a lot more quickly and easily. I'm quite fond of my cobbled-together setup, but I'm lucky enough to have a lot of subscribers now and rather than paying for two separate services where I'm the glue holding them together (mostly by doing a lot of copy/pasting and fiddling with templates) I'm moving to a single 'write once, post everywhere' platform.

If you are a newsletter subscriber, please add words-by-goodman@ghost.io to your address book so that you'll continue to receive my newsletter. The September newsletter will be the last one I send using my current provider, Buttondown.

New work and submissions

This month, of course, was the launch of my debut novel, A RELUCTANT SPY. Which still feels weird to say, even though it's now been out for two-and-a-bit weeks. The month started with a phenomenal review from the Financial Times, which felt like it was near-perfectly timed to sooth my jangling pre-release nerves. I was also getting lots of lovely comments from readers who were signing up to Goldsboro's Crime Collective subscription box. My novel was selected as the launch title, which was an incredible honour and will be a huge help when it comes to the visibility of me and my book. The number one issue that debut authors face is just letting people know that you and your book even exist - without major ad campaigns, it is very easy for a book to go out on shelves in a few bookshops, sell a copy or five, then quietly fade into the darkness. Goldsboro's selection means that I'm going to be in the hands of hundreds of voracious crime and thriller readers who really value Goldsboro's taste, which is an amazing boost.

The FT review was followed by another great review from the Sunday Times, which I didn't know was coming and which blew me away. And the effect there was immediate and noticeable - a big spike in Amazon SalesRank, followers on social media and Goodreads TBR adds. I was on my way down to London when I saw it on a Google Alert, so I spent most of my trip south doing social media stuff and freaking out. Then I had a lovely afternoon in London and met my brother and his girlfriend for dinner.

The next day was, no joke, one of four of the most incredible days of my life. The top spot still goes to my wedding day, but the other three all happened during launch week.

The first one was my day in Brighton. I went down to Goldsboro's warehouse, met the lovely Goldsboro team and signed a MASSIVE pile of books. I was a bit overwhelmed when I walked in and it began to hit home that this was a real thing that was really happening.

Then I headed home and collapsed for two days, where I mostly prepped for launch day, chomped vitamins to try and ward off an incipient cold and got extremely paranoid about getting ill before my book launch and planned weekend at Bloody Scotland. Thankfully, two days and a lot of supplements and sleep knocked the incipient illness on the head and I woke up on release day (after a brief trip into Edinburgh on the Wednesday to record a podcast) feeling pretty okay.

We announced something pretty big on release day - that A RELUCTANT SPY has been optioned for television by Carnival Films. So I spent a huge amount of the actual day typing 'Thanks!' over and over again in slightly different ways to the many, many people who saw that news.

Then, around 6pm we headed into Edinburgh to Blackwell's and I bounced off the walls with nerves for fifteen or twenty minutes before people began arriving. The place was absolutely packed and my wife Valerie did a superb job of chilling me out. My friend and critique partner Nick Binge was chairing the event and asked some fantastic questions, as did the audience. I think I mostly managed to sound coherent. Then I did my first ever public signing, with people queuing up to get their books signed, at which point I felt like I was watching myself from the outside with my mouth open at how weird and cool everything was.

We finished the night at an excellent pub called McGonagall's on George IV Bridge where we had book cake, an actual massive vinyl banner with my book on it and a lot of wonderful chats and hugs with friends from all of the various walks of my life - writers, former and current day job colleagues, old friends, family and more. It was an absolute peak experience and one of the best days of my life. Nick Binge, my wife Valerie and Matthew Land at Blackwell's all helped make it happen in extraordinary ways, but many other people from the writing Discord server I help run, Edinburgh SFF, also pitched in to help. It was a genuine community moment and made me even happier to have found my writing folk.

The next day we went to Bloody Scotland. I wrote that up here, so I won't repeat myself too much here, except to say that the Saturday doing my reading and a signing with Frank Gardner was another absolute peak experience. Frank was a lovely guy to be paired with and we both sold out of all of our books!

I'm now well on the other side of launch day, but the good things have continued as people sit down to actually read the book. We got a great review in The Sun, I got a small piece published in the Express and I'm pretty sure I will never tire of being tagged in lovely reviews by readers. I've also had several friends send along screenshots of reviews from their family members (dads, mums and siblings) who have picked the book up. The audiobook came out and I listened to it, which was very surreal, but wonderful.

Now I'm in a bit of a data limbo - people are busily reading the book all over the place and occasionally I hear about it in a review. But all I have are a few very early sales figures and the echoes of one of the most exciting weeks of my life. It will be some time before we have a really clear picture of how well the book has done and what comes next. But I can say, for sure now, that I'm a published novelist. And whatever else happens, I will always have this accomplishment now. That feels incredible.

Writing and editing

For, I hope, obvious reasons it's been a middling month on the writing front (not the publishing front, that's been intense). Still, I've managed some pretty reasonable numbers - a shade over 16,000 words as of this morning. A lot of long train journeys (for both publishing and day job stuff) have hugely helped with that.

All of that has been on the sample for PROJECT SCARLET, which is the notional sequel to A RELUCTANT SPY (that's not it's actual title, I use codenames for unannounced projects). As usual when I'm drafting, I have no real idea if it's any good or not, but I'm forging ahead with the chapters I have micro-outlined, which I think will take me up to the 20k mark or so. Then I'll do an edit run, run it by my critique partners, then clean it up and send the whole package (along with a pitch document and synopsis) to my editor. Hopefully that will be in the next couple of weeks.

After that I have a short story called Ridealong to edit, then I'm back into PROJECT SHARD for an edit with my agent's notes, which I reckon should keep me busy until mid-November or so.

Publishing and community

Aside from the aforementioned launch events and Bloody Scotland, I was really chuffed to be invited to Goldsboro Book's 25th Anniversary event in London last week.

I was in London briefly on my way back from a day job event in Bristol, so it was really fortuitous timing, and a lovely evening. Goldsboro is an amazing company that does an incredible amount of good things for the UK book trade and I got to meet all kinds of folks for the first time, as well as getting to thank David Headley in person for choosing A RELUCTANT SPY for Crime Collective. Altogether it was a lovely capper to a phenomenal month.

Reading

This month I only finished one book, but it was a doozy.

• Ninth Life by Stark Holborn - This is the third book in the Factus series, which I have loved since the first book TEN LOW. My copy is a bit battered because it’s accompanied me through the last couple of weeks of my own publication travel and excitement, which is fitting because the first book in the series fell into my hands right when I most needed it, when I was first querying and trying seriously to get my short fiction published. That book inspired and excited me so much and this book has done the same. Stark has kept pushing the narrative techniques used in each book and NINTH LIFE is a tour de force, pulling together a bunch of narrative threads from the whole series and placing them in an astonishing framing narrative. Just chef’s kiss for gorgeously written, allusive, brain-stretching SF that also exists within a compelling pursuit thriller and at least three nested perspectives. Masterful. I highly recommend the whole series.

Doing

I have not done a whole lot except book stuff this month. It's been really nice in the latter half of the month to get back to my writing routine a bit and get out for walks. As the temperature drops a bit I'm finally in the brief window of the year when I get back from my morning walk and I'm not all sweaty, which is very nice.

Planning

October is going to be for drafting, going to a couple of book launches, recording a bunch more podcasts, continuing to stalk the bookshops of Edinburgh for unsigned copies of my book and another brief trip to London mid-month.

I'm also going to migrate my website to Ghost, as noted above. I've decided to do this manually because doing it in any sort of automated way involves JSON files and complicated stuff that will take me longer than I have to figure out, which is significantly more vexatious since I started blogging near-daily about three or four months ago. Ah well, hoist by my own petard.

Linking

Some delicious clickables.

• The BBC has put a bunch of its sound effect archive online! Very cool!
• This is a great thread by Veronica Roth (who wrote the Divergent series) on what she's learned from media training and interviews.
• An excellent episode of OtherPPL with Brad Listi talking to Kathleen Schmidt about what actually sells books.
• I want to live in this Norwegian house wrapped in a giant greenhouse. That roof terrace though!
• George Sandison of Titan continues his series on acquiring books by talking about the dynamic between sales and editorial.
• Three of my agent siblings (Amber A. Logan, Richard Swan and Adam Simcox) have a long and fascinating discussion about writing and publishing.

Well, that's that then. Life goal achieved.

I was quite lucky, before my launch, to have several writer friends take me aside and say, very gently, variations of 'be ready for a massive emotional crash'. And I think having that foreknowledge actually helped me (mostly?) avoid it, because I was able to stop and take stock of how far I'd come and how proud and happy I was to have reached this goal I've had for so long.

September, in the UK, is the end of harvest season. This, to a degree, felt like bringing in a harvest. But it wasn't the end of a single year - it was the end of five years of sustained effort and before that twenty-five years of learning and figuring out what it means to be to be a writer and a storyteller. It's so easy to discount that effort, once it's behind you. But this month, I've focused on it, and on making sure I don't immediately start focusing on the next thing and forget to enjoy one of the best months of my life. Stay tuned for whether I've actually avoided said emotional crash, or if I've just put it off until next month.

Now we're heading into the last three months of the year, my birthday month next month (woohoo!) and it's finally getting a bit colder. We're down to double figure days until Christmas (what) and I've got plenty of stuff to do before that rolls around. But it's nice to coorie down (as we say in Scotland) a wee bit and put the flannel sheets on the bed.

I know the winter can be really tough for some folks as the light fades, but there's still sunshine to be found. If you can, get out of the house and look up at the sky. And when you come home, get under a blanket with a good book. I hope you're looking forward to the next few months and that you get a chance for a rest before the hustle and bustle of the festive season.

In the meantime, as ever, keep reading, keep writing and keep moving.

If you have a question, suggestion or something else you'd like me to write about, please get in touch over on Bluesky, Instagram or Twitter, or send me a message on my contact form.