The Decrypt - August 2025

Welcome back!

Another month has passed, which means it's time for The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.

Compared to the extremely busy and exciting months of June and July, August was supposed to be a lot quieter. And it was, at least on the public events and things-I-can-talk-about front. But it was also a month of sustained editing effort and a lot of buildup for the rest of the year. So I wouldn't quite say it was as restful as I'd anticipated. But that's okay - good to leave the summer months on a bit of a high note.

So, let's settle down, grab a cuppa and find out what's new.

It was a much quieter month in August - no literary festivals for a start. The Edinburgh International Book Festival was running but I didn't go along this year, because the two or three events I was interested in were sold out. Time was I would book at least a week of annual leave to go to EIBF, but the last few years nothing on the programme has really grabbed me. Fingers crossed for next year.

What I did do in August was sign a lot of books.

After I won the McDermid Debut Award in July, a few booksellers got in touch to ask if I would go along to sign copies, including the wonderful Jack from Waterstones St Andrews. After a bit of chatting, we agreed it would be more fun if I brought another author along (it was originally going to be three of us, but the other author couldn't make the date work) and tour around different bookstores in and around Fife.

So that was how myself and Gareth Brown, author of THE BOOK OF DOORS and the new book THE SOCIETY OF UNKNOWABLE OBJECTS, ended up spending a day driving in a big circle around St Andrews, Dundee, Perth and Dunfermline over the course of a sunny August day. It was great fun and a lovely opportunity to meet lots of really amazing booksellers, sneak in a lunch with my friends Mo and Erin (aka MK Hardy) and even meet a few readers.

A couple of weeks later, we had a very nice but bittersweet lunch with an old university friend of mine who was about to move to Australia with her family. It was great to catch up (and meet her youngest for the first time), but very sad to say goodbye knowing it might be a year or two before we meet again. The world is a smaller place than it was a few years ago, but Australia is still a very long way away indeed. Still, at least we have texts, emails and video calls.

The following week I had an interview with Dawn Geddes from the Bloody Scotland team, for the 'three weeks to go' edition of the Bloody Scotland newsletter. We had a great chat about my history with the festival, and how excited I am for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. Only two weeks to go now!

Last Monday, I took advantage of the bank holiday (I live in Scotland, but my day job goes by English bank holidays) to head over to Glasgow and sign more books, again instigated by a bookseller, the fantastic Laura from Waterstones Braehead.

I signed 40+ copies across five branches of Waterstones (sneaking in a visit to the Princes Street branch in Edinburgh on my way home) and again met a load of friendly, welcoming and extremely kind booksellers (thanks Rowan, Finn, Ewan, Duncan and Aija!).

Early on, especially when you don't have a paperback out, signing trips can be a little dispiriting, as you trudge from store to store and sign a single copy at a time. But when there's a few more copies in and you can normally find one or two, it gets a lot more fun. It's a good idea to call or email ahead to say you're coming in - booksellers may even order in an extra copy or three if you tell them you're planning a visit. I had a brilliant time in Glasgow, although I will try and visit on a day other than Monday next time, as the two indies I was planning to visit (The Bookmonger and Daydreams Bookshop) were both closed.

I rounded out the month with another interview, this time with the fantastic In My Good Books Podcast. This was another Bloody Scotland build up interview, with all five Debut Prize shortlisters being interviewed. Look out for that coming out next week.

And finally, just last Friday, I had a very exciting Zoom that I can't tell you about. Suffice to say that it is an opportunity that is going to fulfil a very long-standing ambition of mine, and I can't wait to tell you about it.

August was the first time since May that I spent the majority of the month editing, as I got my edit notes back on the next Legends novel, SOLITARY AGENTS. Although we only announced this book in mid-July, we signed contracts on it late last year and I handed in the first draft at the end of May, so it's fairly advanced in the publication process.

This edit was a combined structural and line edit, although happily there weren't too many big changes my editor wanted to make. So I made my edit list and set about a front-to-back readthrough and line edit, as well as adding about 6,000 new words and then cutting about 3,300 words.

Some of this was adding new chapters to address specific narrative goals (like providing some more detail for readers who haven't read the first book, or read it some time ago) and some of it was writing lots of little single-sentence insertions to clarify or add additional character motivation. As well as a million little line cuts and additions to improve flow and clarity.

I was given a really nice long deadline to work on this, but there's also a bunch of big publishing things coming out that we wanted a version of this book to be ready for, so I went pretty fast, completing the edit in about 2.5 weeks. That was mostly working my regular hours, rather than any mega-long shifts, so it felt pretty decent and sustainable.

After that I jumped into pitch-writing for the rest of the month, and I'll probably continue that in the first week of September too, before returning to PROJECT DRIFT. There's going to be edits coming for PROJECT SHARD at some point, as well as the next stages of production for SOLITARY AGENTS, including a copyedit and a proofing stage. I'm fairly hopeful I won't have another line edit round, but we'll see.

This year has been very interesting as my first real experience of managing multiple ongoing projects at different stages - A RELUCTANT SPY coming out in paperback and all the promo activity associated with that, SOLITARY AGENTS being drafted and going through the production process, PROJECT SHARD going out on submission and PROJECT DRIFT coming in as a new draft. It's been quite a lot! But it's also reassured me that I can handle this kind of juggling and even quite enjoy it? It certainly keeps things fresh and interesting.

The big thing coming up in September is, of course, Bloody Scotland!

This will be my third year attending and my second year as a programme participant, as well as my first year as an award nominee. It's been quite the journey. I first went to Bloody Scotland in 2023, mainly because I was very aware that I had zero connections in the crime and thriller world (and wanted to make some) and I wanted to support my friend Nick Binge, who was doing the Crime In The Spotlight as part of promoting his book Ascension.

I had an incredible time and I vividly remember sitting in the cafe at the Albert Halls doing the last few edits on A RELUCTANT SPY and wondering if it would ever be sold in the festival bookshop next to the cafe. It was indeed, the very next year, as I appeared on stage before Frank Gardner's interview as a Crime In The Spotlight reader, then signed books alongside him.

This year I'm back as a nominee for the debut prize and as a spy novelist. I'll be appearing on the Debut Prize Panel (sold out I'm afraid!), then, obviously the prize ceremony. And on the Saturday I'll be appearing with Michael Idov and DB John, chaired by Kim Sherwood, in the Spies West, Eyes East panel about spy fiction.

There's loads of other great panels on and I'm anticipating it will be a packed weekend. If you're coming along, please do say hello in the bar, on the street or wherever you see me. It's always a pleasure to meet readers, writers and folk that work in the publishing industry.

On the 20th of September, me and the other Debut Prize shortlisters will be getting back together for an event at Waterstones Braehead. I'm really looking forward to that one, once the tension of waiting to see who's won has been dispensed with. Should be a hoot.

I'll also briefly be passing through London at the end of the month, so I might sneak into a few bookshops and sign things if the timings work out with trains. We'll see.

Reading

It's been a slow reading month, thanks to all the edits. But I've finished a few audiobooks and beta reads.

• Berlin Wolves by James Conway - I started this last month and loved it. And it really delivered by the time I finished it. This book isn't yet with a publisher, but I have a good feeling about it. It's a really up-to-the-minute gritty spy thriller that drips realism. If you enjoy my work, I'm near-certain you'll want to pick this up when it finds a publisher.
• The Power Of The Dog by Don Winslow - Crawling through this still, not because it's hard going, but just because I'm reading multiple things. I really need to learn to focus on one book at a time.
• Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman - I've heard a lot of good things about this book and it didn't disappoint. A very well-written thought experiment on the life well lived, as expressed in the titular average of four thousand weeks of life. It is one of those books, though, where I nodded along for most of it but came away without a hugely clear idea of whether it was actually going to inform my behaviour in the future. Not every book needs to change the way I live or think about the world, but when a book is explicitly about living a good and meaningful life, it's an odd feeling to come away from it not terribly sure how to apply its lessons.
• Underland by Robert Macfarlane - This was a beautiful (and beautifully read in audio) book. Macfarlane's books are often a sequence of vignettes, but I felt this book had a particularly strong and cyclical narrative throughline, rising and falling and rising again in very interesting ways. It's a fascinating exploration of all the different ways that we, as a species, tunnel and bore and dig our way into the soil and earth and rock of our world, which Macfarlane uses as the backbone for a series of questions about history, time and humanity. An absolute cracker.

As an aside, I was very, very chuffed to see that Kobo, who make a fantastic series of eReaders that I've used for the last five years or so, have replaced their defunct Pocket integration with a new Instapaper one. I love being able to save articles from my browser and have them show up, nicely paginated, on my distraction-free eReader and I'm so glad I can do that again.

Watching

A nice mix of films and TV this month:

• Early in the month we watched SINNERS, which I thought was a gloriously original and visually stunning piece of cinema. Absolutely loved it.
• We also watched the whole of THE ASSASSIN, featuring Keeley Hawes as a middle-aged contract killer trying to reconcile with her son while simultaneously being hunted by a lot of very angry people with guns. It was great fun, with a cracking script. Shame about the dull-as-dishwater title though.
• We watched MICKEY 17, which was a lovely looking slice of SF but I found rather odd and tonally jarring. Everyone individually was great, but I felt the whole thing didn't really hang together and the Gilliam-esque nightmare space bureaucracy was good, but not enough to carry the whole film, especially when it turned into a fairly conventional action film (albeit with giant space worms) in the final quarter. Odd one.
• I thought K-POP DEMON HUNTERS was fantastic - just an absolute ton of fun, incredible music and wonderful visuals.
• We finished DEPT Q on Netflix and really enjoyed it, although the odd Americanism sneaking into the script ('could care less'? really?) irked me greatly. I did find all the little tweaks quite amusing though, like Police Scotland being renamed Police Caledonia.
• We're currently watching ALIEN: EARTH and really enjoying it - it's got the aesthetics of the first film down perfectly, and the episodes are getting a bit more room to breathe now than the first two did.

Playing

What I've been zapping this month.

• I played a lot of the BATTLEFIELD 6 open beta over the two weekends it was live in August and it was terrific. I felt that BATTLEFIELD 2042 was a real mis-step, doing away with a lot of the things that defined the franchise, whereas this game feels like a big return to form. I think it's probably my favourite semi-realistic shooter, and a welcome reprieve from the daft skins and endless microtransaction stuff on CALL OF DUTY.
• Still playing a lot of HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER after I learned that the original developers, Blackbird Interactive, have managed to get the rights to the IP back and are planning to make more in the series. I really hope they do, it's such a fun game.

What's been filling up my feeds this month?

• Loved this video about the 20 best bookshops in Edinburgh. A real mix of places including several that were new to me.
• This was a great Reddit thread about attending large science fiction conventions as a writer (disclaimer, I contributed to it).
• A great interview with fellow spy/speculative crossover writer Nick Harkaway (who is also John Le Carré's son and carrying on his Smiley books) on the Monocle Meet The Writer's podcast.
• I loved this interview at The Honest Editor with the book review editor for Prima magazine, although the sheer volumes she was talking about were pretty eye-opening.
• A great piece from historical crime author DV Bishop on the concept of literary citizenship and what we owe to our writing communities.

Do you feel it? There's a very definite breath of autumn on the wind. I even saw leaves on the road drifting in the breeze driving home last night.

It'll soon be time to close a few windows and put on another layer and, if I'm quite honest, I'm here for it. I love the summer months for the long days and the sunshine, but I don't half love pulling on a jacket and looking out the winter duvet. We've probably got a few more weeks of relative warmth before it gets properly chilly, but the geese at our nearby nature reserve have started their daily practice flights before they fly south for the winter and my morning walks are getting windier and cooler.

It also means we're heading into the last four months of 2025, as well as rapidly approaching a full year of being a published author, which I can't quite believe. It's been a heck of a 12 months, on many different fronts, but I'll be doing a wee review of that right before I head to Bloody Scotland.

I think the autumn is a good time to take stock, figuratively and literally. As the year begins to wind down, I like to think about where I've come from, where I'm going and what I'll need to get there. So far, this year has gone pretty much as I'd hoped it would in most ways, and significantly better in others. There's been challenges along the way, of course, but it feels like I've done a better job of looking after myself and getting the work done at the same time. Long may that continue.

I hope you're finding a similar sort of balance, as we get ready for winter and the festivals of the darker months. If you're feeling a bit threadbare, I hope the cooler temperatures and shorter days will give you a chance to coorie down and get some rest.

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 or Instagram, or send me a message on my contact form.