The Decrypt - December 2025

We did it everyone! We got to the end of both December and the year 2025! That means it's time for the final issue of The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.

This one is going to be a short one, because it's Hogmanay (what we call New Year's Eve here in Scotland) and because December was also, frankly, a pretty quiet capper to a frenetic year. So there's both not all that much to cover, as well as not much time to cover it.

So, uncap your New Year's beverage of choice and let's get down to it.

This is definitely going to be the lightest part of the newsletter, because I did zero events in December and only a single podcast recording, with the excellent folks over at Spybrary. I've listened to the excellent Spybrary podcast since close to its inception and it was really exciting to be invited to appear on it. The Spybrarian community on Facebook is apparently a really active and friendly group, though I binned Facebook many years ago and have no intention of going back. Which is a shame, because many of the members of this group are apparently fans of A RELUCTANT SPY. Hopefully they'll enjoy the podcast when it comes out in January.

Aside from that, it was a pretty quiet month overall. I had a trip to London for my day job and managed to fit in a bit of signing books at Waterstones Piccadilly, but other than that I was mostly just finishing up for the year, in many different senses - tying up things at the day job, finishing off my writing work for the year and doing a lot of admin.

As I talked about briefly in my annual By The Numbers post, I also pushed the button on going part-time at my day job in 2026, with my request being approved at the end of the year. I'm really excited about the possibilities this change will open up next year (and a little nervous too if I'm honest).

To start with I'm not going to do too much planning about how I will use the additional time on Fridays - I'm going to be working 4 days a week for the first time in my adult life and that's a major change I want to get used to. Once the dust has settled a bit and I've landed on a new routine I'll write a post about the differences and what it feels like, as well as a more in-depth look at how I made the decision to make this jump. It's an incredible opportunity that I'm very happy to have, even if there are very real and quantifiable downsides to what I'm giving up. But the potential upsides are also huge. More on all of that in the new year.

I started the month spending most of my time outlining a new project called Project VAULT (title to be decided/revealed). This is a project I've been discussing with my agent and various folks for a while and which I was able to make a start on this month. I spent the first two weeks of the month structuring a new Scrivener file and writing out a bunch of backstory that will be essential for drafting this book, then on December 15th, a week before the end of my writing year, I started writing.

I got about 6,000 words in that week, then I noticed, in the process of putting together my By The Numbers post that if I wrote a little over 3,000 more words, I'd have doubled my word count from last year, which was a pretty tough year for me, writing-wise. So I wrote, in the end, for another two days in order to get over that milestone. It was quite the morale boost to have managed to return to my typical annual output after that difficult year. Lots more in my numbers post if you're curious about the writing routines and work that I've done over this year.

I'm about to head into a steady drafting period, working on Project VAULT, as well as getting a new writing routine established with my new four day working week. That hopefully means I'll be doing more events next year, though currently there's only one thing planned for January, which is a panel at Stockport Noir right at the end of the month.

The event is sold out, so if you managed to bag a ticket, I look forward to seeing you there!

Other than that, it's going to be full steam ahead on the next book and trying to get used to the new writing routine. I'm very excited.

Reading

I've continued to mostly be doing beta reading this month, but I also continued with a couple of proofs and got a few new books in the Audible Christmas sales.

• A Spy In The Blood by Paul Warner - I had to pause this one while I finished two beta reads in early December, but I'm rolling through it now and really enjoying it. This one comes out at the end of January.
• The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett - I had forgotten that there were new multi-narrator audio versions of the Discworld series, with Peter Serafinowicz as Death and Bill Nighy as the footnotes, but I was extremely delighted when a friend reminded me and promptly used a credit to pick up the first one.
• All The Fiends Of Hell by Adam Nevill - Another audiobook sale pickup and an excellently creepy and disconcerting book, about being among the sole survivors of some kind of rapture event that leaves Earth the preserve of chittering, invisible, faceless demons. Great stuff.
• Outlaw Planet by MR Carey - I've only just started this, but I'm a big fan of Mike Carey's extremely broad body of work and this one has a cracking narratorial voice.

Watching

Finished off a few things this month:

• We finished off PLURIBUS last weekend - I've seen a bunch of online discourse about how slow this season was, and I can only theorise that the complainers were unfamiliar with Gilligan's work - most of his shows are slow-burn central and this is no exception. I've really enjoyed it and I think Rhea Seehorn is fantastic, very effectively playing a woman utterly flummoxed and terrified by a an enormous global change and expressing it (somewhat realistically, I think) through the medium of terse irritation.
• We watched CONCLAVE, which I've had on my list for ages but hadn't got round to. It lived up to the hype, with gorgeous visuals, excellent tension and some superb performances.
• We started DOWN CEMETERY ROAD this month, as well as THE DEATH OF BUNNY MUNRO, but the thing they both had in common is that we didn't immediately leap to watch more episodes. They've gone into our telly backlog though.
• One thing I did start absolutely inhaling though was MOONHAVEN, which was apparently on AMC in 2022, got cancelled during a corporate merger despite excellent ratings, then got picked up by Netflix. I jumped on it after reading this post about how good it was and it is excellent and really quite different from a lot of mainstream TV science fiction. Strongly recommended.
• We also started on the third season of THE DIPLOMAT, which is as snappy and fast-moving as ever. It's a strange sort of heightened reality where everyone is always pithy and deadpan and the stakes are always absolutely sky-high. But I do enjoy it.
• In the festive break, we've watched KLAUS (an excellent and strong Christmas movie rotation candidate), MUPPET'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (need I say more?), A CHRISTMAS STORY (another classic), IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (look we're seasonal movie traditionalists and my wife is American, okay?) and to shake things up a bit, SPIDERMAN: INTO THE SPIDERVERSE, which is a gorgeous movie that's leaving UK Netflix in mid-January.

Playing

Kapow!

• I'm still playing an absolute tonne of ARC RAIDERS - more co-op with friends but also a fair amount of solo lobbies. The learning curve to fighting bigger and bigger enemies with upgraded gear and skills is intensely satisfying. I expect I'll get bored of it at some point but so far it's the perfect lunchbreak game and the interactions with other players are often really fun and heartening, instead of being brutal PvP deathmatches.

Unwrapping the last few festive links.

• I enjoyed this video about how to read a book a week from Productive Peter.
• I thought this episode of the Past Due podcast with Mary Robinette Kowal was an absolutely fascinating exploration of how she makes things work money-wise. The whole podcast is excellent.
• I wrote a piece for the Booktrail blog about the locations in A RELUCTANT SPY.
• I was chuffed to see three of my friends (Claire Wilson, Tariq Ashkanani and Callum McSorley) mentioned in this Herald article about up and coming crime and thriller writers in Scotland.
• The Honest Editor did a fascinating writeup of a typical week as a working editor. Includes a whole bunch of things I wouldn't have thought were part of the job but of course they are.
• The Page One Christmas Special this year was a lot of fun - Fiona Cummins, CL Taylor and Ed Burns were excellent guests and there's a lot of laughs.

Well! That's a wrap. Told you this was going to be short(er).

It's been quite a year, even if December itself was a little slower-paced and quieter. I needed it, honestly. The weather here in Scotland has been a dispiriting combination of strangely warm and awfully dreich and grey, so it took me until just a few days before the end of the year to begin feeling festive. But the last couple of weeks have been great, and finishing the year on a high of hitting my word count goals was wonderful.

I hope you've had a good 2025 and managed to rest a bit and see friends and family here at the very tail-end of the year. And if you were working, or caring, or otherwise still plugging away right up to the bells, then I hope there's a weekend or two off in your near future.

I'm extremely excited about the upcoming year. I'm making a big change to my working life that I've dreamed about for a long time, I've got plans for finishing two novels and I already can't wait for the events, conventions and festivals that I'm planning to attend across the year. I hope you've enjoyed these newsletters in 2025 and that you'll stick with me to see where this whole enterprise goes in 2026.

Happy New Year when it comes, and thank you for reading.

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.