The Decrypt - June 2025

Welcome back to The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.

This was... a heck of a month. A lot of very cool things happened. So much, in fact, that I'm not entirely sure where to start. I suppose at the beginning is as good as anywhere. So pour yourself a glass of something cooling and let's dive in.

The month started with a heck of a bang. On the 5th of June, I got to both celebrate the paperback release of A RELUCTANT SPY (which I've been looking forward to for months) and simultaneously announce that it had been shortlisted for the McDermid Debut Award. It was quite a day - on a par with announcing I'd got a book deal in the first place.

So it was a pretty amazing twenty-four hours. I'm up against some incredible authors, but it's such an honour to have been selected for the second year of this award, founded by crime writing veteran and festival co-founder Val McDermid.

However, I was also keeping a secret - I'd also been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Award - that news broke the following day.

Again - I've got some intense competition here. It was particularly cool to see that Claire Wilson had also been shortlisted - our books came out a month apart last year and we're represented by the same literary agency, so we've been bumping into each other in various book-related contexts for the last 18 months or so. And it was also very cool to see Natalie Jayne Clark on the shortlist - I actually saw her pitch her book THE MALT WHISKY MURDERS at Bloody Scotland's Pitch Perfect event back in 2023, the first time I went.

I won't lie - it's both hugely validating and a little nervewracking to be up for two debut awards. But I couldn't be happier - it's thanks to readers and reviewers enjoying and talking about the book that I've got to this point. And it definitely makes me feel like I'm on the right path.

Right after that I headed to my first book festival of the year - the absolutely wonderful homegrown Cymera Festival here in Edinburgh. I've been a regular at Cymera since I first attended virtually in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. It's how I found my writing community at Edinburgh SFF, how I met my critique partner Nick Binge and it's one of my absolute favourite weekends of the year.

I started on the Friday with a bit of a signing tour of Edinburgh bookshops, which was enormous fun:

After finishing, I headed to the festival for the opening panels and pub quiz, then spent Saturday and Sunday pretty much living at the Pleasance Courtyard, including early morning RPG sessions, late-night panels, an incredible workshop with Stark Holborn on writing for games and dinners with friends. While the sun that Cymera has been blessed with the last few years was replaced by scattered showers (and massive downpours at points), it was as busy, friendly and frenetic as it always is. I can't recommend it enough if you're even slightly inclined towards science fiction, fantasy or horror writing. This was also the first time in a while I'd attended as a punter alone (rather than volunteering or running a workshop) and it was actually really nice to just chill out and talk to people.

I spent much of the following week chewing vitamin supplements and trying to get lots of sleep to recover, as I was intensely paranoid that I'd come down with something after such an intense few days and then miss the next week's events, which were the Bloody Scotland 2025 launch event in Stirling on Thursday 12th, followed by my first ever panel at the amazing Capital Crime festival in London the next day.

Thankfully the vitamins stood me in good stead for an intense few days.

It started on Stirling High Street with a photo op to celebrate our shortlisting. That's me on the left, with Claire Wilson, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Richard Strachan, all holding up our books. After this we took lots more photos with the leading lights of Scottish crime and thriller fiction, followed by a great launch event and a great event with the Canadian author Linwood Barclay. Each of us shortlisters also got interviewed by local newspapers and radio, including this great piece by the Courier.

Straight after I headed back down to Edinburgh and got a train down to London, sadly arriving too late to join in with the opening evening party of Capital Crime. I got some sleep, then headed to Waterstones in Wimbledon early on Friday morning to meet the wonderful Andreas, a bookseller who I first met at Harrogate last year. He'd asked if I would come and sign stock at his store and I was more than happy to.

Then we headed off to Capital Crime together for an amazing couple of days. I got up on stage for the first time as a panelist and managed to not trip over my own words too much. I was very lucky to have an excellent chair in Brian McGilloway and two phenomenal co-panellists, Remi Kone and S.M. Govett.

It went really, really well and I spent the rest of the festival coasting on the high of my hour on-stage. Capital Crime was a fantastic event and I can't wait to go back.

Unfortunately I had a flight booked for our first holiday abroad in a couple of years, so I couldn't stick around for the big closing party on the Saturday night, but the view from our hotel in the Stockholm archipelago more than made up for it.

This beautiful old hotel was under heavy refurbishment while we visited, which I think it was why it was remotely in our budget, but it was a fantastic place to stay and we did a lot of reading, sleeping and wandering about, in and out of Stockholm and the archipelago. It was a wonderful trip, although we both came back ill. I suspect relaxing after quite a few months of intensive work might have been the culprit there. Thankfully it wasn't covid and we're both on the mend now.

While I was away, I also found out (via Google Alert) that A RELUCTANT SPY had been shortlisted for Best First Mystery in the Macavity Awards, from Mystery Readers International. A really lovely surprise and I'm honoured.

Phew, what a month, right?

By contrast, June was a month of very little writing. That was planned, so I don't feel too bad about it, but sometimes I still get a little nervous when I don't do much drafting or editing in a month.

I finished off the submission draft of PROJECT SCARLET right at the end of May and sent it off to my editor, then decided to take the first two weeks of the month for some outlining and planning. I knew my time was going to be chopped up with travel and I also had a bunch of reading to do, so I kept my goals low and focused on preparing the ground for after my holiday.

So, I wrote a couple of high-level pitches for new novels, as well as working on the outline for another, secret project called DRIFT. The high-level pitches are just that - a page-long query-style pitch and supporting information, like the series it might fit into, title ideas and so on. I'll use these in discussions with my agent and eventually my editor.

The DRIFT work was more in-depth, as it was actual story outlining. It went very slowly, because I was quite distracted with all the fairly intense stuff I was doing in those first two weeks, but I also spent a bunch of my holiday quietly mulling over ideas, so I got back into it with vigour this morning.

I only did about 8 writing days in June and wrote less than 3,000 words, but the whole point of this month was to take a break, so I'd say mission accomplished.

July is going to be another very busy month on the event front, starting this Wednesday when I'll be in conversation with the writer, editor and historian Iain MacGregor about his new book THE HIROSHIMA MEN. The fantastic indie bookshop Night Owl Books in East Linton organised this event and I'm really, really looking forward to it. Iain's book is a fascinating look at the bombing of Hiroshima that introduces several new perspectives and takes a broader view than many histories, and I have a very long list of questions I can't wait to ask him.

A couple of days later I'll be doing a group interview with the Scots Whay Hae! Podcast about being shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Award - really looking forward to that, though I'm not sure when it's being released. I'll keep an eye out and post about it in a daynote.

The following week I'm being interviewed by the UK Crime Book Club, again as part of the Bloody Scotland buildup. It's going to be a busy one for podcast and video interviews over the next few weeks.

On the 16th, I'll be doing a half-day event with visiting students from Arcadia Abroad. I did an author talk for Arcadia's students back in February and really enjoyed it. This will be a longer event, including a bit of a walking tour around Edinburgh's Old Town. I'm really looking forward to it.

The next day I'll be heading to Harrogate in Yorkshire for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. Last year I went for three days, from Friday afternoon to Sunday. This year it will be four, as the awards ceremony for the Crime Novel of the Year and the McDermid Debut Award is on Thursday night. I am slightly bricking it, both about the award ceremony and being at a book festival for four straight days. If you're going and you see me and I look a bit frazzled, I give you full permission to tell me to take a break. I have a very bad habit of succumbing to FOMO at events like this and hanging out aaaall day, when wondering why I feel absolutely exhausted and fried. So this year I intend to actually plan in breaks and disappear to my hotel at regular intervals. Like, I'm literally going to put them into my calendar. At least two breaks per day.

After Harrogate things calm down a bit and I'll settle back into the routine. So far August is looking like a quiet month event-wise, but it's also the Festivals (Fringe, International and Book Festivals being my focus) in Edinburgh, so I suspect I might head into town a few times. We shall see.

There may also be some very exciting news in July, but I'm waiting to hear about it from various third parties, so I can't promise an update. But keep your eyes on my socials and website in the next few weeks...

Reading

I finished all of my proofs and beta reads, so I have (shock horror) been reading actual books from my actual bookshelf.

• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - Five years after it came out I finally read this amazing book and it lived up to the hype. Gorgeous prose, a fascinating and intricately constructed world and a really masterful central mystery that pulled me through the book beautifully. I finished it in two days. Fantastic.
• London Rules by Mick Herron - I've been reading the Slough House series for a few years, at a rate of about one a year since the TV show started coming out. I like to make sure I've read each book before the TV version comes out and it's been really interesting to see how the two different mediums have cross-pollinated in my brain. It also means I've usually only finished the book a few weeks before I see the TV show, so I can see quite clearly the changes that have been made. This story is particularly interesting because it's the fifth book and is only now introducing plot points (particularly about Jackson Lamb's past) that were appearing in the TV show from the second season. Just really bloody good books.
• The Hiroshima Men by Iain MacGregor - I finished this right before I left for Sweden and it left an impression. As I noted above, it takes quite a different entry point into this moment in history and does some really interesting and unexpected things with it. Highly recommended.
• The Power Of The Dog by Don Winslow - I recently gave up the idea of a 'TBR' (to be read) stack (I have a blog post brewing about why) and one of the fun side effects is that I'm picking up books off my shelves that I've had for literal years but not read. This book from 2005, a crime/thriller novel about Mexican drug cartels and New York mafia, has been kicking around forever. Now that I'm reading it I'm really glad I've jumped on it. It has a fantastic sense of place and voice and a fascinating, semi-omniscient narratorial POV that swoops through scenes with a very keen eye. I'm really enjoying it.

Watching

Not a huge amount of telly this month, on account of being away in Sweden:

• We've been watching MURDERBOT and really enjoying it. It's a very faithful adaptation in most ways (doing a very good job of replicating the tone of the books) and my wife (who hasn't read the books) is greatly enjoying it.
• We've started Season 4 of THE BEAR and it's, so far, working better for me than the last season, which I enjoyed moment-to-moment but which definitely felt like it was narratively wheelspinning at points. We're rationing it out, a couple of episodes a night.
• We're still watching THE RESIDENCE and still enjoying it - it's a very well-crafted, extremely twisty murder mystery with an excellent Rashomon-style multi-POV gimmick that works, episode after episode.
• We're also still watching THE HANDMAID'S TALE, although when we got back from Sweden, both of us with an awful headcold, the brutal opening of the seventh episode was, well, a bit much. We'll get back to it soon though.

Playing

Here's what's new with the pew pew pew.

• Still playing WARZONE a bunch. I'd say I'm now (mostly) a net asset to my team. I die a lot less anyway.
• Still also (re)playing THE LAST OF US 2, although I'm playing it in little bursts between other things, because it's a) quite difficult and b) emotionally intense. Still great.
• I also started on CITIZEN SLEEPER 2 after Stark Holborn talked about how good the writing was at Cymera. I absolutely loved the first game and so far the second one is not disappointing - it's smoothed out some of the slightly rougher gameplay edges and deepened the lore substantially. One of those rare games where the world and the story intertwines perfectly with the gameplay mechanics. Wonderful.

Hoo boy, the internet just doesn't ever stop does it?

• I thought this review by Adrian Hon of a 3 day LARP called Eclipse, based on films like INTERSTELLAR and ARRIVAL, made it sound absolutely fantastic. I am very intrigued.
• For Reasons, I have been digging around looking at tv and film scripts. A producer I was chatting with told me to check out the BBC Script Library, which I'm pretty sure I've looked at before, but which has grown hugely since the last time I looked at. It's really an incredible resource.
• I love travelling by train, especially sleeper trains, so I got very excited about this new concept for all-private room trains that could be as cheap as a budget flight. Not launching until 2027, but if they pull it off I'll be first in line.
• The McDermid Debut Award website now has video interviews with the six finalists, including me.
• Loved this long interview with the cast of Andor. What an amazing experience it must have been to work on a show like that.
• Absolutely loved this piece on The Honest Editor about pricing, promotions and retailer space. It's easy to forget how much physical book retailing is a logistics business, but this is an excellent insight into the factors at play.
• I really enjoyed this discussion on PubTips about the best day jobs for writers. Lots of good advice here.

This was the first of my 'full-on' months for the year, but it was also my first seriously low word count month. I've been working hard on PROJECT SCARLET for the first five months of the year, but now that that is away to my editor, I made a very deliberate decision to take it easy in June, both because I needed a break after five straight months of writing and editing, and because I had a lot of event stuff happening in a short period this month.

July is likely to be similar in pace events-wise, although I'll be doing my best to return to my routines and get some words down in between events, podcasts and travel. I missed the major heatwave here in the UK (it was a lot cooler by the Baltic Sea, though still very sunny), but I suspect July is going to be hotter and more tiring, when I think about daily work, travel and my first time going to a book festival for four days straight. I'm going to try and travel very light, get enough sleep and continue compartmentalising everything I do as much as possible. Clear separation between work, rest and the necessary stuff to keep my life ticking over has proven to be very, very key.

I hope you're having a nice summer. We came back to our raspberry canes absolutely loaded with fruit, so we've been eating some very nice fruit salads and sweet things with raspberries in them. Not sure what we're going to do with the plums from our plum tree once they finally ripen - that tree has also decided to go absolutely mad this year.

If you're out in your own garden, I hope you have lots of nice things to eat or just sit and look at. And if it's a window box, or even just your local park, I hope you're getting outside and the weather is nice wherever you are. If you're coming to Harrogate and you're a blog or newsletter reader, please do say hello. I look forward to meeting many of you over the next few months.

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.