The Decrypt - June 2026

Well, crikey. That was a heck of a month, huh? A new book released, the midpoint of the year passed, an amazing weekend in London at Capital Crime and steady-if-slow progress on another book. Phew. And on top of that, an unprecedented heatwave. It's been A Lot in several overlapping ways.

The summer of festivals and trying to finish books is still only just beginning, but June is done, which means it's time for another edition of The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media. I'm waiting on edits, submitting Secret Things, making plans for the second half of the year and generally feeling a bit frenetic. Also trying not to think too hard about Book 2 reviews. But let's take a look back before we charge forward again. Get yourself something iced (have I mentioned how hot it is?), settle in and let's get to it.

It has been a hectic month. A book launch for me, a programme launch for Bloody Scotland, two weekend-long book festivals at opposite ends of the country, multiple podcasts and several book events for writer pals. I have managed to take some short breaks and catch my breath, but looking back my calendar for June is just an absolute mess. Kind of amazed I got through it, to be honest.

I started the month with a quiet day, though the last two or three days before a book comes out are, I've discovered, this sort of extremely high-strung waiting period where my brain just sort of sizzles constantly. I did actually manage to do some editing work during this fraught interval, but mostly I just stewed and waited. When you've had something on your calendar for well over a year, the actual date itself seems to creep interminably towards you, and then it arrives and it's somehow still a shock.

I did a long release week roundup post that I won't hugely rehash in this newsletter, but I will post some pics of what a brilliant week it was. I went to the Bloody Scotland programme launch in Stirling, then my own book launch, then four days of Cymera Festival.

The launch itself was a joy, and I was far less nervous than 18 months ago when I launched A RELUCTANT SPY at Blackwell's. We had a really great turnout and my friend Nick Binge did a brilliant job chairing the discussion. Release week also held some other real delights, including a podcast with Quick Book Reviews, another podcast with the Page One Podcast, a belter of a review in the Sunday Times, being on stage with three SF writers I really admire at Cymera and a bunch of stuff detailed in my roundup post that I'm struggling to remember because it was a full on week.

Basically, an absolutely dream launch week. I think I might want to not have a book launch and a four day SF book festival in the same week in future though, because I was extremely wrung out by the following Thursday. A whole bunch of podcasts I'd recorded over the past 2-3 months also all came out within a week or so of each other. You can see the full list on my Media page, but here's the ones that came out in June.

• Murder Junction Episode 186 - David Goodman - June 2026
• The Le Carré Cast - Spy fiction as travelogue - June 2026
• In My Good Books - Episode 104 - June 2026
• The Conversation Coffee Break - David Goodman - June 2026
• Page One Extra - Writing spy thrillers with David Goodman - June 2026
• Quick Book Reviews - Interview with David Goodman - June 2026

After all that excitement I had a relatively quiet week, with just a podcast recording with Murder Junction, then a lunch with an aspiring short story writer who wanted to ask me about how I'd gone about writing and submitting short fiction. I made some good progress on editing that week, mainly because I wasn't getting four hours sleep before scrambling back to a book festival.

The week after that it was back to the frenetics, heading down to London for Capital Crime. It was an amazing weekend, starting with the Fingerprint Awards on the Thursday night, then my espionage panel on Friday morning. It was well-attended (especially for a 9:30am panel the morning after an awards do!) but there's no photographic evidence, as James Wolff, one of my co-panelists, is ex-SIS and pictures weren't permitted. But I had a great time, my co-panelists (also including Chris Humphreys and Paul Warner) and chair Jane Thynne were lovely and we had a good signing queue afterwards. Photos of that do exist thanks to my friend Jordan.

As I said in my post after the event, I did feel absolutely drained after this full weekend. Capital Crime is moving to a new venue next year and I'm super, super curious about how it will affect the vibes of the event, so I will almost certainly go, but I probably won't do four days again. I'm just too exhausted and those extra couple of hotel nights are a wallet-killer. I am, however, doing four days at Harrogate and three at Bloody Scotland this year, so I shall just have to gird my loins and take more frequent breaks.

After I came back from London and had (just about) recovered, I had a couple of really nice book events to go to in the past week, starting with my friends Erin and Mo (as MK Hardy) doing a panel with Heba Al-Wasity at Waterstones for 'Haunted Happenings', discussing the gothic and spooky with Heather Palmer:

And then, this past Friday, I got to go along and see my friend Benedict Anning launch his debut novel ATOMIC COFFIN (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon):

It was a really lovely night, with a brilliant turnout and Ben looking that particular flavour of delighted and overwhelmed that only a debut book launch can really create in a writer.

I am almost certainly missing a tonne of stuff, but thankfully I documented as I went this month in my release week roundup and Capital Crime post, so if you'd like more photos, more links and more podcasts, check those out.

I also submitted a Secret Thing in the last week which I'm trying quite hard not to get too excited about. If it comes off, it could be a real gamechanger in a bunch of ways, but I'm very much at the start of it with no guarantees. More soon if something does, indeed, come of it. We'll see!

The last weekend of the month I did... absolutely nothing book-related. I bought some plants, went for some walks in the woods, read a bit, caught up on laundry and cleaning and slept. And it was very, very welcome. Plus the heat got a bit less intense (it's been nothing like as severe as England and Wales, but still pretty sweaty), which helped with the sleep and recovery. What a month!

June was a slow month on the work front (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the summary of everything I had on above). I'd submitted Project VAULT at the end of May, so I spent nearly all of the month working on Project DRIFT, a novel I started writing last year and which I had about 38,000 words of.

However, it had been six months or so since I'd touched this story, so I decided to go back to the start and do a consolidation edit, to clean up the draft, re-familiarise myself with the story and the world and prepare myself to continue. I have two different editors sending me edits in July/August on two different novels, so I will likely be heavily engaged with those books (hopefully sequentially!) next month. So with the event-heavy schedule for June, it felt like consolidation was the best use of the time I did have available.

The impact of events is pretty clear in the ol' spreadsheets, with my working time dropping to a paltry (for me) 25 hours across the month (compared to 40 in May). I did get the whole 38,000 words edited (with a net cut of -541 words) and added around 5,000 words to the draft overall as I got back to drafting in the last few days of June. But it was a sloooooow month.

This is another factor in my intention, after this year, to get a bit more strategic about how I approach multi-day events. Having two in one month is unusual, but even one 3-4 day event in a month can easily knock a third or even half of my usual productivity flat on its arse, because I'm tired afterwards for a week or more. I'm starting to realise why many of the veteran writers I've met over the past few years will appear, do their panel, hang around for lunch/ an afternoon to see some friends and then leave again. It's a self-preservation technique, and one I might need to start adopting.

July is going to be a fun month, but a little less crazy than June was. I can only hope that the summer heat abates slightly, or at least doesn't get quite as hot for quite as long, since I'll be in Yorkshire for four days.

I'm starting the month with an event at Waterstones Kirkcaldy this coming Friday!

You can call or email the bookshop to book your FREE place, so if you're in Fife or Fife-adjacent areas and you'd like to hear me talking about my new book, please do book, as it helps the bookshop plan the event and ensure it goes ahead. Hopefully see you there!

After that I'll have two glorious weeks with very little on (aside from a birthday meal for a friend and a couple of wedding/anniversary parties at the weekend) which is good because I will be neck-deep in book edits I think.

And then, of course, I'll be off to the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, from the 23rd to the 26th of July. This year I'm not on programme in any way, I'm just there to hang around, see friends, probably drink too much lime and soda and not get enough sleep. I'm really looking forward to it. It will be a good exercise in pacing myself, though I've learned my lesson and got a hotel that's a) closer to the venue and b) not directly above a nightclub. Hoping for temperatures below 30°C and a light breeze.

There may also be some exciting news in early July... stay tuned!

It was a very light month, media-wise, for all the reasons above. But I finished and started a few really great things.

• DECEPTION, by Alan Parks - I was sent a copy of this noir/espionage/crime crossover thriller set in New York City at the height of the Second World War and I've been really enjoying it. It's the second in Alan's 'Gunner' series, but you don't need any context to hop in with this book, since he does such a good job of setting the scene. As a historical spy thriller, it's got atmosphere by the bucketload and plenty of Nazis being foiled, which is exactly what you want in a spy novel of this era. Great fun. (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon)
• THE FIFTEENTH MAN by William Cook - Another proof very kindly sent to me by Viper, William's publisher, and another extremely immersive depiction of a specific time and place, namely West Berlin in 1990. I'm not far into this, but it has a very compelling hook and the prose is great, so I'm certain I will fly through it once I get going. And the core story, about a jaded journalist hunting Nazi war criminals right after the Wall came down, is a belter. (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon)

Watching

Starting and finishing a few series:

• We finished FOR ALL MANKIND this month. It ended on a pretty satisfying note, though as is usual when depicting political struggles of any kind, everything was neatly tied up with a bow by a single big incident/climbdown, rather than the years of grinding effort and sacrifice that is more usual in the real world. Still, as an alt-history I wouldn't mind living in, it succeeded pretty well.
• We finished watching THE BOYS too, which had an appropriately visceral and satisfying ending that continued the tradition of exceptional foley work. Bit of an odd duck this show, but overall I'm glad we persevered with it.
• A really fun show we started and finished this month was BIG MISTAKES on Netflix, which was short, hilarious and very well made. For some reason I found it really hard to remember the title and kept calling it 'Bad Mistakes' or 'Huge Mistakes'. But it was great fun.
• We really enjoyed Patton Oswalt's comedy special on Youtube, TEA & SCOTCH - which is somehow both vintage Oswalt and also bang up-to-the-minute. The piece on watching cleaning videos on Tiktok/Instagram is particularly accurate.
• We started on the second season of PARADISE, which was pleasingly full of trope subversions for typical post-apocalyptic fare. Looking forward to seeing where that goes.
• The big hit for us this month, though, has been WIDOW'S BAY, which is getting buzz everywhere I look online and for good reason. It's both unsettling horror and absolutely deadpan comedy and it does both really, really well. Highly recommended.

Playing

Spaceships and spies, appropriately...

• I'm coming towards the end of STAR WARS: OUTLAWS. I've reached the 'point of no return' in the narrative quite quickly and I'm fiddling around doing side quests rather than jumping into the end game. This is a persistent problem for me with big open-world games, I find. But I'll finish it off in July I suspect.
• I've picked up but not yet played much of the new Bond game, 007: FIRST LIGHT. It's by the same studio that makes the (excellent) HITMAN games which I absolutely love (and played somewhat compulsively a couple of years ago when I was distracting myself from an intense summer of writing A RELUCTANT SPY). There's a lot of shared DNA in the game mechanics, but it's also, so far, a very well-made narrative adventure game too. Great fun.

I return from the dark forests of the Internet, bearing baskets of delicious digital harvest.

• The Bloody Scotland programme went live in June and it includes a spy event with myself, Paul Warner and Kim Sherwood, chaired by Chris Merritt. Get yourself a ticket!
• Speaking of Bloody Scotland, their Crime In The Spotlight applications are open! I did this in 2024 and it was an incredible experience.
• Kate McKean on what to do if you're scared of promoting your book.
• This new game CROSSFIRE looks absolutely right up my street.
• A great piece from m'friend Lorraine Wilson on what readers and reviewers 'owe' to authors
• Loved this list of 40 alternatives to 'traditional' book events from Pine State Publicity
• I've done a fair bit of solo travel for book stuff over the last couple of years, so this piece from Claire McGowan about doing things on your own resonated quite a bit.
• Loved this episode of the excellent Starship Alexandria podcast discussing Susanna Clarke's PIRANESI.
• This online game, ANTHROPEUM, where you try and guess the geographic and chronological origins of human-made artefacts, is (fair warning) very addictive to play.
• Re-linking to this piece from Lorraine Wilson (two links in one newsletter!) about losing and finding agents. Well worth a re-read.
• A great piece from The Honest Editor on the rather nebulous idea of having 'a vision' for a book and what editors mean when they say it.
• And if you want another, longer list of bookish links, this post from Womble at Runalong The Shelves is excellent.

Another extremely busy newsletter, saved from being even longer by the fact that I already wrote two, long, interim posts during June just to keep up with the sheer number of things happening.

There was a time, once, when my summers were a time of rest and not doing much except farting around in the long summer days, but that was before all this author malarky and the annual summer helter-skelter of festivals, events, bookshop visits and more. It's a lot of fun but this extremely busy launch + two festivals month has shown me I'm really going to have to pace myself, both this year and in the future.

On the plus side, I have managed to keep writing and carve out a little time at home. Never enough time, for reading or sleeping or going for walks, but some, which is better than none. And I have, for the first time, managed to maintain some kind of workout schedule, which has actually helped a lot with general fatigue and energy levels. I'm merely dead on my feet, rather than actively feeling like I might die. I'll call that a win.

I think in my early middle age I'm beginning to reverse how I spend my year, with the winters being the time for quietude and hibernation and the summers being the busiest part of the year. It would all be a lot more bearable if the temperature would drop a tiny bit and we'd get a nice breeze.

Still, July should be a tiny bit less frenetic, at least on the events side, and there's a lot of editing to do, so I'll be sticking close to home for most of the month, getting the pages edited and prepping myself for the one big trip to Harrogate.

If you're having a busy summer too, please remember to hydrate, put on a bit of sunscreen and close the curtains on the sunny side of the house (counterintuitive, but it works!) on the really hot days. And if you're having a nice, relaxing summer break, I hope you're really enjoying it.

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.