Hello again! Welcome back to The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.
It was another busy month, though this time more on the actual writing front than everything else. A book draft finished, another book edited and some very fun events. Let's get going!
I'd planned to go to my first event of the month on the 1st of March, which was the Luna Press Publishing annual birthday bash, which I've been going to for the past few years. I was especially looking forward to it this year, because it would have been my first attendance as a Luna author, albeit in an anthology. Unfortunately a persistent cold from a very wet and windy February meant I wasn't in any fit state, but by all accounts it was an excellent night.
The following week I did have a very nice lunch with three author friends for Nick Binge's birthday, which was a really nice catchup, industry gossip session and generally lovely time. One of my favourite things about the last few years has been finding entirely new groups of friends who are as fascinated by the writing, craft and business sides of this as I am, but who are also just really decent, fun, smart people who I love to hang out with. It's cool making new friends in your forties.
Speaking of friends, we also took a trip through to Glasgow for Sharon Van Etten and The Attachment Theory at the Barrowlands Ballroom.
A member of the band is an old school friend of my wife's, so it was both a chance to catch up with them, my first ever gig at the Barrowlands and a fantastic night of music. We also decided to stay over rather than struggling back on trains and night buses, and scored a really good hotel room, followed by a gentle amble back east the next morning. We had a great time and I think we're going to try and get along to more gigs in the future - it's very easy when you both work from home and live out in the country let months go by without getting out and about in the world for art, music, movies and theatre. I find that every time I do it's a massive creative shot in the arm.
I rounded off the month by attending Nick's book launch for his new novel DISSOLUTION, which was a fantastic, multi-faceted literary evening. I wrote about it at length in my daynote the following day, and I really hope that more authors will think about trying different things for their events in the same way, because the energy of the whole evening and opportunities to catch up and chat about writing were fantastic. Plus the proceeds all went to charity. A genuine win-win.
My writing in March was split almost exactly into two distinct halves (in terms of what I was actually doing, i.e. drafting, then editing) but three phases (in terms of what I was working on).
At the start of the month I was about 30,000 words away from the end of PROJECT SCARLET, with an intention to finish by the middle of the month. I met that goal, with a big push to the finish before March 16th, including some weekend writing. When I get close to the end of a first draft, I get excited and also kind of just want the thing to be done. It also took me well over my planned draft (100kish), with the book ending up finishing at 125k. I've got a lot of cutting to do as a result.
It's been very reassuring though, to be three months into the year and to have topped 106k for the year already (especially after last year's sobering numbers). I've had some big word days - my biggest session so far was just under 6,000 words, right at the end of the book. But the majority of days this year so far I've been writing somewhere between 1,200 and 1,800 words, which is bang in my comfort zone for drafting in a usual 90 minute writing period. It's reassuring that sticking to my plan is paying off.
After finishing the first draft of PROJECT SCARLET, I took a week away from it to do some edits for my agent on PROJECT SHARD, an SF novel that I've been working on in various forms for several years. The version he has now is a very substantial rewrite from the first draft in 2019, and I'm hoping that we'll be taking it on submission sometime in the very near future. It was also really nice to work on something that wasn't drafting and also wasn't the book I've been working on for several months now.
Once that was away, I went back to SCARLET, which I'm working on steadily now, with the objective of finishing a second full draft before the end of May. I've been using my Supernote Manta to mark up the manuscript, then working from that when I edit. This is working pretty well so far, because I can look at big picture things like pacing, plot holes and continuity when I read it on the tablet, then focus on doing lots and lots (and lots) of little word-by-word cuts when I actually edit each scene. So far I'm editing around 5,000 words per day, so I'm on course to get through the whole thing in around twenty five working days, which gives me about a two week buffer for my deadline.
Somewhere in there I will need to import the scene list into Aeon Timeline and lay everything out on a detailed timeline, both so I can check continuity stuff in future edit rounds and also so I can see where the pace is lagging and where I might be able to cut whole plot arcs, if I'm hurting for word count towards the end of the edit. But for now, I'm just ploughing ahead and making a lot of notes.
I started the month with an appearance on Nadine Matheson's excellent podcast 'The Conversation', talking about A RELUCTANT SPY, how I write and plenty more besides. It was a long and very fun conversation.
A week or so later, I also wrote about the experience of being a published author for six months, which was a significantly cheerier post than the one I wrote after two months, when I was still feeling a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing.
And finally, last week, I got to announce something I've been sitting on for a while - that I'm going to be appearing at Capital Crime this year on a panel!
I've never been to Capital Crime, so it's going to be a double first for me. But I've heard nothing but good things about it, and I'm really, really looking forward to the panel.
This won't be the last of my festival appearances this year, so keep your eyes peeled for more announcements soon.
Finally, I finished off the month with the news that my story Best Practices for Safe Asteroid Handling, which appeared in the September/October edition of Analog magazine, has been picked as a finalist in their annual 'Analytical Laboratory' reader poll! That also means you can read it online, along with all the other finalists.
Next month, I'm looking forward to a couple of events. First up is a visit to a local book club (which has been unavoidably postponed twice, but which is hopefully going ahead in a week or so).
Then on Thursday 10th of April, I'll be heading to Tariq Ashkanani's launch for THE MIDNIGHT KING.
Tariq is a friend and also one half of the excellent Page One podcast, and I've heard very good things about this new book, so I'm really looking forward to this event.
Reading
It's been another slow month on the reading front, thanks to beta reads and reading my own drafts, but I've managed a few things.
- Saturation Point by Adrian Tchaikovsky - I picked this up in a 2-for-1 sale on Audible and I'm glad I did. It's a short-ish novella, but a very well-done one, despite working within a very limited viewpoint - the whole novel is presented as audio transcripts of a diary kept by one of the researchers sent to a 'climate dead zone' to investigate the disappearance of a scientist. Heaps of fun.
- Gogmagog by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard - I first read Jeff Noon in the mid-Nineties, when his debut novel VURT came out. As a science fiction reading teenager, it absolutely blew my mind. This book, which is the first in a (gorgeously duel-covered) duology, is similarly strange, florid and intriguing. I've been really enjoying it.
- SCORPIO by Marko Kloos - This is a new spinoff series from the completed 'Frontlines' military SF series that I really enjoyed, and so far it's a really interesting evolution - a different character focus, new characters and a tighter scope, as opposed to the multiple star systems of the first series. But it's excellent.
Watching
Some good stuff in March:
- We re-watched ANDOR in anticipation of the next season coming out and wow, not only did it hold up, it's actually better on a second watch. The script really shines, there's a ton of detail I missed in the first viewing, and the real barnstorming speeches and key lines hit way harder. So good.
- We watched PARADISE on Disney+, which starts out as a fairly standard-issue murder mystery, then morphs into something quite spectacularly different over the course of the series. The penultimate episode was one of the most tense things I've watched in ages.
- Towards the end of the month we started watching SEVERANCE Season 2, which is as head-spinningly strange as the first season. The production design of the Lumon offices continues to viscerally upset me at a deeply subliminal level.
- We also watched ADOLESCENCE, like everyone else. I'd put it off for a week or two because while the technical and acting achievements sounded amazing, it also sounded utterly harrowing. And it was a pretty tough watch, but also a really incredible piece of filmmaking.
Playing
March was a month of undemanding gaming. When I'm writing a book, or editing one, or otherwise running low on narrative juice, I can't really focus on big, narrative-led games, so I tend to play a lot of multiplayer, or games I've played before.
- I'm still playing a bunch of HELL LET LOOSE - they have a mode now called 'Skirmish' which is a lot shorter than the main game modes, so I'll play a round or two of that of an evening when I'm not in the mood for anything longer. It's still a really fun game, especially on a server where players cooperate.
- I started a replay of DAYS GONE, a very under-rated zombie apocalypse game which has a huge map, fun game mechanics, genuinely challenging massive zombie hordes to fight and big motorbikes to drive around. It's also getting a remaster on the 25th of April, so I may hold off on playing much more until that comes out.
- I've also been playing SPACE MARINE 2, off and on, but I'm not really that into it. The environments are gorgeous and the gameplay is pretty good, but I find it all a bit linear and repetitive. The co-op elements are apparently more fun, but I haven't tried that out yet.
Another month of freshly harvested internet:
- Really enjoyed this episode of Page One with the novelist Simon Scarrow.
- Loved this episode of the Le Carré Cast about the new TV adaptation of LEGACY OF SPIES.
- A very sobering post from Mark Lawrence on the realities of debut attrition.
- A really interesting and heavily annotated blog post about living through the original dotcom boom and bust in London.
- If you're going to be a guest on a podcast, the Podcast Guest Guide is a brilliant resource.
- The first episode of the Bloody Scotland podcast was great, and I love the format of pairing an interview with an established author with one from a debut.
- Loved this video about constant-thrust space travel.
- Also loved this video with Brian Cox about the Fermi Paradox.
- Eliza Chan's appearance on The Real Writing Process was really great.
- A fascinating post from HUDS + GUIS about the interface design in SILO.
And just like that, a quarter of the year is gone. Seems hard to believe, and yet the linear progression of time stops for nothing and nobody.
I've been pretty good about sticking to my routines and getting out for morning walks, so I've been enjoying the slow spread of green and new buds in the woods and the gradual (very gradual) warming of temperatures. There's been a few false starts and a fair amount of wind and rain, but it really does feel we're heading into spring proper now, and the longer days are very, very welcome.
I'm also feeling a bit tired. I've had a couple of days off in March, but so far no longer holidays, and I've realised that it takes me about three months of steady work without a break before I begin to feel exhaustion and incipient burnout setting in, thanks to the combination of writing work and day job. Against a background of generalised WTF in the world-at-large that I'm finding secondarily stressful, I think it's time for a break of some kind. So I'll be doing a bit of research and planning for that in April.
The second quarter of the year is going to be busy with editing before I dive into a series of events over the summer, but, so far at least, everything is going pretty much to plan (touch wood). I hope your own plans and schemes have been going as well. And if they haven't, I hope you're enjoying longer days, warmer temperatures and the unfurling leaves on the trees.
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.