The Decrypt - March 2026

Good lord. A quarter of the year gone, somehow. It's the end of March, we're three months through 2026, I'm 80% of the way through a new novel, the daylight is coming back rapidly and my new Friday writing routine is settling in.

But today is the last day of the month. Which means, of course, I'm here with another edition of The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media. It was a big month on the writing front and a medium-sized month in other respects. It's still a little chilly out, so grab a nice hot drink, settle in and let's talk about it.

The month started with a local event at the John Gray Centre in Haddington, a market town near me in East Lothian. A local community group asked me to come along and give a talk about my books and my writing career.

They were a fantastic and attentive audience and asked lots of insightful questions at the end. Then many of them followed me across the road to Kesley's Bookshop to get signed and dedicated copies. Thank you to Simon and Rachael at Kesley's for ordering in stock and helping me out. Of course, I completely forgot to take any photos, but it was a really fun event.

I had been due to interview crime writer Neil Lancaster the following week about his new book THE DARK HEART (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon), but the Edinburgh event was unfortunately cancelled. Still, I had a great time reading the book.

The very exciting London Book Fair came and went in the middle of the month, and I got to enjoy the vicarious excitement of watching my friend Nick Binge, writing as Nick Brucker, get to announce his new heist thriller WHITE SMOKE. I'm one of Nick's critique partners and I've been telling him virtually since the first page that this book was something special. It was amazing to watch and yell in group chats as a truly extraordinary week unfolded. Half the fun in this game is watching incredibly talented and hardworking friends do amazing things.

The rest of the month was pretty quiet, aside from recording an episode of The Conversation with Nadine Matheson. She was kind enough to have be back on to talk about SOLITARY AGENTS. I met Nadine a couple of times in person at festivals last year and it was a real joy to chat with her again. That episode should come out in June.

Finally, towards the second half of the month, the first two episodes of our actual play role playing game Loki's Gift, the first scenario from Narrative Damage, went live on Youtube and podcast feeds.

In this series, I'm playing Lord Wilbur Linklater in a late Victorian scenario of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, alongside the aforementioned Nick Binge and Tariq Ashkanani, with Marco Rinaldi as our gamesmaster.

The second episode went live last week:

And the third and final episode goes live on Thursday. Narrative Damage will be running lots more scenarios in future, with more published authors as guests, as well as interviews with RPG creators. Subscribe to get it in your Youtube or podcast feed.

It's been a steady and pretty productive working month on the ol' typing front. The vast majority of that effort has been focused on Project VAULT, which is now sitting at over 90,000 words. I've also notched a little over 5,000 words on a short story called SKILL BASE.

I'm particularly pleased with the progress on VAULT, which was sitting at 60,000 words at the end of February. In my original drafting plan, I'd planned to hit this point two or three weeks from now, but as it stands it looks like I'll have the first draft of this novel done by the first week of April. That's really exciting because it gives me way more leeway for the editing. I'd allowed a month, but I'm going to get more like six or seven weeks. With the somewhat systematic way that I edit, that will make a huge difference.

I was also happy to get through my second 'wobble point' on this book, which usually happens at 70-80,000 words, as I begin to wonder how the hell I'm going to pull everything together and bring the book in to land. Thankfully I've learned the secret is 'keep writing' (as it so often is).

This month also marked my first full month of structured and productive 'Writing Fridays' - I went part-time in January with Fridays as a dedicated writing day and the difference is pretty dang obvious, if I actually use those days for (mostly) writing. I worked about ten hours more over the course of the month according to my spreadsheets, with the result that I wrote a several thousand more words, got a lot of editing and outlining done and also handled a bunch of admin tasks. And I didn't work (much) over the weekends. It's exactly what I was hoping for when I decided to take the risk of going part time, namely a moderate increase in output and a much better balance of work and life. Now that I'm settled into it a bit more, I'll soon be updating my writing routine post with a new version that reflects how I do things here in 2026.

There were no really huge writing days in March, but there was also only one day with a sub-500 word count, and racking up those days of 1,000 - 1,500 words one after the other really made the difference.

It's kind of wild to me that I'm nearing the completion of my eleventh full-length novel (if you include partially completed projects, it's more like fifteen or sixteen). At a certain point, it moved from an apparently insurmountable task to something I had confidence I could reliably execute. It's never got easy, but it has become a thing I definitely know how to do, even if the challenges and the details change over time. Nevertheless, every completed novel still feels like a real victory.

It's mostly going to be another quietish month in April, with the first two weeks getting my head down and trying to finish the first draft.

Then on the 16th of April, I'm heading to Edinburgh Sparks, an open-mic night and literary event, where I'll be doing a reading and Q&A. I'm really looking forward to it.

On the 23rd of April I'm going to see the stage adaptation of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, which is touring the UK after its successful London run. I'm a bit sad I didn't see it in London as I heard it was an incredible production, but I'm looking forward to seeing the touring version nonetheless.

The following day I'll be recording again with the Narrative Damage crew (see above) - this time we're doing a Delta Green scenario. That should hopefully come out sometime in May.

At the end of April I'm heading down to York overnight for my friend Alessandra Ranelli's event at Criminally Good Books with Kristin Perrin. Her book MURDER AT THE HOTEL ORIENT comes out on the 30th of April and you should pre-order it (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon). I love York and I love Criminally Good Books, so it's going to be a great (if brief) trip.

Finally, this month, we also announced a couple of launch events for SOLITARY AGENTS! I'll be in conversation with Nick Binge (that man gets everywhere) to celebrate the release of my second novel, on Thursday June 4th, 7pm at Waterstones West End in Edinburgh. And, a month later, I'll be at Waterstones Kirkcaldy on Friday July 3rd! We're working on some more events before, during and after release month, so keep your eyes peeled. If you'd like to come to one of these events, please do book a ticket - a good estimate of numbers helps the bookshops to plan their events, order stock and lay out the right number of chairs.

There's a couple of bits of exciting news (possibly three or even four, we'll see) that I might be able to announce in April, so keep your eyes peeled for those!

Reading

I can finally see the end of my proof pile and I'm starting to pick up actual books I bought with my own money. Delighted about that.

• Octagon by CJ Merritt - My second proof of the month and also great. Chris has really done his research with this book and it shows. The core plot is absolutely breakneck and the two main characters are a brilliant duo. An excellent action espionage thriller (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon).
• The Infinite State by Richard Swan - I finished this excellent distant future space novel and really, really enjoyed it. The first two thirds are exceptionally bleak, but the payoff is worth it. Great stuff (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon).
• No Way Out by Max Connor (aka Neil Lancaster) - This is Neil Lancaster's second spy novel as Max Connor and I'm really enjoying it - it's got corrupt cops, sinister people traffickers and banter a-plenty. I should have a blurb for it later in April (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon).
• Mordew by Alex Pheby - (Bookshop, Waterstones, Amazon) - My first non-proof book in... a while. I heard about this book on the Coode Street Podcast last year (when one of the contributors was talking about the third book in the series) and thought it sounded fascinating. It is a profoundly unusual fantasy setting (I lost count of the number of times I muttered 'wow' as I read the opening chapters) and gorgeous prose. It's also a chonker of a book so it's going to take me a while I suspect.

Watching

Murder, whimsical homunculi and a bit more murder:

• We finished DOWN CEMETERY ROAD at the start of the month, and it escalated in a very Slow Horses way towards the end. Great fun and very well made, and Emma Thompson absolutely stole the show.
• We really enjoyed HOW TO GET TO HEAVEN FROM BELFAST, from the same showrunner as Derry Girls - a very twisty and fun murder mystery that was also absolutely hilarious. It was great.
• Another fun show this month was SMALL PROPHETS on the BBC, one of those thoughtful, fascinating pieces of big-hearted, extremely British urban fantasy that falls squarely into the 'how did this survive the commissioning process in this form?' box - it seems like one of those risky, nuanced pieces of TV that so rarely get made. Fantastic script and a brilliant cast.
• We also, twelve years after everyone else, watched the first season of TRUE DETECTIVE. Absolutely dripping with atmosphere, stunning visuals, an amazing two-hander performance from the the two leads and a surreal finale. I can see why everyone was excited about it back then.

Playing

A bit more falling, then a blaster, a speeder and a fast ship...

• I finished CAIRN in the middle of the month, after mainlining it for a solid week, restarting my game three times because I kept dying and eventually bowing to the inevitable and turning the difficulty down. It's a tough game! But it was worth it - the end of the game is fantastic and, quite apart from the beautiful visuals and brilliant core gameplay, the writing and story are great. Definitely pick this one up.
• After the emotional ravages of climbing a bloody great mountain, I decided I wanted something a bit broader in scope and SF in tone, so I started a new game of STAR WARS: OUTLAWS, which is basically 'space smuggler: the game'. It's an open-world-ish (actually three or four very large maps linked by space travel) Ubisoft game, so it has the same slight feeling of overwhelm/filler-ish content, but sometimes all you want to do is fart around in a cool setting and steadily complete a bunch of side quests, so it's perfect for that. Fun upgrade/skill tree mechanics too and there's something fun about wandering around listening to aliens and droids chattering.

• In case you missed it, my second novel SOLITARY AGENTS is available on NetGalley. A little over two months to go until release!
• Loved this interview with Louise Welsh over at The Incident Room podcast, it's a fascinating dive into her career.
• This blog post by Ada Palmer about how she (finally) got published is a decade old, but it's still a really interesting insight into how long and winding the road can be.
• This behind-the-scenes video of the visualisation and build-out of PROJECT HAIL MARY'S sets was great. I miss DVD special features for this kind of thing.
• A great post from The Honest Editor about London Book Fair (and the myths about what it is and how it works).
• A fascinating interview with Dominic Sandbrook about the apparent decline of reading at the New Statesman.
• A fun interview with Joe Abercrombie on VE Schwab's podcast No Write Way.
• A very, very nice review of SOLITARY AGENTS by book blogger and all-around decent chap Dave at Espresso Coco.
• A great presentation from the Author's Guild on promoting your work as a writer without social media. I think about this a lot.

The clocks sprang forward at the weekend (apologies if you didn't know that and I've just given you a shock), so we're firmly into Proper Spring, in calendar, meteorological and daylight terms. It's still a bit chilly and wet, but the green buds are coming and the woods are coming back to life.

A full quarter of the year gone feels bizarre though. And it's been quite a quarter, for many people around the world, in many more ways than one. I'm hoping that the rest of the year absolutely does not match the energy of this first three months.

On the plus side, the calendar ahead is full with exciting stuff, I'm approaching the end of the first completed book of the year and it feels like there's plenty of possibility ahead. If you're emerging, yawning, into the sunlight and making progress on your own projects, I wish you a happy and productive spring. And if the cold winds of March have brought a sigh to your lips, I hope you feel the warmth of the sun on your face soon.

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.