The Decrypt - September 2025

Hello again! The linear progression of time has struck once again and we find ourselves at the end of September, so here's The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.

September has been... well, everything I could have possibly imagined and more. Certainly it was all I hoped for one year ago when my debut novel was released, plus a few things I didn't dare dream about.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's autumn now, so find a hot drink and a comfortable seat and let me tell you all about it.

The month started with the critical-but-laborious important stuff, namely getting our business and personal taxes filed, which meant finishing off the categorisation and receipt-finding for the last year of writing-related expenses and double-checking everything. Nothing hammers home how many different things you've been to and places you've stayed like trying to track down dozens of receipts.

Thankfully that was squared away very early in the month, so I had a few days to mentally prepare myself for Bloody Scotland, starting with a lovely series of interviews by Susie Green of the In My Good Books podcast. She interviewed all of the shortlisters, including me, which was a really nice lead-in to the festival itself.

Also that week, Ruth Matheson from Lomond Radio played my music picks on her 'Ruth's Reads' segment of the TENuous Links show. My segment starts about an hour in. I didn't stay up to listen to it live (since it was at 11pm) because we were getting up early to go to Bloody Scotland!

On Friday 12th September we drove up to Stirling, got checked in and headed to the famous Golden Lion Hotel to start our Bloody Scotland weekend. This wasn't my first time in the green room (that was last year when I did Crime In The Spotlight right after the book came out) but it was my first time being a panellist. After a drink with Sean Watkin in the hotel bar (one of my fellow McDermid Debut Award shortlisters) and saying hello to Trevor Wood and Sarah Moorhead, we headed up to find the other Debut Prize shortlisters and went to Stirling Central Library for our panel.

It was a great panel, wonderfully chaired by Alex Gray (one of Bloody Scotland's founders) and we had a signing afterwards, which you can see above. We were all fairly jittery by that point though, because the prize ceremony was coming up.

We were ushered back down to the Golden Lion and to a downstairs room to meet the 'Prime Suspects', members of Bloody Scotland's new supporter programme, who were having a champagne reception with local dignitaries from Stirling and the shortlisted authors for both the McIlvanney and the Debut Prize. After a while they all headed upstairs to take their seats and a piper came in to pipe us all through the hotel and up to the main ballroom, which was absolutely packed. Thankfully we had reserved seats down at the front, so we settled in and tried not to look too nervous.

Then, well, I heard my name read out as the winner for the second time this year. And a few minutes later, I heard my friend (and fellow Harry Illingworth client) Tariq Ashkanani announced as the winner of the McIlvanney Prize!

It was a really, really incredible feeling. We were taken outside after the ceremony for more photographs with the amazing performers from Rubber Chicken Theatre, then we headed up the procession to the Albert Halls along with Sir Ian Rankin and the Lord Provost, Councillor Elaine Watterson. Mostly, Tariq and I sort of looked at each other as we walked and muttered about how extremely cool and weird it was.

As I've said in several interviews, this book has been quite intimately connected to Bloody Scotland since the start. I finished the first draft and sent it to my editor while sitting in the cafe at the Albert Halls. I read from it and signed books at Bloody Scotland the day after it launched as part of Crime In The Spotlight. And now, three years after my first visit, I won the Debut Prize. It's been quite an arc.

After that, the rest of the weekend was honestly a bit of a blur. We did a great interview with Nicola Meighan for her A Kick Up The Arts podcast (along with fellow shortlister Claire Wilson) and I had a fantastic panel on the Saturday with Kim Sherwood, DB John and Vaseem Khan. I managed to get to a few panels, including the first half of Mick Herron and Nick Harkaway (I had to leave to get mic'd up myself). I also had a really nice dinner with my wife Valerie, my editor Toby Jones and authors Dominic Nolan, Heather Critchlow and Sam Holland, then a great lunch the next day with Tariq Ashkanani, Nick Binge and Marco Rinaldi (I highly recommend Nooch Bar & Kitchen).

In between, I spent a lot of time in the Golden Lion's bar with old friends and new, didn't get nearly enough sleep and received a tiny version of my book made by my friend, author Alessandra Ranelli, who'd made them for all of the shortlisters:

We capped the weekend off by heading back to the Central Library to see my friend Marco Rinaldi (one half of the Page One Podcast and a writer himself) win the Pitch Perfect competition on Sunday morning. It was a perfect ending to a phenomenal weekend. And when I got home, I was able to do this:

Every time I come into my writing office (which is several times a day) I catch sight of these two awards and I shake my head a bit and blink. Because I still can't quite believe it. But it's happened. My debut novel won two awards.

The next day, I was interviewed along with Tariq on Len Pennie's BBC Radio Scotland show 'The Arts Mix'. Sitting in the studio with a big pair of headphones on my head was when it began to really sink in that something remarkable had happened.

It was a hell of a weekend and, honestly, a huge relief to end my summer of pre-award tension. I've been lucky enough to be shortlisted with nine other incredible debut writers across the two awards, who were each gracious, kind and supportive from the moment I met them. It was an incredible honour to be listed with them and I hope we'll stay in touch over the long haul, since we're all entering this world together as debuts. And I have zero doubt that future shortlistings and wins await each of them.

After that, the rest of the month has been fairly low-key, slowly getting back to my routine, doing some podcast interviews and preparing for the cover reveal on book 2 (see below) as well as squeezing in an e-bike tour of East Lothian with my twin brother and his partner (a joint birthday present from our family) and a lovely dinner with fellow writer Alessandra Ranelli and her partner at the tail-end of their tour of Scotland.

I also managed to get a cheeky signing in at Waterstones Piccadilly while I was briefly in London for work. Booksellers Dec, Grace and Andreas helped me sign 30+ copies, including 22 for Piccadilly itself and a bunch for the Wimbledon and Putney stores.

Andreas (who helped organise a signing for me in the Wimbledon store in June) went above and beyond by lugging those books across London in some tote bags. And it turned out Grace was a newsletter subscriber (hi Grace!) who first heard me on a podcast. So my media strategy of inescapable podcast and newsletter ubiquity seems to be working. It's such a pleasure to meet booksellers like this, who are so passionate about books and writing. They're the absolute backbone of the industry.

Phew! What a month. October is likely to be quieter, with only a couple of podcast interviews and biting my nails around Frankfurt Book Fair on the writing docket. It's also my birthday towards the end of the month, so I've got a week off that I'm deeply looking forward to. But I've also got a lot of writing to do.

This month was very up and down on the writing front, as the build up to and then recovery from Bloody Scotland meant I lost a fair few days, along with some work travel and long days. But I've still done a reasonably creditable 10,000 words or so, over about 25 hours of work. I'm actually drafting this newsletter on the Sunday before the end of the month, so there's a reasonable chance I might add three hours to that total and another 2,000-3,000 words. But we'll see.

Focus-wise, I started the month writing pitches for future projects. These are just high level documents, of 2-3 pages, outlining an idea with a bit of context and a query-style pitch, along with some brainstorming about titles and general vibes. It took me three days to polish two existing pitches and write two more.

Then I jumped into PROJECT DRIFT, which I've been working on all month. This is a wholly new project (not part of the Legends series) and it's been a lot of fun to write in a very different style and try out some creative muscle groups that I haven't had much call for while writing tense spy thrillers. Originally I had some fairly ambitious plans to have a draft of this book done by the end of the year. I still might, but progress has been a bit stop-start as I fitted it around events, work and travel and also suffered a bit from a fuzzy outline.

However, in October I don't have any major events planned or work travel. I do have a week off planned, where I don't intend to write, so right now I'm extending the timeline on this draft into late February. If I catch a tailwind and start drafting faster I won't complain, but I'm trying to focus on just making steady progress, whatever that looks like. There's some big unknowns right now (about future projects and when edits/copyedits/proofs on existing projects will land) which means I can't rely on having an unbroken period of drafting to push this project to the finish line. But I learned the hard way last year that it's still best to keep pushing things forward when you can - it's so easy to burn weeks or months of time waiting for things to happen and for a perfectly-sized gap in your schedule to materialise. Spoiler - it won't. Better to get a few days of work done now than wait for a clear week, month or quarter.

This month we also revealed the cover for SOLITARY AGENTS, the second book in the Legends series and the sequel to A RELUCTANT SPY!

I also had the help of an amazing group of book bloggers and writers for the reveal, when they collaborated with me to post the book trailer reveal:

The book comes out in hardback, eBook and audio on June 4th 2026. Check my Books page for more information and hit the Links page to pre-order.

I'm so happy with the cover for this book (designed by Phil Beresford) and it seems like it's gone down very well with readers, writers and industry folks too. It recalls the cover of the first book while not repeating it and I absolutely love the balance and colour as well as the darkly brooding sky. Even though I'm in the 'heartily sick of my own book' stage of editing SOLITARY AGENTS, seeing this cover everywhere has made me excited for it all over again.

I was also very pleased this month to be invited to a new anthology called THINK WEIRDER, with my Analog story from last year 'Best Practices For Safe Asteroid Handling' being included as a reprint.

The anthology comes out in October! I'm really looking forward to seeing what other stories have been selected - the cover authors are pretty intriguing already.

Reading

Another slow-ish reading month thanks to the travel and events, but I've polished off some crackers too.

• Time Bomb by Adam Simcox - Kicking off my blurb reads for this month was this excellent time-travelling thriller from Adam Simcox, author of the Dying Squad trilogy. If you could go back in time and fix your biggest mistake, would you? And what if the new world that resulted wasn't what you expected? A fantastically exciting and well-crafted book, crackling with energy and Nineties nostalgia. Brilliant.
• No One To Hold The Distant Dead by KL Schroeder - I was asked to read this by the publishers Psychopomp (I know Kristen, the author, through the amazing Edinburgh SFF group) and it was absolutely fantastic. It's a beautifully written and haunting novella about an ecologist whose (incomplete) mind state is transmitted and placed in an artificial body in an attempt to reverse ecological collapse on a distant colony world. Gorgeous prose and compelling characters in a stunningly evoked future. Highly recommended.
• A Killer In Paradise by Tom Hindle - Tom's publishers very kindly sent me a proof of Tom's next Golden Age mystery and it's a cracker - a remote eco-resort in Costa Rica, six friends, buried secrets from long ago and more red herrings and twists than you can shake a stick at. It kept me guessing to the very end and very badly made me want to go on a nice holiday (though preferably without the murder).
• Step by Step by Simon Reeve - I've been driving a lot this month so I've picked up a few audiobooks and been working through them, including this excellent autobiography. I really enjoy Simon Reeve's TV shows and it's absolutely fascinating to hear how he went from being a teenage tearaway in Acton to author and TV presenter. I firmly suspect the kind of social mobility he experienced as a working class kid in the 90s is now rapidly fading away, but it's quite a story he has to tell.

Watching

Some great stuff this month:

• We enjoyed KING & CONQUEROR on the BBC, a sexed-up interpretation of the rise of William The Conqueror with a lot of brooding and fighting and swearing. Fun stuff, but not exactly WOLF HALL.
• We finished ALIEN: EARTH and overall really enjoyed it, though I think my main thought about it was that it was... uneven. Still a great expansion of the ALIEN universe, but the wobbly alien suit in broad daylight, slightly over-packed early episodes and complete lack of self-preservation instincts among scientists in the ALIEN universe undermined it a fair bit.
• Obviously we're watching the new SLOW HORSES - I've seen some criticism of this season that it's a bit of a mess tonally, but one episode in I'm really enjoying it. Maybe I'm just deeply uncritical?

Playing

Pew pew pew.

• I've been playing a fair bit of BATTLEFIELD 2042 this month, since they added a great new map and a free battlepass for the upcoming BATTLEFIELD 6. I'm enjoying it a fair bit, though still looking forward to BATTLEFIELD 6 more when it comes out in October.
• I've also started playing NO MAN'S SKY for the fourth or fifth (?) time. I've bounced off this game so many times, but the latest update seems to include some incredible stuff, like ships you can build and design yourself. I'm not sure I'll stick with it - the grind to acquire all the stuff you need to get to the cool things shown in the trailers seems to be quite substantial.

The internet never stops, does it?

• A great article on how foreign rights work from the Honest Editor.
• And another Honest Editor post I liked, this time on how the bestseller charts work.
• A great interview with VE Schwab on the On The Write Track podcast.
• A fantastic post from Elizabeth Bear on 'networking' (aka making friends) at SF conventions and book festivals.
• A great episode of SFF Addicts with Dave Wragg on surviving the midlist.
• Susie Green did a brilliant roundup episode of interviews from Bloody Scotland for In My Good Books.
• I thought this post by Kate McKean on the economics of promoting your work made a good point, though it split quite a few hairs on the way to making it.
• Finally, I wrote up a long post on my first full year as a published author.

Quite the month.

Autumn is here for sure, if the low light and leaves on the trees are any guide. We're still having the odd warmer day, but it's very, very nice to be back in Jacket Season most of the time. I get hot very easily, so I spend the months from April to September constantly trying to avoid turning up to places dripping sweat. But in the autumn and winter I can just... live in the world and wear comfy jackets.

Of course shorter days mean less light, so it's more important to me than ever that I get outside at least once a day and move my body. Thankfully events and work travel are tailing off in the last quarter of the year, so I'm going to try my best to stick to the writing routines, get outside, breathe the cool air and enjoy the turning of the seasons. There's less than 90 days until Christmas, which is pretty astonishing. Somehow, though I've lived through more than four decades, the speed with which a year can disappear never ceases to amaze me.

There's big 'back to school' energy in my corner of the writing world, as my crit partners return from busy summers, people settle into their drafts or edits and the smell of freshly-sharpened pencils fills the air. I hope whatever you're up to in this autumnal season you're getting enough Vitamin D and you're enjoying cooler days and longer evenings. Whatever you're doing, whether reading or writing or anything else, remember you can only do as much as you can do. And that's just fine.

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.