What I'm up to - July 2024

July was A Lot, but in a really good way.

New work and submissions

This month I got my author copy of the new anthology Nova Scotia: Volume 2. I was so, so grateful to be asked to submit to this anthology and even happier to be selected, alongside some incredible names representing both the best of the last (nearly) twenty years since Volume 1 was published in 2005 and a new blend of voices from across the country. This is my first anthology and I'm so happy that it's this one, since it's a subject dear to my heart - the future(s) of my country.

I also wrote a wee companion blog post to go with the story, 'New Town', that appears in the anthology.

Writing and editing

Early in the month, I finished a provisional outline for the next book in the Legends series, which would be a direct follow-up to A Reluctant Spy. I sent that off to join another outline I'd sent earlier for a standalone novel. Then I sat down and (thank goodness) actually wrote some brand new words on a brand new thing!

This was partially just an accident of timing - the first third of the year I had lots of edits to do on A Reluctant Spy, plus a lot of calls and meetings for Reasons I Can't Reveal, plus two sets of short story edits, PLUS all the work to finally get PROJECT SHARD off my plate and away to my agent. I hadn't really planned to wait until the second half of the year to write anything new, but here we are.

I think I will try and consciously plan next year to have something new in my plan, even if it's just a short story, at least every couple of months, even if I need to temporarily halt an edit to do it. Lots and lots of back-to-back edits is quite draining after a while. I've found it really helps to alternate and put in the odd bit of drafting just to keep that bit of my brain supple and active. I found the first couple of thousand words of the new story, Ridealong to be really quite hard, because it was the first entirely new thing I'd written since late last year. But once I got going it felt fantastic to be inventing stuff again. One of the key breakthroughs in my writing process was learning to love editing as much as I love drafting, but there is something uniquely exciting about creating something from nothing. And it's been too long.

Publishing and community

It was a big month for me on the publishing side of things. First up, I received a wonderful blurb from I.S. Berry, a fellow author and former CIA case officer, who wrote the book The Peacock and the Sparrow, an award-winning spy novel set in Bahrain. She read my book and had this to say:

I've had some incredible blurbs, many of which I solicited directly, which was a really empowering and exciting exercise over the past few months. I got to speak to several authors I really, really admire and many of them were kind enough to read the book and blurb it. If you're a new author and you feel up to it, I think seeking out your own blurbs is a really, really good thing to do - it lets you make new connections with other authors and, frankly, I think most writers are more likely to say yes when it's the author themselves asking, especially if you're a debut. Of course, not everyone responds and not everyone is able to give you a blurb, but on balance it has been one of the most validating and exciting parts of this whole journey for me. I will likely write a blog post about what I did once the book is out.

To give you a sense of how the book is being received, here's a quick Instagram reel with some amazing highlight blurbs.

The next cool thing was announcing my launch event at Blackwell's in Edinburgh!

Nick is my friend, critique partner and fellow author (his novel Ascension came out last year and is fantastic) and he'll be joining me for an hour to ask me all about A Reluctant Spy, my writing process and more. You can book a ticket from £3 and I will be signing after the talk. This is definitely one of those author bingo card dreams and I really can't wait to do it. If you are planning to come along, please do book a ticket early - this will help the bookshop order sufficient copies of the book and plan seating and refreshments. And if you do come along, I look forward to seeing you!

Last weekend, I also had another new experience - my first trip to the crime and thriller festival at Harrogate.

Harrogate is (I think?) the biggest crime and thriller book festival in the UK, taking over the Old Swan Hotel and its grounds for four days of panels, quizzes, socialising and buying too many books. I went on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday and had just the best time. I got to meet two of the writers who blurbed my book and bought them both drinks (thanks Mike and Antony!). I met several other DHH clients (hi Alessandra, Tom and Adam!) and spent most of the weekend hanging out with them having a whale of a time. I met a book scout who read my book after London Book Fair and had a long and fascinating conversation about how scouting works. I had at least two people say 'hey, are you Dave Goodman?' which is just about the weirdest and coolest thing ever, shook Will Dean's hand, met Ian Rankin's agent, went to a brilliant panel about spy books, met a wonderful bookseller named Andreas (top lad, say hello to him if you're in Waterstones Wimbledon) and casually hung out for most of Saturday evening with Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls. It was an incredible weekend.

It was also, for me, a real lesson in pacing yourself. I'm going to WorldCon in Glasgow in a little over a week, which is five days long, and boy, Harrogate taught me I need to get over my FOMO and take regular breaks. I work from home about 95% of the time and live in the middle of the countryside, so 8-12 hours a day of standing, talking, and walking around among hundreds of other people and being an outgoing situational extrovert is intensely draining. I had a HUGE mood crash on the Saturday afternoon (being permanently sweaty and hot from the very warm temperatures in Yorkshire didn't help) and basically fled to my hotel to lie down for a bit. I'll be doing that at WorldCon, but deliberately and systematically.

I also got a piece of Very Good Publishing News this month which I can't talk about yet. If you're keeping track, I now have two completely separate pieces of Very Good Publishing News that I'm not allowed to tell you about. Hopefully I'll be able to reveal both around the same time. We shall see.

Reading

I have been reading published fiction this month and it has been WONDERFUL, after months of beta reading.

• Moscow X by David McCloskey - Unlike McCloskey's first book Damascus Station, which throws you into street espionage from literally the first page, Moscow X is a slow burn after a slam-bang opening - the first third of the book is a series of deftly drawn character sketches that begin to link together a big cast who all seem to be hiding something. Artemis Proctor, the CIA station chief from the first book, is the linking element between all of these characters and has a lot more to do in this book, which I was very happy about given she was easily my favourite character in Damascus Station. And after the gently rising tension of the first half, this book goes HARD, especially in the last hundred or so pages. Highly recommended and a real stylistic and structural departure from the first book too.
• There Is No Anti-Memetics Division by qntm - This book is... well, look, you just have to read it. You can find it for free on that link there, but I strongly recommend grabbing the very affordable eBook version. It's a series of linked stories set in the SCP collaborative storytelling universe about a mysterious organisation fighting 'anomalies' that threaten the human race in weird and interesting ways. And this particular set of stories is about a division within SCP who are trying to fight ideas which resist being remembered. It's head-spinning stuff and I enjoyed it immensely. The author qntm (pronounced 'quantum') also wrote one of my favourite pieces of meta-fiction, the fascinating/horrifying story 'Lena'.

Doing

Not content with doing an absolute shedload of writing stuff this month, I've also been doing a heck of a lot around the house too. My wife was in the US visiting family for two and a half weeks this month, so I took the opportunity to do some gardening, some DIY and to get our loft boarded. We live in a terraced house with a long, narrow loft that had a few planks around the hatch but not much in the way of actual storage room, so we pretty much just used it to store some Christmas decorations and a few of our larger suitcases. But now, after some incredibly fast and high quality work by the Loft Boarding Company we have absolutely tonnes of storage space, shelving and, crucially, I no longer need to balance right at the top of a shoogly stepladder to get up there. It's going to make such a difference and it only took about four days of very sweaty box-moving and furniture-shoving to make it happen.

The garden also survived my wife's trip away (she's the brains of the garden operation, I'm very much just the easily-tired muscle) and our tomatoes went absolutely wild. This is our second year of having a greenhouse and it is so satisfying to see the tomatoes appear. It looks like we'll also get a good harvest from our plum tree and our apple tree this year as well. It's going to be jam central in a few months in these parts.

Planning

After a great conversation with my editor, the next thing on my plate after finishing Ridealong will be re-tooling the standalone outline I sent him earlier in the year into a Legends book. I'm really excited about that, because I think it takes the strengths of that book's core pitch and then puts them into the hands of a cast of characters I already know. I pitched the idea to some of my agent-siblings at Harrogate and got enthusiastic thumbs-ups, so I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in.

From the 8th to the 12th of August, I'll be at WorldCon in Glasgow. I'm on the programme, running a workshop about critique groups and participating in an Edinburgh SFF book launch hype party for members with books coming out this year. But otherwise I plan to just wander about, meet fellow authors, go to panels, barcon it up and probably buy too many books.

It's also my wife Valerie's birthday later in the month, so we shall doubtless have a barbecue. And somewhere in there I have a much needed actual week off. One of the real challenges of having a day job and a writing career is that your annual leave very quickly gets eaten up with writing stuff. And while those things are fun and exciting and cool, they are also work, and often quite physically and mentally draining work. So I'll be trying quite hard next year to do a better job of balancing time-off-for-writing-stuff with actual time off.

Linking

A fine selection of internets for your perusal:

• I really enjoyed this post about building intimacy when talking about your books - essentially the fine balance between posting about your work and presenting a semi-authentic author persona to the world. Lots to think about here.
• At other end of the scale of putting yourself out there, I thought this was a fantastic guide on how to pitch podcasts as an author.
• This is a superb list of templates and resources for the many different possible outcomes and situations while finding an agent and getting your first deal. I really wish I'd had it three or four years ago (h/t Rukman Rugas for the link)
• I kinda want to try this app that turns your eReader into a screen for a Bluetooth keyboard (via your phone). Very clever.
• A sobering post from George Sandison, editor at Titan, about the volume of submissions they receive and how they handle them.
• Confessions of a Book Collector is a great podcast, but this episode with Chris Whitaker is a genuine jaw-dropper. Fantastic interview.
• Really enjoyed this interview with Paolo Bacigalupi at FanFiAddict.

Whew! That was a lot, right? The pace is definitely picking up. In the last couple of weeks, everything in our garden has exploded with growth after a wet, cold June and to be quite honest my writing life is feeling much the same way.

But in other ways, life is quiet at the moment. There's brief bursts of frenetic activity around events, but it's the summer holidays and many of my day job colleagues are off, the streets of our village are ringing with the sounds of kids playing and when the weather's nice, we're spending long weekend afternoons in the garden.

August and September, by contrast, are going to be frenetic, with day job picking up again, the final few weeks of promotional work before my book launch and possibly some Big Announcements. Right now it feels like we're in a lovely, quiet and kind of restful little lull just before everything properly kicks off. I hope you are having a lull of your own, watching the Olympics on the telly, grabbing some time outdoors or even heading off somewhere predictably warm and sunny for a proper holiday. And if instead July has been your frenetic month, I hope August is a little more chill.

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, Instagram or Twitter, or send me a message on my contact form.