The Decrypt - February 2025

Hello and welcome back to The Decrypt, my monthly newsletter on all things writing, publishing, craft and media.

February may have been the shortest month of the year, but it sure didn't feel like it. I am knackered. But pretty happy. This month I mostly finished a book, did three author talks, saw a lot of my friends and got back into my routines. Let's dive in!

The end of January was very, very busy for author events, with three in one week after some ill-advised scheduling on my part. By contrast, February was pretty quiet for public events, but I did have three author talks.

The first one was at Arcadia Abroad, which is a study abroad program for American students, based in Pennsylvania, but which draws in students from across the US and brings them to Edinburgh University, among many others. I had a really enjoyable evening speaking to Dr Hamish Thompson and the students about my life, my work, my inspirations and how I manage writing alongside everything else in life. It was great fun. The link above includes an hour long video of the talk and the following Q&A.

After that, I did two Friday workshops with the students at Napier University in Edinburgh, teaching alongside my friend and critique partner Nick Binge. The first week we took a lot at the practice and business of writing and selling short fiction, and the second week was a joint workshop with Nick on writing community and critique workshops. The students seemed to really enjoy both sessions and so did I. I really enjoy talking about writing and publishing in this way and I hope to do more of it.

Other than that it was a quiet month on the writing community front (I missed an ESFF meetup from exhaustion on the first weekend) but I did catch up with one of my oldest friends right at the beginning of the month (looooong overdue) had a really nice dinner with some of my wife's university pals a week or so later, celebrated my sister's birthday and played some D&D with pals.

It's very easy, I think, to let book stuff crowd everything else out because there's so much of it once you know a few other writers, so it was good for the soul to strengthen some of the older friendships and connections in my life. And a good reminder that not getting in touch with old pals because they 'seem busy' and you don't want to bother them is a shite idea. Send the text. Arrange the coffee. Keep in touch. It can be hard, but it's worth it, I think.

As I wrote about in my end-of-year stats post, my debut year did not go the way I'd hoped when it came to overall productivity. While I don't think raw word count is all that useful as a day-to-day metric (and can mess with your brain in funny ways if you let it), I do still track what I write, and last year my annual word count reduced by more than half, which gave me a bit of a shock.

Thankfully January and February of this year have been the complete opposite. As of this newsletter I've written about 73,000 words this year (40,000 of them in February) so on the last day of the second month of the year, I'm only 13,000 words shy of my total word count for 2024. That is very reassuring.

This first book of the year is PROJECT SCARLET, which is an as-yet unannounced thriller. I'm working to a deadline, so I'm writing pretty fast, but I decided to focus on getting a draft done, do an edit myself then run it through my critique group for the third draft. I've got a decent amount of time before it's due, so I'm working steadily on it. I think I'll have a finished first draft next week.

Somewhere between drafts on SCARLET I'll do a final edit on PROJECT SHARD, probably in early March, so that it can go on submission. And in April, I'll start on the next thing, which I'm calling PROJECT DRIFT. I'm obviously not going to knock out 40,000 words a month, every month, for the rest of the year (there's a lot of editing to do for starters) but I'm reasonably sure that I will have drafted and edited two novels by the end of the year, as well as putting the finishing touches to a third. Starting a fourth is likely too ambitious, but it's a stretch goal.

One of the questions the students at Arcadia Abroad asked me about was how, exactly, I wrote like this, which was handy because it was a question I had just answered at length in my updated writing routine breakdown. Fair warning - that's a very in-depth look at all the nuts and bolts of how I make words.

This month we passed 100 days until the paperback edition of A RELUCTANT SPY comes out, and I got to reveal the new cover!

Here it is again, in case you missed that blog post:

As I said in that blog post, I'm really chuffed to be getting a new cover. And I love the paperback format deeply, so it's very cool to get a new design. I quite like having my name in electric lime green too, haha.

Other news is a little thin on the ground this month because I have a burgeoning pile of announcements building up that I can't talk about yet, but suffice to say some Cool Stuff happened this month and, hopefully, in the next two to three months, I'll be able to talk about them - new books, events and other things I really can't talk about. But I will!

One thing I can talk about is other people's work, and my friend Nick Binge's next book, DISSOLUTION, comes out this month. He's having a book launch for it on the 27th of March that promises to be an absolute blast, breaking out of the standard 'warm wine and a reading' template with communal art, a raffle, music, games and more. And it's in partnership with Argonaut Books (a fantastic indie bookshop in Leith), with all proceeds going to Alzheimer's Scotland. I'm really looking forward to it and to seeing many of my writing pals there too.

Reading

This month has been much better reading-wise, at least partially because I decided to use the majority of my lunchbreaks for reading, as well as prioritising reading time in the evenings. Turns out if you actually focus time on reading (and crucially, for me, remove distractions like phones and laptops) you can read a lot more! Who'd have thought, eh?

• How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell - I actually started reading this late last year, but bounced off it pretty hard because I was expecting an easy-breezy self-help book about how to doomscroll less and what I got was a pretty deep, meditative, allusive and dense, nigh-on scholarly book about the nature of attention, community and human relationships. It sat at the top of my TBR stack for another three or four months and I decided to give it another go (as part of my own attempt to rebuild my ability to read regularly, which was part of the motivation). And I'm really glad I did. It's a book that really rewards close reading and I ended up enjoying it a lot.
• Wintering by Katherine May - I read this one for a book group I'm visiting in March and it was another book I warmed to as I got closer to the end. It's a memoir that, judging by the jacket copy and the first couple of chapters, looks like it's going to be a quite deep and affecting look at sudden grief. But that turns out (spoilers) to be a false alarm, and it's actually about illness, time, attention and living a fuller life. It is very definitely an artefact of a certain place and social class and will get up some reader's noses as a result, but I thought the last quarter or so of it was a really interesting look at how to organise a 'good' life, and what that actually means.
• The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan - This is the second in Richard's 'Empire of the Wolf' trilogy (he's just released the first in the second trilogy set in the same world of the Sovan Empire) and it's excellent. It takes the characters of the first book and places them on a much bigger stage, with bigger stakes and a lot of very well written spooky shit and action. Highly recommended.

Watching

We watched a lot of different stuff in February:

• We started the month off by finishing Season 1 and then watching all of Season 2 of SAS ROGUE HEROES. A very well made war drama with a contemporary edge and slightly OTT tone.
• We also started watching PANTHEON on Netflix, which is an anime based on short stories by Ken Liu. Really good so far, though we've only watched a couple of episodes, and asking some very timely questions (even though it's from 2022).
• We watched a bit of MYTHIC QUEST, which continues to be pretty funny, nerdy and well made. It does feel a tiny bit like it's going in circles narratively though.
• Started watching WRECK, a very fun murder mystery/comedy horror set on a cruise ship. I described it to my sister (who's actually worked on a cruise ship) and she went 'oof, close to the bone'. Which it is, figuratively and literally.
• At the end of the month we watched Season 2 of THE DIPLOMAT which, though it got a bit bananas overall plotwise a couple of times, was some of the sharpest writing I've encountered in a while. Loved it. Season 3 is going to be interesting.

Playing

• Been doing some chill gaming this month - played a lot of TURMOIL, which is a phone resource management game about drilling oil in the 1800s. Very daft, but weirdly compulsive.
• Also, I picked up CITIZEN SLEEPER 2 for the Switch. The first CITIZEN SLEEPER was amazing and I can't wait to dive into the sequel - some of the best writing and minimalist visuals I've ever come across.
• Played a bit of JUSANT, an absolutely gorgeous 'climb an infinitely tall tower' game that's kind of hard to describe, but very meditative - gentle problem solving and nice music.
• I've also been playing a bunch of HELL LET LOOSE, which is a semi-realistic WWII shooter focused on teamwork and tactical cooperation. It's a very good game, even though I die a lot playing it. But it's fun to play a game where the chat is mostly people actually talking and helping each other out, rather than kids screaming abuse at one another.

It's been a good month on the internet front:

• Only a few days left in my friend Alessandra Ranelli's Killer Twist Pitch Prize!
• What to do with yourself in the long lull before your book actually gets published (PubTips).
• An excellent post about why you hate marketing your book.
• Really enjoyed this podcast on the 'Strange Death of Cultural Originality'.
• Craig Mod's 'rules for running a membership program'.
• An excellent long post from Matt Gemmell about why he moved back to a Mac after eight years (!) of solely using an iPad.
• This video about spin gravity in fictional space structures melted my brain (in a fun way).
• This Resources for Writers site by Jules Arbeaux is amazing.
• Loved this episode of The Real Writing Process with M.R. Carey.

Phew! That was a bunch of stuff. February is often my least favourite month of the year, much like Tuesday is my least favourite day of the week. It's not a fresh start, full of optimism. But neither is it anywhere near the middle of the year. It's cold and it's often wet and windy. But hey, at least it's short.

The maelstrom of appalling shit in the world at large, and particularly across the Atlantic, continues to dismay, upset and distract me, as I know it is doing for many, many people. I've done my best to focus on what I can control and directly influence, help where I can and keep doing the work that keeps the lights on and the brain functional.

I've managed to keep up the workout and (mostly) the improvements in sleep patterns and that's making things considerably easier to bear. And I've stuck to the writing routine, which has greatly helped my badly knocked confidence after last year.

Once or twice this month, I've even felt a bit of warmth in the air and sunlight on my face. It's now light when I leave for my morning walk, and still light when I head out for my evening walk too. Actually, that's another thing you can give to February, aside from its shortness. It's the month when the light really starts to come back, here in the northern hemisphere. In times of figurative darkness, feeling the sun on our face feels more important than ever.

Hard to believe we're approaching the end of the first quarter of the year already. As the days get longer and the flowers begin to bloom, I hope you get outside, breathe the air and remember that the world is still turning and us with it. We'll get through, one step at a time.

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.