Well, almost exactly two years since my last post, and an awful lot has changed. I have a literary agent, a two-book deal with a publisher, and my first novel is due to be published in February 2025. This will be 'The Unrecovered', a gothic-historical novel set during the last months of the First World War, in a hospital for recuperating soldiers just outside Edinburgh.
In the run-up to publication I'll be trying to update this site a lot more, not only to try and rustle up a few more sales, but partly to attempt some insights into the whole publication process for anyone who might be staring down that particular barrel themselves. I was always taken with Neil Gaiman's early online journal, more than twenty years ago now, where he documented the experience of copy-editing and checking the proofs of American Gods, and seeing the early reading copies go out into the wild in search of welcome encomia.* I'd like to try something similar, so that the whole blogging experience feels less of a drag, or something artificial. A running diary or a place where I can set down related thoughts on this strange business might tempt me into keeping it up to date, rather than letting it fade away as these things so often do. (Or disappearing to Substack in an attempt to monetise all this ...)
Anyway, more to follow in good time ...
* Note: I wrote this before the allegations about Gaiman emerged. I thought about going back into this blog post and deleting the reference, but in the interests of historical accuracy thought it would be more honest to leave it where it stands.