Shortlisted

 It just goes to show how terrible I am at social media and self-promotion more generally that I haven't got round to updating this blog with my latest piece of news. Anyway, The Unrecovered has been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize, which will be judged on 12th September in Stirling.

Bloody Scotland is a literary festival specifically for crime fiction. I was interviewed on their podcast when the novel first came out (I wrote about it here), and although I wasn't sure if my book strictly counted as crime, it certainly counts as a literary mystery. I'll be on a panel with the other shortlisted authors (David Goodman, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Claire Wilson) on the 12th, just before the prize announcement.

I'll also be appearing on a panel on the 14th September, with Sarah Hornsley and David Reynolds, entitled 'Gamekeepers Turned Poachers', looking at the experience of writers who have worked in other parts of the publishing industry:

I was in Stirling last Thursday for the launch of the programme, and was interviewed alongside the other shortlistees in the Courier:

There should be another couple of podcast interviews lined up with me and the other shortlisted authors over the next few weeks. I'll add the details here when I can.

I have an odd relationship with Stirling, on the whole. I was born there, but only lived there for my first 20 months or so, before my family moved to Trinidad for the next four years. For a couple of years, roughly 2000 - 2002, I lived down the road in Larbert and would head into the town regularly (because there was absolutely nothing to do in Larbert). Then, in the sceond half of 2004, I lived on my own in a poky flat on Cowane Street while working at the Waterstones in the Thistle Centre, before moving to Dumfries for a while. And now its the scene of The Unrecovered's first shortlisting for anything, so hopefully all these earlier attachments and associations bring me luck on the night.

Summer plans, proofs, genre

 The copy edits on the second novel* are done and have been sent back to Bloomsbury, and the next stage is to await the proofs for a last check-through before the book goes into production. Did I say a last check-through? Of course not; there will inevitably be half a dozen other chances to drag my resisting eyes through the text, cringing at every single word, until the book is actually published. I found with The Unrecovered that there was a strange cooling-off period lasting two months or so after the novel came out. During that time I absolutely hated the thing, and it was only after I had some distance from it that I could look on it with even the vaguest equanimity. I'm hoping that period is a bit more condensed this time round. This second novel was much harder to write and involved a lot more research, but going through the copy edits made me feel that I might actually have got close to what I was trying to achieve. It'll be interesting to see if that holds up when I look through the proofs.

I've also finished the very rough first draft of a third novel, the last part of my tentatively connected, thematically linked trilogy (which isn't a trilogy) about war, history and trauma, filtered through the lens of the supernatural. If The Unrecovered hints towards the gothic mystery, the second novel is going to be a sort-of ghost story, while this third novel hints towards cosmic horror. All three of these books are attempting to make their metaphors concrete; to use what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called 'the mask of genre'**, employing the fantastical to decipher and renew a shop-worn reality. As is my usual practice, I've printed out the typescript of this third book and will spend the summer carving it down and refining it as much as possible before sending it on to my agent in the autumn.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the year, unless it's tinker away at this third book until it's ready to submit. I've got plenty of ideas for a possible next novel, but it might be wiser to step away from the notebook for the time being. If you have a general facility for writing, there is such a thing as writing too much after all...

* Such is the opacity of publishing, I've no idea whether the title and plot of this second novel is a closely-guarded industry secret, but I'll keep everything unnamed for the moment.

** I cannot find the reference for this quote anywhere, but I'm sure del Toro said it. It probably comes from his superb book Cabinet of Curiosities.