Bloody Scotland, the festival of crime writing, is over for another year. I wrote elsewhere how pleased I was to be shortlisted for the Debut Prize despite not having writing a traditional crime novel, and although in the end I didn't win (that deserved honour went to David Goodman for his novel 'A Reluctant Spy') I had a great time all the same. The Debut Authors panel in Stirling Central Library was really well-attended, and I enjoyed talking through our different journeys to publication with my fellow shortlistees. I was also on a panel on Sunday, with David Reynolds and EC Nevin, entitled 'Poachers Turned Gamekeepers', about our experiences as booksellers and publishers, and how this might have informed our approach to writing. Given that I'm published by a Bloomsbury imprint, I enjoyed having the opportunity to thank David Reynolds, as one of the founders of Bloomsbury, for me indirectly sitting there.
Last week brought other good news, when I found out that The Unrecovered is on the Fiction prize longlist for the Saltires, Scotland's National Book Awards. I'm really delighted with this, and hopefully I can get through to the shortlist next month. My main ambition for The Unrecovered was to have the book long- or shortlisted for at least two awards (if not all the awards...), and so far it's done its job. This isn't hubris on my part, it's just a way of signalling to my publishers that I was worth the bet, and that hopefully I'm worth the bet going forward with a third book. Being a published author is basically a temporary experience that could stop at any moment. The more outward success this book has, and the second novel in April '26, the more likely I am to publish another, and another after that.
Beyond that, the Bloody Scotland experience really underlined how terrible I am at keeping social media up to date. In retrospect I had any number of opportunties to post 'content', which I singularly failed to do, but given that I think social media is poisonous and contemptible, and is clearly tearing society apart, this maybe isn't something to worry about. I'll do my best in the future, but I have no idea how much of an effect any of it has on the critical or commercial viability of my books, which, let's be honest, is the whole point. At the moment I seem to have gravitated more to Instagram as a tolerable medium; it's not as much of a cess pit as Twitter, or a censorious echo chamber like BlueSky, and fewer people feel the need to post nebulous and rebarbative 'political' statements on it. The little corner of it that I've seen makes it feel more like what the internet was always supposed to be; an irrelevant space for trivial cat videos, and easy to ignore. But given that I'm posting this on Blogger, the original form of social media, perhaps hypocrisy is fundamentally unavoidable. I'll continue leaning into Instagram for the time being.
Next up will be some signings for the paperback of The Unrecovered in October. I'll formally be at the Waterstones in St Andrews and Dundee, and I'll unofficially get myself around as many bookshops as I can around that date. More to follow.