Despite my expectations, Esperancehas made it to the shortlist for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, shortening my odds from twelve-to-one down to six! Grateful thanks to the librarians and other judges who put it there. 🙏🏽 The ceremony will be in London in September, and I am very much looking forward to being there.
In a misguided attempt to console me for not winning the L.A. Times Book of the Year Prize (misguided because I didn’t need consoling—I had a great time!) someone told me that book prize winners are always the third best book. Their theory went like this: the judges go into the room and discover that they are split between two books. Group A won’t give ground to Group B’s book, and Group B won’t give ground for Group A’s book, so they both plump for an acceptable compromise: hence, third best. 😆 It’s a fun story, but I don’t believe it. Luminous, Sylvia Park’s L.A. Times winner, is an absolutely stunning novel. I could never have written it in a million years.
In any event, I will soon be in the judge’s room myself. I have been asked to take part in the Joffe Books Prize, which is, I believe one of the biggest crime fiction prizes in the UK. It is open to unagented BAME authors and is intended to encourage greater representation in the marketplace. The winner gets £1,000 in cash, a two-book deal with Joffe Books (I should be so lucky!) and a £25,000 Audible audiobook offer for the first book. On any view, that is an amazing proposition. What is even more amazing is that Joffe Books have taken it into their heads to get me involved. It’s going to be a blast. At least until I have to make some decisions. I have no doubt many of the entries are going to be amazing. The problem is, to quote from Highlander, one of the all-time great movies, “There can be only one.”
Delighted to announce that my latest book, Line of Descent, is to be published on November 17! I am really excited about it, not least because the publisher let me keep the title. As regular readers will know, that is not a given for yours truly! 😆 There was some discussion about it because Line of Descent is apparently the title of a Bollywood movie starring Brendan Fraser (I have so many questions!) and there was a concern about search engines. In the end, though, everyone agreed that Line of Descent was the best title and that readers are plenty smart enough to tell the difference between Brendan Fraser and my good self.
I’m going to throw the back-cover description up on the Home page, so I won’t do that here. But what I’ve written is political sci-fi set aboard a generation ship in deep space, with a mix of terrorism, power plays, and a murder, the latter forming the lens through which the rest of the story is told.
As some of you may have figured out, I have a thing for generation ships. There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost, I just think they’re cool—at least when they’re city-sized like mine. It’s like writing a story set in London or New York, except with noir corridors, family-driven politics, and the occasional absence of gravity.
Secondly, though, I can’t quite shake myself of the (possibly retro) view that science fiction should, at some level, be about science. That it should offer a glimpse of a plausible future. A future plausible enough, perhaps, to encourage a younger reader somewhere to grow to adulthood and make it happen. Which brings me to this: space travel is hard. Right now, we are struggling to land humans on the moon. Genuine interplanetary flight, to Mars and beyond, is at least ten times harder. As for interstellar travel, I shudder to think how many zeroes one would have to add to the ten to encompass the level of progress needed to do that. We can presently get to the moon in about three days and hope to reach Mars in roughly a year. The nearest star? Many thousands of years. In every sense of the words, we have a long way to go.
In SF, though, we mostly ignore this with our warp drives, dimension hopping, and star gates. Alpha Centauri? Poof! Easy as pie. Let the story begin. And, let’s face it, the stories are great!
Physics, unfortunately, refuses to play ball. We know beyond doubt that anything with mass (like us) is incapable of reaching the speed of light, never mind going beyond it. That is just a fact. Not quite a fact is the likelihood that, when it comes to interstellar travel, we are unlikely to achieve speeds beyond a modest fraction of the speed of light. We can hope to get interstellar travel down from the thousands of years to the hundreds, maybe the tens, but poof-easy-as-pie is never going to happen.
But we can get there! I genuinely believe that. But to do it, I can only think of three ways: learn to live a really long time (and not get bored), master suspended animation, or build a generation ship.
I can’t build a generation ship (obvs!), my generation can’t build a generation ship, but there’s no reason in principle why one can’t be built. And so long as we write enough stories about them, I am confident that someone, somewhere, will make it happen.
I am not that long back from Los Angeles where, having been nominated, I attended the awards ceremony for the L.A. Times Book Prizes. Spoiler alert: I did not win! 😆 That said, though, I had a wonderful time. After all, 80% of the authors there were destined not to step up on stage, so I was in some pretty august company. Congratulations to Sylvia Park, whose novel Luminous did win—and deservedly so. I met a bunch of interesting people, made some new friends, met up with some old ones, and got to soak up the California sun after a dark Scottish winter.
No sooner had I returned home, it seemed, than I learned I’d been long listed for another award! This time, the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, which I am also very excited about. It is a long list of twelve, which is longer odds than the L.A. Times’ shortlist of five, so I am not holding my breath!
But if I’m not holding my breath, why am I so excited? After all, including two successive long listings for BSFA best novel, I have now been nominated for at least four major awards, have so far won none and, statistically speaking, that streak is likely to continue. Why then, do I get a buzz about competitions I’m likely to lose?
The bulk of the answer to those questions is contained in the cliched phrase, “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” Cliched because it is true. Writing a book is an extremely subjective process: the writer has only a limited sense of how well or badly it’s going. Some days, I think I’m writing the next Hugo/Edgar award winner. Others, not so much. I just plow on and hope for the best. So, when something you’ve put out there gets nominated for something or picks up an award, it’s objective proof that someone, somewhere, thinks your book is not only good, it’s worth telling the world about. That is a rare thing and something to be cherished. Win or lose.
The vast megacorp for which I work is very keen on AI, has spent (I suspect) vast sums of money investing in AI, and is going to great lengths to make sure that reluctant employees (i.e., yours truly) not only use it on a daily basis but learn to use it “properly.” As a result of endless roundtables, seminars and certifications, I am now significantly more up to speed with AI than I used to be. Much to my surprise, I really do use it every day and it is genuinely useful. Sometimes. I don’t see myself being replaced by a Large Language Model any time soon, but it is a terrific productivity tool.
Having been acclimated to the use of AI in my day job, I had begun to wonder whether it could be of any use in my writing life. Not to write a novel, or plot a novel, or outline a novel (no, no, no, no, NO!) but maybe something around the edges, something more administrative than creative. Could I find what Corporate America would undoubtedly call a “use case?” (Which reminds me: a new study from Cornell University seems to show that people who are impressed by corporate BS may not be very good at their jobs. 🤣) Curious, I thought I’d play around with AI in a couple of low-stakes areas.
First up, LoD, which is due out this fall, needed back cover copy. I had drafted one for the publisher, but they’d come back to tell me that it had too many syllables. Their amended version did, indeed, have the requisite number of syllables but read a little flat. I wanted to change it but was kind of stuck. Could AI help? I crafted an appropriate prompt and five seconds later it came back with an alternative version. It wasn’t that great either, but it did contain a couple of turns of phrase that inspired me to use some different turns of phrase that got the job done. I would have got there in the end, no doubt, but having been noodling the problem for around half an hour, my AI-inspired fix took about five minutes from prompt to final edit.
I have also (finally!) finished the outline of Murder in the Third. (I still don’t have a “real” title for the publisher to change 😬). What my editor usually wants, though, is a two-page synopsis to share with their colleagues. Hoping to save some time, I fed my outline into the AI and asked for a summary.
I did not save time.
To start with, the AI produced a series of summaries for non-existent novels, none of them very good. But even after I’d wrangled it into doing what I asked, the output was so grossly inaccurate it couldn’t even be described as a bad attempt at a rough draft. Large Language Models are very good with straightforward, factual prose, but the nuances and leaps of a fiction outline proved too much for it. Maybe, if I’d spent even more time on it than I already had, I could have corralled the AI into giving me something I could work with. But why? It had already taken too long. I ended up writing the synopsis from scratch, it didn’t take half as much time as I feared, and much to my surprise, I rather enjoyed it. As a productivity hack, AI as synopsis writer was an epic fail.
People in the creative industries are rightly leery of Large Language Models, not least because their original sin is the copying and synthesizing of human work product without seeking permission and without paying for it. For the creators of AI, human creativity is, quite literally, worthless—at least, until they get sued. But AI is in the world now, and we have to get used to it. For creative people, do LLMs have anything worthwhile to offer? An LLM is neither alive, nor sentient, nor intelligent. At bottom it is a probability engine generating word salad and I don’t think we should be scared of it. We do, however, need to understand what it’s good for and what it’s not good for. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s not that much use for novelists. I got the most use out of it as a glorified thesaurus. It provided a spark to my own thinking. But when I needed its help to generate something more substantial, it didn’t produce anything useful. My views will undoubtedly evolve over time, but right now I don’t think AI has a stellar future in the world of fiction.
Now, having said that, this whole exercise forced me to confront something I find extremely troubling. Bearing in mind that AI’s output suffers from the taint of stolen intellectual property, I was very careful to expose it only to my own work and no one else’s. But it turns out the LLM has no respect for that particular boundary. For instance, in the course of providing synopses of non-existent novels, the AI generated an equally non-existent character called Dorothy Vane. Now, I happen to know that Harriet Vane features in a number of Dorothy Sayers’s Golden Age detective novels. I can’t prove that the AI smushed those names together from that particular source, but it got the name from somewhere. This matters, because even if the AI is simply helping you with something minor, there’s no guarantee it isn’t stealing someone else’s intellectual property to do so. Just the other day, the New York Times cut ties with one of its book reviewers, because the book reviewer used an AI to assist him in writing one of his reviews. While no one is suggesting that the review reflected anything other than the (human) writer’s opinion, the fact of the matter is that the AI copied chunks of language from a Guardian review of the same book without informing the reviewer that it had done so. The plagiarized language ended up in the New York Times and the unsuspecting human paid the consequences.
We shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with AI, but we do need to be careful. AI is not, itself, creative but it can be a spark to our own process. What we can’t do is let it spark our process on the back of someone else’s hard work. Given AI’s original sin, is that even possible?
I still can’t quite believe it. A few weeks ago, now, my U.S. publisher’s publicity person, Laura, emailed me with “THE BEST news.” Even though Laura never capitalizes like that, I was quite unprepared for what came next. ESPERANCE HAS BEEN NOMINATED FOR THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN SCIENCE FICTION!!! I feel like the father in the movie A Christmas Story, who is over the moon because he has won “a major award.” Now, in A Christmas Story, it has to be said that the major award turned out to be a plastic lamp in the shape of a lady’s stockinged leg, but being nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize is the real deal. And I know it’s a cliché, but it really is an honor just to be nominated. The other nominees are Stephen Graham Jones, for “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,” Jordan Kurella, for “The Death of Mountains,” Nnedi Okorafor, for “Death of the Author: A Novel,” and Silvia Park, for “Luminous: A Novel.” I’ve only read two of the four and I don’t know I’ll have time for the others before the award ceremony, but the two I read are just incredibly good, and the other two will undoubtedly be in the same league, so I am genuinely stunned to find myself in the same company. I do win for shortest title, though!
I will be ditching the day job to fly out to L.A. for a few days to attend the awards ceremony, the afterparty (I’ve never been to an afterparty—certainly not in L.A.!), and to sit on a panel the following day at the L.A. Festival of Books. The L.A. Festival of Books is reputedly the largest book festival in the United States, so I imagine it’ll be quite something. Plus, compared to Edinburgh, the weather is sure to be amazing. What a rush!
Despite the various traumas that have rattled our world from pole to pole, 2025 was a pretty good year for yours truly. Esperance came out in May to terrific reviews, including just recently best-of-2025 lists from Booklist, CrimeReads, and LA Public Library among others. Readers have been kind; and I had the opportunity to meet readers, fellow authors, and a whole bunch of delightful people at a variety of book festivals, including Cymera, the Harrogate Crime Writers Festival, and Bloody Scotland. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for better experiences.
As for 2026, one hopes that the world will calm down a bit while, literarily speaking, there are a lot of fun things to look forward to. LOD is on track to be published in the fall, I’ve had a military SF short story accepted for publication (a real departure for me), and I am putting together an outline for a third Quiet Teacher novel. No title as yet, so let’s just call it Murder in the Third for now. 🤣
On top of that, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre, has asked me to present an online masterclass (their word, not mine) on worldbuilding. It’s on their website for February 5th so it’s all official and far too late for me to back out. As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a huge fan of Moniack Mhor, having attended three times now on writers’ retreats. This, though, is the first time I have been asked to teach and I’m a wee bit nervous about it. So much so that, appalling procrastinator though I am, I have already prepped the presentation and finalized the slides! 😇 Fingers crossed it goes OK. Nerves aside, I am really looking forward to it.
Then, starting on February 8th, I am back on tour. That’s when I will be taking part in a panel devoted to police procedurals at the Cheshire Crime Writers Festival in Frodsham. (I was going to add Frodsham’s county, but if you can’t figure that out there is something seriously wrong with you.) After that, on February 21st,I will be back at Granite Noir, in Aberdeen Scotland. I had a freezing good time last time I was there (although my blog makes no mention of the temperature!) and am looking forward to renewing acquaintances and meeting a whole bunch of fun new people. Hopefully, it will be warmer than last time but, as it’s Aberdeen in February, I’m not counting on it. Hopefully the weather will be warmer for Shetland Noir, this June. I don’t have full details of the program yet, but I am confident that, like last time, it will be an absolute blast!
So, lots to be looking forward to. Here’s hoping 2026 will be a better year for everyone.
As some of you may recall, I have been anxious about the fate of D______, my latest novel and something of a prequel to my debut, Braking Day. I had sent it off to my agent, the estimable Brady, for review, after which it was due to go to my editor, the hard-driving Aranya, for the final verdict. For several weeks, I have been on tenterhooks. But now the verdict is in.
I am happy (relieved!) to report that the verdict has been overwhelmingly positive. If you like SF, SF mysteries, or can tolerate SF for the sake of a mystery, D______ will not disappoint! Aranya, Brady and Brady’s assistant, James, have made a number of excellent suggestions that I will be incorporating into the final text, but D______ is very much on its way.
Although it won’t be called D______. We have settled, probably, for L___ o_ D______. I’m still blanking out the words because I’m not a hundred percent sure there won’t be a further change. I have been caught out like this before!
Normally, this is the point where I whine about the publishing industry changing one of my perfectly good titles. But in actual fact L___ o_ D______ was my suggestion. As the manuscript took shape beneath my fingers, L___ o_ D______ felt like a better title than D______, and that’s the one I used when I sent the draft out for review. The publisher pushed back on that a bit because L___ o_ D______ comes up in searches as a Bollywood movie (!!!) and that will make finding the book using a search engine a wee bit harder. What a world we live in, eh? This is not something that would even have been considered until a few years ago.
Nonetheless, as neither the publisher, Brady, nor I could come up with anything better, L___ o_ D______ remains intact. If (if!) it continues to remain intact, L___ o_ D______ will mark the second time in a row (after Esperance) that my choice of title will have survived contact with the professionals, so maybe I’m starting to get the hang of it!
My tour of the book festival circuit continues with a recent appearance at the Black British Book Festival at The Barbican in London. It was an enormous amount of fun and an opportunity to talk books and the writing of books through a slightly different lens. It was a particular pleasure to meet Edinburgh-based Tendai Huchu and fantasy author Marvelous Michael Anson for the first time. As always at events like this there were a number of budding writers in the audience, and it was a pleasure to share what someone called our “publishing journeys” with them. Neither Marvelous nor I have been overnight successes (there is a lot of rejection in publishing) so both of us, I think, were able to offer up some hope to people who might otherwise become discouraged.
Book signing at the Barbican (by Ayo Okojie)
Which got me thinking about celebrity authors, who, at least in publishing terms, are overnight successes. They rock up to a publisher with an idea for a book, get it published and, lo and behold, instant best seller. I’ve mentioned before that there is a certain amount of resentment in the crime-writing community about the fact that not only have celebrity writers not “paid their dues,” a significant number of them can’t actually write and rely heavily on ghostwriters. Personally, I’ve always been rather relaxed about this. If you’re a writer and you think a celebrity’s road to publication has been easy, my response has tended to be along the lines of, “Fine. Go out and become a celebrity then.” Not as easy as it looks! Celebrities have worked long and hard to earn the fame that guarantees their publishers an instant bestseller. Why they should be criticized for that is a mystery to me.
The ghostwriter criticism is a lot trickier, though. I have tended to the view that if the reader enjoys the product, that is answer enough. Who cares if the celebrity actually wrote it?
And yet. If you’re a celebrity chef, say, that the public can’t get enough of, you can’t just launch a music career. You have to be able to, you know, sing. If you can’t, you will be found out lickety-split and reduced to the status of amusing novelty act. The Eddie the Eagle of music. But if you’re a celebrity who can’t write, a ghostwriter and a decent editor can make that particular deficiency vanish from the page. It is, in a sense, a fraud. The reader thinks they’re consuming the talents of the celebrity – maybe a glimpse into how they think – when it’s entirely possible that what they’re reading is the celebrity’s idea for a book (the easy part, as I once heard Anne Cleeves describe it) turned into something enjoyable and real by the talents of a different person altogether. And then what about the talents of celebrities who really can write, like Richard Osman? Fabulously successful though his books are, are his achievements being somehow devalued by the lurking suspicion that because he’s a celebrity he must have had help?
This was my confused state of mind when, running far later than I usually do in the mornings, the actor Reese Witherspoon popped up on my radio to announce that she, too, has now written a book. Before I could reach over to switch stations, though, she went on to explain that she’d had help: none other than the great Harlan Coben. He’s on the cover with equal credit. And why not? He’s Harlan Coben! Paradoxically, though, because Ms. W openly admitted to having help, I felt that she had probably written more of this book than I would originally have been inclined to believe. And if Reese Witherspoon (who could totally have used an anonymous ghostwriter) is happy to share credit, why can’t everyone else? The thriller writer James Patterson famously writes with co-authors to maintain “his” prodigious output, and no one minds a bit. Perhaps it’s time for the celebrities and publishers who use ghostwriters to finally come clean. The “Children’s Division” of the UK’s Society of Authors has recently called for exactly that. They have demanded more transparency for the “unsung” ghostwriters behind celebrity-authored children’s books, with the ghostwriters to be given credit on the cover as a matter of course. Although it would remove the “ghost” from ghostwriter, this strikes me as no bad thing. In a world already chockful of deceit and misdirection, a little honesty in the world of celebrity book writing would be a welcome breath of fresh air.
I am not long back from Stirling and the world famous Bloody Scotland crime festival. What a great time!
As some of you may recall, I attended Bloody Scotland a couple of years ago to do a breakout author spotlight, which took all of three minutes to deliver and an entire evening to prepare. This time, I was participating in an actual panel, Murder Most Speculative, with Ben Aaronovitch and Nick Binge. It was a reunion of sorts: I shared a panel with Nick at this year’s Cymera Festival in Edinburgh, while Ben and I appeared together at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. And, like Harrogate, the topic was the how (and why!) of writing SFF crime mysteries. The panel was chaired by Scottish writer Zoe Venditozzi, who carried out her task with charm, verve, and insight – no easy task, let me tell you: we were in a Scottish pub on a Friday night. The default setting was, er, rowdy.
One of Zoe’s questions – an observation, really – has stuck with me ever since. Not least because it’s got me worrying that I am a hopelessly naïve human being. She congratulated me on writing a book with strong female characters, a statement that left me somewhat at a loss. Not because it wasn’t true but because she thought it worth mentioning. A female character is a character, after all. Some are strong, some are weak, some are charming, and some are complete a—, well, not very nice people. I made the (to me) obvious point that women are half the human race and that if you’re not using them, you’re losing half of your potential story. To which Zoe responded that I would be surprised at how few female characters there actually are.
In the past, I thought to myself, but not now, surely? Isaac Asimov, one of the great writers of 20th century SF, had almost no female characters in his books, and certainly (with the stunning exception of the robot psychologist, Susan Calvin) no strong ones. And it’s the same with JRR Tolkien. There are female characters in Lord of the Rings, for instance, but they tend to be other-worldly and ethereal, far from the center of the action. That said, though, Tolkein was born in 1892, Asimov in 1920. They are authors of their time. Times have changed.
Or have they? There are definitely more female authors in SFF these days, and Crime has always had great female writers (think Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, P.D. James), but what about the characters? Thinking through the books I have read lately, there are plenty of female characters but, Tolkien-like, many of them are not at the center of the action, regardless of how strong or high-achieving they are. Digging around a little more, it turns out that Dutch academics carried out a study on this very subject in 2020 (Actual Fictions: Literary Representation and Character Network Analysis, Cambridge University Press). Comparing Dutch novels written in the 1960s with more modern times, they found almost nothing had changed with regard to female representation. As summarized by one of the authors:
“The emancipation in novels has made very little progress between 1960 and 2010. In general, the male-female ratio is pretty constant: 70% of the characters are male and only 30% are female. Not only that, but female characters in novels continue to operate on the margins of social networks.” So, Zoe is right it appears.
In which case, I have a simple suggestion for my fellow writers. Regardless of whether you plot meticulously or write by the seat of your pants, every time you introduce a new character, alternate the sexes unless there is a compelling reason not to. How hard can it be?
Normally when I return to this blog after so long away it is with a profound feeling of guilt. Not this time. I have been sooooo busy! Honestly! Some of it is the day job. For a variety of reasons, we are shorthanded at work, so that’s been taking up even more of my time than it usually does.
Then there is the small matter of revising D______. Last time we were here, I had just finished the first draft. Since then, it has gone through two more iterations and is now in the hands of my agent, the estimable Brady, who will endeavor to make it better before I hand it over to my editor for her to make it better before it’s finally allowed out into the world.
The revision process for D_______ has been . . . interesting. Even with a week’s writing retreat at Moniack Mhor (which is as stunning in summer as it is stark in winter), everything seemed to go more slowly. In the end, I found myself eating up more and more family time just to keep my head above water. Worst of all, I had to push back my delivery date. Now, asking for more time is quite normal in publishing, where deadlines are, um, flexible. But I’m a lawyer at heart. Asking for an extension to a previously agreed schedule is, quite simply, excruciating.
As for the underlying cause of these tribulations, I am far from sure. On my worst days, I worry that D________ is simply no good and that I have been applying endless amounts of lipstick to a literary pig. On my middling days, I berate myself for being overly ambitious and reaching beyond my abilities to tell a story. And on my OK days, I figure that D______ is simply a new frontier for me – part psychological thriller, part noir in a sci-fi hull – so getting it right is bound to be challenging.
But mainly I worry that it’s no good.
A couple of months ago, I attended a launch event for this year’s Bloody Scotland crime festival, to which I have been lucky enough to be invited. Linwood Barclay, the great Canadian thriller writer, was on stage. In discussing his writing process, he likened sending out his finished manuscript to waiting for someone to mark his exams without the slightest sense of how well or badly he’d done. For the first time in my writing life, I know exactly how he feels.
Time to start work on something else. Take my mind off it.
