Critical Death Theory: first draft, 15,400 words
Shetland, to which I recently traveled for the Shetland Noir crime writers’ event, was something else. I wouldn’t call it beautiful, exactly. Bronze age sheep denuded the islands of trees, leaving behind an ancient landscape of close-cropped, rolling hills that end abruptly in spectacular rocky shorelines: either the North Sea or the Atlantic, depending on which side you’re on. Stone Age boundary markers rise suddenly out of the thin soil, and the wind blows across everything. The overall effect is stark: handsome, rather than pretty. Austere instead of lush.
With the cleanest air I’ve ever breathed in my life.
And the hospitality was amazing. I always feel like a bit of an impostor as a crime writer. I didn’t set out to become one, it just happened. I woke up with Greg Abimbola in my head one day and he wouldn’t go away. A Quiet Teacher was born and now, here I am, working on its sequel, Critical Death Theory. But no one treated me as an impostor. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The whole atmosphere at Shetland Noir was like a big, not dysfunctional family. Even though some of the giants of the genre were there – Ann Cleeves, Val McDermid, Shari Lapena, among others – there was no sense of hierarchy. Everyone just mingled and chatted and it was quite impossible to tell who was who just by looking at how they were treated. And the Mareel, the center where all the activities took place, turned out to be the perfect venue, with amazing coffee, a suitably broad selection of alcoholic beverages, and stunning home baked cakes, courtesy of the islanders. All with a sea view!
Highlights for me included meeting some fellow Nigerians, pygmy goats, on a coach tour of the Mainland, emceed by local author Marsali Taylor, a wonderful writer and a driving force behind the whole Shetland Noir enterprise. At the gathering itself, I had forced myself to sign up for something they called speed dating. You paired up with another author, in my case the delightful Shari Lapena, and spent a couple of minutes each pitching your book to a table full of readers before moving on to the next table, and the next, and the next . . . To be honest, I’d been rather dreading it, but it turned out to be an absolute blast. Everyone was very receptive, the questions they asked were really interesting, and there were plenty of laughs. Plus, all my books sold out at the bookstore!
On the last day, I attended a workshop on how to write a crime novel (better late than never) and found myself sitting next to Dea Parkin, who is not only the coordinator for the Crime Writers’ Association and an editor but also, it turns out, someone I was at college with. Small world! I paired up with Dea on the workshop’s sole exercise: tell the story of Goldilocks in twelve sentences of no more than eight words each. I babbled some words, Dea edited them into coherence, and we knocked it out of the park. “Join the CWA,” she said. “We’d love to have you.”
So I did.