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D______, first draft: 36,600 words

Somehow, I am 36,000 words into my new novel without having made a blog entry.  How did that happen?  No idea.  Oh, wait.  It’s been ages since my last blog entry.  Too much writing, not enough blogging.  Bad Adam!  Bad!  As ever, I don’t expect my working title to survive contact with the publishing profession, so we’ll just call it D______ for now.  It’s possible, actually, that I might change the working title before I finish the first draft as I’m thinking there’s a “better” one.  But, then again, what’s the point of making up two titles that will never see the light of day?

Anyway, D______ or whatever is a prequel to my first published novel, Braking Day.  I don’t want to say too much more about it right now, but I’m very much enjoying writing it.  Which is a relief because the outline, let me tell you, was er . . . challenging!

Rather than chat about D______, what I will be talking about — quite literally — over the next few months is Esperance.  I’m going on tour!  Well, not really, but I will be appearing at three UK book festivals over the summer.  First up, I will be at Cymera, Edinburgh, Scotland on Saturday, June 7.  Cymera, as long-time readers of this blog will know, is the first festival I ever attended as either a writer or a reader and I have been hooked ever since.  I am really looking forward to going back there.

Esperance, unlike Braking Day, is not only a SF novel, it is also a murder mystery.  As a consequence of that, I have had the incredible luck to be invited to the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, in Harrogate, England, which is a major, major gig on the crime writing circuit.  So excited!  I’m slated to appear on a panel tentatively titled, What Planet Are They On? on Saturday July 19, which should be an absolute blast.  Old Peculier, by the way, is a beer.  And “Peculier” is not a typo . . .

Finally, on Friday September 12, I will be appearing at the awesome Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival in Stirling, er, Scotland.  Some of you may recollect that I was there in 2023 with a short (three minute!) spotlight appearance as an up-and-coming crime writer.  This time I have been promoted to an actual panelist so I must be doing something “write.”  (I know. I know!)

So, some fabulous things to look forward to.  If you can make it to any of these, I would love to meet you!!!  And in between all of that, one of my nephews is getting married and my son is graduating from college.  It’s looking like it’s going to be a great summer.  Even though, this being Britain, the weather will be sh . . .

I am not long back from a trip to the States.  Virginia Beach, VA to be precise, where I was the featured science fiction guest at Marscon 2025.  After a rather more eventful trip than I would have liked (it is, in fact, possible to enter the United States on an expired passport) I reached my destination and spent an amazing four days surrounded by weird, wonderful and stimulaing people.

I must confess I did not fully appreciate what I was signing up for until after I arrived.  I had assumed, because, like the terrible lawyer I like to think I’m not, I had failed to read the fine print.  I had thought that Marscon was a SF book festival.  It is not.  It is way, way more than that.  The first clue was the cloaked wizard who turned up at registration.  Followed by the Star Fleet officer.  And the Japanese vampire.  Full disclosure, I had no idea what a Japanese vampire looks like.  Someone else in line said: “Hey.  Are you a Japanese vampire?”  To which the reply was, “Yes.”  You learn something new every day.  Sometimes several new somethings.

Marscon is a full-blown fan convention.  It has SF writers to be sure, accompanied by their Horror and Fantasy cousins.  But it also has gamers, and costume competitions, and art, and music.  The music was both incredibly good and incredibly geeky.  For a sense of what that means, let me introduce you to House Rules by Rhiannon’s Lark, the musical guest of honor, a beautifully rendered folk homage to the perils of gaming under someone else’s roof.  An experience to which I can relate!

Also, unlike a book festival, where your obligation generally extends to a one-hour panel where you will talk about your latest book alongside a couple of other authors, the science fiction guest of honor was expected to turn up to several panels, at none of which he talked about anything he’d written – or not much, anyway.  I think my favorite was Your Weird Civilization Is Infringing on My Utopia, a discussion (mostly) about whether utopia was even desirable, never mind possible, and why people keep writing about them.  One of my fellow panelists, Tory Brown, had spent time as a union organizer and I was very struck by one of the things she said: that no matter how miserable conditions might be at a non-unionized workplace, the hardest part of her job was getting people to even imagine that it could be different.  Though Tory herself is a gamer, it brought home to me how important it is to write fiction.  To write down things that are different.  To help someone imagine.  To pave a road across the undreaming desert, opening a path from “here” to “there.”

That is no small thing.

The covers for my new SF novel are out in the world. E_______ can now be revealed as Esperance, the first time ever a title of mine has made it all the way to publication.  I’m almost as excited about that as I am about the book itself!

I spoke a little bit about the covers last time, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.  A big difference between Esperance and my previous SF novel, Braking Day, is that Braking Day is space opera and Esperance isn’t.  It’s very much set on present day Earth: a murder mystery with an SF twist. 

According to my publishers, Esperance is what they call “speculative fiction,” which is what I naively think of as SF+.  Science fiction for hardcore SF folks plus posh people who don’t generally admit to reading SF at all.  In any event, speculative fiction covers tend to be different from their space opera counterparts.  Space opera covers tend to be led by big machines and other tech — rockets and ray guns if you like — whereas speculative fiction covers lean toward the abstract.  Compare Abaddon’s Gate, by James S.A. Corey, space opera with a vengeance, to Blake Crouch’s speculative classic: Dark Matter.  While I was expecting something with fewer rockets and ray guns than Braking Day, the US cover, when it arrived in my inbox, was a real shock.  The mosquito!  The blood red background!  The tiny little sailing ship!  Once I climbed back on my chair, though, I quickly grew to love it.  By the time they reach the last page, the symbolism will make sense to the reader and the starkness of the cover makes a wonderful visual impression.

Interestingly, the original UK cover concept also led with an animal: in this case, an acid pink barracuda.  It may say something about my taste in animals, but I could never get comfortable with it.  Arcadia were great and agreed to go back to the drawing board.  I love the new cover with the sailing ship front and center amid worlds of multi-layered complexity.  Again, I think it’s a cover that will make sense to the reader by the end of the story.  Fingers crossed!

Two Times Murder is out in the world!  Yay!  The early reviews are in, including a starred review from Kirkus.  People seem to like it so, phew, thank goodness for that!  Some of my colleagues at the day job have come up to me and said nice things (not a given in my work environment!) which has generated a warm fuzzy feeling that I don’t usually experience at the office.

Writing is odd, though.  While my writing life is outwardly filled with Two Times Murder, there are two other books fighting for attention inside my thick skull — and I’m really bad at multi-tasking.

The first is E________, which is now hurtling towards publication (May next year, since you ask).  Unlike Two Times Murder, which is published on both sides of the Atlantic by Severn House/Canongate Books, E________ has two publishers: DAW Books in North America, and Arcadia/Quercus in the UK.  Apart from some corporate reshuffling, this is the same arrangement as for Braking Day.  Unlike Braking Day, though, DAW and Arcadia have opted to commission separate covers.  The North American one is basically set and I should be able to do a cover reveal soon.  It’s incredibly eye-catching and I hope you guys like it as much as I do.

The UK cover is still on its journey.  I have been genuinely amazed at how generous Arcadia and its art department have been with their time and talent.  Were I a publisher and one of my authors came to me and said, “I’m really not sure about this,” in respect of something my team and I had worked really hard on, I’d most likely have told said author to pound sand.  Not Arcadia, though.  They went away and came back with a whole new concept.  We’re not quite done yet, but I think we’re essentially sorted and have moved on to the tinkering stage.  The base concept is awesome and while it’s very different from the DAW cover, I think UK readers will enjoy it immensely.  If they don’t, the fault is entirely mine.  Fingers crossed!

The second thing I’m thinking about is, well, writing.  I’ve promised DAW a new SF manuscript by August of next year.  As some of you will be aware, my mind had gone completely blank when it came to writing something new.  Fortunately, I am through that stage and am now settling down to craft an outline.  OK, not an outline, exactly, more like the outlines of an outline.  The point, though, is that we’re on our way.  So, when I recently met with Aranya, my new editor at DAW, to discuss my new book, I had quite a lot to say about it.

Until, that is, she asked me about the title.

My mind, it turns out, is blanker than I thought.

My wife, whose belief in my literary abilities is clearly not what one might hope, recently bought me a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, the great man’s half memoir, half how-to book.  The “how-to” being how to write.

Thanks, dear.

I read the whole thing in three or four days, which, for me, is super fast.  I suspect this will sound odd to many of you, but On Writing is the first Stephen King book I have ever read — having been scared enough for real in my life, horror and horror-adjacent simply isn’t my thing — and it is easy to see why the maestro sells so many books.  It is punchy, unflinchingly honest and elegantly written.  If you are interested in the craft of writing and haven’t done so already, I thoroughly recommend cracking it open.

That said, On Writing is not so much a how-to book about writing as a guide to being Stephen King.  Being Stephen King is (obviously!) great, but the world already has one of those, who, (equally obviously) is not me.

Writers, like all people, are both the same and different.  While emphasizing difference is generally the dark road to bigotry and conflict, when it comes to writing, differences are important.  There is no point trying to be an oak tree if you sprang from a fir cone.

Stephen King is what some people call a pantser, for seat-of-the-pants writing.  He believes that stories are “found,” that you start with a situation (woman and child in broken-down car + rabid dog outside) and write from there, discovering the story along the way (= Cujo).  His contempt for outlines and plotting drips from the page.

I, on the other hand, am very much a plotter.  If I’m writing something, particularly a mystery like Two Times Murder, I don’t start on chapter one until I have a pretty decent outline.  When I write, I want to write, I don’t like wrestling with plot points along the way.  Some wrestling always occurs, of course, because no outline is the last word on anything, but it’s the aspiration that counts.  My time for writing is short.  I don’t want to be delayed — and I absolutely don’t want to get 25,000 words into a project only to “find” there’s no story there after all.  The Stephen King method is not for me, and that’s just fine.  My brain is wired differently, is all.

Another area of same/different I came across is where to write.  I think most writers, certainly yours truly and the great man, feel it’s important to write somewhere you feel comfortable.  But comfortable varies.  For Stephen King, the place to write is in his study, at a modest desk behind a closed door, particularly for the first draft.

No!

I do have a home office and I do write in it, but only if I have to.  It’s too cluttered and too tied to my day job to give me a sense of escape.  I much prefer anonymous public spaces, like coffee shops and libraries, where I can be around people without actually having to be social and where, most importantly, there is a bare expanse of table to park my laptop.  For some reason, I can’t do my day job if my desk is tidy and I can’t write novels if my surroundings are cluttered, so running off to coffee shops and libraries is the perfect solution.

Unless, of course, some indescribable ass closes your coffee shop.  The Costa Coffee on Hanover Street in Edinburgh is just . . . gone!  I stood outside the door last weekend for maybe five minutes refusing to believe it before heading up the hill to the Starbucks on George Street, which, let me tell you, is not a suitable alternative.  The vibe is wrong.  Because, yeah, not any coffee shop or library will do.

I am good for right now because my weekday coffee shop is still here, but what I’m going to do this coming Saturday is very much up for debate.  Go to the same coffee shop as during the week, I hear you say?  Absolutely not.  I have rules about that sort of thing.  And when, like the author of On Writing, I can articulate what those rules are, you’ll be the first to know.

It’s likely to be a while.

Why, Costa?  Why?

I find myself stuck in a mental wasteland.

Two Times Murder is completely done and rolls on toward publication. I have just finished the copyediting on E________ for my UK publisher (which mostly involved removing all the American grammar.  I can only imagine what my US publishers are going to do with that!), so nothing to do there.  And as for YAP, well YAP is with the estimable Brady for feedback.

Writing wise, I have nothing to do. 

Aaaaargh!

Normally, what I’d be doing now is mulling over ideas for the next MS.  The problem, though, is that I don’t have any.  As I write this, my creative landscape is a barren desert.  Ideas will come — they always do — but in the meantime, I can’t help feeling a mild sense of panic.  It’s at times like this that the robotic allure of AI is at its most intense, a mechanical guide to lead me to the nearest oasis.

There was an article in The Guardian last month that cited a study claiming that AI prompts can actually boost writer creativity.  Apparently, people reading stories generated in this way rated them as 8.1% more novel and 9% more useful than stories generated by good old fashioned gray matter.

The kicker, though, was this.  The writers who benefited from all this electronic assistance were those who were the least creative.  Creative types got no meaningful benefit at all!  So the prospect of electronic rescue for yours truly is, like so many things in this particular desert, nothing more than a mirage.

Unless, of course, I’m not as creative as I like to think.  Or I’m tapped out . . .

No!  We are not going down that particular rabbit hole.

AI, while pointless for me, would be extremely useful for those who are not particularly creative but are still cursed with the desire to write and publish stories.  It could open a door that has been locked to them, much to their frustration.  If so, more power to you!  Knock yourself out.

Now, I’m aware that some of you out there might be a little surprised by what I’ve just said.  It’s more competition for “naturally talented” writers after all.  Why not condemn it as unfair competition?

Well, for starters, I’m a sci-fi writer.  I don’t see much point in railing against the future.  If tech can make creating stories easier for certain people, those people will use it and there’s not much point in people like me whining about it.

Secondly, though, I’m also a crime writer.  You can’t spend a lot of time in that community without coming across a whole lot of grumbling about celebrity writers: people who are famous for something else and have leveraged that celebrity into a book deal they would never have got otherwise.  The complaint isn’t simply that these are people who haven’t paid their dues (whatever that means) but that some of them can’t actually write and have benefitted either from ghostwriters or a level of editorial support that would never have been afforded to a “normal” manuscript.  If that subset of celebrity writers who can’t actually write get to benefit from the human intelligence of those who can, why can’t people who aren’t celebrities benefit from intelligence of the artificial variety?  If ghostwriting is OK in the publishing industry, there is no logical reason why AI should be viewed as somehow beyond the pale.

Finally, and most importantly, I am a reader.  At the end of the day publishers exist, authors exist, because there are readers who wish to read, to be entertained or informed or both.  If an AI assisted author can produce something that a reader will enjoy, who am I to stand in their way?  If books written by celebrities had somehow been magically banned at the get go, we would never have had the benefit of Richard Osman’s incredible Thursday Murder Club, for instance, and the world would have been all the poorer for it.

So there it is.  I don’t know how much AI will affect the future of publishing.  But I have no doubt that it will have some part to play.

Bring it on.

Where have I been, you might very well ask.  In which case I’ll tell you.  Norway.  More accurately, a Norwegian fjord cruise on the Queen Mary 2.  We had a fabulous time.  Norway was spectacular: like Scotland on steroids.  The place was spotless, with not a pothole to be seen.  The weather?  Also like Scotland.  On steroids.  When you could see them, the tops of the mountains were still covered in snow.  When you couldn’t, because the whole thing was encased in a swirling mist, it was easy to believe that trolls (of the non-internet kind) were lurking in the dark places waiting for their chance to eat you.

Meanwhile, however, the bookwork piled up and I have been busy working my way through it.  Hence the silence.

But now I have news.  Two Times Murder has a cover!

Given that Greg Abimbola, my protagonist, is an ex-spy, my publisher wanted to lean into that with a more espionagey cover.  They didn’t quite say it that way because “espionagey” isn’t a real word, but you get my drift.  The bridge and skyline are real: the building I used to work in when I lived in Pittsburgh is on the extreme left, and the bridge is named for Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, the book that raised public awareness as to the damage DDT was doing to birds’ eggs.  The man, though, is not real.  At least he won’t be for much longer if he insists on walking down the middle of that road.  The Rachel Carson Bridge is busy.  My first reaction when I saw the cover was not, “cool!” it was, “he’s gonna die!”

I’m over it now.  The cover is cool.  I’m really looking forward to seeing it on the shelves on November 5.

YAP, present draft: 53,700 words.

Super, super, SUPER excited to be nominated for the Japanese Seiun Award in the category of best translated novel!  As this is the Japanese equivalent to the Hugos, it’s a tremendous honor and I’ve been waltzing around on Cloud Nine for days now.

The Seiun Award is given each year for the best science fiction works and achievements during the previous calendar year (Braking Day was published in Japan in 2023). Organized and overseen by the Science Fiction Fan Groups’ Association of Japan, the awards are presented at the annual Japan Science Fiction Convention.^[1] It is the oldest SF award in Japan, the first being handed out at the 9th Japan Science Fiction Convention in 1970 (thanks, Wikipedia!).

The full list of nominations in my category is as follows:

• Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji. Translated by Tsukasa Kaneko
• Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. Translated by Naoya Nakahara
• The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Translated by Masayuki Uchida
• Civilizations by Laurent Binet. Translated by Akemi Tachibana
• The Greenhouse at the End of the World by Kim Cho-yeop. Translated by Kang Bang-hwa
• Drunk on All Your Strange New Worlds by Eddie Robinson. Translated by Ken Mogi
• Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Translated by Mayumi Otani

As I’ve said before, it’s the company you keep, right?  These are fabulous books by fabulous writers.  To be associated with them in any way is like a dream come true for me.  Like I said: CLOUD NINE!

YAP, present draft, 22,600 words.

Looking to the top of this blog entry, it occurs to me that I am not one to shy away from grandiose titling!  Can I justify it?  Well . . .

Last year, as some of you may recall, I attended my first ever crime festival: Shetland Noir in, er, Shetland.  It was a fantastic event, sponsored by the incomparable Anne Cleeves but organized by Shetland-based crime writer, Marsali Taylor.  Her latest, Death at a Shetland Festival, is coming out on May 9.

Marsali and I, together with authors AJ Liddell and Lydia Travers, will be hosting An Afternoon of Crime at the Aberdeen Central Library, Aberdeen, Scotland (not Mississippi) on May 7.  As for world firsts, I will be reading in public from my latest novel, Two Times Murder, for the very first time.  Needless to say, I’m a little nervous about it.  But also excited!

Two Times Murder is a sequel to my first mystery novel, A Quiet Teacher. We are still working on the details but the cover copy will read something like this:

Greg Abimbola is many things. He’s Black, British and fluent in Russian. He’s a snappy dresser, a reasonable teacher, and an unenthusiastic sports fan. But most of all, he’s exceptional at keeping secrets. Like, who he really is, and the things he’s done.

Determined to keep his head down after helping solve a murder in the school basement, Greg fears a trap when Sergeant Rachel Lev of the Pittsburgh police corners him in his apartment. Because his refusal to take credit isn’t modesty, it’s a survival tactic.

But Rachel is here on another matter entirely.  She needs his help. She’s lead detective on the homicide of an unidentified man fished from the Allegheny River.  With clues scant, and surrounded by colleagues who’d love to see her side-lined, Greg is her final roll of the dice.

Greg has no choice.  He knows more than he’s saying about Rachel’s mysterious corpse. To add to his troubles, a school trustee plunges to his demise after a heated board meeting. Both deaths come with potentially lethal consequences.  If he doesn’t find answers, and soon, Greg Abimbola will be the third man in Autopsy.

Looking forward to it!

YAP, present draft: 11,200 words

I would be completely consumed by jealousy today but for an antidote and a distraction.

Consumed because today is a total solar eclipse across a gigantic swathe of the United States.  Everyone, including my agent, the estimable Brady, is off to enjoy it except me.  I’m stuck in Scotland, where our measly ten-percent-or-so partial eclipse will no doubt be obscured by clouds.

What’s really gnawing at me is that I could totally have been in the total eclipse zone if I’d known it was happening ahead of time.  I mean, I did know about it ahead of time, like several months ago, but by then it was already too late: hotels booked up, RV parks jammed: no hope for Johnny-Come-Latelies like yours truly.  Now, watching the coverage on CNN, part of me is thinking that we should have sucked it up and gone along anyway.  The other part, the part that is being swamped beneath a tidal wave of regret right now, remembers the one and only total eclipse I have ever seen: Devon, England in 1999.  I drove down on the day and it was complete chaos: traffic jams like I’ve never seen, a desperate scramble to find somewhere, anywhere, to sit down and watch and then the whole thing was hidden by clouds which, to be fair, didn’t stop the eclipse itself from being awesome.

But the traffic.  That’s what I need to remember.  Getting home was a 170-mile journey.  It took me the best part of twelve hours.  Sadly, I am an irrational human being and it’s not enough.  I remain consumed with regret and envy, the only saving graces being the aforesaid antidote and distraction.

The antidote is this.  There is another total eclipse in 2026, this one running from the Arctic across Greenland, Iceland and, most importantly, the always sunny north of Spain.  Spain is very easy to reach from Scotland and I have already booked my spot.  Yay!  And for those of you who really like to plan ahead, there’s another one in Australia in 2028 . . .

As for the distraction, it is, as usual, writing.  Two Times Murder, as I am learning to call it, is basically done.  There’s copyediting and stuff left to do, of course, but the heavy lifting is over.  Which means it’s time for the next project.  Alternating as I do between mystery and SF, it’s time for SF.  I don’t want to say too much about it because (obvs) it’s not finished.  I will say this, though.  It is a young adult project, called . . .

Hah!  No way.  Having been burned yet again on the naming front, I’m not even going to give it a working title, so there.  We’re going to call it Young Adult Project, or, more appropriately, YAP.  When it comes to titles, I’m on strike.