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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.

I am a huge fan of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, both the book and BBC/PBS TV series.  With a cold Scottish rain rattling against the windows, I recently spent an entire Sunday afternoon re-bingeing the TV show from start to finish.  I have no regrets!

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the basic conceit of Magpie Murders is a mystery within a mystery.  Alan Conway, a successful crime writer, dies in suspicious circumstances, circumstances that only make sense if one is aware of how his latest novel, Magpie Murders, concludes.  The problem is, no one knows how Magpie Murders ends because the last chapter is missing from the manuscript he handed in to his publishers.  His frustrated editor, intent on locating some usable version of the final chapter, finds herself inadvertently investigating a murder.

There are a few things I always take away from watching the TV show.  First, Lesley Manville is a simply brilliant actress; second, that I will never, ever behave like Alan Conway, a vile man who treats everybody, including the readers he is so lucky to have, with contempt; and, third, if it were me rather than Alan Conway who was the subject of Horowitz’s murder mystery, he’d have to come up with a completely different ending.

Without giving too much away, the reason I say this last thing is that the titles of Alan Conway’s books are an integral part of the plot.  “Not The Magpie Murders.  Magpie Murders.  That’s the bloody title!” as he tetchily informs his publisher.  But for the titles to fit into the plot like this, Alan Conway had to have control over them, something that yours truly absolutely does not.

As regular readers of this blog will know, no one trusts me with titles.  Neither of my two published novels, Braking Day and A Quiet Teacher, were called those things when I wrote them, not even close.  So chastened was I by this experience that I refused to reveal the title of my next novel, E________, because I was certain that it, too, would be changed.  (I keep saying I hope to be able to share news about E________ soon, and I really, really will.  Soon.)

With my fourth novel, though, the sequel to A Quiet Teacher, I was sure I had cracked it.  From the estimable Brady’s tongue-in-cheek 2 Quiet 2 Teacher, we (by which I mean I) settled on Critical Death Theory.  Brady liked it, Editor Rachel liked it, we were good to go.  I revealed it to the world.

And then I handed in the manuscript.

“Yes, well, the team is leaning against Critical Death Theory,” which is publisher-speak for, “You must be out of your mind.”  Needless to say, I didn’t put up much of a fight.  After a bit of toing and froing about what would best fit with an educator who solves mysteries, we came up with Two Times Murder.

So, there you have it.  Two Times Murder, the sequel to A Quiet Teacher.  Coming soon.  More details to follow!

Back from a fun weekend in Aberdeen attending the Granite Noir crime festival.  First though, a word about trains: they are awesome.  Scots complain a lot about the trains but, coming here after twenty-three years in the States, I have nothing but praise for them.  Sure, they sometimes run late or get canceled, but they mostly don’t.  They mostly run on time (to the minute) and, importantly, take you where you want to go when you want to get there.  If Amtrak got only half the support British railroads (railways!) get, travel in America would be revolutionized.

I mention the trains because that’s how I got to Aberdeen in the first place.  It took less than three hours. The route runs along the east coast of Scotland, around the firths of Forth and Tay, and then into northeastern Scotland with the icy blue of the North Sea for company.  It’s the most spectacular train journey I’ve ever taken and, if you ever get the chance to do so, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Just make sure to sit on the right/eastern side of the train!

Aberdeen’s nickname is the Granite City (hence Granite Noir) because granite is the local building material, and it shows.  All the older buildings are constructed with it, and many of the modern ones at least pay homage to the concept.  I was expecting a grimly gray metropolis, but Aberdeen is nothing like that.  The sun was shining and everything looked bright and crisp, even the seagulls that cruised low over the streets looking for scraps.  I look forward to visiting again.

As for the festival, it was an absolute blast and, as usual, I couldn’t stop myself from buying books.  All the hard work I put into reducing my TBR pile undone at a stroke.  I shared a panel with Briar Ripley Page (The False Sister) and Maud Woolf (Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock).  Both were delightful company, although I thought it was a little ironic that I, who consider myself a SF author with a sideline in crime, was the only one on the panel who’d written a straight up murder mystery.  Briar’s The False Sister, is a horror story set in the past and Maud’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock is very much a sci-fi.  Maud, indeed, was way more interested in Braking Day than A Quiet Teacher!

It never ceases to amaze me how receptive book festival audiences are to new(ish) authors.  I’m still at the stage where I dread sitting down to do a book signing because I don’t think anyone will come.  Once again, though, I was proved wrong.  It was a joy to meet new readers and talk books and book writing with them.  Also, I remain forever grateful that they are tolerant of my appalling handwriting!

I am looking forward to attending more festivals.  Critical Death Theory is now at the publisher’s, being gone over by Editor Rachel.  Fingers crossed she doesn’t hate it! Assuming no major rewrites, we look to be on track for a November 2024 release so, the next time I am on a stage, I should hopefully have a new book to talk about.

Critical Death Theory is finished!

This is publishing, so when I say “finished,” I mean finished for now.  The manuscript is out with my agent and others to take a look at before I submit it to the publisher.  I’m crossing my fingers that no one comes back and says, “This is awful.  You’ll have to start again.”  I don’t think they will (???) but the thought of it is bringing me out in cold sweats.  I’m hoping for some useful comments and tweaks to strengthen the final(ish) product before sending it out to Editor Rachel and her red pen.  More tweaking now means less red later.  That, at least, is the hope!

The fact that this project is running more or less on time is due entirely to the fact that the writers’ retreat at Moniack Mhor was a cracking success.  I really got a lot done there, despite napping at least twice a day, and the company of the other writers was incredible.  Which was just as well because we were basically snowed in for most of the week.  It wasn’t impossible to get out, but tough enough that no one was minded to make the effort.  We settled instead for a lot of writing during the day followed by red wine and convivial conversation in the evenings.  Plus The Traitors, the BBC reality game show that had a solid following among my companions.  I’d never seen it before.  Now I’m hooked!

As is usual on the last evening, there was a mostly traditional haggis supper (prepared in theory by yours truly and others but actually by others.  I simply chopped vegetables, washed dishes and took the credit).  I say “mostly” because the piper was snowbound and couldn’t make it over to pipe in the haggis.  You Tube and a cellphone filled in instead.  After which most of us read a little of what we’d been working on, which is always a treat.  It is a humbling experience to be surrounded by so much talent.  Over the course of a week you start to think you’ve got at least a sense of someone, then they read out their work and it’s like, wow! There is so much more going on there.

Someone told me that the piece I read out from Critical Death Theory reminded them a little bit of Slow Horses, the Apple TV series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels.  If so, then I’m in great company.  I’ll take it!

With Critical Death Theory finished (for now), I have rewarded myself by taking the time to re-read every single one of Martha Wells’s incredible Murderbot series and doing nothing writing related at all.  Now, though, my mind is turning to what’s next.

And what’s that, you might very well ask.

I haven’t quite decided.