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Harrogate, here I come.

July is nigh. I like July. July means the next major writering gathering I regularly attend each year.

Crime & Publishment in February, Harrogate in July. Bute Noir in August. Bloody Scotland in September.

Last year’s Harrogate was, for me, a little subdued because of some deeply hurtful personal stuff that happened shortly before July. Took the shine off a lot of my life, and rather tarnished my excitement at attending what was my first Harrogate.

But this year, I’m past the nastiness of 2022, and can’t wait to spend a couple of days mingling and jawing and hugging (and possibly imbibing a few refreshments) with My Tribe. I know Harrogate is seen as a great networking opportunity, and I’d be a big, fat, fibber if I tried to claim I wanted none of that cynical nonsense, but there *are* some people I’d dearly love to bump into, for various reasons.

There are people I feel a need to apologise to, like the lovely lady who took the trouble to hand-write some excellent notes on my then Pile-Of-Tripe, but which then I lost and possibly left lying on a chair in a hotel in Gretna. I then compounded my sins by failing to pluck up the courage to approach said person to apologise for said transgression when I saw said person at last year’s Harrogate.

Then there are people I want to thank (guchingly, I fear) for all the patience and support and bottom-bootings with which they’ve blessed me in my long, painful, embarrasingly needy, journey where I am today – actually believing my scribblings might actually be worthy of publication.

Finally, there are the people who just make my heart swell when I see them. Good, kind, generous, loving people. Typical crime writerers. My Tribe.

I’ve missed you all. xxx

 

 

 

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WTF just hit me?!?

So much for me trying to keep this wee blog of mine updated at least semi-regularly.

Since landing my publishing deal way back in July 2023, I can quite honestly say WTF? While my publisher, Storm, has done a fine job of baby-sitting me and guiding me through the various professional edit stages to actual, for-real, nae-kiddin’, publication, I vastly underestimated the impact this wee life event would have on me.

While I still have enough hours in most days to deal with writing and editing and self-marketing and soclial meedjaing and all the other nonsense that comes with becoming a – gulp – proper writerer, I’ve found my mental capacity has struggled. I promised myself I would write at least a few words into this blog thing most days, if only for the cathartic benefits, but the task seems to always slip down the back of my mental sofa, to be found, months later, covered in psychological lint and the dust of many emotional takeaways plastered to it. (Did I stretch that partocular metaphor a wee bit? I think I did.)

Anyway, with one book actually, for-real, nae-kiddin’, published, and a second on it’s way through the publishing machine and expected to emerge, blinking and whimpering, into the brilliant light of “out there” on 2nd May, and even a third book in the process of oozing from my diseased and troubled mind into my laptop and yet to fall under the brutal but transformational virtual red pen of my editor, the marvellous Kate Smith, I’ve come to realise one, fundamental and unavoidable truism – if one writes line after line of utterly purple and over-showy prose in a blog entry, one runs a serious risk of forgetting what the hell one was talking about.

Like the role model of my childhood, troubled and unfortunate genius Wil E Coyote. All I can do is keep chasing that pesky bird (I know, stretching the metaphor again).

 

Onwards and upwards, always.

xxx

 

 

I’ve only gone and done it!

 

*** Self-indulgence alert – apologies ***

** Sweary words, too. Sorry, I have to be me. ***

I suffered clinical depression (chemical imbalance in my brain) for the first fifty years of my life. Then my amazing wife, Maaike, made me get help. I got medicated and literally (and I mean literally “literally”) within days, I was transformed. Which was nice, because after 50+ years of absolute mental hell on earth, I finally got to understand that I have an illness. I’m not a worthless piece of shite, or a loathsome waste of oxygen, or an idiot always too stupid to understand what everybody else around me seems to “get” without effort.

I had, and have, a medical condition. A treatable medical condition. Like Diabetes. Or Migraines. Or any number of other conditions that other people live with but don’t interpret as cosmic evidence of being an ugly and unwelcome and embarrassing carbuncle on the arse of the universe.

During those same fifty years, I dreamed of writing and “being a writer”, but the aforementioned self-loathing and fundamental belief in my own worthlessness smothered any effort I managed to muster to realise that dream. After my amazing wife, Maaike, helped me to get help, I started the long process of rebuilding my self-confidence.

I took what even my heathen mind can call “a leap of faith”.

Crime fictiony events like Bloody Scotland and Bute Noir and Harrogate and the wonderful, cosy, Crime & Publishment, do far, far, more then just let people meet their idols or booze-and-schmooze. They offer people like me an environment where we are encouraged to believe in ourselves, to trust the opinions and judgement of people with massive amounts of *lived* experience and zero interest in false-flattery or ego-stroking. And when someone whom you admire and whose opinion you trust tells you you can write, how bloody idiotic is it to question their better judgement, and their objectivity, and their *lived* experiences and the wisdom that brings?

Hence, a leap of faith. When the wee bastard poison parrot is telling me I’m shit and I should know I’m shit, I tell it to fuck off because such-and-such seems to believe in me and her/his/their judgement is about a gazillion times more reliable than the PP’s nasty, snide, destructive, toxic, and never-ending campaign to sabotage what – I’m finally starting to believe – is something I actually might be pretty good at.

I’ve just signed a three book deal with the talented Kate Smith at Storm Publishing, brokered by my excellent agent, Kevin Pocklington of The North Literary Agency. And while my inner idiot still irrationally fears they’re all wrong or playing some huge Truman Show style trick on me, I have enough sense to choose to believe that these people – lovely and kind and supportive as they very much are – are ultimately business people, and if the product they’re hoping to sell (me and my writing) wasn’t damned good, they would not invest their time in me.

Fuck the parrot. To hell with Imposter Syndrome. Attend events. Make friends. Not “contacts” you “networked with”. Friends. Write. Then ask (nicely, of course) for feedback from people whose opinions you trust. Then write some more. Then some more. And never, ever, EVER, give up.

Never.

Onwards and upwards, always.

xxx