September

September

This last month has been somewhat of a whirlwind, and since the start of September I have barely spent more than three consecutive nights at home. All due credit goes to my wonderful wife and also to her parents for stepping in and keeping our children alive while I was off gallivanting. There were some wonderful experiences, but I am now very glad to be home and have essentially nothing planned for the rest of the month, at least in terms of travel.

LONDON

The first stop for me was going down to London to meet my new editor. I’d been working up until recently with the absolutely stellar Vicky Leech, who left her job at Voyager recently to become Publishing Director at Bloomsbury. A wonderful step in her career, and I hope our paths cross again, because I will miss working with her immensely.

My publishing has now been taken on in the UK by the equally wonderful Rachel Winterbottom, who was a Senior Editor at Gollancz and now joins Voyager as Editorial Director and in charge of my list. I wanted to meet her in person and had a great time down in London meeting her, the team at Voyager, and also catching up with my agent while I was in town.

BLOODY SCOTLAND

Before I’d really had the chance to breathe in Edinburgh, I was off again up north to Stirling for Bloody Scotland — our fantastic crime and thriller festival that brings authors and readers together from all over the world. I was invited to do a reading alongside the great Steve Cavanagh and TM Logan and we shared a book signing afterwards.

As a brief interlude, it was also around this time that I found out that ASCENSION had returned to the national bestseller charts in Spain for the second time, which just wonderful!

BOURNEMOUTH

Literally a couple of days after returning from Stirling, I was down south for my grandpa’s funeral, a slightly darker note in an otherwise exciting month. I had the privilege of delivering the eulogy for him — a really remarkable and wonderful man — who had lived until the grand old age of 96 and filled his life with more adventure and excitement than most of us could ever hope to.

BUDAPEST

After another few days back in Edinburgh, my September culminated with a bit of a Hungarian book tour. My Hungarian publisher Agave invited me to Budapest in order to do some press interviews, signings, and also an event for the Budapest International Book Festival and PesText (another literary festival happening at the same time).

I also bumped into the delightful John Scalzi, also in Hungary for the festival, and we managed to grab dinner together.

The last day ended with a fantastic interview in a packed room and a book signing queue that took a solid hour to fully clear!

It was a great trip and the people at Agave are so wonderful. I can’t wait to be back in Hungary again, maybe when the next book is out?

That was my month, really. There are more updates and exciting things going on, but for now I’ll say goodbye and you can find out about them next time!