David Goodman: Writing is Like Being a Spy, But Without the Cool Gadgets!

Dive into the fascinating world of espionage and writing with David Goodman, author of "A Reluctant Spy". Our conversation reveals David's enlightening journey from aspiring writer to published author, shedding light on the intricacies of crafting a compelling spy thriller in today's publishing landscape. David shares candid stories about navigating the complexities of rejection and persistent self-doubt, all while maintaining a passion for storytelling. 


The episode is rich with practical insights for emerging authors, emphasising the importance of resilience and genuine creativity in the writing profession. Discover the allure of spy fiction and the endless learning opportunities within the publishing world by tuning in to this insightful discussion. Join us to be inspired, motivated, and equipped with actionable tips to help you on your writing journey. Don’t forget to subscribe, share and leave a review to support the podcast and engage in this vibrant literary community.

A Reluctant Spy

Jamie Tulloch is a successful exec at a top tech company, a long way from the tough upbringing that drove him to rise so far and so quickly.

But he has a secret...since the age of 23, he's had a helping hand from the Legend Programme, a secret intelligence effort to prepare impenetrable backstories for undercover agents. Real people, living real lives, willing to hand over their identities for a few weeks in return for a helping hand with plum jobs, influence and access.

When his tap on the shoulder finally comes, it's swiftly followed by the thud of a body. Arriving at a French airport ready to hand over his identity, Jamie finds his primary contact dead, the agent who's supposed to step into his life AWOL and his options for escape non-existent.

Pitched into a deadly mission on hostile territory, Jamie must contend with a rogue Russian general, arms dealers, elite hackers, CIA tac-ops and the discovery of a brewing plan for war. Dangerously out of his depth, he must convince his sceptical mission handler he can do the job of a trained field agent while using his own life story as convincing cover.

Can Jamie play himself well enough to avoid being killed

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Episode
• 6:16 The Allure of Espionage in Fiction
• 19:12 Writing as a Journey: Persistence and Procrastination
• 36:54 The Intersection of Writing and Professional Life
• 56:15 Understanding the Publishing Process
• 1:24:30 The Unexpected Experience of Rejection
• 1:41:20 The Path to Becoming a Published Author
• 1:55:42 David Goodman's New Novel: A Reluctant Spy
• 2:12:05 Audience Q&A and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You come in and you think, oh well, I've got an agent. Now that's the hard part, so we're done with you. Know, 100% not. The hard part comes when you're trying to compete with other fantastic books, all of which have already got over that first hurdle.

Speaker 2: 0:15

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Conversation with your host, nadine Matheson. As always, I hope that you're well and I hope that you've had a good week. Also, you're going to have to excuse me because I have a bit of a cold, so I'm not going to do my usual longer intro where I talk about whatever subject has just popped into my head at the moment, but what I will say is this right now, it seems as if every day we wake up to some kind of, as if every day we wake up to some kind of nonsense. So I'm going to encourage you to please take refuge in books. Buy all the books, read all the books, support your independent bookshops. You need to distract yourself from whatever's going on sometimes, and books are the best refuge. Now let's get on with the show.

Speaker 2: 1:01

This week I'm in conversation with author David Goodman, whose debut novel A Reluctant Spy is out now, and don't forget the links to buy his book and the books of all of my guests on this podcast are available in the show notes, and in the show notes you'll also find a link to my book list on bookshoporg, and the list for the conversation with Nadine Matheson podcast contains all the books from all of my guests who have appeared on this podcast, and the best thing about bookshoporg is that you will always be supporting independent bookshops. So head to the links in the show notes to purchase Dave Goodman's book, pre-order the paperback and buy all of the books, any book you fancy. And also, please, please, don't forget to support this podcast by buying me a cup of coffee, or, at this rate, a cup of Lemsep on my coffee, or is it Kofi? I'm not sure right now. Again, the link is in the show notes right, let's get back to Dave Goodman.

Speaker 2: 2:10

In our conversation, dave Goodman and I talk about his answer to the question are you a spy, how telling people that you're writing a book is actually a form of procrastination, and the dangers of writing to trend, and also we talk about the evolution of a writer. Now, as always, sit back, we'll go for a walk and enjoy the conversation. Dave Goodman, welcome to the Conversation. Hello, thank you very much for having me. You're welcome, right? My first question for you is that you write a spy, espionage, contemporary thriller. So I was thinking how much research do you do into this spy thriller? And I'm not asking if you're a spy, because that would just be like you wouldn't even tell me anyway a lot of people do ask me that.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Uh, to be fair, um, I the disappointing answer that I give to this question, because I get this question quite a lot. The two questions I get are how, how do you know about this stuff? Uh, and how did you research it? And are you a spy? Um, and the answer to the first question is uh, I mostly make it up, uh. And the answer to the second question is no, I'm definitely not a spy. I have a legal document, which is the contract I signed with Headline, my publisher. They have a special clause that they only put into contracts when the person has written something that involves the military or spy stuff. That basically says we don't need to get this book checked with the ministry of defense or the government. And if you sign that clause, you're essentially saying this is all made up, um, and that's very definitely the case, because I signed that. I signed on the line and said you know I'm I, I made this up entirely really that's what your contract specifically has, that clause yeah, and it's not in everyone's contracts.

Speaker 2: 4:03

They only add it when they're uh, when there's sort of that legal gray area where somebody might have some sort of history that they're using in their fiction you know, obviously the lawyer side of me is just like fascinated by that, because mentally I'm going over my contract in my head and I'm like there's, I don't think I have anything even similar to that.

Speaker 1: 4:23

I've checked with some friends of mine who have contracts with the same publisher and they've said no, I don't have that clause. So, legally speaking, I'm definitely not a spy. But the more I say that, the more people are like, no, I don't believe you. And although I did get a review about just before Christmas from the what's called the studies and intelligence journal, which is an in-house journal of the cia, um, and this, this happened just before christmas and I because I, you know, I have google alerts for my, for my book and my name and everything and I saw like a cia url in my google alert. So I was like what, what is that?

Speaker 1: 5:05

And I clicked through and it's a public journal that they distribute for free and they, they have a a thing in there called the intelligence officers bookshelf and it's their, you know, it's their fiction. Most of it's kind of dry academic stuff about intelligence and so on, but they have like a fiction section and they were they were like, oh yeah, this, this book, is obviously, you know, not realistic in the slightest, but it's a very solid thing. Man, I was like, brilliant, I can, I'm getting that on a t-shirt.

Speaker 2: 5:31

This is amazing you need to get it on a t-shirt. You need to get it. Well, it's not a testimonial, but you need to have it somewhere within your, like your paperback editions of the book. But it's like the more you talk about it, the more you protest. The more I'm sitting there going. I'm looking at you like a client now yeah, I'm like yeah okay, are you sure I'm like?

Speaker 1: 5:54

okay, I will follow your instructions, but personally I'm thinking I'm not too sure it is interesting because there's I think there's a long history of people who have had a brush with intelligence, sort of making nod and wink references to it and saying oh yes well, of course I was approached when I was at cambridge etc.

Speaker 1: 6:12

And I and I think that, like that's just not happened to me, I I will confess there was one very brief period and we'll probably talk about this later. But, um, at one point I was thinking about joining the army and right before I moved to london to start a graduate job I had one interview with the army's intelligence corps, a ta unit up in scotland, um, and they, you know, I was on the point of kind of starting the recruitment process with them, but then I got a job and I moved away, so I just never followed through on it. But that's the only time I've ever been anywhere near actual intelligence work and it was one interview and a cup of tea, so definitely not a spy my closest was um.

Speaker 2: 6:54

I applied to MI5's graduate scheme after uni.

Speaker 1: 6:59

I remember hearing you say that in one of your interviews.

Speaker 2: 7:01

Yeah and I, just when I think about it now, I remember the reason why I applied. I saw I didn't. I think I saw an evening standard back then that and I think back then evening standard used to be free. So you get your free copy of the evening standard and, um, they always had their job section on on a Thursday and in the Thursday in the back of it they had that. You know, join MI5 and I think it was the first time they started and this is like late 90s, the first time they started actively, openly recruiting and me being me was like all right, I will why not, I'll give it a go and see what happens.

Speaker 2: 7:39

So, dave, how would you describe your, your writing journey?

Speaker 1: 7:42

so it's always like your writing journey and your publishing journey are two completely different things both very long and very short, is probably the um answer to that and I think, um, I. So I've been writing since I was very young, um, probably very early high school. I was writing stories when I was a kid, telling stories around the campfire and seeing oh, this is a thing I can do. That gets a good reaction from people, so obviously you do more of it. Then I had a couple of supportive teachers in high school and then a very supportive professor at university when I was there and I was writing that whole time but I never really tried to get published. So my first novel, I think, I wrote when I was 23, 24, which would have been 2005 period.

Speaker 1: 8:32

I did NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month, and I wrote a science fiction novel. That was terrible, it was really, really bad. And NaNoWriMo you have to write 50,000 words in a month, which is about 16, just just under 16, 1700 words a day, so which is quite a lot. And at the time I was doing this graduate job and I was living in hotels in the middle of rural Berkshire and it was kind of quite miserable. I was doing long days and then coming back to the hotel and and writing in the evenings, but it did show me that I could finish a book, um. But then I took this book and I went out and, because it was 2005, there was really not a lot of information out there about how to query a book, how to find an agent, how the publishing process worked. So I I sent it to the two or three agents that I could find in the writers and artists yearbook if you remember that big big thing, yeah, book with all the, I think. I think they still publish it, but it's, you know, it's kind of been superseded by the internet, um, and at the same time I was writing short stories and sending them, mostly to american magazines, and you had to actually post it to them and then wait for them to send the rejection slip back, uh, which took, you know, six weeks, um, and I, I did that and I got some very nice replies, probably nicer than I deserved, given that I didn't really know what I was doing. They just said no, no, thank you, I'm not really interested in this. So I kind of just stopped doing that and then just wrote books for 10, 15 years, until 2018, 2019. And in that intervening time I'd been doing kind of very demanding day jobs. I'd worked in marketing mostly and I was working for agencies. I was doing long hours for not much pay and it was not great.

Speaker 1: 10:24

And then 2017, I said I'm gonna, I'm gonna find a job that's a better work-life balance, and I'm gonna try and focus on this writing thing, because it'd been in the background the whole time. So it was only really 2019 2020 that I started figuring out like a regular writing process and started to produce stuff systematically. And then I thought, right, I need to, I need to kind of get off the fence here and give it a proper go. Uh, so I learned to edit because I had a lot of unedited novels that I hadn't really gone back and done anything with. I just produced the first draft and then threw it over my shoulder and kept going. And then I I took this book and I said I'm gonna use this as my test project, I'm gonna just learn to edit took this book and I said I'm going to use this as my test project. I'm going to just learn to edit with this book.

Speaker 1: 11:08

And then I edited it and I tried out lots of different ways to edit and I figured out a process that worked for me and I read it back and I went actually I think this is all right, maybe I could try querying it. And I queried it, sent it out to about 50, I think, 56 agents. In the end, over the course of two or three months, 56? Yeah, I was going quite quickly. I was like sending out sort of four or five a week for a while and I got a couple of nibbles, a couple of full requests.

Speaker 1: 11:40

But then my current agent, harry Ellingworth, who's the same agent as Tom Hindle that you had on the other day actually, he came back to me and said can you send me the full book?

Speaker 1: 11:51

And I sort of went oh, that's very exciting, and I guess I'd done a bunch of research. But I didn't realize at the time how good of a fit Harry was going to be for me as an agent, because he's very much focused on thrillers, which is half of what I write, but also science fiction and fantasy, which is the other half of what I write. So I was like kind of got quite lucky really, um, and he read it, and he read it really quickly. And he came back and he said, um, can we have a chat? Uh. And we got on the phone and, uh, he offered to represent me and in that same week I also sold a short story for the first time. So I had this very, very good week in early 2021 where just my career just appeared overnight like like mushrooms after rain. But it was kind of coming on the back of 20 years of just typing on my own in a room and not really interacting with the writing community or publishing at all. Uh, so it's been very long, but also very short.

Speaker 2: 12:46

It's only been four or five years since I've been in that world basically the thing, though people will see your book on the shelf and there's, there's always an assumption, which you can't. You know you can't blame them that it's happened overnight, but the truth is it hasn't happened overnight. There has been those long, long days and long nights when it's just you staring at your screen thinking what the hell is this? Why am I doing this? This doesn't make no sense it's.

Speaker 1: 13:12

It's been interesting as well, though, because I the. The one thing that people would probably say they remembered about me if they worked with me or if they went to uni with me or if they'd encountered me in some other context was, oh yeah, that guy. He talks about writing all the time. You know, his writing is kind of his thing, um, and I think I kind of got tired of meeting people that I hadn't seen for a little while, and they were like how's the writing going? And then they do the little head tilt, like how's the writing going?

Speaker 1: 13:40

and I would just and I would just feel this, like just just my heart would sink a little bit and I'd be like, oh well, you know, I'm doing x, y, z, and I got sick of sort of mumbling in response to that and that 2018, 2019 was I. I saw a friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a couple of years and they, they did exactly that. They said how's the writing going? And I was like, oh yeah, it's not great and I wanted to be able to say something different.

Speaker 1: 14:06

And you know, and just to say I gave it a go, it did work, it didn't work and I think that like that motivation to fulfill the thing that I've been working towards for a long time was what kind of carried me through the querying process and everything else.

Speaker 2: 14:23

You know, it's really interesting because this morning, before we started, before we met um, I was listening to a podcast. Well, I had a pod, not a podcast. I had a youtube um video going on in the background and I can't remember it was now. The guy was basically saying that the way you succeed is you basically need to work in silence and that when you tell everyone, oh, I'm gonna be writing a book and he actually used the example, you know you tell everyone, you listen, I'm gonna be writing a book, and then you never actually write the book because you spend so much energy saying I'm gonna write the book, you don't actually put that energy into writing the book, so you just have to basically remain quiet about what you're doing and then all of a sudden, ta-da, like here's my book.

Speaker 1: 15:03

But I understand, I understand what it what he was saying yeah, I definitely empathize with the, the, the experience of looking for like a shortcut, looking for a, a thing that would just unlock it all for me and give me the motivation that I needed and give me the, the, the kind of um, the knowledge that I needed. So I did a lot, a lot of that, a lot of procrastination, reading other people's books about how they wrote their books, that sort of thing, and I think, ultimately, that there isn't really a shortcut. If you want to write a hundred thousand words, you need to start typing um, and I and I think, uh, make kind of kind of coming to peace with that and saying I do need to sit down and actually do this and I need to figure out how to do it sustainably in a way that doesn't kind of wreck my mental health or make me deeply unhappy. How do I do this in a repeatable way that I can then build a career on? Because publishing it takes what it takes and it and it it has.

Speaker 1: 16:07

It's quite a structured process with, with um. Quite it's quite deterministic because, if you think about it, publishing is all about moving large amounts of paper around, really, um, and it's all about pallets and warehouses and covers and printing presses and some big you know and ultimately the printing presses and the palettes don't really care about your feelings or how you're doing. So if you're going to engage with that ecosystem, you need to kind of go in with a good idea of how you're going to manage your time and your moods and everything else. And it really was in the last three or four years that I've sort of figured that out. I think. Um, you know, the second book and so on is always going to be a bit more of a challenge than the first, but it's been.

Speaker 2: 16:54

It's been an amazing sort of two or three years definitely because this is the thing you know, when you talk about persistence and yes, persistence is all well and good and you know we need to be persistent, we need to be consistent but I don't think people often talk enough about how exhausting persistence is and what a mental but what a mental drain it is, especially when you can't. You know, especially I say no one's asking for the book at a point you're in a contract, you're just, you're writing in the hope of something that will happen and you're like I need to be persistent, but it can be mentally draining because you don't know what's going to happen at the end absolutely not.

Speaker 1: 17:30

And um, and I think even when you're published and you're under contract, you still get those.

Speaker 1: 17:34

You know, if you want to try a different genre or you want to write a standalone that nobody's asked for, you still sometimes have that thing where you're writing a book that you know is just yours and that could be quite freeing sometimes because it means you're not. You know you're not on a timeline, but also you're not on a timeline so you might end up sort of fiddling with it for a year or two years instead of just getting it done and getting it out there. But it's yeah. If you don't kind of think a bit about how you're going to structure that, then you end up, I think, just getting buffeted around by the forces of publishing and your agent and your editor who are all trying to do good things and do right by you as an author, hopefully. But equally, you know, you end up kind of a hostage to fortune. So I, what I try to do is to come into it with a bit of a plan and then think consciously about how I'm structuring my work.

Speaker 2: 18:28

I was thinking you know I was talking about timing and you know you're working on if you could be working on different things that you may not necessarily be contracted for and I'm working on something. And then I was going over, like the previous pages, and then I suddenly noticed the date for an event that happened in the book was 2022. I had to sit back and say to myself I have not seriously been working on this thing since 2022. And then, obviously, common sense dictates that well, you know, within that time you would have written three other books, so not including the jigsaw man. So you've written three other books in your series. So there's a reason why you, you know 2022 is the start date, but it is a crazy thing if you, if you haven't got, you know, someone's not demanding something of you, you can see how it can take a take a while for you to get to well, get to the end yeah, it really can.

Speaker 1: 19:22

I think I've got. So the book that I got representation with is not.

Speaker 1: 19:26

It's not a reluctant spy is no no, so I I wrote a science fiction like an eco, like climate thriller. Essentially it's kind of a near future, semi post-apocalyptic story called the burning line, and that was the book that I taught myself to edit with. And that book, the very first draft of it, I wrote in 2014. So it's over 10 years ago, and it sat on my hard drive for four or five years, didn't do anything with it, and then I started to look at it in 2020, because in 2019, I wrote another book which was called Shards of Starlight, which is another big science fiction book, and that was an experiment for me in in outlining and doing a really, really detailed outline. But the problem was that the final draft was 186,000 words.

Speaker 2: 20:13

it was just way too long and I kind of looked at three books. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 20:19

It's far too long. And I looked at that book and said I have absolutely no idea how to fix that book, so I'm going to pick one that's shorter and I'm going to try and edit it down. So I looked at this book the Burning Line and I said I think this is quite commercial, I think it's got potential. So that's the one I used to practice editing and then ended up submitting and harry signed me for it. But it it was this kind of classic thing where it's it's kind of a thriller but it's also kind of sci-fi. And we submitted it to thriller publishers and we submitted it to um science fiction publishers and both sides of that equation said it's not quite right for us. It just fell right in the middle between those two genres, which was kind of the point. But, um, they just nobody took, nobody decided to take it on, which was a shame. So I wrote uh, harry said can you, can you write just a straight spy thriller, just a straight one. And I started writing a book called the disaster club, um, which is also not this book, um, and that was 2022-23. That went out on submission and it went just to Thriller Imprints.

Speaker 1: 21:29

And then Toby Jones at Headline who's? My editor now got back in touch and said so you can obviously write quickly. You've sent me two books in the space of less than two years. Um, they're both very good. I can't buy either of them. Um, do you have any other ideas? And I sort of went whoa and freaked out a bit and harry said, like let's, let's have a chat about it. And we wrote up some pitches. We sent them over um, and then he asked for a sample for one of them, which was a reluctant spy. It was called Legends when I first started drafting it. The name came later and I wrote a sample. We sent it off and they bought it on the sample. So I sold my debut on a proposal, even though it was actually the third book that I'd written with Harry, my agent, so quite unusual with Harry, my agent, so quite unusual.

Speaker 2: 22:30

I have so many questions about that, but first one I popped in that was in my head with Toby when he said you know, you can obviously write, you can write well, but also you can write quickly. It explains to you why he wouldn't take those two books on he wouldn't take those two books on.

Speaker 1: 22:46

Yeah, so I, I have the actual, I have the rejection emails to go go by, and the first one, uh, the burning line. It was basically it's too sci-fi for us as an imprint yeah uh, this the second one.

Speaker 1: 22:53

He was like this is a great book but it's um, it was a contemporary spy thriller but it had a kind of techie, techno thrillery type twist. Yeah, uh in and he said that's not kind of a good fit. Like it's a great book, really enjoyed it, but that that vibe is just not quite right for for the list that we currently have. And I think a lot of the time the bigger unacknowledged thing is that you come in and you think, oh well, I've got an agent. Now that's hard parts over and done with. Uh, you know a hundred percent, not like.

Speaker 1: 23:25

The hard part comes when you're trying to compete with other fantastic books, all of which have already got over that first hurdle of finding an agent. But you're competing for a limit, very limited number of physical slots to actually produce those books and, as a result, you know you could have an amazing book. But if there's another book that's very similar, or they already produced one that last year and they don't want to do another book of that kind, or there's just one other that's just a slightly better match, you're out of luck. You know it's nothing really to do with the individual quality of your book, it's just the the market that you're in. So it was quite interesting.

Speaker 1: 24:04

I I was really excited because it I think it and toby said this to me at the time he says I really want to work with you rather than buying a particular book from you. Um, please, please, validate my belief by giving me some good ideas. And I and I said here's some good I hope some good ideas. And he said, let's, let's try that one. But it was really weird because I ended up in this situation of writing my first ever debut novel, you know, effectively from scratch, in the space of about six months, without you know, without the time that most debuts have to spend, you know, two or three years thinking about it and putting it together.

Speaker 2: 24:45

Um, so yeah, it was a pretty wild experience you know, listening to you I feel like my head's in the tumble dryer because it's just like, and also thinking rejection is such a strange thing. Because I think you know, when most people think about rejection they see it in terms it's a straight line you offer something or you ask someone out and they say no, and then that's the end of it, like you go back, you get, you go back to the start. But your rejection was like I'm offering you something, we like it, but we don't like it, go back and do something else. So you're still in this very strange relationship. You have to keep you know you keep offering something until you can offer something. You know, here's a pie. Can you make a better pie? Can you put apples in it? Can you put cinnamon in?

Speaker 1: 25:31

it? Yeah, and I think, to be honest, I've. I've, because I've made a lot of friends in the in the writing arena, since, since um getting an agent, I've met various people through my agent and through different writing communities I'm in. I've definitely seen a huge range of people's experiences with their second book. Uh, because that's the one where they are. If they've got a two-book contract, they're they're, you know, pitching ideas and they're, for the first time, they're doing it in collaboration with an editor, yeah. Or if they're you know, one book deal, they're having to pitch an option book and they're trying to come up with something that might get another deal. And a lot of them have really struggled with that and they've struggled with writing the book. And you know I've.

Speaker 1: 26:14

I struggled with it a bit as well, but I've kind of my first book was my second book in that in because the first book that I actually wanted to get published just didn't find a home, and I think that is also way more common than people let on. I think it happens constantly and it's horrible. But if you do want to interact with trade publishing, you kind of need to get used to the idea that a lot of very good books just don't make it um and and and kind of be slightly unsentimental about that fact, I think, but it's, it's a difficult adjustment to make, definitely what do you think is about your psyche that makes you, that's made you, be able to come speak?

Speaker 2: 26:58

so I was saying, what is it about your psyche that enables you to handle it? Because it's a completely different sort of pressure than what most people are used to. And most people, a lot of people, you know they can't separate, separate themselves, their personal selves from the professional self, and so that rejects like you can't help it. You're taking it on personally. A lot of people just say, well, well, I'm giving up. I've given you three books, what more do you want from me?

Speaker 1: 27:26

And I do not blame them at all. I think I'm quite stubborn. As a general rule, I don't like hearing no, so I tend to push and push and push. I think that I also I kind of had a word with myself early on when, when I was transitioning out of this you know, working long hours in my day job and saying I want to give writing a proper goal, I kind of had this chat with myself, because I live in the country and I live near the, the beach and some woodland, and I go to the woods and I go down to the water most mornings. So I have a lot of long walks and a lot of thinking time.

Speaker 1: 28:07

And I remember quite vividly having several walks where I was thinking like, if you try to do this and you don't get anywhere, does that mean you're going to give up? Are you going to stop writing? And I was like, well, no, because I think for me, writing is not. It has to not be about the extrinsic stuff that I can't control, the you know, awards and getting picked for waterstones and all the stuff that's out of my control. Yeah, I can't control any of that. I can't control whether I get published. Can't control whether of that. I can't control whether I get published, I can't control whether I find an agent. None of that's in my control. I can only control the work itself, how much I produce and how good what I produce is. And I think that I was like do I enjoy that bit, do I enjoy the writing bit? And I'm like, yes, I do. Are you going to do it anyway, even if it never comes to anything? Because at the time I was working this agency job and the money wasn't all that great and I could have been doing freelance work. There's a bunch of other stuff I could have done with my time. That probably would have been a better economical use of my time, um, but I was like I would probably be very unhappy if I did that.

Speaker 1: 29:15

And, and that's the thing is, I tried to give up writing two or three times in my mid to late 20s because it felt like it was only bringing me sort of angst, um, and then I sort of thought about it and said, no, I'm, I'm always happier when I'm writing, so I need to figure out how to do that regularly enough, uh, that I can do it all the time and then disentangle it from publishing as an entity and kind of try and keep the two quite compartmentalized.

Speaker 1: 29:44

Um, and I, I would definitely recommend, if you are a younger writer or somebody who's interacting with publishing for the first time, do that, thinking like, sit down, write it out, think about who, who you are and what you want and why you want it, and try and disentangle what you want and why you want it and try and disentangle goals that you can actually affect from, from dreams that you you know that might happen and might not happen. Uh, because if you can focus on specific goals, I think you'll be a lot happier than if you focus on the dreams and then, if the dreams don't come true, you're going to be devastated, obviously, uh, and that I think a lot of people tangle those two things up I always say as well, you know, you can't look at what everyone else is doing.

Speaker 2: 30:28

You can be inspired by people, which I think is completely different.

Speaker 2: 30:31

So I can be inspired by you and seeing what you've done, I can be inspired by you said we mentioned tom hinder, who I spoke to um the other day know and be inspired by the fact that he got Waterstones Book of the Month twice and I'm like how on earth does that happen?

Speaker 2: 30:47

So you can be inspired by people, but I don't think. I think if you go into it looking to replicate what they've done and saying I must have that you'll be unhappy, because it's hard. You have to focus on what you can do, because even I remember I've said it with a jigsaw man when I wrote the book because I'd self-published before, I already had this option in my head was which was well, if I don't get an agent and it doesn't mean it means it does I don't get traditional publisher, I'll just publish it myself. It doesn't and I won't stop writing. I just knew there's another option for me and I think sometimes you have to be quite clinical about it and take the emotion away from it and I think as well, the thing that's always given me a lot of um solace is is the.

Speaker 1: 31:37

It's a sense that no book is ever really truly dead. Um, you know you, even if nobody buys it, even if it just goes back into your drawer, you can revisit it in the future, you can self-publish it if you want, you can uh use it as a calling card and and it might end up getting you, you know, a phone call from an editor later on, like it did with me. So these, the work is always there. The work that you've done is doesn't just evaporate as soon as you stop doing it. You know it's behind you, um, but it can form this sort of uh well, of resources and ideas that you can just call on.

Speaker 1: 32:15

And I think, if you start thinking of it that way, instead of being like, oh well, I've wasted my time, I've wasted my time on this book, nobody's bought it. I can't believe I spent a year writing this thing and you know, and I see that all the time People say stuff like that online or in the pub when we're chatting, they're like oh, I can't. You know, it was a waste of time. I was like no it book and you have a finished book and maybe five years from now you can pull that book out of your back pocket and say to an editor do you want my zombie romance? Now? You know, because you know there's books will always have a long-term shelf life, beyond just the the immediate first time that you try to get them out in the world I mean I'm laughing about the zombie romance.

Speaker 2: 33:02

I'm sure there's a film about a zombie romance and I know there is several.

Speaker 2: 33:06

Yeah, yeah so that was one reason why I was laughing. Listeners, it's time for a very short break. If you're enjoying this conversation with nadine matheson, I want to help keep the podcast going. Why not buy me a cup of coffee? Your support goes such a long way in keeping these conversations flowing. Just check out the link in the show notes. But also, it's so true what you say about having that book in your back pocket, because before Christmas.

Speaker 2: 33:34

So I'd finished editing Henley Book 4, and that was literally, yeah, a week before Christmas. I'd finished that, that, and I'm then in my zone of I'm free, I'm free as a bird, I have nothing to do and I'm reading stuff. And then I was going through my computer and I was going through these old files and then I found the book that I'd written in 20. When did I write it? I've got to think when I did the course. I did started the course in 2016, so I wrote it and finished it in 2015. And my plan was to edit it and then I'll just self-publish it. But then I did the course and Jigsaw man happened, so it just kind of just got left away in the hard drive and then I found it.

Speaker 2: 34:14

So I've written this book, nick, what 10 years ago? And and I mean it's completely different to what I write now. But I read it and I was like actually there's something. Yeah, I'm like there's something in here. There's something in here, so I'm going to resurrect it in the summer. My agent might be surprised when I give it to him. I was like this is so not what you write. But you said I don't think anything. Really it doesn't go to go to waste at all. And anything you do is not just because you know you don't get the agent you want, you don't get the publishing publication deal you want, or you have self-published and self-publishing hasn't bought you in a penny.

Speaker 1: 34:48

It doesn't mean it's gone to waste, because you have actually learned something from that process 100, and the work that you did five or ten years ago is rarely as bad as you think it is, but also the work you're doing right now is rarely as good as you hope it is. So it's kind of a as you know, there's that you're constantly evolving and there's you can always learn lessons, I think, by looking backwards as well as forwards definitely but was there ever a moment when toby's suggesting to you, well, what about a straight down the line spy thriller?

Speaker 2: 35:20

did you not ever say to yourself, really, is this what I should be doing and can I do this, or are you just like? This is business, let me just see what happens.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Well, I mean, this is the thing is. It's actually worked out very well for me because I've always had two big kind of, uh, genre fascinations. One is science fiction. You can probably see the shelves behind me are full of science fiction novels. One is science fiction, which I've always been into. I've always wanted to write it. I have written it since I was quite young. The other is spy fiction.

Speaker 1: 35:51

So I did my dissertation at university on John le Carré and Graham Greene. My professor, who's named in the acknowledgements for the book, was one of the first people to say to me you seem to really enjoy this genre, you should maybe think about writing one. Uh, he got a name check for that. I sent him a copy. Actually, it was lovely, he, you know, and he wrote me this beautiful handwritten letter back saying thank you so much for sending these to oxford. And yeah, it was, it was really, it was really nice. Um, so spy fiction has always been there. I think.

Speaker 1: 36:23

When people force me to choose, I always kind of say, well, purely by volume alone, I've probably read and written far more science fiction than spy novels. But I, I hope to do both. And the other thing you might notice behind me is this you know, half a yard of ian banks, yes, and uh, ian banks or ian banks, had this very, very um structured career where he wrote contemporary fiction as ian banks and science fiction as ian banks and he convinced two different publishers to to let him do that and he basically just alternated them. And I've said, every chance I can, when I'm talking to my agent, when I'm talking to my editor, uh, when I'm talking on podcasts, I've said I want to do exactly the same thing, right down to using a middle initial, uh, because to me that's the ideal, because I write quite fast, uh, and I ideally want to write two books, uh, alternate like one book one year, one book the other year. Now, whether I can get that to line up uh in in a nice way that means I don't have any horrible publishing or scheduling clashes, that remains to be seen, but that is currently the plan. That's.

Speaker 1: 37:33

What I'm doing is I'm writing the second book in this series at the moment, um, and I'm also in the middle of final edits on a science fiction novel. So it's kind of, hopefully I'll hop between the two. So you know, I I haven't had to choose. It's not like a commercial decision where I've. I've said I, I I'm only going to write the one that will make me money. But you know, I haven't made that decision. I'm instead just doing both. Um, and that's. That's my happy place.

Speaker 2: 37:59

That's where I want to be it's good, though, isn't it, that you have that happy place, and these are two. Your two genres are these are the genres you actually want to write and, as opposed to, as in a lot of people, they they feel like they have to write to trend and they're not being authentic to themselves because it's going against what's going against the grain, it's going against what you enjoy yeah, and I think if you're, if you're attempting to write to trend, it's it's a little bit like timing the stock market.

Speaker 1: 38:28

You know it's probably a bad idea because you're at least two years behind that trend. You know, this is this. The books that are coming out today are what people were buying editorially two years ago. Yeah, so you know, if you're just sitting down to write a woman on a train in a window, domestic thriller, you know that had its moment five or six years ago. It might come back again and if you've got one ready to go, awesome.

Speaker 1: 38:58

But I think that kind of slightly cynical timing of the market is not, um, is not necessarily all that sensible of a strategy. I think you, what you can do is write the book that you want to book, that you write. You want to write, but have an eye on the market when you're doing it. So think about, you know, is this viable? Does this feel like it? Does it? Does it have a hook that I can explain in a single sentence? Um, can I convincingly get across what this book is about to my editor? You know, and all those commercial considerations are going to come into play when you have those conversations, um, and you can't avoid them. Once you're in the ecosystem and you're talking to people, they're like what's the? You know what's? How am I going to pitch this to sales?

Speaker 2: 39:41

how am I?

Speaker 1: 39:42

going to pitch this to the, the booksellers, and you have to.

Speaker 2: 39:45

You have to kind of figure that out, I think yeah, I, because I remember and I don't keep going back to the jigsaw man but when I wrote it, when I came up with the idea to write it, I was looking at the market because obviously you look, and I was because I was doing the course so you're looking at what is number one, what is popular, and at the time you know it's the girl on everything that was, it was psychological thrillers everywhere. And I just remember, look, I just remember looking, thinking, well, yeah, there's psychological thrillers everywhere and domestic um thrillers, but there's no serial. No one's writing about serial killers anymore. It's like the serial killers had disappeared. I thought I'm gonna bring the serial killers back. And then by the time I wrote the book and then the time the book came out, it must have been a lot of people must have had the same idea, because then there was a load of serial killer books that came out. In what year was it? 2021? So you can't predict it.

Speaker 1: 40:38

I thought it was just going to be, you know, be me alone bringing it back I think there's actually a name for that like it's because it happens in hollywood quite a lot like you'll get two completely unrelated volcano films or two completely yeah asteroid films. It happened, I think, three or four times in the night happened loads of times armageddon and the core deep impact.

Speaker 2: 41:00

Do you like pierce brosnan's one with the volcano?

Speaker 1: 41:03

I can't remember what that one's called, but anyway but yeah, I think it is literally just called volcano. Um, oh, no, dante's peak is the one.

Speaker 2: 41:10

Yeah, that's it I don't.

Speaker 1: 41:12

How do I know that? That's ridiculous. Yeah, I just I I store useless information. I think a lot of guys store, like, football statistics. I store, like you know, random movies, piece Brosnan's filmography and things like that. But I think I do have a question for you. Actually, I'm very curious because I've met a lot of lawyers who are also authors. Yes, what do you think it is about lawyers that makes them good or attracted to the world of publishing?

Speaker 2: 41:47

You know I've asked this question of other lawyers.

Speaker 1: 41:50

I've heard you ask it. I want to hear your answer.

Speaker 2: 41:55

The only thing I can put it down to is that I I hear so many stories in the and that, and that is what you are. That is what they are. When I'm given a case, it is literally a story. You know, something happened at the beginning, middle and hopefully I get to the end of it. And there was.

Speaker 2: 42:12

I do remember going through a client's um statement, or no. I was drafting their proof of evidence, as we call it, if you're the defense, so it's their statement, their version of events, and I'm going through it and I'm thinking this is just a story. I don't know if I believe it, but it is a story and I think that's what you're. You're drawn to you, you're drawn to that story and and whilst thinking criminal law, there's so many various twists and turns in that story.

Speaker 2: 42:40

There's, you know, a witness can come in at the last minute and completely turn everything on its head, and that's kind of what you want in a thriller. You want that red herring to not be the thing you thought it was going to be, and then something to come in and take you by surprise and also, I think, like clients, like you would have heard me, I've done it more than once I'll say character and I end up saying witness or client what I meant to say character. But you know, I always say you can have 10 clients charged with the same offence, but everyone's story is different and I think I realise, with clients as well, and when I am looking at character, you're not, they're not just one dimensional villains, not just a villain. There is a backstory to them. They've been, something has made them that way and then something continues to motivate them. So that's the only. I mean those, that's some. Those my reasons, probably why I'm drawn to writing, and especially criminal.

Speaker 1: 43:36

Do you think this, the very structured nature of of legal training, uh and, and the quite high pressured nature of the job as well, kind of prepares you to to do things like write, writing to deadlines?

Speaker 2: 43:48

yeah yeah yeah, definitely, I mean I, I think personally, even if I didn't have the legal training, I need someone to say to me I need it to be done by such and such day, otherwise, yeah, yeah, I need a deadline.

Speaker 2: 44:01

But I I can find a million other things to do I can get. I get distracted very, very, very easily, so I need those deadlines. But the legal training it does, it does a variety of things, so it does the. Here's a deadline. You need to write to deadline.

Speaker 2: 44:16

If you're writing an application, you're writing a skeleton argument. Have you? Have you got rid of all the noise, all the stuff that's not relevant, everything that's important? Are you able to put that, just the essential facts, in an hour in your document?

Speaker 2: 44:29

If you're making, if you're doing your closing speech which I always say to the baby lawyers you're telling them a story, so you need to convince them to arrive at the conclusion you want them to arrive at. You need to that. You want them to follow you. So I think all of that works. When you're writing a book without it, yeah, and and also I'm a, I know you're a planner because I read your blog and I'm I'm a planner and I need, I need that plan. But again, same as when I'm writing a closing speech, I'll always say to the baby lawyers that you don't have to stick rigidly to that speech, you know, because you need to allow for the fact that the prosecutor might have said something 10 minutes before you got on your feet, so you need to be able to have room in there to respond to that. And that's the same way I feel about writing my plan for my books. I have my plan, but I'm not like I need to stick to every single thing in this plan.

Speaker 1: 45:22

It's I just call it a safety net so I can go off course and then come back to it if I need to and one of the kind of side effects of having sold, uh, the, the book on proposal is that, um, I've, I've had to kind of formalize how I do planning and and, uh, pitching and and writing up proposals, um, because before that I would, you know, I would write, I would write a bullet point outline and it was very light, um, and then I went the to the other extreme, and I had like a spreadsheet with you know every scene and every plot beat in it, and that's how I got 100 pages.

Speaker 2: 45:57

Spreadsheets scare me no it's terrible.

Speaker 1: 46:00

And then what I realized is I had a really nice middle ground where I could produce something that looked a bit like a film treatment. So it's between three and five pages, or sometimes eight to ten pages, and it's essentially just like a slightly jazzed up synopsis. So it's got a bit of voice to it. It's not just a dry recounting of what happens, but it is quite high level and it's functioning at the chapter level rather than scenes and beats. And then when I actually start writing, I then, as I'm writing on a monday or a tuesday, I'll sit down and say what am I writing this week? And I'll look at the high level outline and then I will do a micro outline for that week and I'll go through and do plot beats and what.

Speaker 1: 46:44

What does the scene need to do? Who's in the scene? You know how does it? How does it link to previous scenes, how does it link to future scenes? And I do the detail work only when I get to it and I think that helps me to be flexible and adaptive and have the flexibility to change things a little bit as I go, but without feeling like I don't have a plan at all and I'm just sort of flailing around trying to figure out what's going on, and that works really well for me.

Speaker 2: 47:11

I mean there are some people who would be listening to us, me, I mean, there are some people who'd be listening to us and the very idea of you know, they're saying talking about beats, microbeats, planning going back to the planner, but what? No, no, it would just, it would just scare them off. But you, just you, honestly, you just have to find the right way that works for you, and you probably don't, you probably won't even realize what works for you until you've actually written your first book no, and one of the nice things about becoming published is is making connections with other writers and you know, sitting in discord servers and various other places, chatting to people in group chats and things.

Speaker 1: 47:46

and I have several friends who are discovery writers who tell me oh yeah, well yeah, in order to write that book, I had to essentially write it three times, you know, know, and completely broke it down, rebuilt it from scratch. I'm like that sounds horrendous, that sounds really painful. And I always say to them I'm like I'm discovery writing as well. It's just I do it in bullet points instead of finished books. You know, I'm still making it up, but you guys are like writing the whole book to figure out what's going on and I'm like that's a lot no, I'm not found.

Speaker 2: 48:17

What's happening now, though? Obviously it's like anything the more you do, you adapt as you go, as you go along. So, whereas before, in the early days, when I made with the first, definitely the first three books in the series that I wrote it was very much I had the plan, I stuck I say stuck to the plan, you know it's flexible, but it was. It was linear from beginning to end. And then I found, with the fourth book and it was a timing thing, so I was doing other things I was like I don't have time to get this book done, and then I just adapted it, whereas I wrote the not what I do.

Speaker 2: 48:53

I would write the first two acts, so act one, act two, because that's how I, that's how I plan, that's how I work. Yeah, I was before I'd do finish it and then go back and do the rewrite. I wrote act one and two and then, when I finished that too, I then started to rewrite, so I wouldn't do the last, third, because then once I've yeah, because then once I've rewritten it, I know exactly, you know I've cleared up the mess, because it's the messy first draft I don't finish the messy first draft. And so with the fourth book, I'm like yeah, and I'm like that's, I was telling Tariq about it. When was that? Yeah?

Speaker 1: 49:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 49:26

I was telling him about it and he was like, oh, same thing. I said, yeah, and I've worked, and I and I've worked, and I've worked. I think actually that works for me, because my first draft is always an absolute mess, but if I leave it at the end, before I get to the end and clear it up, I know exactly what I need to do to finish it see that's, that's really good and the thing is like that could work for me.

Speaker 1: 49:47

I could try that and I might yeah, I might even try it on the book I'm writing at the moment.

Speaker 1: 49:51

But I think the the one thing I've definitely found is that writing processes they they're not static, they change yeah, uh in response to your skills, how much they've changed, new things you've learned how to do and time pressure and you know competing projects and once you're published you you're doing that kind of merry-go-round where you're promoting one book, you're outlining a second book, you're drafting a third and you're possibly editing a fourth. That's depending how fast you write and you can't have a rigid writing process that never changes.

Speaker 2: 50:26

You need to kind of roll with the punches a little bit did it surprise you once you got into the publishing process and you found yourself when when it happened to me you find yourself in that situation where you're you're working on a same book, two book, one's pissed off doing whatever, and you're getting into the flow of writing your book, and then the next one, the book that you've sent off, has come back and you're like I need to start, I need to go back and do the edits, whatever on that, but also you're supposed to be promoting the book that's currently out at the moment, so you are doing three things. Was that a shock? It was a shock for me. I didn't like it really was.

Speaker 1: 51:05

Yeah, I I think what I've said, uh to to my family when I'm trying to explain this and they're asking me what you know what I'm working on and things, I said I used to have three jobs. I used to have the. I used to have the job of being just a human, just existing in the world and you know, keeping the house clean and you know, um, seeing my family and you know living, yeah, doing my day job, um, making sure that you know the lights stay on and I do a good job at my day job. And writing and writing was like the third thing and it was kind of the third thing, priority wise, because it was always the thing that would fall by the wayside of the first two, you know, picked up.

Speaker 1: 51:41

I now have four jobs. I have been a human doing my day job writing but publishing is a is a fourth and probably sometimes occasionally harder job where people are relying on me to do things at certain times. They're relying me to complete things within agreed timelines. So suddenly that has kind of leapfrogged and writing is dropped into sort of third place sometimes and then publishing is sort of hopping up and down, depending. You know it goes silent for months at a time sometimes. But I've definitely found that quite hard and I think, even though I felt like I was really prepared for it.

Speaker 1: 52:18

You know, the numbers don't really lie and when I looked at my word count for last year I do an end of years numbers post where I kind of count up what I've done each year, and it was half. My word count had been cut in half and I was like goodness me that I didn't expect it to be that drastic. I thought, oh, maybe it'll be 20, 30, 000 words less than last year and it wasn't. It wasn't, it was half. You know, I went from a 160, 180, 000 words in a year to 80, 000. Oh, wow, that is a big cut, big cut and it was largely because I just I was doing stuff.

Speaker 1: 52:49

I felt like I was really busy. I was kind of faffing around with the outline for a science fiction novel. That felt like work, but it wasn't really work. I was procrastination, um, and I don't regret it because you know it's my debut year, it's first time I'd ever done it. But I definitely, looking back, I'm like I probably should have just cracked on with a, with a book, and just distracted myself by writing another thing, and I didn't really. I finished books, I kind of finished edits and I did bits and bobs, but I didn't really start a new project and I kind of wish I had. I'm on one now.

Speaker 2: 53:22

I'm started one now yeah, I think it takes you about a good three books in before you start getting into the rhythm that works for you. Yeah, or writing you said writing, publishing, promoting, because they're all completely different things, do all completely different jobs. I think it takes about three years to get into a rhythm that works for you. I had a god, I had a question for you and I went out of my head and I was supposed to write it down and it's gone. But I'll ask you this question instead. You know, when you're talking before earlier about you know telling people you're going to write a book and you haven't written the book and then you meet your mate in the pub you haven't seen for years and that's happened to the book.

Speaker 1: 53:58

How did they respond when you were like I have the reluctant spy um, exceptionally and exceptionally well, and I think you can probably tell that by the, the number of people that I thank and the acknowledgments.

Speaker 1: 54:12

Yeah, I think every, every first time novelist is always gonna, their first acknowledgments page is going to be their longest. So long, yeah, because that is where the bill comes due in terms of all the people that have helped you over the years. And and that's your first and best chance to make sure that you know, because not everyone's going to read every book I write, but most people I know are probably gonna at least buy or check out the library my first book because they're like, oh yeah, dave's finally made good on the thing he's been saying he's going to do for years. I'm gonna have a look at it, and one of my favorite things to do has been to hand the book to a friend of mine who's in the acknowledgements and watch them when they get to their own name, because it's it's really.

Speaker 1: 54:57

You know, I didn't do this on my own. I did it with the support of my friends and my family and all the people who I worked with over the years, who didn't sort of um, who didn't laugh at me when I said that I was a writer. You know all those people, even if they weren't actively supporting me, they weren't discouraging me, and that's kind of almost as important sometimes, and I think it's been. The amazing thing has been the number of people that I used to work with you know, 10, 15 years ago in some cases who have messaged me on LinkedIn, of all places, saying it's always LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 55:30

It's always LinkedIn. The weird one. It's no use for facebook. Yeah, it's no use for anything else, but all of a sudden, you'll get people you've worked with. Yeah, I've got like.

Speaker 1: 55:41

I got a message the other day from a guy that I worked with uh in the playhouse theater in edinburgh when I was um 16 and I've I've not seen him since and, for whatever reason I'm on, it's the only social media network that uh that I I'm linked with him on and he followed me on there years and years ago. He lives down south somewhere now and he messaged me. He said oh, I picked up your book. It's fantastic. And I'm like that's awesome, like thank you, you know, because you know it's only out in hardbacks, coming out in paperback yeah june and 20.

Speaker 1: 56:15

You know it's 22, 18 to 22 quid. It's quite a lot of money to spend on some guy you worked with 30 years ago. You know I'm like, thanks, man, that's so. Yeah, it's great, it is, and the response has been really amazing and kind of kind of humbling, to be honest yeah, this is the question I was going to ask you, the one that disappeared from my brain.

Speaker 2: 56:36

Is there anything in your previous jobs that has, I'd say, made this publishing, publishing journey easier?

Speaker 1: 56:46

yes, I think so. Yeah, so I, I was an English literature graduate, um, and we'll maybe talk about this when we talk about the kind of set questions that you have at the end. Yeah, but when I came out of university I didn't really know what I wanted to do and, for reasons that I'll tell you in a minute, I didn't go for the thing I thought I was going for. So I was kind of adrift and I ended up getting a graduate scheme job, working in it, consulting, which is kind of quite techie, but I was doing the soft side of it. I was, I was writing communications, so I was having to write, you know, uh, advertising and um manuals and all sorts of writing. So I did creative work for a long time and I got to work with some amazing advertising writers, people who wrote ads, and I got to do lots of different things and work in lots of different industries. So I can fairly convincingly talk about a lot of different industries, which is useful, and I also just learned how to figure out how businesses worked.

Speaker 1: 57:56

So when I came into trade publishing, I think I was kind of primed to look at the processes and think about how it all slotted together and kind of takes a slightly unromantic view of it, because I think, you know, it's a creative industry and it's full of people who love books and it's full of kind of quite introverted bookish people who love to talk about books, and there's this of people who love books and it's full of kind of quite introverted bookish people who love to talk about books and there's this tendency to treat it all like it's sort of covered in stardust and it's all about dreams and hopes. But it's as I said before, I think it's quite a it's a logistics business when you get down to it yeah and, as an author, the in the most unromantic way.

Speaker 1: 58:33

You are a business to business supplier of a product that they then, you know, send out into the world for you. Um, so I think, coming in with that mindset not not like cold, hard commercialism, but coming, coming in and thinking, yes, this is a really fun, collaborative, creative thing that I'm doing, but it's also it is a business and I'm dealing with them as business partners um, that helped me, I think, to.

Speaker 2: 59:00

I mean, it didn't help me that much because I still had quite a tough first debut year yeah, it did a number on my productivity 100 but I think it did help me to think more, and think quite consciously about how I interacted with publishing and with my publisher and my editor and so on but it's like what I've always said more than once on this podcast there comes a point when you've got to take off the tv glasses version, like you know, the tv movie version, glasses of publishing, which is, you know, you know your editor sending what did I watch the other day? She, um, she didn't send her up, she sent her off to a castle to um, to edit her book and think about what she wanted to do with her, her editor, I think murder.

Speaker 1: 59:42

She goes on a cruise. Uh, yeah, when her publisher sends her on a cruise, yeah because she handed in her draft early.

Speaker 2: 59:48

Actually, I want to talk to my editor. I'm going to say to her man, I gave you my edits my like my edits a week earlier than I said I would where's my cruise? I'm gonna watch that. She'll just laugh.

Speaker 1: 1:00:01

It's interesting because the other thing that happened, uh, around the publication of the book was it got, uh, optioned for tv, and my experience of tv was very much that it was like being wined and dined. It was incredibly exciting zoom calls and then complete silence for, you know, six to nine months, because that's what I? Somebody once explained it to me. They said um, everything in publishing is a no until it's a yes, like it's no, no, no, no, and then you get a yes and you no, no, no, yes, whereas in film and tv, everything is a yes until it's a no. So people are very excited to meet you. They've got all these ideas. Here's a pitch deck.

Speaker 1: 1:00:43

It's so true, you know it's super exciting, but then complete silence and and almost nothing actually gets made relative to the number of things that get optioned. And I was really glad somebody said that to me because I I mean, my head was spinning anyway just with the, the number of meetings we had and the number of people we spoke to. But it was, yeah, it was good to kind of keep me grounded level grounded yeah because otherwise I'll be sitting there like jessica from uh demanding my cruise and say, come on, let's get going but.

Speaker 2: 1:01:17

But there's a reason why they call it development hell, because it really is development hell, because even with um jigsaw man, I remember getting to the point where you said everything's a yes. It's a yes that we got these screenwriters we've got on board, we got this director we have on board and this is what we'll do with it. So you're having all those meetings, having all those discussions. I was having phone calls where the person was going to be adapting the, adapting the book, and talking about character, doing all these things, and then it's like you've had all these dates, you've been romanced to the hill. You literally think, well, I'm going to get the ring now, and then they just ghost you and the thing is it might happen.

Speaker 1: 1:01:56

It might still happen like they might come out of nowhere a year later and say, okay, we've got a green light and you're like, oh, brilliant, uh. But you know, you just need to get used to that weird, like really intense love bombing at the start. And I'm scottish and, as a general rule, we don't do very well with like receiving compliments straight to our faces. So I was sitting on these calls just like, just like I really I don't know how to respond to people being this nice to me in a sustained way for like an hour. It was intense, but it was amazing. It's one of the weirdest two months of my life, but it was. Yeah, that was. I think, to be honest, that was a large part of why blew your mind yeah, just really the only reason I'm laughing so much.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

I just feel like it's just going to be like an eastenders episode. You know you've been love bombed and then he's. He's disappeared and then no one's seen him for years and they think he's dead. You know there was a funeral, you're sure he's dead. And then up he pops he just walks in the door of the queen hello paula, yeah, yeah, I don't watch these tenders.

Speaker 1: 1:03:06

I don't know any characters you've summed up these tenders.

Speaker 2: 1:03:11

So right before we go on, it goes on. I told you it goes off in the tangent. Anyway, before we go on to the last set of questions, then would you like to tell listeners of the conversation about a reluctant spy?

Speaker 1: 1:03:22

and then what's happening next for you uh, yeah, we should probably talk about the actual book um so it might be a good thing. So reluctant spy is about a young man called jamie tillich. Um, he is, uh, scott from the west of edinburgh.

Speaker 1: 1:03:39

I'm a scott from the west of edinburgh, but I'm not you're not Jamie no, I'm not Jamie um, and he uh, he's a young guy from a slightly sketchy housing estate on the edge of Edinburgh and he uh gets to Cambridge on his own uh, essentially on a scholarship. And when he's at Cambridge, he's very aware that he's not like a lot of the other people who are at Cambridge University. And then he gets approached by an MI6 program called the Legends program who say we will give you the safety net that you do not currently have, so we will essentially pay off your student loans. We'll find a job after university, we'll help you build your career, we'll give you all the things that your middle and upper class colleagues all have already because of where they were born and the people they know. We'll give you that. We'll give you that support and in return, we'll come back five to 10 years from now and we'll ask you to just go on a quick holiday while we use your identity for something and we won't tell you what it is, but you'll come back from your holiday. Nobody will be any the wiser. We'll have done what we need to do, um, and and it came from this idea that faking an identity in the digital age is incredibly hard to do so what if we had people who would just loan their identities to covert agents? So he says, oh yeah, I think I can do that. And he agrees to do that.

Speaker 1: 1:05:06

And when the book starts he's living his new life, uh, and he's kind of unhappy because he feels his life feels quite limited. He's not allowed to have that many friends, he's not allowed to have photos of himself online. He just needs to basically exist in the world and create that digital trail that convinces people that he's a real person, because he is a real person. But then he gets activated and he gets told to go to charles de gaulle airport in paris and meet his handler, and then he'll swap with his opposite number.

Speaker 1: 1:05:35

Who's this doppelganger? A guy that looks like him, who's going to step into his life, and he does that. And when he gets to charles de gaulle airport, uh, things go badly wrong in charles de gaulle airport. And then he ends up, through various twists and turns, on the mission himself, playing himself, uh, and he's dealing with russian arms dealers and all sorts of stuff. And the second half of the novel is set on zanzibar, in the, in the resort of a russian oligarch, um, and simultaneously there's shenanigans going on in london. But that's the, that's the basic pitch. Is that the an accidental spy, a reluctant spy, who ends up, uh, on a mission that he was never supposed to be anywhere near?

Speaker 2: 1:06:12

were you thinking of movies, like having it as adapting to film, because you know the when you read the opening it feels like you know it reminds me of mission impossible.

Speaker 1: 1:06:22

Three, when you have the whole where is the rabbit's foot and then it goes back I think I'd be lying if I didn't say that spy films are a definite influence. You know, I love the born movies, for example. I think they're fantastic and, um, I wanted something that trod that line between cinematic explosive, you know things exploding in helicopters and so on and the the more sort of um, slow moving, john lecari-esque uh, you know everyone, you know some people's got ketchup stains on their ties and they're, you know, just gradually losing the will to live. I, I wanted somewhere in the middle between those and I think mckerrin writes books like that where there are, there is action, but there's also that gritty, realistic feel, and I wanted mine to be in that same ballpark, definitely. But yeah, I, I write cinematically because I think visually I think in scenes I think in camera angles, um.

Speaker 1: 1:07:17

But I also try to balance that out with internality and have characters thinking on the page and and and.

Speaker 2: 1:07:24

So it's not just pure surface and just reading, like a script essentially I see the scenes first when I'm coming up with the idea. It's with the bite, with the binding room. I saw not the opening scene, I saw like the next scene when I discover, um, the boy I say the boy, the young man tied to the bed and they think he's dead. I saw that scene first and I was like, ah, okay, now I need to, yeah, now I'm building around that. So what's after? Reluctant Spy.

Speaker 1: 1:07:52

So I'm doing edits at the moment on my agent literally came back last night with edits on the science fiction novel and I'm drafting a second novel which I can't tell you about, but it's another spy novel I like that, um and that's such a spy thing to say dave, yeah, I'm drafting a spy novel, but I can't tell you about the spy novel yeah, hopefully I'll be able to talk to people about it uh, fairly soon.

Speaker 1: 1:08:18

But, um, yeah, the the plan is to get another spy novel done, get another science fiction novel out on submission and then after that. I'm not sure, but I write pretty quickly and I get bored quite easily, so if we talk again in a year's time, I'll probably be on something completely different.

Speaker 2: 1:08:39

Well before I ask you your first question, what's your response to when your edits land in your inbox?

Speaker 1: 1:08:46

Well, I actually wrote quite a long blog post about this because I think, oh, you did, yeah, it's called how I Deal With Edit Letters and weirdly, that blog post ended up having like a weird second life among PhD candidates. It got forwarded around by a bunch of people doing their PhDs because in the PhDd world you get effectively edit letters from your phd markers that you don't have to and and a lot of phds struggle with that aspect of the process. So it got sent around a load of like academic blogs and stuff. But what I do? I I read it, I just read it quickly just to get a sense of it, and then I don't touch it for 24 to 48 hours because I need to go away and just, you know, have a, have a sulk, essentially, um, because I'm like, oh, you know, you're completely wrong, um, and I just, I know I have that reaction and I don't want to start working on it while I'm still having that reaction, because I'll probably end up discounting really good feedback if I do.

Speaker 1: 1:09:48

Yeah, so I go away, I have a sulk. Then I read it in detail and I break it down and rewrite it in my own words um, and I usually at that stage. I'm also combining it with beta reader feedback from my critique partners. So I will write down literally, you know, let's say I, I want to improve the foreshadowing of uh, of big johnny's relationship with his mother. I'll say big johnny, mother relationship foreshadowing. That's the task. And then I'll say on page x I'm going to do it here, I'm going to do here, here, here and here, and I'll break it down so that I can just check those off as I go through, and that structuring that kind of turning it into a series of bite-sized chunks of work that I can check off, is the difference between me staring at an edit letter and having an existential crisis because of the scope and the scale of the work and me going okay, today I'm going to try and do these two things.

Speaker 2: 1:10:42

Um, so that you know, I have to break it down because otherwise I'm just uh, I would have a breakdown if I didn't break it we're similar in the sense that I get the email and I'm like already that's happened a lot. I was like already okay, and then I was fast.

Speaker 2: 1:10:55

When you don't want them to be fast, I know when you're like it's back, so the edit, I get the email. Yeah, it's like, here's your like thank you so much love. All I need to see is like we love the book. I'm like, good, we love the book. And it's like well, here's my, here's my edit letter and then here's the comments and I this is what I do, thank you so much. I'll let you know by the end of the week when I will be getting back to you with and then I don't read the actual letter for about two days because it's like I'm mentally preparing myself.

Speaker 2: 1:11:26

It's like I need to prepare myself to read it, and then I read it, and then I sulk, and then I.

Speaker 1: 1:11:32

So it's like a week, so you add an extra two days. Before that I read it straight off because I do want to make sure there's nothing too scary in there. But yeah, I might do do that, I might just add an extra couple of days I have a buffer zone, but they're still they're still sulking involved, like what really, yeah, okay, I am, I am very lucky. So far my edit letters have been relatively structurally light and I think that is because I am part of a very in-depth critique group.

Speaker 1: 1:12:05

So by the time a book that I've written gets to an editor, it's been through a draft, an edit that I do on my own, then an edit with my critique partners and usually another full edit that I do on my own again. So it's been through two or three revisions at that point already and it's usually fairly structurally sound.

Speaker 2: 1:12:25

But I I think even if you don't have like a critique group or beta readers, um, by the time you're probably like on your third, I'll say your third or fourth book, by the time you get your third or fourth edit letter, you'll find that your editing is actually lighter because you're actually you may not be going through with a red pen editing, but you are actually thinking more in terms of a in editor mode when you're writing, as opposed to in the very beginning. Right, so dave, because we're talking and talking and talking. But are you in? I know we have. Are you an introvert or extrovert or a hybrid of the two?

Speaker 1: 1:13:02

uh, I am a situational extrovert who is introverted by um, by inclination, so I I'm definitely, uh, you know, if, if I have a choice, I will always want to. And I was nodding along when I listened to tom hindle's answer to this question, because I'm pretty much identical. I can, yeah, stand up, I can do something like this and I can chat away to somebody I've not met before and be very animated, but I'll probably need to like not speak to anyone for six to ten hours after this um, and I think, uh, one of the things I was thinking is is introverted folks, um, like, and writers, I think, quite often end up with similarly introverted partners, because for me, like my wife, valerie, um is the only person who I don't find draining to be around all the time, like you know, even friends and family. I'll go out, I'll meet them, I'll be extroverted, I'll chat away to them, but then I need to come home, you know, and my wife is the one person that I don't feel that need.

Speaker 1: 1:14:05

You know, just spending time with her feels, feels really good. So I think I definitely found last year because I did, uh, harrogate and I did bloody scotland and I did a whole bunch of other little smaller conventions and I found that I was just wiped out at the end of the year by that kind of being on in public and talking to people and and that was before the book came out. So I've no idea what it'll be like this year, because presumably people will be like, oh hello, I read your book and I'll be like, oh, you know, it's gonna be a lot, but definitely introvert. Who can play act at being an extrovert?

Speaker 2: 1:14:39

yeah, your Harrogate experience. There's two. There's like two versions of you. There's going to be the pre I've got a book out, harrigan and then the next one, you and you'll see the difference. Like, oh, this is what it's like now, because now you're, you're, oh, you're that david goodman, that's what's gonna happen.

Speaker 1: 1:14:54

Yeah I had one or two. I had one or two of those like people. There was a bookseller who approached me, a lovely guy who works in, uh, wimbledon, warreston's, called andreas, who's like yeah, I'm andreas you met.

Speaker 1: 1:15:05

You met andreas yeah and he's one of the nicest guys and and he what? He was the first person to walk up to me at a festival and say, are you, david goodman? And I was like I've been waiting for somebody to do that. This is amazing. Um so he was super. He was just so encouraging. And that was the first day when I'd arrived, and it was yorkshire and it was like 35 degrees celsius and I was standing there in a flannel shirt like just melting. And he walked up and he was like are you david goodman? I was like, oh, brilliant, you've, you've made it worth it those are good moments.

Speaker 2: 1:15:36

That is a good moment, okay. So what challenge or experience in your life shaped you the most?

Speaker 1: 1:15:42

well, I alluded to earlier, I think. Um. So when I was 21, 22, I was at university and I joined the officer training corps, which is the at the time territorial army unit that's attached to the university, and I for a long time, pretty much the whole way through university, I was like that's what I'm going to do after university. I'm going to join the army and, just, you know, get some experience in the world, go and do some stuff. Obviously, this was right before 9-11 and Iraq and Afghanistan. So a lot of my friends joined the army and then immediately went on back to back tours in active conflict zones for several years. Um, however, I I went to sandhurst, I went to the um, the rcb, which is the regular commissions board, and I went through that and I got a category one which is basically you're good to go um. But then in the, the medical assessment at the time, I had quite bad eczema and um, because it's hereditary, and eczema at the time was a, was a bar to regular service.

Speaker 2: 1:16:49

Um, really, yeah, yeah I have eczema so I'm like, but at the time really, yeah, and it's kind of a cold.

Speaker 1: 1:16:57

It's kind of a cold war hangover because they thought that most british army soldiers would at some point have to put on an NBC suit and sit in a trench and wait for the Soviets to come across the border at them. And they believed at the time that if you had any sort of skin condition you couldn't do that. You couldn't sit in an NBC suit in a trench. So they basically said nope, sorry, not going to happen. And it was the first time, I think, in my life, because I'd always been brought up to be like you can do anything you want to do, you can you know go and go and figure out what you want to do with your life.

Speaker 1: 1:17:32

Um, that was the very first time I'd had a door like closed in my face, um, and as a result I was kind of I just really didn't know what I was going to do with myself. I I hadn't done any sort of internships. I hadn't didn't know what I was going to do with myself. I I hadn't done any sort of internships, I hadn't done any thinking about any alternatives and a lot of my friends were becoming teachers and other people were going into publishing or into sort of magazines and newspapers before those started to collapse and I was just sort of making coffees at starbucks and not really knowing what to do with my life. But because I didn't go into the army, the whole course of my life completely changed. It was very much, um, this kind of key divergence point and everything else that's flowed from that the, the graduate job that I got in london, the work that I did in advertising, moving back to scotland after being in london for six years. All of that happened because I didn't go into the army.

Speaker 1: 1:18:23

And I think if I had gone into the army I'd probably be quite a different person in a lot of different ways, just because the army is not just a job, it's very much a lifestyle and a social culture. And my friends who went into the army have kind of always looked at me and said you probably wouldn't have liked it all that much. I think you enjoyed playing at soldiers when you were in the territorial army and going away at the weekends and doing the kind of weekend warrior thing, but you probably wouldn't have interacted well with the army at an institutional level. But what it did give me was a bunch of knowledge and you know contacts and things that have become useful in writing the fiction.

Speaker 1: 1:19:02

Uh, and I'm able to play on that and to write reasonably realistic stuff. And Mike Craven, who blurbed Reluctant Spy, he was in the army for 12 or 15 years and he got back in touch with me and I said was there anything in there that wasn't realistic from a military point of view? And he went no, oh yeah, I think you nailed it. You know I'm like cool, good phew, because I you know I very much was a, an amateur part-time soldier for two or three years and I was, but it was enough to give it a flavor of realism but who would have thought x-men would be like your sliding doors moment yeah, I know it's.

Speaker 2: 1:19:42

Yeah, it's just it's just annoying to me. I have it and it's just. It's an annoyance, but it hasn't been a sliding door moment for me and it is weird.

Speaker 1: 1:19:54

I do think about it because it's probably something that if I had realized, I probably wouldn't have disclosed.

Speaker 1: 1:19:59

I probably would have said, oh no, you know yeah I wouldn't have put it on the form, um, and I did, and not realizing that it was going to be a bar to service, they took me down. They I probably would have said, oh no, you know, I wouldn't have put it on the form, and I did, and not realizing that it was going to be a barter service, they took me down. They sent me down to Aldershot. The army's dermatologist examined me, because the army apparently has a dermatologist like a dedicated dermatologist and she's like I'm really sorry it's not going to happen. And you know, it was intense and I went through a lot of different careers and did a lot of long hours and learned a lot of things as a result. But what I didn't do was the thing I thought I was going to do, which was to be a soldier.

Speaker 2: 1:20:34

It's crazy because, you know, the only time I ever think about people getting disbarred from the army or not being legible for service is when I'm not mentioning his name, because I don't like him. The current president, president, the new president. And he didn't go to what? To vietnam because of bone spurs. So that's what you're thinking about, which didn't exist, but anyway, that's another story for another day. But you're thinking, if there's a bar to the army, it's going to be something big yes you know, not just like slightly itchy skin, yeah you've got a bit of an itchy skin.

Speaker 2: 1:21:02

Oh my god, you need a prescription for it, all right. So if you could go back to when you were 25 years old and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 1: 1:21:11

so I was again. I was listening to tom's interview when he was talking about this and for him, 25 was like six years in the past. For me it was longer than that, um, and I was trying to think back to what my life was like when I was 25, and at the time I was working in marketing. I was working long hours. I just got married uh, we still lived in london. We were thinking about moving back.

Speaker 1: 1:21:36

I think if I could tell that guy anything, it would be to worry a bit less about, um, making the wrong choices, especially when it comes to writing, because I think I spun my wheels for a long, long long time, uh, worrying that my ideas weren't good enough or that, you know, worrying about the opportunity cost of making any particular decision or deciding to write any particular book. And the thing is like, life is long and you've got quite a lot of you know it's the longest thing there is, as billy connelly used to say, and I think that, um, you can waste way more time worrying about whether you're making the right choice than if you just made a choice and then lived with the results and I and I, and I think I'd love to say to that guy stop sitting there writing out lists of ideas and then worrying that none of them are good enough, and just pick one and start working on it.

Speaker 1: 1:22:30

Um, and and maybe as well, like, go and get an in-house job and stop working for marketing agencies earlier, because it'll make you happier, you'll get paid more and you'll have more energy to do the stuff you actually want to do. Um, but he'd probably ignore me because he was having a great time he's having a great time right.

Speaker 2: 1:22:53

I've got one extra question now before we, before I do the last final one what is your one writing tip for writers?

Speaker 1: 1:23:01

my one writing tip is that's a good question. Um, I think it is to focus on whatever makes writing sustainable for you. Um, because and that the answer to that is going to be different for everybody there's no one thing you can do or or routine that you can do that will work for everybody. But if, if you, it's not really about how many hours a day you write or how many words per day you write, it's about how many days in a row, or not necessarily even in a row, but how many days you can stack up in aggregate, and whatever makes it possible for you to run that marathon, uh, over a long time, is gonna stand you in good stead, uh, for both dealing with publishing, because you need that steady production pace in order to deal with publishing, but it's also going to just mean that you will do, I think, better work, because you will be rested and happy and you won't be emotionally turbulent when you're trying to do your creative work that's a good one, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:24:05

And finally, how can listeners not? How, where can listeners of the conversation find you online?

Speaker 1: 1:24:11

uh, the quickest way to find me is on davidgoodmannet, which is my website. Um, I writea near daily blog. It's not daily I, because I I can't write every day, but most, most weekdays, I will, I will be writing. And I am also on blue sky. Uh, I think I'm dave goodman author on there, or possibly just dave goodman. I can never remember what I've set up on what uh service on instagram is dave goodman author and I'm on mastodon, if you're into that, if you're a nerdy type. I think I'm on threads as well, but I, I don't. I I'm not vibing with threads.

Speaker 2: 1:24:45

I don't know this I see you more on blue sky.

Speaker 1: 1:24:49

Yes, I'm much more on blue sky definitely blue sky is quite a nice place socially it's got. It's got good tools, good it's a nice space.

Speaker 2: 1:24:57

Well, that just leaves me, david goodman, to say thank you very much for being part of the conversation. I have been. I've had an amazing time.

Speaker 1: 1:25:02

It's been great. Thank you very much for being part of the conversation. I have been. I've had an amazing time. It's been great.

Speaker 2: 1:25:05

Thank you so much for listening to today's conversation with Nadine Matheson. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode featuring more amazing guests. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow and if you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a cup of coffee or sign up on Patreon. The links are in the show notes and if you'd love to join the conversation as a guest, feel free to send an email to theconversationatnadiemaffersoncom. Thanks again for your support and I'll catch you next time.