Is this thing on?

Hey, it’s me. I’m back. Sorry, I just got out of the habit. And Mondays stopped working for me as I would tend to work a bit later, what with those pesky clocks going back etc.

Here I am this morning after I walked up a massive hill:

#Music

So, this is a weird one. Seems like a lot of bands are making mistakes and thinking this year is the 30th anniversary of their albums which came out in 1994. I mean, it can’t be 2024, can it? CAN IT? Crap, it is. How did that happen?

1994 was an amazing year for music, as good as any of the more fabled ones from before. Suede, The Manics, Orbital, The Prodigy, Oasis, Nirvana and Therapy? (who I saw last Friday in Edinburgh playing Troublegum in full...) all released their best albums that year. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting too. Well, Parklife came out then too but it’s not Blur’s best album (IMHO), similarly Vauxhall & I isn’t quite Morrissey’s best solo album (Viva Hate or Your Arsenal would be).

(I just looked at the wikipedia page entitled 1994 in British music and it was the one where Wet Wet Wet were no 1 forever. A lot of absolute crud that year too, as in every year.)

But Dog Man Star is the best of all those albums mentioned and it’s pretty much perfect (I say pretty much because it’s got Daddy’s Speeding on it and not the single version of Stay Together, their best song). And this is such an emotionally brutal song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEL6OpDoNU

#Last Week

So, let’s talk about work, eh?

I outlined Marshall 7 a few weeks ago, entitled FEAR OF ANY KIND. Set in Hawick and that part of the Borders, it’s going to be a wee bit different from the previous six, but that’s to be expected. I hate getting bored with my writing and I’d hate for readers to think they were getting the same story just in a different town now.

After that, I reworked the first Police Scotland book, DEAD IN THE WATER. You’ll maybe remember how I wrote this in 2021 as part of the Cullen & Bain series and it acted as a prequel. When I resequenced them all, including merging the first three Cullen & Bain books into THE COLD TRUTH and fourth and sixth into THE DEAD END, this became the first book. It’s only 44,000 words and audiobook listeners want a bit more for their credit – I did the same with BLOOD & GUTS, Vicky Dodds 1, expanding from 35,000 to 63,000 and that’s done really well in audio, I have to say. The second book is out now, with the third and fourth on preorder – and the fifth will be up on preorder late this month. We’re dropping them monthly to bridge the gaps around Marshall books. There are fourteen Police Scotland books and a constraint in that the rights for 2-4 are with another publisher and don’t all revert until the summer, so that’s around when Angus’s new editions will start dropping, probably fortnightly.

A few weeks ago, I had another bout of AF after stupidly downing a protein shake straight from the fridge. My flecainide pills knocked it back into shape within a few hours (20 this time), but they have a severe impact on me, physically and mentally. Exhaustion and brain fog and depression. Not good! And that didn’t really slow me down, though perhaps it should’ve done. Because this week, I reviewed the outline I did for Marshall 8 and it’s an absolute mess. Another reason why I can’t just make stuff up as I go along, which is pretty much what happened with this. It’s gibberish and incoherent. Anyway, I’m reworking it now and it’s shaping up to be pretty good. It’s called OUR DEBTS TO THE PAST and is set around Earlston and St Boswells, with Scott’s View featuring pretty heavily. Aim for this one to come out in July 2025, hopefully. It’s also massively different from the other books in the series, but still consistent. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it when it comes out!

#This Week

Finish the revision to the M8 outline and maybe have a stab at the third Shunty story, FALSE HOPE, which will bridge M7 and M8. But I really, really, want to get writing M7 as it’s a while since I’ve written anything and I’d like to get this book done by Xmas, so it’s in the editing pipeline for a release in late Feb/early March. I’m trying to get a more regular cadence with this books for 2025, three plus a Shunty next year at least. I’ve got M9 done to a reasonable level, with an outline being the next step – and I’m just decided M10 is going to be set around Innerleithen.

#Stuff

Watched a few things recently, but nothing great. Actually, the best thing I’ve watched is RIVALS, the Jilly Cooper adaptation on Disney+ – it’s super cheesy but very entertaining. THE PENGUIN was a real slog to get through and should’ve been a film – oddly, given Colin Farrell’s character was comic relief in THE BATMAN, this was oddly po-faced and humourless. I’m a big fan of having a full range of emotions in stuff, otherwise it just feels flat.

Oh, and here’s a lovely album by a Scottish singer. Shades of Beth Gibbons and Lana Del Rey:

#Socials

After recent events, I’ve decided to not even log in to my Twitter (RIP) account. It’s there just so someone else doesn’t nick my login (until Elmo steals it), so if you engage with me there then I just won’t even see it. I’ve tried Threads but it gives me the ick almost as much as Mastodon did with its content warnings. But I’m astonished at how vibrant Blue Sky has become in the last fortnight – I’d written it off as a failed experiment but a lot of people have left X to go over there. Given it’s a fork of the Twitter code, but with an open-source MO that was spun off before Elmo bought the platform and filled it with nazis and pr0nbots, it’s intuitive and feels just like Twitter used to in about 2015/16 when it was at its best. You can control your own algorithmic feeds or just use the default chronological one which is as it should be. The beauty of the open source thing is nobody can control your content in the way Twitter could – it’s designed to be portable so if it becomes horrible you can move to a new instance of the AP protocol, assuming people start spinning them up. Anyway, I’m actually posting stuff there:

And that’s me. I’ll try to do these regularly again.

Cheers,
Ed