I think I’m done with Booksprout, the service I’ve been using to provide free advance copies to book reviewers. The service itself is fine, and the reviews I’ve been getting are largely positive. Near I can tell, though, said reviews haven’t contributed to book sales in any meaningful way. And… (keep reading)

So I’m back in the UK now, after three weeks visiting in Canada — specifically Edmonton, a city I am now woefully maladapted to living in. People here in Newcastle constantly complain about the state of its public transit system, but that’s only because they’ve never been to Edmonton: a… (keep reading)

I’m on vacation back home in Canada, following 30 hours of transatlantic travel ending at 1:00 AM. If you ever need to completely reset your sleep schedule, I hightly recommend 30 hours of transatlantic travel ending at 1:00 AM. Because I’m staying with my parents, who have more streaming subscriptions… (keep reading)

Committing a crime is easy. Committing a crime and getting away with it — that’s hard. One of the big stories on the internet last week was the Chase bank “viral TikTok trend.” Long story short: The prevailing narrative surrounding this whole thing is one of stupidity. There’s no shortage… (keep reading)

I’ve got a new(ish) story out this week, which means I must once again calculate how much of my personal dignity to sacrifice in the name of selling books. I don’t have the personal charisma or humiliation kink necessary to become an “author-influencer,” so my marketing options are limited to… (keep reading)

I finally got around to uploading an avatar for this newsletter. It’s a photo of the brick I keep on my desk at work: It is perhaps worth noting that the brick was not a decision I, personally, made. A colleague bought it for me (and commissioned an Etsy artist… (keep reading)

Still working on the next Casefile of Jay Moriarty story, which involves an art gallery heist. The thing about writing crime fiction is that you are constantly figuring out: At least one of those things needs to be something your characters haven’t handled before, and ideally all three of them… (keep reading)

I went to the beach with some friends last Friday night in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately I live in a country forsaken by the sun with near-100% cloud cover most of the time, so that didn’t exactly work out. There was also… (keep reading)

My mum has been asking me about ways to promote my dad’s work online, and TikTok came up as a possibility. So I decided to sign up for a TikTok account and see what it was like from the creator side. My findings were as follows: Thus ends my experiment… (keep reading)

Thanks to the shortest and least effective real estate deal in the world, I recently moved to the town of North Shields. It’s out on the coast — roughly 20 minutes away from Newcastle by car, a little longer than that by transit. By Canadian standards, this is a pleasantly… (keep reading)