For those who read these things, there’s a diabetes update published this evening too.

I’m pleased to say that I sold some copies of The Raven and the Hart. In terms of sales, it did better than Coyote in the Corner did in it’s first two weeks, but I reduced the price so my actual revenue was slightly less. It has to be said that it wasn’t a huge amount, but I could see from Amazon information that a lot of the sales were to strangers, and I sold a handful of eBooks through Draft2Digital too, and they are likely also to be to strangers. By that I mean it wasn’t just family and friends buying out of a charitable disposition. There’s only one review so far, but it’s a good one so I’m happy with that. Of course, all of you have already bought at least one copy of each of my books, haven’t you?

The sequel novel to Raven is written and out with beta readers now. Once I’ve had their responses and put it through a further revision, I expect it to be released in early 2023.

So what next?

Well, I have a dauntingly long list of things I’d like to write, including finishing a sequel to Coyote in the Corner and sorting out a heap of short stories I have on my laptop into something like useable form. So it was with some dismay that an idea for a completely new series hit me this week, inspired in part by a conversation with an old friend from the Registers of Scotland days. I’m still figuring it out, but it will be set in 1930s Edinburgh. I emailed my editor to ask for her gut reaction and it was immediately positive, which is a good sign (I discovered quite by chance this week that she used to be Alasdair Gray’s editor, which is nice.)

I can short circuit some of the creation of the new one because I can abandon a half-thought-out story in my notebook and reuse the same research for the new one, although I anticipate spending two weeks or so in the National Library of Scotland combing through period copies of the Scotsman, the Edinburgh Evening News and the Evening Despatch. I also have a Freedom of Information request in for some criminal trial records currently locked under the 100-year rule. Beneath its prim, Calvinist veneer, Edinburgh in the 1930s was a hotbed of vice and immorality, and that’s where I’m focusing.

Also, these guys are likely to feature, at least by reference: The Mills Brothers.