The season of mist and mellow fruitfulness, autumn is upon us. Or at least it would be if the weather wasn't so strange. As I type the final parts of this newsletter at almost ten at night in the middle of September, I've got the window open and warm air wafting through. In Scotland. I'm normally in woolly jumpers by now. 

Welcome once again to my (almost) monthly newsletter of random musings. If you're reading this, you must have signed up for it. We all make mistakes, so please feel free to unsubscribe if you're suffering buyer's remorse. There's a link at the bottom, or simply reply letting me know you don't want to read my nonsense any more and I'll scrub your name from the list.

The reply email address comes straight to me, so if you've any burning questions you want to ask, observations you want to make, offers of film production or the like, feel free to get in touch. I try to answer every email that needs answering, even if it sometimes takes me a while. Oh to have minions to do all these things for me.

But if you do get in touch, for whatever reason, please spare a thought for my inbox and delete the contents of the original email (this newsletter) that appends itself to your message. My poor old Mac Mini is getting old, and struggles with multiple large files.

Structural edit notes came back from my editor and agent not long after the last newsletter went out. They were both pleased with What Will Burn, but as ever had some good ideas as to how it could be better. I've spent most of the past month taking out about 15,000 words and putting in another 9000 or so. I'd hoped to trim the thing down a bit more, but sometimes that's not how it works.

I like the editing process, mostly. I've read of some authors who approach the whole thing in an adversarial manner - fighting their corner for their art sort of thing. I've never been able to understand that attitude. Your editor is on your side. They are trying to make your book better, and they're bringing a fresh and trained set of eyes to your work. That's not to say that everything your editor suggests is right, or that you need to implement all the changes they suggest. At the end of the day it's my name on the cover, not my editor's. But even when they suggest things you don't agree with, that can be a useful sign that what you're trying to do hasn't worked. If your editor misunderstands your intent, then it's probably not because they are stupid, and it's likely all your other readers will misunderstand too.

As an example (and mild spoilers), a strand of What Will Burn involves what I intended to be a case of workplace sexual harassment, with the woman being the one abusing her power over a subordinate man. My editor thought this came across as harmless flirting, and seemed both out of character and unnecessary. He'd missed the point I was trying to make, and his suggestion was that I take it out. Had it been simply flirting, taking it out would have been fine, but that wasn't what it was supposed to be. That he hadn't got it meant that other readers would likely do the same, and the power dynamic between the two characters is actually important to the development of the plot. So rather than taking out the flirting, I had to find a way to make it more obvious that what was going on was far from harmless.

Some stuff can be taken out, of course. In The Gathering Dark, each day starts with McLean waking up in a cold sweat, having had nightmares sparked by the horror of the truck crash he witnessed at the start of the book. In the first draft, I included the actual nightmares and dropped in hints to the strange, otherworldly forces at play. They added nothing, and reading them a month or so after having written them they were actually a bit embarrassing. All we need to know is that poor old Tony is suffering from PTSD after the crash, and having him regularly waking up in a cold sweat, sometimes with the ghost of a scream still on his lips, is enough. The rest can be left to the reader's imagination.

You'd think I'd learn, but apparently not. I also wrote a series of scenes from victim's point of view in What Will Burn. Each shows an unknown man dying in a strange and unsettling way - something of a theme in the book. The problem is that the scenes give away what's happening long before McLean puzzles it out. I'm not particularly writing whodunnits, but a story can become dull quite quickly if the main protagonist is too many steps behind the reader. 

The edit for that problem was simple - remove the scenes. The details become apparent as McLean and the team investigate the unusual deaths, with each one adding a little more to the bigger picture. 

There is something very liberating about deleting large chunks of text, even as I remember the blood, sweat and tears that went into writing them in the first place. And nothing is ever really wasted. When the book comes out next year I'll almost certainly post some of those deleted scenes in the newsletter. Lucky you!
 

Diuc the bull has been doing his business as expected. Hopefully he's not firing blanks - we'll know come February when everyone gets their ultrasound. He has one more week with the cows, and then its back to the nearby field with Hamish and G'Bernard for company. Nothing to do except eat and get brushed regularly until next August. What a life.

Other than daily checks to make sure everyone is the right way up, the past month has been a quiet one here. If you follow me on the Twitters, you'll have seen the daily video of coos doing very little indeed. I have only livestock, no arable crops on the farm, so have been spared the annual panic that is harvest. My neighbours have been busy though, when the weather permits. A whole team descended on the field right outside the house a few weeks ago, and it was harvested, straw baled, ploughed and seeded with next year's crop all in a matter of days. 
 

Why, I hear you ask, is your house so close to the farm boundary between you and your neighbour? Aren't farmyards usually in the middle of the farm? (What? You didn't ask that? Well, I'm going to answer it anyway - these newsletters need content, after all.) 

My father moved to this farm in the mid-80s, and the farmyard was pretty much slap bang in the middle of the farmland then. It was a mix of arable and pasture, but the balance was too much to the arable side for the farming he wanted to do. Soon after he arrived here, a large area of hill grazing came up for sale immediately to the south, so he sold some of the northern arable fields to a neighbour and bought the hill land. That made the ratio of livestock to arable a better fit, but meant the geographical centre of the farm moved south. The farmyard and house stayed put, of course. Not easy to move a hundred and fifty year old buildings.
 

Looking south towards the Lomond Hills

Fast forward to 2008, and my parents' untimely deaths. I have two brothers and a sister, and the inheritance was an equal four way split. In order to take on the farm I needed to buy out the others, and the only way to do this was to sell a chunk of land. I wanted to have time to write as well as farm, so concentrating on just livestock suited me fine. I could have gone the other way - sold all the grazing land and concentrated solely on arable - but that's quite dull farming. The fields immediately to the north and east of the farmyard were all arable and ended up being sold to another neighbour, so once again the farm moved south while the farmyard stayed where it was.
 

Old army rifle range on the southern border of the farm. 

Planning rules meant I was only ever going to be able to build a house on the edge of the farmyard. My younger brother's share of the inheritance was the old farmhouse and some paddocks, hence my living in a caravan for five years.

And so it is that my house is right on the northern boundary of my farm, the southernmost point a mile and a half away in a straight line. Amusingly, this is almost exactly the same distance as from Kings Cross station to my publisher's offices on the Embankment in London. I almost always walk it when I'm there, although I rarely encounter any Highland cows on the way.

My hair is now a month longer than it was a month ago. I'm getting used to it now.
 

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These are strange times indeed. I suspect one of the reasons I'm struggling with reading crime fiction is that it's not much fun immersing yourself in murder, mayhem and mystery when the world is quite literally on fire. It's hard to shake the impending sense of doom hanging over everything - a feeling only amplified the yapping noise of social media.

As an antidote to it all, I am trying to inject a little more levity into the new Con Fairchild book. So far no-one has died, which is probably a first for me. Whether that survives the first draft, I don't know. We'll see.

It's not all bad, though. There are good things and hope out there. If you haven't already seen it, I'd recommend David Byrne's latest venture, Reasons To Be Cheerful. Sign up to his newsletter for a weekly dose of positive news, and don't let the bastards get you down.

Until next time...