Crashing-landing in the Highlands
Back in May, I finished the first draft of a novel I’d been writing since March 2024, alongside a full-time job, two family visits to Australia and a bout of cancer. The Survivor Covenant came in at 82,000 words. Bells and trumpets!
This seemed perfect timing: late last year, I’d booked a week’s retreat up at Moniack Mhor in the Highlands. I could put my head down and go turbo on editing.
As with so many narratives, this one did not go according to plan. I was exhausted. Not just tired in the moment, but deeply, drained down to my bones and brain cells. Sleeping eight hours a night didn’t touch it.
I went for a daily walk on the forest path. I read a Barbara Pym novel, which I judged to have zero overlap with my near-future YA dystopia. (The reading of other novels while writing your own is a delicate matter.) Crampton Hodnet was delightful. I wished I had the entire Pym collection with me. I also read a pacy police memoir, picked from the hundreds of books in the Moniack Mhor library. I had no appetite for earnest, beautifully written, blamelessly competent B-list ‘literary’ fiction, of which there is a global oversupply, at least in the Anglosphere.
The weather was unnaturally good, the surroundings, divine.
These photos don’t capture the heady, vaguely tropical fruit smell of the gorse in full bloom.
The other writers were the usual quirky mix of poets, memoirists, novelists, playwrights and screenwriters. I was the only self-published writer. Asked to give a short talk about my experience, I did so happily, flattered to be regarded as a source of useful information. But nobody was seriously considering the indie option. As well as procedural simplicity, trad pub offers powerful validation, which writers, being sensitive artistic souls, crave. I should know: it took me years to let go the fantasy of my book on the front table in Waterstones. Giving up on trad pub was like leaving a relationship you know is impossibly unequal, bad for you and going nowhere, but which still represents something you think you can’t do without.
I read the first draft through, once. I made some world-building notes and thought ahead to the next three books. I organised my notes. And then it was time to get an early morning taxi to Inverness railway station, for the three-hour-plus winding journey through the Cairngorms, Perthshire and Stirlingshire back to Glasgow.
The Survivor Covenant will be published late this year or early next year. Well, that’s the plan.