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#192 - David Goodman
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Contemporary spy thriller writer, David Goodman is here to chat about his debut novel, the unusual journey it took on submission and keeping a healthy mentality when it comes to writing and publishing.
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Transcript
The Role of Writing in Storytelling
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question. I love it. Because the writing is sort of everything, right? You could have fixed plot holes, but if the writing isn't... So some readers love that, and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this. So it's kind of a gamble.
Introducing Dave Goodman and 'A Reluctant Spy'
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast. On today's episode, I am joined by novelist and short fiction writer, Dave Goodman. Hello. Hello. Thanks so much for coming on the on the podcast. ah Let's start off, as always, with the latest publication, which is your debut novel, A Reluctant Spy, which came out just a few weeks ago. Tell us a little bit about it.
00:00:39
Speaker
Sure. So it came out on the 12th of September. It's in hardback from um Headline. It's also an audiobook and ebook. um It'll be coming out in the US in early January, I think January 7th. And it's a spy novel. It is about a guy called Jamie Tulloch, who is a kind of bright young thing at university, but he's come from a kind of fairly tough background. So he ah hasn't got a lot of the sort of support networks that a lot of people might have um and he signs up for or he is invited to apply for I think all the legends program which is a MI6 program where people are essentially
00:01:23
Speaker
asked to lead a particular kind of life, quite an offline life, quite a restricted life, and in return they get a bit of support. So they get their student loans paid off, they get kind of looked after, they get found jobs and so on. So it's it's giving him that stability and that um safety net that he doesn't necessarily have coming from what he does.
Plot and Premise of 'A Reluctant Spy'
00:01:43
Speaker
ah But then you the bargain is that at some point you step out of your life i and an SIS, an MI6 agent takes over your life for a few weeks or days and then you go away on a holiday, they do whatever they need to do and then you come back and you step back into your life again.
From Science Fiction to Spy Thriller
00:02:02
Speaker
and But obviously because it's a ah novel that doesn't go to plan and he ends up um having to deal with the the outcomes of of a mission that he was never supposed to be anywhere near um and complications ensue from that point. Okay. Okay. So when it comes to, I've looked at you kind of other other stuff that you've written, other work that you've published, it's a lot of it's sci-fi. So like, how come this debut novel is um a sort of contemporary spy thriller?
00:02:33
Speaker
Good question. and ah Thereby hangs a tale. So i um I love writing both. I did my dissertation on spy fiction and I've kind of always been a spy fiction reader. and But I've also always been a science fiction reader and writer. And I spent a long time writing SF, writing many, many science fiction novels and short stories, but not really kind of doing anything with them, just sort of piling them up in a drawer.
Editing Journey and Finding an Agent
00:03:00
Speaker
um And then I when I started to look seriously at trying to get published and find an agent, I started out by taking one of my science fiction novels and the one that I thought was the most kind of commercial, which was a near future sort of climate collapse ah thriller um that also is essentially a spy novel.
00:03:22
Speaker
um And I wrote that but um ah i edit wrote that book about 2015-2016 and it sat in a drawer and then I pulled it out essentially as a project to teach myself how to edit because I think the the thing that I was doing was writing drafts and then sort of throwing them over my shoulder and just carrying on writing the next draft of a completely different book. And I think there's quite often two mistakes that novice writers make, one one of which is just to write books or book shaped objects without ever actually trying to turn them into a finished, you know, publishable project. And the other is kind of endlessly tweaking the same project. yeah I've done both at different stages. But at this point, I was kind of chucking.
00:04:02
Speaker
these unfinished, unedited books over my shoulder. And I used this book, which was called The Burning Line, to teach myself how to edit. And and that I then used that to go on Queenie for the first time because once I'd edited it, I was like, oh, I think this is actually maybe good enough to Queenie.
Challenges in Cross-Genre Publishing
00:04:20
Speaker
And I sent it out.
00:04:22
Speaker
that got me my agent um and then we ended up at the same time I was just starting to see success in science fiction and short fiction. and So the the short stories were coming out and I was doing really well and I really wanted to debut in science fiction because I think it's a it's kind of my first love and in a lot of ways.
00:04:42
Speaker
yeah But the book went out, The Burning Line went out on submission and didn't didn't sell, which is for various reasons. it kind of a lot of There's a lot of discussion about sort of cross-genre and kind of things that will sit in both camps equally. But we found that the science fiction imprints were saying, no, this is too much of a kind of commercial mainstream
Selling a Debut Novel on Proposal
00:05:03
Speaker
thriller for us. And the mainstream thriller imprints were all saying, no, there's too much science fiction in this book. So it just very neatly fell right between ah right through the the crack in the in the middle between those two kind of different kinds of publishers. and So my agent said, could you write a straight contemporary spy thriller? And I did. And I wrote a book called the The Disaster Club. but And that book went out on submission as well. I wrote that quite quickly. I wrote it in the summer of 2022, I think.
00:05:33
Speaker
um and that went out and it did it it did okay. we got We got fast responses back and it was only going out to sort of Thriller imprints and Thriller editors. And they it just just didn't quite get there. We got a lot of very complimentary rejections. But then Toby Jones, who's the editor at Headline that we're working with on this book, he came back and he said, I can't buy this book because it's too similar to something I've already got and various boring list fit reasons, but do you have any other ideas? And that was the point at which I said, well,
00:06:08
Speaker
I've got a drawer full of them and kind of came back and said, here's here's here's one, this kind of idea of these cover stories that are actually living people and how badly that could go wrong in interesting ways. They said, write me a sample for that. And I did. And then we sold the the book on proposals. So it's kind of kind of been a winding road. i'm out But I think the the the outcome has been great.
00:06:30
Speaker
It's such an interesting and unusual route to be taken. So you went on, you went on submission with three separate novels and then were not picked up by any of those but work but an editor liked them and the third one enough that they said, have you got anything else?
00:06:49
Speaker
and Not quite. I went on submission with two and then sold the third one on Proposal after writing a sample. um which yeah i think i I think it's quite common for working novelists who have two or three books behind them to to sell books on Proposal and to sell books in that way. That's very unusual for a debut. But I think for me, effectively, I had demonstrated to this editor, Toby,
00:07:13
Speaker
I demonstrated that I could write could write quickly, could write pretty, pretty decent stuff fairly fast because he'd, you know, he'd seen a book come to him. And when an editor is looking at a debut novel, they're like, did this person write this in a year or did they write it in 10 years? No, no real way to tell apart from just asking them directly. and Whereas he had seen two books from me and relatively swift.
00:07:37
Speaker
ah orderator and I think he said maybe I'll have a chat to this guy and thankfully we were able to find an idea we both liked and I was able to write it pretty quickly. What was the time frame like for like when you went on submission with the first one?
00:07:53
Speaker
So I got my agent in ah November of 2021 with the burning lane, which is that was that I had a hell of a week. ah I sold my first pro rate short story. um And I was like, this week cannot get any better. And then that that same week, I got an offer of rep from from Harry.
00:08:13
Speaker
or in fact he requested, that's my agent Harry Illingworth, he requested the book and and then we I think got got agented in November of 2021, went on submission in February so it was quite quick. I think Harry was quite happy with the state of the book and we went out quite quickly.
00:08:31
Speaker
um it kind of lingered for a while. I started writing another book that summer, which was The Disaster Club. um And that kind of slowly died. it Well, it died quicker because it was going ah to thriller imprints who I think tend to turn things around quite quickly because they're quite... most thriller imprints are reasonably big and have and enough editors so they can they can turn stuff around quite quickly. And and I think that ah trying to remember the order of events now, we kind of accepted it was dead towards the end of 2022.
00:09:04
Speaker
two um And in February of 23, we got an email from from Toby saying, ah if nobody bites on this book, I'd love to chat to david about anything else he has. um And we had we had that first initial chat in March of 2023. I was away at the time, actually, I was at a writing retreat that a couple of friends of mine had organised in Wales.
00:09:32
Speaker
so we had that chat on the Monday and I'd had all these plans that the writing retreats will work on a edit of a big science science fiction novel and and Toby had had sort of a few pitches from me and he said you know can you can you write me a sample of this one so I was like well I'm in a remote mining village, former mining village in and Wales with nothing else to do and it's raining and there's terrifying goats outside. So I think I'll all sit down and just and write this for ah for the week and wrote the first 15k in that week.
00:10:05
Speaker
okay then He took that sample. He went away and chatted to his acquisitions team. And then we he came back and he said, can you write a little bit more? And it did. I kind of expanded it out to about 40k. And then we got the green light in June, I think June of last year. And I wrote the rest ah between June and September. And then it went into the production pipeline after
Balancing Writing with the Business Side
00:10:28
Speaker
that. So it was pretty quick. It's interesting because I i spent most of my time focused very focused on developing my knowledge and my networks and
00:10:37
Speaker
other writer like writer friendships and and contacts in the science fiction space. So all of my reference points are for how science fiction imprints work and they tend to be a bit smaller and they tend to have smaller lists. and So it's been really interesting to so to kind of be dropped into the thriller world and see how that works and tends to work a little bit faster. They have bigger lists, they have more more turnaround times and and things like that. So it's it's been fascinating to see.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And it's so interesting that that experience that kind of route for publishing a novel, getting picked up on a proposal and then having not actually written the book, but sort of getting the green light to do it, that as a debut is so rare. That's much more something you would expect from someone who had previously published and they were sort of following up on a second or third novel.
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And i'm I'm hoping that will mean, if fingers crossed in Touchwood, but I hope that will mean my second book is not as painful as some of my friends have told me their second books were because, you know, they're they're spending three or four years writing their first book and then they're they have to do their second book under the pressure of you know the the reception of the first book and production timelines. and you know I think a lot of people fall at that hurdle because it's a very, very different experience, whereas essentially that's what I did with my first book.
00:11:57
Speaker
You sort of skipped out the whole debut thing. I just went straight onto the second novel. Yeah. I mean, I wrote plenty of books before this one yeah got purchased. So i've I've definitely had the experience of noodling around with a novel for a year or two years. But um yeah, I think this experience has stood me in pretty good stead, I think, for the future. Yeah, definitely. So it was about um was about two years that you were kind of on sub with both both of those first um books that actually didn't ever make it to a publisher.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's a part of me that ah is like, well, that could have been crushing and kind of was and, you know, it was pretty tough, like hearing no's over and over again. But I think I, one of the things I i did before I sat down to to really focus on trying to find an agent and trying to get published was to have ah have a word with myself essentially and say, you know you're now going into ah into a new kind of realm of writing and the writing world where where you essentially have two jobs to do. You have the writing job and you have the the author job. And that author job is kind of very much separated and very different from the writer job.
00:13:12
Speaker
and it's possible that you won't get anywhere and it's possible that you might get somewhere but then get repeatedly kind of crushed and told no this this isn't the right book write another book write another book and i kind of sat down and said if that happens how you react to it is probably going to be ah fairly critical in whether you actually get to the finish line or not and and get a book published. And I think that and because I've had that word with myself to say, you know, it might not be this first book, you might have to write another two, three, four, who knows, you might need to keep going. And and and I kind of
00:13:50
Speaker
wanted to separate the publishing side from the writing side, because if i if you tie them together too tightly, I think, then the the ups and downs of the publishing side can really suck the joy out of the writing side in a way that makes it much harder to write. So I very consciously kind of separated them and said, I'm going to write regardless. So then the the kind of other side of my personality, the publishing side of my personality,
00:14:14
Speaker
can kind of take the work from the writing side of my personality and that the writing side can mostly
Sustainable Writing Routines
00:14:20
Speaker
just get on with it. and I've been semi-successful in compartmentalizing my brain that way. I don't i don't always succeed, but it it does really help, I think, to think of it as two very separate jobs, even though the product of one is it's the input to the other.
00:14:37
Speaker
No, absolutely. I think then that's a very sort of like switched on ah way of setting your expectations if you're like looking to get into this industry. is that did you Was that kind of something that you thought to yourself um once you'd signed with Harry, once you were on submission to editors, or was that a thought that came to you earlier sort of when you started querying to agents?
00:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think i think it it was there right from the start because um the precondition to getting a book ready to the point where I felt it was ready to query was figuring out my writing routine and making it sustainable because it really wasn't sustainable before I used to have these sort of seasons of writing where I would write feverishly for a couple of months and then I would stop writing and feel bad about it if you just feel bad about the fact I wasn't writing um and be really miserable and consider giving up and
00:15:34
Speaker
you know, in some cases, give up for six months or a year and then come back to it. And I just was like, this feels horrible, like this just not writing sometimes, writing other times. And there would be moments where I'd be like, this feels amazing. I'm getting loads done. I'm really excited about the story. And then that motivation would drop away. And I would end up sort of just looking at what I'd done and being like, oh this is terrible. I'm never going to get anywhere. So I was like, I have to figure out a way to repeatedly and sustainably and healthily do this work um that isn't whatever I'm doing now because this it wasn't working for me. It was making me kind of unhappy and I think the the work I was producing was wasn't great as a result.
00:16:18
Speaker
so because I was kind of doing a lot of heavy thinking about how to do it, I was very focused on and how do I do something that I can keep doing year in, year out without it being hugely impactful on my ability to live the rest of my life, do my day job, ah you know, just exist, to be a good husband, be a good brother and and son to my family. And I think having that that conversation with myself meant that I was able to sort of sit down and say, OK, but once I start interacting with the publishing ecosystem and agents and editors, there's going to be various pressures on me. how do i How do I maintain that? And I think that thinking about it as early as possible and focusing on getting my routine as sustainable as possible, I think has really helped.
Querying Agents and Overcoming Challenges
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, you kind of, I feel like now that you you really like approached it with a very serious kind of thoughtful way. And was it a long um querying road for you? Or once you started querying, did you find Harry quite quickly?
00:17:24
Speaker
it was i It was medium medium-long, and was i think i think there's a lot of especially now because the querying landscape of 2021 was quite different today. you know It's not unusual, I think, for people to be waiting on just even an acknowledgement for six to nine months and sometimes never getting it, whereas Back in 2021, most agents most of the time still responded, or at least would tell you no. So I think I queried 56 agents over the course of about three months. and I kind of got them out there relatively quickly. um ah Back then, the the kind of recommendation was to do find people who responded quickly using tools like a query tracker that has kind of aggregated data for for how many
00:18:13
Speaker
how how people respond. Find a few fast responders, send send them your queries, see how they respond, and then make changes. and I did that and didn't get any responses, so I had decided to to go, okay, i'll just but I'll just start putting it out there. um And I I essentially tried to treat it like very boring ah though high stakes data entry and just try and do two or three queries a day and just get them out there one after the other and and try not to attach too strongly to the outcome of any one query. I think that helped because i was just putting them it was still horrible. i still
00:18:50
Speaker
you know It feels like the querying process and the agenting process is like the worst possible system apart from all the others. and you know is It feels like the one we've landed on, it doesn't mean it's perfect, and it and it it does a number, I think, on a lot of people's motivation and and kind of energy to write because it is quite it full of ups and downs and just so much wasting and limbos.
00:19:13
Speaker
And it's all subjectivity in there, as like most of this industry is, but you know, there's a lot of the time your you yeah you haven't met the agent, you haven't had a long discussion about what literature they like or what they think is currently working in the market. So you're basically going, you can sort of read a bio, which i I've spoken to enough agents to know that they don't update them that regularly.
00:19:38
Speaker
no And you, you could be reading a bio and just suddenly think, wow, this is the perfect agent. This is the one. And then like you were said, it's easy. Like you kind of stopped yourself getting attached to any one submission, but it's so easy to be like, Oh no, I've sent five submissions out, but there's that one who I just think is so perfect. And it's like, you, you don't really know, you know, you're going off a bio. You can never know. him you get you can't and i think that you can You can do a lot of research. you can do There's tools you can use, like the you know digging through the bookseller, digging through publishers' marketplace in the US, query tracker, writer discords. There's loads of places. And and and Reddit's PubTips community is probably one of the best resources I've seen for like queryying getting queries looked over for free. It's obviously just the internet's opinion, so it's not necessarily
00:20:29
Speaker
100% valid all the time, but some of the commenters on there are former editors, current agents, and they're just it's it's a really great community. ah But I think that a you know casting your net relatively widely and not kind of self-rejecting, not looking at a bunch of agents and saying, oh, he says he doesn't like high fantasy, my book's fantasy. It's not high fantasy, but maybe I won't query him because he maybe he doesn't like fantasy after all, that kind of thing. just interpreting the genres people are asking for as generously generously as possible, I think is ah is a very good idea because it's querying is really hard. Don't make it harder for yourself by not wanting to bother people. you know agents Agents want to hear from you, um even though sometimes it feels like they don't.
00:21:18
Speaker
Yeah. And when they, you know, from the agent stuff spoken to, if they're going through a pile of things and they see something which is just a genre or a style that they simply don't represent, don't feel bad because they ah they'll just say, Oh no, I don't represent that. And then that's ticked off for them that they just put it to one side. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Fine.
00:21:35
Speaker
I wouldn't, i you know, I wouldn't query people who explicitly say, you know, don't send me your romanticy if they don't read that you're kind of wasting your time in theirs. But I would say, you know, if they're like, I like fantasy novels, don't question, well, what kind of fantasy novels? Just send them your fantasy novel and don't worry about it. and And I think so much of it is down to timing and you know what they happen to be ah looking for at any particular time that you just have to get as many queries as you can out there and do the best that you can and follow the submission guidelines. And if you're doing those things, you're probably ahead of 95% ninety five percent of the the people that are querying anyway. ive I've heard some absolute horror stories for the kinds of things that end up in an agent inboxes.
00:22:21
Speaker
Oh yeah, I've heard some. I had Megan Carroll on recently and she had, ah she mentioned a few sort of horror stories about things that she sees in her queries, but she also mentioned that, but and in fact, there was something recently that she she, you know, she has a very long list. So any, if she's ever adding something to her list, it's such a big consideration.
00:22:44
Speaker
um because she might not have the time and she she came across a query which she absolutely absolutely loved, but she looked at her schedule and she you know she sort of realistically looked at it thinking, I could take on this author, but I won't be able to get back to them and like seriously look at this and seriously go out on and submission for like six months, maybe more because of everything else that I've got lined up. So she very begrudgingly had to pass on something that she loved. I think it got picked up by someone else.
00:23:13
Speaker
And she was saying she still spies on them to see what the situation is with that book. And she's still mad that she couldn't she didn't have time to pick it up. And I think that's incredibly common. Agents, if they could, they'd probably take on a lot more then that of the of the books they see coming through than the authors. There's probably a lot of people that they're like, yeah, I feel like there's an 80% to 90% chance that I could do something really great here. But I think from what I've seen, agents most agents, especially the ones who are later on in their career and already have ah ah quite a big client base,
00:23:49
Speaker
they you know they have to save their offers for the 100%. They have to save it for the, I ah absolutely will be bereft if I don't sign this author. Because if they're going for people who they're like 80-90% sure about it and they're like, this looks great, I could do great things with it, I think. you know if they If they signed all of those, they would just essentially crumble under the amount of work.
00:24:13
Speaker
Yeah, because they so you know they already have a large list of authors that they need to be giving their time to and a lot of them are like successful authors with recurring contracts and things like that. and its yeah The longer the list, the the the less kind of time they have to look at more other things.
Writing Across Multiple Genres
00:24:29
Speaker
um Let's get back onto you though. ah Before we head over to Desert Island, I wanted to ask, because you mentioned this is a a spy thriller and you youre so you sort of have um almost like a so ah a range in your genres. You go from sort of sci-fi up to these kind of contemporary spy thrillers. And like you were saying before with the first submission, you you almost had the issue of being too much in the middle of those two genres that you write in. I imagine you're working on something new.
00:24:56
Speaker
Is it going to be more spy thriller or is it going to go more towards the speculative sci-fi? Well, because I might have gotten for punishment, I'm working on two things at the moment. Perfect. Yeah. i'm worried So I am ah writing a sample for the second book in this series, a which is going to go to my editor hopefully in the next couple of weeks.
00:25:22
Speaker
um And that's, you know, obviously everything is contingent on how the first book does. um i I just have a one book deal with an option for a second book. So hopefully the book is doing really well. We're in this sort of weird post publication limbo where there's not a lot of data yet and there's not a lot of trends. So we're just kind of we got we were very fortunate to get some really great press coverage. We got reviews in the FT Sunday Times and The Sun, which is a pretty good spread ah for a debut author. and So hopefully that, combined with just kind of a bit of momentum ah from reorders and things like that, well will get us to the point where we you know a second book is viable.
00:26:04
Speaker
So I'm writing the sample for that. and I'm also about to do an edit on a big science fiction novel, which is kind of pure, pure SF. you know It's set in space. It's set hundreds of years in the future. um And it's very much it's not I don't think it's going to fall in the gap between genres at all, because it's very much it's about generation ships and things like that. So I'm doing an edit on that with my agent, and then hopefully we'll go out on submission with that later in the year.
00:26:33
Speaker
and my My objective, and I'm quite open about this and I talk about it a lot, is is to essentially try and emulate what Ian M. Banks did where he writes you know contemporary fiction under one name and then adds an initial ah for the science for the science fiction.
00:26:48
Speaker
and because I think that that's my ideal really is to to play in both worlds because I write relatively quickly and I think if I was only writing in one genre and kind of waiting for publishing cycles I would probably get frustrated quite quickly whereas if I'm writing in two genres with two publishers I can ah can alternate and kind of if if I'm waiting for one thing I can go and write another.
Commercial Potential of Thrillers and Sci-fi
00:27:11
Speaker
Yeah. And they they're two good genres to to be in because you've got ah thrillers like Spy, kind of clandestine thrillers are very commercial. yeah They tend to do very well in in in terms of sales. And then sci-fi is a bit more niche. So I guess if you get both of those up and running, you've got kind of one kind of covering the other because obviously when a sci-fi blows up, it really blows up though. And you get the movie and things like that.
00:27:37
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. And I remember I went to see Ian Banks once speaking out at Waterston's in Edinburgh, um and he he was talking about that, actually, and he was saying it's quite common for interviewers to assume that, you know, he did the science fiction stuff as ah as a commercial thing to backstop his literary, more literary fiction. And he said, no, it's it's the opposite. the yeah The science fiction is very much the work of his heart that he's doing because he really enjoys it. And the literary fiction outsells it by about 10 to 1.
00:28:07
Speaker
and But then, obviously, occasionally, as you say, a book will blow up and will get adapted and as a result will become part of that broader cultural and media conversation, which I think makes a huge difference. Yeah, because ah it's almost like um the potential for a sci-fi novel when it when it does hit that kind of stride is to just get atmospherically big, like three body problem, I guess is the most recent one to sort of blow up and be everywhere.
00:28:35
Speaker
Yeah, although I think spy fiction and has the benefit of being relatively more likely to be produced because people sneaking around in dark alleys is not as heavy on the budget. Yeah, exactly. Fantasies offers the same issue. where it so There was a phase, I think after Game of Thrones, obviously all the ah production companies were trying to get in quotes the next Game of Thrones and they all wonderfully failed. yeah ah Now I speak to people who have had having their books optioned and things like that and it's like the reluctance to do fantasy and I think to a slightly lesser degree but still there is sci-fi.
00:29:13
Speaker
It's just so high because the taking an option of that, they know that the budget's going to be so big. And if it doesn't land, you know, if you get like the Borderlands movie, which must have had a massive budget and it's just made no money.
00:29:27
Speaker
i remember I remember reading when The Expanse was being made because I think before it was with Amazon it was with sci the Sci-Fi channel. um i't have ah I can't remember. It was a while ago. But I remember the ah reading a story that said the executives at the original company called it The Expense rather than The Expense because it was so expensive to produce relative to other things they were doing.
00:29:50
Speaker
yeah but yeah I mean, it got rescued and and they managed to finish the story, I think, which is which is great. But yeah, they by definition, I think if you've got spaceships or castles or dragons, you're goingnna you're going to be upping your budget. Yeah.
Impactful Reads and Personal Favorites
00:30:04
Speaker
um I don't know if this is true, but I heard a story about the Expanse, whatever it was originally, and then Amazon picked it up when it got cancelled. And I don't know if this is true, but I heard the story was literally because Jeff Bezos liked the show. So he basically told them to pick it up because he wanted to see the end.
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not sure I want us to rely culturally on the the whims of billionaires for for yeah whether a show gets continued or not. But at the same time, I'm glad he did because I think it's a story that deserved to be told fully. Yeah, yeah, it was it's it's it's a good one. um And that brings us to the point in the episode where we head over to um the desert island. So David, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book do you hope that it would be?
00:30:51
Speaker
So I think the kind of conservationist side of me, um and I'm so i'm assuming these these are books that I actually own, are they? or i mean It could be. it No, you have to own it. I have people making up books to take.
00:31:05
Speaker
And so I think the, I was, I was going to say, you know, if I was conserving things, it would be the oldest book I own, which is a copy of Spencer's, the fairy queen that my grandmother left to me, which is well over a hundred years old. i am But I think really um the the sort of genre reading um side of me would think it would be the book that really blew my mind when I was in my early teens, which is Excession by Ian bank in em Banks. um And I remember reading that and then realising that the author was from Scotland and ah essentially lived about 15 miles or so away from where I grew up. And it blew my mind that someone who lived in North Queens Ferry, which is this slightly rainy town on the north side of the further forth, had written this book about
00:32:00
Speaker
giant ah AI ah spaceships talking to each other and dealing with ah an intrusion on our reality by another reality and and what what that meant. and it's so it's you know it's essentially Again, it's essentially a spy thriller. It's about a bunch of these culture minds like trying to you know trying to do some skullduggery to try and fix this situation. But it's told almost in like instant messages. like There's a bunch of messages between these ships as they talk to each other and I'd never read a book that had this kind of formatting or told a story in this way and I basically reconfigured my brain when I was about 14 and essentially said you can do pretty much anything you want and it doesn't matter really where you're from or what sort of stories you're supposed to tell or what stories are are worthy or interesting you can do what you like and you can do what you like with any technique you like and I think
00:32:57
Speaker
Realizing that when I was 13 or 14 just completely changed my brain and changed my the way I thought about writing. Okay, that's cool. it's It's almost more important about the kind of geography of where Inbanks was from more than the the kind of story itself in a way. Yeah, definitely. And I think it's quite a common experience among writers in Scotland in their 30s and 40s. I've definitely heard three or four other people say the same thing. They read this book and it just broke their perception of what writing could be.
00:33:28
Speaker
yeah So yeah, it's it's ah it's a cracking book. I think it's possibly my favorite of the culture novels. Trying to think if I've, I've had, ah I definitely have had a similar moment in terms of reading something and just being like, this is writing on a, on a level beyond what I previously kind of comprehended. And I'm like, when I was, it was the, the Watchman Alan Moore's graphic novel. Yeah.
00:33:50
Speaker
And I remember reading that and just kind of stopping between a lot of the chapters and thinking, how does a human being conceptualize on this level? would like this must have And obviously I know that it it doesn't all happen at once. It's it's in the edits, it's in the read drafts, but it's just, there's a level of writing sometimes that I'll see and I'll just think, wow, this is incredible. This is like the the peak of literature, that similar kind of experience, I guess. Definitely. Yeah, I love that reaction where I i finish a book or I get to the end of a chapter and I just sort of exhale ah because I didn't realise I was holding my breath and it's maybe not because of the act what's actually happening in the book, the kind of tension of the scene or the characters interacting. It's just that I can't believe what I just read. How the heck did he come up with that? yeah after
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, it it it's amazing. That's possibly my peak experience. That's what I read for and what I write for is to is to create and to read things like that. Definitely. Amazing, but that's a great choice, something that really sounds like it like had such a big impact on you and and probably is the the first block to fall ah leading up to your career as an author, I imagine. and Definitely. So next up, ah we're going to chat about film and TV planning and pantsing and our favorite spy and sci-fi stuff, but that will be an extended cut available on Patreon. So, but that's all the time we've got
Closing Remarks and Social Media
00:35:18
Speaker
for today. Thank you so much, David, for coming on the podcast and telling us um all about your experiences in publishing and about the new book, A Reluctant Spy, which is out right now in all the usual places. It's been really cool chatting with you.
00:35:30
Speaker
Thank you for having me. I'm a huge fan and um it's a life ambition to have appeared on this podcast. For anyone wanting to keep up with what Dave is doing, you can follow him on Twitter at wordsbygoodman, on Instagram at Dave Goodman author, on blue sky at Dave Goodman, or on his website, davidgoodman.net where he where he does still blog. So that's probably the best place to find him.
00:35:53
Speaker
To support the podcast, like, follow and subscribe when you're podcast platform of choice. Join the Patreon for extended episodes ad free and a week early and check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes. Thanks again, David, and thanks to everyone listening. We will catch you on the next episode.