INTRO

Hello from Edinburgh in February, the month for which the word “dreich” was invented. Outside, everything is grey. Grey skies reflect from puddles on grey pavement, and even the warm brown stone from which most of this city is built takes on a grey cast when soaked with this much drizzle. My wardrobe, too, is primarily grey. I am part of the problem.

You'll note that it has been less than a month since last we spoke: this is because I realised that a mid-month newsletter is silly, and an end-of-month one is inevitably retrospective, while writing at the start of the month feels full of possibility.¹ The flipside of this is that I now have to struggle with the temptation to pivot to “what WILL I be doing this month?” and just make up some nonsense.

¹ _{I wrote this part last week and am only now finishing the email. Shut up.}

READ IT FORWARD

Read It Forward is Bookshop.org’s annual charity initiative: buy any children’s or YA book through them during February, and 10% of the sale goes to BookTrust and the Scottish Book Trust. It’s a good cause, and a good source of books, and I’m always keen to support both beneficiaries.

Oh, and wouldn’t it be convenient if I had a YA book available through bookshop.org? Good news: I do! If you’ve been wondering about buying a copy of The Restaurant at the Edge of the World, now would be a really good time to so. Look, here’s a link you can click on to get to the bookshop.org page! Don’t say I never do anything for you.

AWARDS

For those of you just joining me this month, the big news is that The Restaurant at the Edge of the World, by me and Kelsi Jo Silva, has been shortlisted for the Leeds Book Awards! I don’t have a call to action here, I just want you to know about this because I’m excited about it.

WHAT AM I WRITING?

This month, I have written a short comic for [REDACTED]. It’s been a lot of fun: ten pages of horror, and a lot of freedom to do whatever I want within that. You’ll hear more about it… soon?

It turns out, after a dry spell of over a year, I’m a little bit wound up and ready to go. Two weeks to come up with an outline, and I had it written and approved within two days. Script turned in over a month ahead of deadline. I can do this. (I have always been a terrible teacher’s pet when it comes to deadlines. It doesn’t matter whether it’s academic essays or contracted work, it’s getting submitted at least a week early)

Other projects continue: Project V is deep in rewrites still, getting better and weirder with every slider I move. Project RS is in the process of being wildly reimagined, and I’m excited about the direction in which it’s heading. Paragraphs for it keep on bursting into my head, usually when I’m trying to do something else. I’m finding middle-grade prose to be a very comfortable register to write in, with space to play and a voice that brings me joy. I can’t wait for you all to see what we’re up to.

Assembling long form projects takes time; I knew what I was getting into when I started this life, but that doesn’t change how slow it all is. I may not have much to show off right now, but I’m getting things done in secret. The work continues, always. That being said, I remain very available for more work if anyone’s offering.

WHAT AM I READING?

In January, I read somewhere in the region of fifteen books. That’s because I revisited the entirety of Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s The Edge Chronicles series; these were formative middle grade fiction for me, and coming back to them with adult sensibilities was rewarding. Sometimes, it’s nice to revisit childhood and conclude that yes, you did have great taste as a child, it’s not just that you didn’t know any better.

The Edge Chronicles are a series of fourteen books, published from the late 90s through to 2019, exploring hundreds of years of change in one fantasy setting: a huge, forested landscape on the top of an endless cliff, peopled by sky pirates, goblins, academics, and hundreds of stranger and more unsettling creatures. The thing that’s special about them is that they’re all fully illustrated by Chris Riddell, and they look like this:

They’re gnarly and textured and weird and scary, and present a fantasy world with a physicality that (along with a lot of Jim Henson) informed a lot of what fantasy looks like in my mind: lumpy, physical, and more than a little scary. Fantasy should feel like something old and rough that you can touch. Something you can feel around you, with shadows that maybe make you a little bit uncomfortable when you remember they’re there.

They’re also notable as an influence on me for being wildly anticapitalist. These books present a world in which greed and corporate growth are the greatest evil, and where the best thing you can do is almost always to push a wealthy capitalist off a cliff. They show children that unchecked capitalism will always return to abuse exploitation, and slavery, and that anyone who says they’re one of the good ones while amassing enormous wealth is lying through their teeth and will try to kill you as soon as it benefits them to do so.

The other thing that’s important about these books is that, when I was growing up in Cambridge, Stewart and Riddell were regular fixtures of the “bookshop events for children” circuit. They were some of my first direct exposure to authors-as-people, and to the human side of making a book. And here I am, 20 years later, working out how to do my first kids event as an author. So, thanks for all of that, Paul and Chris.

WHAT AM I LISTENING TO?

The song of the month this month is the first song on the playlist for Project V. It’s Dead Pony’s absolutely unreasonably good cover of Nelly Furtado’s Maneater. Go and give that a listen and don’t come back till you’re done.

Glasgow. 2023. Chvrches are playing at the Barrowlands Ballroom (the best venue there is. Fight me). They’re being opened for by local pop punk band Dead Pony, who I’ve never heard of before. A small group of amiable Glaswegians turn up on stage, and it turns out that they mostly want to talk about their new EP, which is inspired by Mad Max Fury Road. And then they play this cover, and when I leave the venue at the end of the night I know exactly what the book I’ve been toying with in my spare time sounds like. And it sounds like this.

FRIENDS MAKING THINGS

Late last year, friend of the show Stout Stoat Press released Carved in Stone, which is one of the most interesting books I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long time.

Carved in Stone is a remarkable project: everything we currently know about the Picts, presented in the form of a big colourful setting sourcebook for the tabletop roleplaying games. It’s comprehensively researched, beautifully illustrated by some of Scotland’s finest artists, and presented in a format that’s both accessible and useful.

I love serious academic research. I mean, I have a PhD in Late Antique Greek Epic Poetry. Of course I love serious academic research. So often, though, that research gets siloed off into in-group language for academics and books that aren’t even practical for the general public to get hold of, let alone parse; so few academics are even interested in communicating their work to a wider audience, let alone trying active outreach. But this? This is something I haven’t seen before.

A big accessible guide to the Picts would be a lovely thing that would reach more people than an academic text could ever hope to touch. This, though, is an RPG sourcebook: it’s designed to be engaged with and interacted with and shared with a table. It’s made to pull readers and players into another time and another people, and that’s going to be memorable and engaging and effective in so many more ways than any other format could be.

I think more researchers should be seriously considering their publication options. Academia is fine enough, but academic roleplaying game supplements feel like a new frontier that should be explored more thoroughly in future.

One more time: Carved in Stone. It’s a hell of a thing.

OUTRO

The last few weeks have been cold and dark and miserable up here, so I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen. Lately, that's meant learning to make salsas. Did you know that dried chiles are fun and interesting and so, so diverse and full of interesting notes and aromas? They're such a lovely thing to play with and discover nuances in.

Here's my recommendation for the month: go and buy yourself some pasilla chiles and see what you can do with them. Go and make yourself something spicy and fruity and reviving, and take your time. Enjoy yourself! That's what food is for; you don't even have to share it. In a world where food is marketed on how much protein it contains and how it can benefit you, slowing down and taking pleasure in it feels more important than ever before. We exist to feel things, not to optimise. If you can, go and feel something, and take the time to enjoy it.

If I can find six different varieties of chiles in cold dark Scotland in February, you can find them wherever it is you live. I believe in you.

• Ollie, Edinburgh, Feb 2026