INTRO

May, and spring has finally made an appearance. On my balcony, things are growing. Basil, thyme, rosemary, lettuce, radishes, courgettes, two types of cucumber, and one very small orange tree with anxiety. I love my anxious orange tree. If the squirrel that hangs out on my balcony dares to hurt it I will be getting a lovely new pair of squirrel-fur gloves.

I've been using my days off to go for long walks along the coast, and trying to think more about how we connect with nature, and how to recapture a child's sense of the natural world. Big thoughts, with few clear answers. They help my characters to come alive around me. This will all make sense eventually; trust me.

There is a joy to being outside, alone, all day. To walking between places one largely sees as islands centred around train stations. Dunbar is a lovely little town, 20 minutes from Edinburgh by train; North Berwick the same. To walk from one to the other is to connect them, and build a sense of how our little urban islands sit on something larger, older, and slower.

25km is a nice, comfortable day's walk, with time to stop, to greet passing butterflies and birds, to lie down in the grass at the crest of the beach and close your eyes and listen. I come home tired, sunburned, and better feeling how I fit into the world around me.

There is time to pause in a village, wandering into a pub for a pint and a moment’s conversation with a stranger, to write a page and then move on, back to the trees and the coast. It is nice to slow down, sometimes.

THE NEWS

May offers a new experience: The Restaurant at the Edge of the World, by me and Kelsi Jo Silva, has been shortlisted for the Leeds Book Awards! Later this month, I along with several other cool and exciting authors, get to go down to Leeds for a day of talking to school children and finding out which of us have won awards.

The shortlists have been assembled by librarians, but the awards themselves are all voted for by the children. I think that's neat, and how more awards for children's fiction should be organised. And also, I've never wanted to win an award more than this.

What sort of misadventures will I have on the way? Will we win an award? What happens when you let this many authors loose in Leeds on a Tuesday? Come back next month to find out What I Did.

WHAT AM I WRITING?

This week (yesterday, as I write this), I finished the first draft of Project RS! Coming in at 51,919 words, it’s pretty close to the shape I want. There’s still a long way to go with this, and the rest of the team have yet to read it, but there is at least a full, readable text of an entire middle-grade adventure novel living on my computer. It’s silly and adventurous and sincere, and I hope I’ve managed to say the things I need to say in a way that works well for twelve-year-olds.

It’s been a pleasure writing something like this. Writing for children is harder than writing for adults: not only do you need to pitch things carefully, but also children can smell bullshit. I find writing for children makes me honest in a way that writing for adults doesn’t; it’s hard, and raw, and definitely good for me.

Hopefully I’ll be able to talk more about this in the not too distant future. For now, the specifics of the book will have to remain vague. Which brings me to my next point!

Let's try something. I'm now a bookshop.org affiliate, which means I can create reading lists, and if people buy something directly from those lists, I get a tiny cut. I picked this idea up from Mary Robinette Kowal: creating a reading list for a project enables me to share my research bibliography, which is fun. It might not be of much interest to anyone other than me, but it's a neat way to centralise “this is what I've read as part of writing this book”.

So, here's where you can find the reading list for Project RS. This is a pretty vague and sprawling list; it's not all research material. Some of it is simply books I've been browsing for mood or structure. Some of it probably won't even be all that relevant to the finished book. What it should give, though, is some good reading and a little window into where my head is at. How much can you guess about the book from what I've been reading?

WHAT AM I READING?

It's been a slow month for reading, here. Time blurs together and I don't think I read much.

BUT.

Let me tell you about Robert MacFarlane's Is a River Alive?.

MacFarlane is one of my favourite nature writers. He brings a poet's ear for language to the natural world, and understands how to make the reader feel the world around him. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could easily become overwrought; from MacFarlane, it is always elegant and captivating.

Is a River Alive? is a book about animism, and pollution, and the idea of an ecosystem as a single living thing. It is a book about how we depend on the flow of the river, and how we kill rivers despite this. It is about sewage dumping and damming and the ever-moving, twisting flow of water.

This is a book that asks: if you yourself are a living being, filled with moving water and tiny living microorganisms, how can a river be anything less? How can we treat it as a dead thing, a space to be taken advantage of and treated carelessly?

It’s hard to talk about this in any meaningful way, really. Water is protean and vague, a vibe rather than a clear story. It should be experienced by slow, thoughtful immersion, rather than a brief outlining of its main points. This is a book that will sweep you off your feet, make you think about the world around you and the nature of life and consciousness, and then hit you with an emotional punch when you least expect it. It’s beautiful, captivating work. Easily the best thing MacFarlane has written yet, and that’s saying something.

MY LINKS

Buy The Restaurant at the Edge of the World (UK)

Buy Off Menu (US)

My bookshop.org reading lists

FRIENDS MAKING THINGS

This month’s rec is for Alex Plante’s Up The Duff, a new collection of autobio comics about pregnancy. They’re full of some of the most consistently funny cartooning around: Alex is, among other things, outrageously good at drawing unimpressed stares.

There’s a lovely messy humanity to these comics; they’re unflattering and silly and loose and real in a way that I love. Also, the pdf is only about £5. Go. Buy some comics.

OUTRO

It's Thursday morning, I've just been to vote, and now I'm on the train to go for another long walk. Go and vote for someone who won't fuck things up for everyone (I recommend Green).

After you've done that, here's my recommendation for this month: go outside, anywhere far enough from the road that the sound of cars is gone. Lie down in the grass, and let your mind and body both sink into it. Close your eyes. Listen for a while.

“To bend the ear to silence is to discover how seldom it is there.”¹

• Ollie, Edinburgh, May 2026

Subscribe here to receive future emails like this directly in your inbox.

¹ _{Nan Shepherd (1977), The Living Mountain. 96}