Writing & Notes

One of the central constraints in State of Containment is time.

Matthew James has five days before the containment order becomes irreversible. After that, whatever possibility remains of regaining control will have disappeared.

A deadline is a familiar part of a thriller. Something will happen at a particular time and the characters have to prevent it. Used badly, it can feel rather mechanical. People keep looking at clocks, announcing how little time remains and making decisions that nobody sensible would make under normal circumstances.

The more interesting question for me was what a deadline actually removes.

Time allows people to gather information, test assumptions, consult others and reconsider a decision. Most organisations depend on having at least some of it. Problems are assessed. Options are discussed. Decisions are escalated. Further meetings are arranged, sometimes to confirm the conclusions of the previous meetings.

In State of Containment, those options disappear quite quickly.

Communications have failed. Parts of the city are inaccessible. Information arrives late, if it arrives at all, and there is no longer any certainty that the systems people rely on are working for their benefit.

Matthew understands some of the logic behind what is happening, but understanding the system does not mean he knows everything it is doing. He is trying to make decisions while moving through a city that is changing around him, using incomplete information and knowing that waiting for greater certainty may leave him with no decision to make.

That became one of the most useful aspects of the five-day limit.

It means that choices cannot be postponed indefinitely. Routes have to be chosen without knowing whether they remain open. People have to decide which pieces of information they believe. A possible solution may have to be followed before anybody can be certain that it will work.

The deadline also affects the physical shape of the story.

Birmingham is not a compact fictional setting where every important location is conveniently within walking distance. Roads, railways, service routes, buildings and other pieces of infrastructure connect the city, but they can also divide it when they stop operating normally.

Getting from one place to another therefore becomes part of the problem.

A route that makes sense on a map may be useless once access has been restricted. A journey that would normally be unremarkable becomes much less predictable when doors seal, transport corridors close and the system begins directing movement for reasons that have nothing to do with helping people escape.

The passage of time also has a cumulative effect.

People become tired. Supplies diminish. Small injuries matter more. Decisions made on the first day create problems on the second or third. By the fifth day, the characters are not simply dealing with a larger version of the original emergency. They are carrying everything that has happened since it began.

That was important because a deadline should change behaviour, not just appear at the start of each chapter.

Matthew's knowledge gives him an advantage, but it also gives him a particular responsibility. He recognises elements of the Janitor, the failsafe he helped to create, within the containment network. He may also have one way of forcing a reset.

What he does not have is enough time to understand every consequence before acting.

That is where the five-day structure became more than a way of creating tension. It helped shape the routes the characters could take, the information they could trust and the decisions they could no longer avoid.

Without it, this would have been a different story.

State of Containment will be published on 24 September 2026. More about State of Containment.

The new cover for State of Containment arrived this week, and I'm now waiting for the paperback proof.

These are fairly ordinary production milestones, but they change how a book feels.

For a long time, a novel exists as a collection of drafts, notes, revisions and files with names that become less informative each time the word "final" is added to them. A finished cover and a physical proof begin to turn it into something that might actually exist outside your own computer.

State of Containment has taken a particularly long route to that point.

It has been in development for longer than Certified in Sounding Official and has gone through several versions, working titles and covers along the way. Some of those changes were relatively small. Others altered the direction and emphasis of the whole story.

It is also a considerable departure from Crispin's world.

Certified in Sounding Official grew out of language, behaviour and situations that felt immediately familiar. Its world is built from meetings, frameworks, assurance and the peculiar ability of large organisations to discuss a problem at considerable length without anybody becoming responsible for it.

State of Containment takes some of the same interests somewhere much less comfortable.

It is a grounded systems-collapse thriller set across Birmingham, the wider Midlands and the Cotswolds. It begins at Birmingham Airport, where an unannounced military transport arrives carrying something that should never have been released.

Behind the immediate threat is an automated system originally designed to preserve critical infrastructure when human control is lost. The difficulty isn't simply that the system has stopped working. It is what the system has decided preservation requires.

That idea became the part of the novel that kept pulling me back to it.

A failed system is relatively easy to understand. Something breaks, the consequences follow and people try to regain control.

A system that continues to operate is more troubling.

It follows its instructions. It applies the definitions it has been given. It protects what it was designed to protect. The problem is that the people inside the city are no longer included in that definition.

The book is very different in tone and scale from Certified in Sounding Official, but it comes from much the same interest in systems, institutions and decisions whose consequences arrive later.

Working in a different style has meant learning a few new things along the way. It has also made the process longer and, at times, rather less predictable than I expected when I began.

I've enjoyed that.

There is something useful about moving beyond the form that first became familiar and finding out which parts of your writing still follow you. In this case, it seems to be the systems, the people caught inside them and the gap between what an organisation says something is for and what it eventually does.

The cover is now finished. The website has been updated. The proof is on its way.

After several versions, titles and covers, State of Containment is finally becoming a book.

It will be published on 24 September 2026. More about State of Containment.

Following on slightly from my last post, one thing I've found interesting about writing fiction is the balance between using things you already know and researching the things you don't.

There's an obvious advantage in starting with something familiar.

With Certified in Sounding Official, quite a lot of the background came from recognising the language, behaviours and occasional absurdities of working in and around technology, cybersecurity and large organisations.

That doesn't mean the events are real, of course, but knowing how those environments work gives you somewhere believable to start.

I've found much the same thing while working on what comes next.

Places are a good example.

If you know an area well, you remember things that probably wouldn't appear in a tourist guide or a quick internet search.

Which roads become difficult when traffic builds up. Where one type of housing suddenly gives way to another. What a particular underpass or estate feels like. The shortcuts, service roads and bits of infrastructure most people pass without really noticing.

They are usually fairly ordinary details.

In fiction, though, ordinary details can be useful. They give you something solid to build around.

But familiarity only gets you so far.

Once a story starts developing, there are inevitably things you don't know.

That is where the research begins.

It is quite different from the sort of research I'm used to through work, where there is normally a fairly specific reason for doing it: understanding a technical issue, working through a standard or policy, checking how something is supposed to operate, or finding an answer to a particular problem.

Research for fiction is a bit less predictable.

You might start by trying to work out whether one small detail is plausible and end up reading about a piece of technology, a building, a process or something else you knew very little about beforehand.

Routes get checked.

Buildings get looked at properly.

Technical assumptions get challenged.

Sometimes something you confidently thought would work turns out not to, or the convenient route you had somebody taking makes absolutely no sense.

There is also the danger of disappearing rather too far into something that will eventually occupy about two sentences in the finished book.

But even that can be useful.

Understanding more than you eventually put on the page means the detail can sit in the background rather than requiring a paragraph explaining it.

And occasionally the research turns up something much more interesting than the thing you originally went looking for.

I quite enjoy that part of it.

You start with something you understand, follow it into something you don't, and gradually build enough around it that the fictional part has something solid to stand on.

I suppose "write what you know" doesn't necessarily mean only writing about things you already understand.

Sometimes it just means knowing where to start.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.

One of the things I've found particularly encouraging since publishing Certified in Sounding Official has been discovering just how many people in my professional network have a creative side that I knew little or nothing about.

There are other authors, artists, people involved in narration and audio, and quite a few people developing creative projects alongside their main careers.

I've enjoyed discovering that, probably because I'm now doing much the same thing myself.

I still work full time in cybersecurity, so writing tends to happen around everything else.

Evenings. Weekends. Occasionally a note made when something occurs to me at a particularly inconvenient moment.

There isn't really a separate writing life where everything else stops for a while.

It fits into the gaps.

What has changed is that I now have one published novel and other projects at different stages behind it.

Finishing the first book also changed my perspective on the process.

Before publication, most of what happens to a novel is largely invisible.

There is the initial idea, which is usually much less complete than it feels at the time.

Then there are the things that work immediately, the things that definitely don't, characters who become more important than expected, scenes that disappear completely and details that send you down research routes you hadn't anticipated.

Eventually, after rather more revision than you imagined when you started, there is something resembling a finished book.

And then everyone sees the finished version.

I realised that, apart from mentioning a book when it is completed or available, I had shared very little about everything that happens between those two points.

How ideas develop.

What changes along the way.

What turns out not to work.

The research.

And what I'm learning from trying to fit writing around a fairly normal working life.

So I thought I'd occasionally share a little more of that here.

Nothing too relentless.

Those with absolutely no interest in how novels get put together can consider this fair warning.

It isn't intended to become a constant stream of book promotion. There will still inevitably be some of that when there is something worth mentioning.

But I'm increasingly interested in the process itself: where ideas come from, the things I'm working on and some of the subjects that keep finding their way into the fiction.

It has also been a useful reminder that the professional version of somebody is rarely the complete one.

Apparently quite a few of us go home and do something entirely different.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.

There are people who quietly solve problems.

And then there's Crispin Lockwood-Fetch.

One of the ideas behind Certified in Sounding Official came from something I suspect most people who have worked in large organisations will recognise: confidence and competence are not necessarily the same thing.

Sometimes the people who understand a problem best are the least interested in performing that understanding for everybody else.

They investigate. They ask awkward questions. They work through the detail. Then, quite often, they quietly fix whatever has gone wrong.

Other people are rather better at the presentation layer.

They have the language. The acronyms. The diagrams. The reassuring ability to turn something complicated into a slide containing three arrows, a maturity model and the word strategic.

Technology and cybersecurity provide particularly fertile ground for this because much of the subject is difficult for people outside it to assess.

If someone speaks confidently enough about resilience, transformation, threat landscapes, governance or risk appetite, how do you know whether they understand what they are talking about?

Usually, eventually, something has to work.

That gap between sounding convincing and actually being useful became part of the starting point for Crispin.

He isn't intended to represent a particular person, and Certified in Sounding Official certainly isn't a disguised account of somewhere I have worked. Most of the events would probably result in considerably more paperwork if they were.

But the behaviours are deliberately recognisable.

Anyone who has spent time around technology, cybersecurity, consultancy or large corporate environments will probably have encountered some version of the meeting where everybody appears to agree despite nobody being quite certain what has been agreed.

Or the presentation that becomes more polished as the underlying problem becomes less clear.

Or the person who can explain, at considerable length, why somebody else is going to fix something.

That familiarity gave me something useful when writing the book.

The situations could become increasingly ridiculous, but they needed to remain just plausible enough that a reader might occasionally wonder whether something similar had actually happened somewhere.

Usually while remembering a meeting they would rather forget.

And that is probably where Crispin works best.

Not because he is completely unbelievable.

Because, occasionally, he isn't unbelievable enough.

An earlier version of this piece was originally shared on LinkedIn.