Since publishing my debut novel, I’ve been inundated with offers from literary agents and publishers. They email me daily – offering book deals, movie adaptations and untold riches.

Trouble is, they’re all scams. So far, at least. And that shred of hope is the problem. There’s a small, tiny, microscopic chance that an agent reads The Wolf of Wistman’s Wood and thinks: “You know what. That Alex Morrison can really write. I should contact him.”

And that tiny chance means I read all the emails purporting to come from these literary unicorns.

Most are easy to dismiss:

• Dear AUTHOR, we’re writing to offer you $10,000 for… (OK, move on).

Some take ten seconds, rather than two:

• Hi Alex. I read your novel, The Wolf of Wistman’s Wood and I found the plot and characters highly compelling. Please click below to book a meeting with… (Quick check of the sender address – publishing@OddAssortmentOfWords.publishing.com – and… delete).

Some are pretty sophisticated (this is a real example):

• My name is (name), Executive Editor and Vice President at (company). I recently spent some time looking into your work, specifically The Wolf of Wistman’s Wood, and I was impressed by the distinctive narrative voice, the vivid historical setting, and the way you bring together love, survival, moral compromise, and the harsh realities of Victorian life. Given your background in journalism and your work across both nonfiction and fiction, I would be very interested to learn more about your current and forthcoming projects, including the novel you are currently developing set in Antarctica, as well as whether you are represented by a literary agent. If you do have representation, I would be pleased to continue any discussion through your agent. If not, I would be happy to outline how the process typically works, should there be interest in taking the conversation further. If this is of interest, I would be delighted to hear from you. Keep being awesome.

Only at “keep being awesome” did my brain go: hang on – is this definitely genuine? Of course, I should have been suspicious far sooner. But bitter experience hasn’t yet destroyed my irrational optimism (see: the whole self-published author project).

Once I started pulling at threads, this latest pitch quickly fell apart. And indeed the real publishing company it claimed to come from has a scam warning on the homepage of its website.

With AI getting ever more sophisticated – not to mention about half of books now being “written” by robots – I imagine many aspiring authors will fall into the scammers’ traps. On this occasion, I dodged that virtual bullet.

And so that little spark of excitement died and I returned to plodding through the (admittedly very pleasant) foothills of Mount Author, ignoring the shiny AI-generated shortcut marked: False Hope.

Comfort fiction

In the face of such annoying scams, maybe it’s best just to laugh. I recently spent a couple of happy afternoons painting the walls of my office/writing space (an innovative way to avoid actually writing) while listening to The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer.

Now, little-known authors like me should probably hate celebrities who suddenly become writers – and indeed I’m yet to read Selfish by Kim Kardashian – but hating takes effort, and I’m too lazy.

The plot of The Satsuma Complex is what my Geordie neighbour would call “fair to middling”, but it’s very funny. I laughed for a long time at the following line from the slightly feeble hero, Gary, when he meets two intimidating policemen:

“I’m not good with authority. Never have been. Not since my headmaster at junior school shouted at me so furiously in his office that my nose started to bleed and one of my gloves shrank.”

Dicing with Death

We recently recorded “The Night Before” (or at least, that’s what I’m calling the as-yet-untitled episode). It’s the last episode before the big showdown. After three-and-a-half years and well over 100 episodes, our epic story – Small Embers – is about to end.

It feels a bit like finishing a novel: satisfying, relieving, scary and slightly heartbreaking. Working on something for so long – even something that’s been so much fun – becomes part of your routine, and finishing it leaves a gap (although of course Dice Company has many more stories to tell).

The big difference between this and a novel is, of course, that no one controls the outcome. No carefully plotted ending can be arranged. It must depend on decisions, discussions and dice rolls. The (hopefully dramatic) ending will be recorded over the weekend of October 3 & 4 – rare daytime recordings to ensure energy and enthusiasm for the big finish.