Interview With Author Peter Gates
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a Scottish author writing from the Highlands, and I’m disabled, which shapes both how and why I write. I have nine published books across three areas. My memoirs were my life, written to put down what actually happened to me. Fiction came after, and writing the Blood on the Clyde trilogy has become a release, a way to step outside my own circumstances for a while. My nonfiction work on fibromyalgia grew out of more than a decade researching my own condition, and I write it to hand other patients the evidence and the questions their doctors often don’t give them, so they don’t have to fight as hard as I did to be heard.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest book is Fibromyalgia? The Research Patients Actually Need to See: The questions. The evidence. The receipts. It grew out of more than a decade of my own research into fibromyalgia, work I never originally intended for publication. It started as me trying to understand my own condition and fight my own corner with doctors, and over the years it became something much bigger: a body of evidence and the right questions for other patients to take into their own appointments, so they don’t have to start from nothing the way I did.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I write almost entirely lying on my back, since I live with significant chronic pain and that’s simply where the work gets done. I also use speech-to-text rather than typing, which has shaped my voice as a writer more than I expected, it forces a spoken rhythm onto the page.
One habit that comes directly from my illnesses is how I have to store and retrieve thoughts. Sometimes everything I want to say comes at once and I have to get it all down before it goes again. Other times I lose the word or name for something I know perfectly well, it’s there, I just can’t reach it in the moment. So a lot of my process is built around capturing things quickly when they surface, then going back later to fill in what got lost the first time round.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I take inspiration less from a traditional reading list and more from honest, unflinching depictions of working-class Scottish life. Looking After Jo Jo, Frank Deasy’s BBC Scotland drama, and Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s novel, both shaped how I think about voice and place. Beyond Welsh, I’d point to William McIlvanney, often called the father of Tartan Noir, and Denise Mina for how she writes Glasgow without softening it. True crime more broadly has fed into the Blood on the Clyde series too, that same refusal to look away from the truth is what I’m reaching for in my own work.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on something I haven’t shared publicly anywhere else, this is the first time I’m talking about it. A new standalone novel called Raised by the Clyde, Brought Up by the Scheme, following a new protagonist, Frank Ferro, a Glasgow-Italian born in 1960. It sits in the same world as the Blood on the Clyde trilogy without retelling it, a fresh entry point for readers rather than a continuation. As for what actually happened to the characters at the end of the trilogy, I’ve deliberately left that for readers to imagine for themselves. Never say never on a follow-up one day, but it’s not something I’m planning right now.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
So far Awesomegang has been my best find, getting books in front of readers who are actually out looking for something new. Alongside that, I try to keep a presence on X and Facebook to reach readers directly.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Draw from your own experience. Everything I write comes from my life, or from a world I’ve actually lived in, even my fiction. In Blood on the Clyde, a lot of the lead character is built from my own illnesses, things I know firsthand rather than things I imagined. Don’t wait for permission, and don’t assume your story isn’t worth telling because it didn’t come from a writing course. The truth you’ve lived is the best material you’ll ever have.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
The best advice I’ve ever received was to start writing as a release for some of the pain I’d held in for decades. I haven’t stopped since. That advice came from my loving wife.
What are you reading now?
I don’t read a lot of books myself, dyslexia makes it hard going, so I tend to take in true crime through documentaries rather than the page. But one book just caught my eye and I’ve bought it: Fuck Mindfulness… And Other Dangerous Advice for Modern Humans by Tanja Diamond. I’m just about to start it.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Right now it’s about continuing the new novel and keeping the momentum going on both the fibromyalgia books and Blood on the Clyde, trying to build a proper readership since I’m still early in this journey. One thing I’ve learned from the trilogy: splitting it into three books wasn’t really a creative choice, it was down to not yet knowing how to structure and bring out a large novel, even though the whole story was already in my head from the start. I’m not making that mistake again. The new book will be one complete novel rather than split into parts, roughly the combined size of the three Blood on the Clyde books put together, but I won’t be pushing it beyond that, that’s simply not how I write.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Given my dyslexia, it’d have to be audiobooks rather than books. And honestly, I wouldn’t be picking favourite novels, I’d be picking survival. Something practical on bushcraft and wilderness survival, something on basic first aid, and something on navigation or signalling for rescue. My priority wouldn’t be entertainment, it would be getting home to my kids and my family, so every choice would be about staying alive long enough to make that happen.
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