Andrew Shanahan's Blog

Want To Hear About My New Book?

I’m keeping it short and sweet for this post - Number Nine Downing Street is out. It’s a book that’s very close to my heart and is dedicated to my beautiful daughter Matilda, who genuinely helped me write it (but she gets none of the money, ha!)

ebook out today, paperback tomorrow, audiobook, huh, I don’t know!

What’s it about? In short, it’s political satire for children. Why would anyone in their right mind write a political satire for children? That’s an excellent question.

Synopsis:

What if your parents exploded and then things got really weird?

The Butte children have just inherited Number Nine Downing Street - the house right next door to the Prime Minister’s. Unfortunately, life there is far from peaceful. Between unexpected visitors, bizarre scandals, and some very suspicious cakes, the Buttes soon find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of power, chaos and crows.

Perfect for fans of A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Thick of It, this laugh-out-loud adventure blends sharp British humour with outrageous twists, as the Buttes discover that living next to the heart of government is anything but boring.

"It's like someone mixed A Series of Unfortunate Events with The Thick Of It, and we're very glad they did."

"Proper laugh-out-loud, bonkers funny and such a great story." Comedy Club 4 Kids

If you love funny, fast-paced, and slightly ridiculous stories with a dash of politics, you’ll adore Number Nine Downing Street.

BUY IT NOW!

Want to see what I've been working on?

I’ve been busy and I’m absolutely delighted to tell you that my new book Number Nine Downing Street comes out on September 9th (9/9/2025). I’ve been working with the illustrator Karen Donnelly and she’s done this absurdly good cover. Look at it! With your eyes!

The colours! The characters! The poop! It’s one of those covers that really lives in the details. To whit: Karen and I had an in-depth discussion about making the bird poo on the bobby’s helmet less graphic (too much realistic green in the original). I also love that Karen sidestepped the issue of having four children looking round a door being too busy by having one of them (Nora) look through the letterbox.

What’s All This Then?

So, what can we learn from this glimpse into a bright and intriguing world? Well, it’s Downing Street, durr, but not the more famous domicile of the PM, it’s next door - Number Nine. A thin, spindly house that clings to its more famous neighbour like the weaker partner in a three-legged race.

It has been empty for many years, but is now occupied by the Butte children (rhymes with newt, not nut) - Charlie (14), Nora (11), and twins, Pork (8) and Ken Jnr (4). It’s also home to Captain Lavender, but you’ll learn more about him in due course. They only recently inherited the house after their parents exploded at a wedding.

Number Nine Downing Street is a story about young people and power. It’s also about families that explode and how you work your way through the gooey mess to make something whole again. Someone described it as where A Series of Unfortunate Events meets The Thick Of It and that hits it perfectly. Does the world want such a book? Political satire for children? I have no idea, but I, and my mortgage company, are keen to find the answer to that question.

Defucking my TikTok

This is my first book for younger readers and has brought a whole new set of challenges. Like - oh no, most of my existing readers are not aged 8-12, how do I reach them? Also, how do you market a book to 8-12-year-olds when most of them don’t ever check their email, and technically shouldn’t be on social media? I also had to comb through my own social media to prune out the more egregiously sweary videos/posts - defucking my TikTok made me realise how often I lapse into the rudies and I’m going to try and clean up my act. I’ll fail, of course, big dumb shit that I am.

I’m hoping that my new non-sweary persona comes to the fore when I start pitching myself to schools. This, Google/GPT assures me, is the way around the marketing conundrum. Go into schools and bore the little bastards shits (this is so hard!) children with a reading, some poor juggling and then insist that in return for this thin entertainment that the entire class buy my books, which I will then joylessly sign for an extra £5.

“What’s your name, Ken?”

“No, Sir, it’s Ben.”

“There you go, Ken.”

This is a new thing for me. Strangely, schools were less keen on having a middle-aged man reading to children about diabetic amputation or fatbergs - although ironically I should imagine the children would have been a lot more interested. Maybe I’ll slip some in and see how it goes down.

Lovely review

I saw a post a while ago where Holly (aka @deafbookgirly) was talking about wanting books for her birthday. I’d followed her for a while and really enjoyed her posts, so I sent her Before and After - and she put up her review yesterday. I love seeing the emotion in her review; making people feel something, anything, is one of the great joys of writing. It’s also fab for sales, as marketing whizz-kid Maya Angelou was keen to drill home on her book marketing seminar series. She also invented the phrase BOGOF, you know.

@deafbookgirlyBook review for Before and After by @Andrew Shanahan - indie author (There is a spoiler at 4 minutes or so) Thank you for gifting me this book I really enjoyed it! #BookTok #fyp #books #reading #bookcommunity #booktokuk #bookrecommendations #bookreviews [image error]Tiktok failed to load.

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More to come

As the gnashing jaws of my book marketing machine whirr up to mincing speed once more, I should warn you that there will be more messages. Angelou wanted me to go to two a week but that’s insane, isn’t it?

“You’re insane, Angelou,” I told her.

“Boy, I will squeeze you into a funnel and retarget your ass with my foot,” she replied and lunged at me. She ground her cigarette out on my arm. I lost a tooth. She barked her shin. We were banned from all Chef and Brewers. We settled for a slight increase. Don’t blame me, blame Angelou.

Shop Now Or You Will Perish

I’m doing some merch in my shop. It’s not live yet, but it will be soon. In the meantime you can get 10% off anything in my shop with the code ASSMEAT10, but the code is limited, so consume soon. You can get signed copies of all my books there and every sale made on Payhip makes Bezos grind his teeth (one grind per sale).

Until next time.

I'm Going To Come Clean

I’m going to come clean, it wasn’t called ASSMEAT originally. It was called Andrew Shanahan’s Stealth Marketing Team. When I was telling my wife about it, she was the one who said, “Assmeat?” prompting a confusing and ultimately disappointing conversation about what we were going to do with our Tuesday evening.

Once we established that she was, in fact, pointing out that the acronym of my new initiative was close to the A word, I decided to lean fully into it and add a few extra letters. Thus, ASSMEAT was born.

You may well be wondering what the heck I’m blithering on about, well, I’ll tell you. For a while now I’ve run a stealth marketing team. Some authors call them street teams. Some call them guerrilla marketing elites. I call mine Andrew Shanahan’s Stealth Marketing Engagement Activation Team.

The essence of it, is that it’s readers of mine gathered together on a Facebook Group who kindly volunteer to drop a recommendation for my books on various threads each week. In return I do a prize draw each month and send out fun and occasionally valuable rewards. I also try and ensure that ASSMEAT get first dibs on special offers for my books, etc. It’s very much a quid pro quo situation, Hannibal would be pleased - he’d probably even like the name.

Anyway, I would like to cordially invite you to join ASSMEAT. It’s not obligatory. It costs nothing and it’s a huge, huge help to me making my way in the world as an indie author.

Three Short Stories And A Bonus Terrible Poem

Regular readers will know I warm up every day with a 10 minute writing exercise where I start with a blank page and try and create a complete *something* by the time the timer goes off. These are three that I enjoyed for one reason or another.

The Scratch

There’s a little scratch on the wall and it bothers him. The walls were only painted a few months ago and to see this scratch where flecks of paint have been scraped off, reveals the colours underneath – that awful green that the landing had been painted ever since they arrived. He runs his thumb across the scratch and a minute fleck of the paint chips clings to his nail. It’s fine. He moves on with his day.

Later, he finds himself on the landing with a fine grade of sandpaper. He’s not entirely sure where he got the sandpaper from, but he dimly recalls a shop and a joke about DIY. Now here he is and he eases a sheet of the paper out and folds it carefully around a small block of wood, about the size of a chalk-board eraser. This gives him a pad which he can use to gently push at the edges of the gouge. He’s decided it’s a gouge and not a scratch – almost like it was a nail that pulled through the surface. He brushes and wipes and vacuums and soon he has a flat surface – the gouge is less prominent but underneath there’s that green colour that his wife insisted on. It reminds him of pea and ham soup. It’s a colour from another era.

The next morning he lays out a small cloth on the floor which is covered with spatters of colours. He’s mesmerised briefly and half composes a thought about Jackson Pollock, which dissipates as he returns his focus to the wall. He has a small tester pot in a colour which very, very closely matches the colour he chose for the landing when he was redecorating. He unscrews the pot and feels his tongue protrude through his lips as he daubs the paint in a neat line across the length of the seven inch fissure. In a macro he can picture the little valley of the gorge. The trauma that there must have been to create it. He pushes his face up close to watch the brush deposit the paint. As the paint hits the wall it fills the valley. It blots out any trauma and once again pushes the green walls back out of existence. It calms him to look at the now smooth walls. The paint is a good match. You’d hardly ever notice. He hopes it won’t dry darker, he’ll check again in the morning.

Bing Plays With Chaos

There was a small black cat on the table. It could only have been a few months old. Its body was growing but its head was still kittenish and her paws still seemed a little large for her body. The children had named the cats, so this one was Bing. The other ginger kitten was Mr Tumble, which had been shortened to Tum. She pushed at a pen on the table until half of it was over the edge.

“Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea.”

The pen fell and skittered across the floor. The noise scared the cat and it bolted from the table, which wobbled under the sudden movement and the vial tipped on one side and rolled with intent towards the edge of the table. Just as it approached the edge, the man reached out and calmly put a finger on top of the vial stopping it a centimetre from the edge.

He was a big man, but the word fat wouldn’t have done him justice. He was just large. His head was large. His chest full. His frame was double-sized. Even the finger that now held the vial in place was large, the nail as big as a fifty pence piece. He wore a double-breasted grey suit and his head was wet shaved, so that the lights glinted off his dome. Bing circled around his foot, feeling the safety of his presence and brushing his cheek against his legs. He carefully lifted the vial and placed it back in the rack, where it should have been, but it was an object that called to him and demanded to be lifted and rolled between his fingers. The outright horror of what lay behind the simple rubber bung never failed to bring him a thrill. To own death and to keep it trapped in such a feeble prison amused him.

He lifted Bing onto his lap and the cat brushed its face against his hands. It circled several times and sat on one of his thighs, its entire body easily fitting. He lightly curled a finger around the cat’s ear and it lifted its chin to glory at this attention. He reached over and pulled the vial from the rack and ran it across the cat’s jawline. The cat enjoyed the game and feinted to bite at the vial. The man smiled and pulled it out of reach and secured it once more. How thin the line was between chaos and calm.

“Not today Bing.”

The Handler

The line is nearly out of the door. It’s not even straight, it sort of circles around a display tables that has books about crochet on it. The audience is mixed, good balance of male and female, good ethnic mix and, best of all, they’re young – maybe averaging at around mid-20s. That’s all the more unusual when you consider that the city is mostly older and affluent. To attract an audience like this is surely the sort of thing his handler will take back to the publisher.

The handler was suggested by his editor. “She’ll help you make all the arrangements; it’ll free you up so you can focus on getting pages down.” That was the most appalling horseshit. The handler was there to take the temperature. Sales weren’t good on his last two books and although it still made all of the usual lists, that was now a given rather than a bonus. He briefly thought back to that magical Summer evening when he hit the best-seller lists for the first time. There had been whooping and wine and sex. The last time he hit the best-seller list his editor sent him an email asking if he had corrected the proofs for the German version.

He was saying a few words before the signing started. Generous, self-deprecating comments pushing his brilliance to one side and blaming the excellent crowd on the weather. Inside he thought about his pages. There were none. It was the book’s central idea that was the problem – there wasn’t one. He’d declared a breakthrough on this book so many times that it was becoming a bit of a cliché. Every time he thought he’d pinned the idea down it slithered from under his grasp like a squid. Fucking analogies.

“With no further ado then let me open the signing and thank you in advance for your patience.”

The table was set, a comical number of his favourite marker pens, a drink – lightly alcoholic – and, of course, his handler. The first reader came forward and smiled.

“Please could you sign this,” she asked and he took the book from her hands, opened it and fired his standard greeting into the inside cover.

“Thanks. Do we get the twenty pounds from you as well?” she asked.

The handler’s head snapped up.

Bonus crap poem. It’s Muzak But For Poems

I was walking to work the other day thinking about muzak. Did you know muzak is one of those hoover-type dealios, where the brand name becomes the generic name? I suspect you do. Anyway, I was thinking about the horror of the original brief for muzak. One assumes it was something like:

“We want you to take music - the elegance, the fluidity, the hidden joy, the mathematical intrigue and we want you to smash its kneecaps in.”

Given muzak’s ubiquity, I wondered why no one had ever tried to do the same -zaking process to poetry. So, I tried. The aim was to create something poem-shaped, which illicits no emotion whatsoever. If you feel anything whilst reading this, I have failed. It’s surprisingly difficult and, as I read it back now, I can feel the bile spraying from my gallbladder. Horrid, but an enjoyable pain. Please add your own in the comments.

Poemzak

The day is new, the morning bright

The streets are bathed in gentle light

The birds begin their morning song

The breeze is soft, it moves along

The sun climbs high, the shadows shift

The clouds above begin to drift

The evening comes, the colours fade

The world prepares to rest in shade

The stars appear, a scattered glow

The lights below hum soft and low

The night is calm, the air is slight

And all begins to fade from sight

Tomorrow comes, as is right

Another day, another light.

Would Your Child (Or You) Like To Be An ARC Reader?

Fancy being an ARC reader for me?

I’m coming to the end of the second draft of my new book for Young Adults, which I’m currently thinking might be for 8-12 year olds, the feedback so far really made me laugh, especially:

"It’s A Series of Unfortunate Events meets The Thick Of It”

which I think is pretty darn accurate.

I wrote the book for my daughter after we had a long and (I thought) interesting conversation on election day, about how democracy works, which included diagrams, YouTube clips of famous speeches and lived experience galore. At the end, I put down my pen, my face shining with the joyous light of warm, fatherly instruction and looked at her as she said, “I’ve never been so bored.”

In revenge, I’ve written this book for her.

I also think it may have the best first line I’ve ever written. Possibly that’s ever been written.

Obviously, I’m wondering how this sort of explosive start will sit with 8-12-year-olds and so I’m asking my existing readers if their younglings would like to be an ARC reader for this book. You’d get the book quite soon (end of the first week in June, possibly sooner) and I’d need feedback by the end of June. If you have a child of that age (or roughly around there) or you yourself love reading YA books then please fill out this form and I’ll be in touch.

Would You Like To Know What Happened To Marla's Letters?

Ok, first things first - this post contains major spoilers for I Want You To Write A Letter. If you have not already read it then please do so now by clicking the link above, it’s free and it’s brilliant! To move any spoilers further down the page, here’s a brief interlude with me detailing my secret indie author shame…

Ok, I think we’re safe from the uninitiated.

So, what I wanted to ask you is…at the end of I Want You To Write A Letter did you ever wonder what it would have been like for all of those poor patients and the recipients when those letters started to drop onto the doormats in the days following Marla’s death and the well-meaning, but utterly catastrophic, intervention of her landlord?

Well, I’ll tell you - I bloody have wondered.

Since the story came out I’ve been fortunate that some TV people have asked me to do some more thinking about it. As a result, I’ve developed the idea significantly. In the TV programme of IWYTWAL, each episode would begin with a letter innocently hitting the doormat and the recipient curiously opening their letter. The rest of the episode would then follow through on showing precisely how the shit has “worked its way deep into the mechanisms of the fan”.

Consequently, I pretty much know what happens when the letters are sent out, perhaps not all 400 of them that Marla had worked with, but a good number. I know what’s in the letter that the client wrote and I know what happened after it arrived, and I’d really love to share those stories with you.

Then the other day I was browsing Facebook, looking for some Boomer opinions about immigration when I saw this - Scaremail - essentially, a horror story told through letters that arrive in the post. Huh, I thought, that’s a neat idea. Then it struck me. That’s a really neat idea for I Want You To Write A Letter.

Imagine…

Every month through your letterbox, drops:

An unexpurgated letter from Marla’s client, laying it all on the line about precisely why this person has driven them to therapy.

A short story which outlines the chaos that follows it.

I don’t know, I think this might be a really fun thing to do. But what I think matters less than what you think, after all - you would be the one buying it. So, let me ask you - if you’ve read the story, would you consider subscribing to the I Want You To Write A Letter Stories Through Your Letterbox Thing*? Let me know in the poll…

*Yes I need a better name.

Want To See Ben's Flat From Before and After?

I was clearing out some old folders the other day, such is the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of an indie author, and I came across some photos that I’d used as research while I was writing Before and After. I thought I’d share them with you, along with the caveat that however you imagined Ben’s flat is the right way - this is just what I used for research…

SPOILER WARNING FOR BEFORE AND AFTER!

A crappy floorplan I made so I could get things straight in my own head - I’m guessing the white space next to the hall would be where Ben’s mum’s room was. No idea why I didn’t actually put that on the plan, while I very deliberately put the kitchen counters and the bath and toilet.

I think these images came from an urban explorer forum who had made their way into some condemned flats. I remember seeing them and thinking that it had the right sort of proportions, with everything sitting on top of each other. I think the balcony needs to be quite a lot higher though - this only looks like it’s second storey and Ben is fourth floor.

These are the exact flats that I think of when I think about where Ben was, I’m pretty sure that some of the flats in Ben’s building were empty, which was part of the reason that the council wanted him out of his flat so badly. With him gone, they could condemn the building and sell it to private developers. Damn you, City Hall!

I sometimes get asked for more precise details about *where* Ben lives in North Manchester and, funnily enough, I found this map entitled “Ben’s route on the cherry picker” in my files as well. The big red arrow seems to be pointing to this location here and I guess that means that Ben technically lives at either the Nowell House flats, or the ones behind, Nowell Court.

Nowell Court.

And if you follow the map for his journey on the cherry picker then it means that the exercise field that Brown gets trapped at is somewhere hear in Tandle Hill Country Park. I think I need to go for a walk there sometime and see if I can figure out precisely where it would be.

Is that how you imagined it? I’m not sure it matches what was in my mind, but it’s still nice to speculate.

Work update: I’ve just finished tidying the first draft of the children’s book I’m writing and that will go out to a few very trusted ARC readers, so that they can give it the kicking that it deserves and I can recalibrate and rewrite it.

Finally, here’s a random writing exercise I did this week that made me laugh, but only because I’ve got the temperament and intellect of a nine-year-old boy. I also now wonder if someone has done this idea before, it feels like it should have been done already. That said, if anyone wants to do some fan art for what TOTARA looks like then I really want to see it!

Lastly - I’ve moved the shop over to Payhip because Stripe sucks. It also means that you can order books from the US now! Woo-hoo!

First Draft Of New Book Is Done! I'm Celebrating With A Special Offer

I’ve been told more often than I’d like to admit, that using bowel and toilet-related metaphors is never great marketing, but sometimes you simply have to talk about scatalogical things.

You may well appreciate that there are bowel movements where there is a lot of huffing and puffing and general discomfort. Sometimes, the net gain (or loss) of this exertion isn’t great. At other times, it’s so easy it’s like there has been a valet who has done all the hard work for you and you simply sit there and enjoy the ride.

Well, I’ve just finished the first draft of a new book and it was emphatically the latter situation in terms of evacuations. It all just poured out of me and onto the page.

You know what, even I’m starting to get a bit queasy with this metaphor.

Let’s just say that the important thing is that I’ve finished the first draft of my next book and it was a joy to write. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, not difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. I celebrated with a joke:

This is good news and means that I’m well on track to get my first book for young people (8-10) out into the world this year. There is the small issue of needing to find an illustrator who I don’t hate (anyone out there? Recommendations? I’m looking for my Quentin Blake…) I also need to rewrite it and tighten things up. I should probably also learn to market to this new demographic and not have to fall back on toilet metaphors.

To celebrate this piece of good fortune I want us to make a pact. If you have read this far, I now want you to go a little further and consummate our relationship by buying one, three, or several of my books. My target is that by the end of today we hit 100,000 sales. If we do then I’ll come to each of your houses and warmly embrace you for several minutes, longer if necessary.

So, I’ve done my part, it only seems fair that you do your part.

CLICK HERE AND BUY, BUY, BUY, APPEASE MOLOCH, THWART BEZOS, PROVIDE SHOES FOR MY CHILDREN.

When you click that link you’ll note that Stripe puts one of all my books in your basket. While I think that’s probably the minimum quantities that you should be looking at, I do appreciate that some people like to remove items and that’s ok. Just do the dropdown and change the quantity to 0 for the ones you don’t want. I will forgive you in due course.

Come on! Let’s hit 100,000!

I Made A Before And After Video Game And It's Terrible

Look, I know we all hate AI and I get it. As a writer, it’s particularly odious to think of my work being minced and fed into a machine, which then regurgitates a macerated parody of creation. It’s even more galling to think that it might shit out something better than I can write.

I get it. Let’s get together and smash the weaving frames.

But, I was browsing on the socials the other week and I saw that Grok was doing quite a good job of churning out custom video games. Huh, I thought, that’s interesting. It positions the creator as more of a director - imagining the gameplay, describing the jeopardy and the outcomes, with the AI making it so.

As an entrepreneurial sort, I wondered if I could make a game based on Before and After. You have to understand that I grew up in the 1980s and book>game adaptations were all the rage. In fact film>game, board game>game anything>game adaptations were all the rage. Think I’m kidding. how about this:

So, I dusted off my coding trousers and got to work. The process was pretty simple. I drew up a laundry list of requirements and started to spec out the way that the game would work. Most of the time was spent generating 90s arcade style sprites of Ben, Carl and Brown.

This was genuinely fun to do and I’m going to have to wrestle with the ethics of using AI to generate these sort of images. I’m openly soliciting your viewpoints on this - I think it’s evil (in the sense that artists aren’t being recompensed for teaching the algo how to make these images) but I’m not 100% sure why - if it’s computer art isn’t that even more complex? Didn’t the computer make the art first? Argggh!

Opinions please.

In the meantime, let’s all adore digital 90s icon Brown!

Grok wouldn’t get that Carl wasn’t a zombie in the traditional sense and was more like a spluttering Gammon-type. It also really didn’t like doing a Lego leg. Anyway, I think I got somewhere interesting with it.

Next up was the gameplay. I had to keep it simple because AI can’t just spit out the code for a totally original first person shooter, which is a shame, because I could absolutely get with the notion of a FPS Before and After. Generally speaking I think FPS do a terrible job of having interesting protagonists, so I’ll add writing one of those to the To Do List.

My early efforts resulted in quite a lot of crashed applications and I had to spend a wee while figuring out some of the technicalities. Perhaps a qualified coder would be able to make this step go a lot smoother and come up with a better end-product. But I’d set myself a four-hour deadline to get a minimum viable product together and after that elapsed I had to laugh because it was utterly shit. Buggy, unplayable, shit. It made me laugh a lot though and that’s what I’m sharing with you now.

Brace yourself.

Whatever your expectations are, lower them by at least 7,000 percent.

Ready?

Ok, here’s the world premiere of Before and After, the videogame…

BTW, that brown rectangle that blocks Ben’s escape from the flat is a sofa. Brown sneaks underneath and flips a switch, but Ben still can’t get past.

Hopefully, that shower of shit will have made your realise just how good books are as a form of entertainment and so maybe you should go buy some here.

"Ping" Your Thoughts At Me. Plus Top Secret GHOST UNIT recruitment

Disclaimer: I want something from you.

First off - I’m doing my semi-regular survey about the Hello Shan Substack (i.e. what you’re reading now).

I’d love it if you could take 2 minutes to fill in this survey and give me your thoughts.

To do the survey just click the big yellow Shan

As a reward I’ll put all the responders into a hat, well - their names anyway, and send a special prize to the name I pull out. Trust me, it’s something pretty cool.

Go do the survey! Also - I’m looking for volunteers.

Ages ago I had a group called the Shanahananinjas and perhaps because it was the worst named group of all time I sort of let the idea wither on the vine. Sorry Shanahananinjas.

The purpose of the group is to readers who are very happy to do some marketing tasks from time-to-time. It’s the sort of thing that I can’t really do myself - e.g. a thread on Reddit comes up for recommending books about dystopian stories in Manchester. It looks rubbish if I go on there and start pimping my own book. But if one (or two, or three) of you do it, then it’s less gross.

So - I’m taking applications for GHOST UNIT. See, I’ve learned my lesson about branding. GHOST UNIT sounds so cool I want to join.

Only apply if you’re absolutely happy to be asked to degrade and debase yourself in the promotion of me and my books. Naturally, I will not ask you to debase or degrade yourself, but I will ask you to click a link every so often.

As you would expect - members of GHOST UNIT - will get rewards, in this life and the next. CLICK HERE TO JOIN GHOST UNIT. Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash