This has been one of the most exciting and exhausting years for me. I celebrated the publication of my book in two different countries, got spun on a Vietnamese coconut boat and learnt to make a passable flat white. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

January

Went to see Dr Strangelove in the West End. Had my book published in Italy. Grew a hideous beard. Went for a delicious high end tasting menu but had to get KFC on the way home. Moved house for the fifth time in five years. Let Dry January continue into Feb.

February

Got tattooed. Went to Oxford for Super Bowl weekend. Took Emily to see Six in the West End. Experienced an amazing use of free will by taking thirty friends to play laser quest. Lost mini golf to Wiggles. Lost my mind to new board games.

March

Got a new sofa (and haven’t got off it since). Took ownership of a cafe. Went to see Off Menu Live (again). Swam a lot. Rediscovered my love for wholesalers.

April

Started a book club. Lost my goddamn mind at Southend’s 48 Hour Improvathon. Worked some shifts at the cafe and met a lot of lovely people.

May

Visited our friends at Sababa. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was seeing *Thunderbolts. Watched The Trolleyboys smash up The Half Moon. Went camping. Experienced my first gong bath. Co-hosted a hen do.

June

Invested in a walking pad and made it my personality. Wrote a letter to Mel Brooks. Spent a day writing at Metal. Took my married dad friends dancing. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was a Reuben sandwich. Co-founded the Chippy Tea Preservation Society. Failed to learn to ab roller from standing to laying.

July

Took part in the only organised race I bothered with this year. Lovely trip to Margate to see my boys (The Libertines). Co-hosted a vegan BBQ.

August

Went to Vietnam with my best friend. Watched four films on the plane. Cycled through an organic farm. Had flashbacks in the forest. Ate my first ever banh mi. Learnt to make rice pancakes. Had a suit custom-made. Got an overnight train to Hoi An. Considered giving up everything to live in the mountains.

September

Spent the night on a junk boat in Halong Bay. Flew home. Had a meeting with HarperCollins that may well change my life.

October

Signed a deal that may well change my life. Trip to Cardiff where the highlight was the fish tacos. Got invited to a Springsteen listening party. Spent Halloween explaining who I was.

November

Went to see Jobsworth live. Switched my focus from cardio to weights for bulking season. Celebrated E’s birthday. Had the pan of our childhood.

December

Was the murderer at a murder mystery. Ordered a Weeping Tiger for the table. Attended my first Southend Creatives event. Partied with some yogis. Celebrated Hanukkah. Went to see Oh Yes It Is with the GGs. Finished edits on two books. Celebrated Christmas. Started work on the next book.

Listen, having a few days of respite at the end of this year has meant an awful lot. There’s still a long way to go and a lot of work to do but hey, what a journey.

This month, I released my eighth album, These Cowboy Blues. It’s now avaiable in all the places you get music.

TCB is inspired mostly by a conversation with my good friend TS about what a Paul Schiernecker country album would sound like. What ended up happening is that I filtered my own music through with some cowboy references in the lyrics and little else that could make it a country album. All the same, it was a lot of fun.

This album consists of ten songs, which I’ve spent the last year working on. The underlying message is about recovery and personal growth, continuing to fight your corner and not giving up when things are a little tough.

I make music for the sole purpose of enjoying the process of doing it. That’s an unusual thing (for me at least). It’s a catalogue of a time and a recognition of where I am at. Having self recorded and released a number of them now, that’s how I see this. It’s an opportunity for me to share where I am at and look to spread a smile every once in a while.

Good evening.

A week ago, I announced the news across social media but it’s only here that I’ll give you the full details for those who are nosey enough to continue.

After years of graft, and I’ll get into that, I have signed a publishing deal with HarperCollins for the release of The Counterfeiter of Auschwitz.

If this was an award-winning biopic, we would open in a sepia-toned flashback.
A young Paul Schiernecker sits at the family computer, staring intently at the dirty clunky keys and beginning a story.
He prints it out on perforated paper and stares at what he has created.

For as long as I can remember, I have written. To paraphrase Rob Auton; I’m here for the human experience. I’ll sit back at parties and watch other people. It’s been both a strength and a weakness, almost imagining that all these flawed characters are my own creations and that I can squeeze something true and creative out of them. When I was young, I’d write plays for my brothers to perform with me. Sometimes I’d ask them to commit these to cassette tape. Other times, I’d ask if they could perform them in front of our parents. The most memorable of these being my reimagining of Grease: The Musical (including oversized bomber jackets and choreography to die for).

At school, I read everything. I was one of those kids who was sent into the year group above to read from their bookshelves when I’d devoured everything offered for my peers. As they say, the best writers are avid readers.

I studied English for as long as I could. In a conversation with my college tutor (the wonderfully deranged Elsa Harwood), she begged me not to study Law at university because my talents were in writing. Nevertheless, I persisted. I was a bad university student but it did give me three years where I could develop some good friends and some bad habits. I’d stay up late writing songs, scripts and stories only to miss 9am lectures. I was also drunk, a lot. I smoked like a chimney and was a performative male before the term had really emerged. Still, I was writing.

When I graduated, I joined forces with two friends and we wrote and filmed our first feature film, which is one of two IMDB credits to my name to this day. It didn’t cause the impact we expected but scratched an itch I had.

Then, I got a job and tried to be a functioning human. I worked in data entry and got the nickname “Spider Fingers” from my brilliant manager, Paula, because I typed at such a rate that… my fingers looked like spiders.

Once I had developed into something that felt like a career, my focus was drawn back to writing again. The problem was that I couldn’t work out how to finish a story without the help of a tutor or any definition of it. Through therapy, I talked about my perfectionism (since determined to be undiagnosed OCD) and fear of completing anything for fear of it being done. Since then, I’ve not been able to stop.

I wrote my first novel, Situation One, in a year. I wrote the next one, Visions of Violet, in a month. Situation One was a Bret Easton Ellis rip off about my first year of university, told from multiple perspectives. Visions of Violet had a very bizarre ending which was far too close to the twist in the Robert Pattinson film Remember Me. It wasn’t good but I was writing.

I wrote Visions during the first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I took part in. For all the trash developments that have emerged about that organisation, it did me well for a decade, ensuring that I was putting together a draft and then spending time after getting it into a presentable state and sending it out to agents.

Back then, you had to print out the first three chapters and post them to agents. Then, you’d wait three months and they’d post them back to you with a decline response that was often photocopied with your name scrawled at the top. I have kept every one of those rejection letters, knowing that they would be funny in time.

In 2020, when the world got flip turned upside down, I recognised that it was an opportunity for me to write. I was living alone in a small top floor flat, only really communicating with people on Friday nights when someone would organise a quiz. I was running 5km every day and drinking a bottle of wine (at least every night). It was in these circumstances that I started work on what I called The Counterfeiter of Auschwitz. In its original iteration, there was no framing device and the deaths of characters were at odds with what I now recognise as being good plotting. In addition, I stuck vehemently to historical fact, often including long paragraphs on the background, spending days researching the warring factions and the camps. My search history for the period was worrying.
It felt different to anything I had written before and I was reading a lot of Vonnegut at the time, which definitely helped. The tone of my protagonist, Georg, is my favourite thing about the book, based on my great grandfather’s way of holding court when we visited his residential care home.

By September, I had not only written but had edited a manuscript. I sent it out to ten agents, picked based on their specific asks. Fortunately, these submissions were now made by email. Within two days, I had a request for the full manuscript. Using this as leverage, I emailed the other agents and told them I’d had a request for a full. I had six requests for the full. In ten years of writing and submitting, this had never happened. Something was different about this story. I needed to write all of those stories to get to a point where I could tell this in the correct way.

By January 2021, I was in conversation with the gentleman who would eventually become my agent. We talked about a lot of reference points and potential changes but what really got me was that he understood what I was trying to do. He got the tone. He loved Georg!

A year later, I signed to my agency. It felt monumental. It still does. I am amongst fantastic company with them. Everyone I have spoken to and dealt with there has shown me such care and attention. It’s where I should be.

After a lot of edits, we got a pack together and my agent sent it out to editors at various publishing houses. This was 2023. I know because we had been on a date to see The Whale and were in the pub when he called me to discuss it.

From there, time moved slow and fast.

A publisher in Italy picked it up first. They offered an advance. I’m not going to be crass by talking numbers but I felt like I was getting away with something. The publisher ended up taking the Spanish release when they expanded their business.

Then the rights in both Slovenia and Romania went. Again, amazing. Still, my mother kept asking when she could read it in English.

In April 2025, I received a call from my agent to say that it looked like a deal was on the table.

In October, I had a lovely call with the person who is now my editor at HarperCollins. She was so complimentary and again, seemed to get what I was trying to do. I cried on the call. This is very much the dream coming true.

Because I know you’ll ask, it’s currently scheduled for release in Spring 2027. There are still edits to do and I am learning so much as we go. It’s so exciting. I am so grateful to the team behind me.

In therapy, I always talked about the realisation that Matt Damon had on winning an Oscar, and how outside recognition doesn’t match internal self worth.
I am so proud of where I am at and what I have achieved. It wouldn’t be possible without the incredible support system I’ve had and continue to have. The internal self worth is self worthing. That doesn’t mean you can stop congratulating me.

One of the many joys of being a child of divorce is that there seems to be an endless pile of shit in both my parents houses that they want out of their possession but not out of our collective possession. As the eldest child, keeping a well-stocked Schiernecker Museum has fallen to me.

An interesting item recently came into my possession though, amongst the tchotchkes and knick-knacks. An old 78 record from Pier Kiosks with my paternal grandmother’s name on it as well as the words “April Showers”. A bit of research showed that this was a remarkable item from the days when you could go into a recording booth and cover a well known song. In this case, April Showers by Al Jolson. If you’ve read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, you’ll have a better visual of it being used as a plot device.

As a writer, the overly romanticised version of events was that I had stumbled across the only audio recording of my grandmother, Daphne. Aside from grainy VHS recordings, I don’t have anything. She passed away when I was eleven, before she was ever able to see the men that me and my brothers would grow into. I still see her in the faces of little old ladies, massive glasses balanced on her nose, always in a shawl.

I tried to play the 78 on my record player, the saddest record player in the world. I’ve previously written about that. The needle wouldn’t reach. I tried mounting it and still nothing. I’ve shlepped that record around various local stores but they couldn’t play it. Eventually, I found a lovely man who said he could digitise whatever was on the record. I carefully wrapped it up, posted it and waited.

This week, I got the record back with a note. There was nothing on the acetate aside from the piano backing track of April Showers.
I’m left with more questions than answers.

How is that possible?

Why would Daphne have kept a record that, presumably, didn’t take? She was a deeply sentimental woman so maybe just the memory of going to the recording booth was enough for her. Perhaps she was too shy to sing.

What other disappointing remnants of personal history are at my disposal?

I did warn you with the title. Deeply unsatisfying ending.

If you want an idea of what it feels like to try and organise my life right now, here is a perfect example.

My partner arranged a Christmas party at her cafe. I wrote “Christmas Party” in my diary.

A few weeks later, some old school friends of mine (who are all dads and therefore notoriously difficult to pin down for a good time) wanted to arrange a Christmas get-together. I went to write it in my diary, saw that the date said “Christmas Party” and assumed I had somehow predicted it.
In truth, I don’t know what I thought had happened. I was just pleased I didn’t need to put anything additional in my diary.

A few weeks go by. I get invited to a Christmas party for creatives, freelancers, lovies, you know the sorts. I go to write it in my diary. My diary already says “Christmas Party”. Still, nothing about this triggers as being odd to me. I accept the invitation and tell them I will be there.

I’m now in a situation where I have made plans with three different groups of people for, in case it wasn’t very obvious, the same date in December.

I am doing my best to be organised but even that can sometimes fall to pieces.

While I have been told it makes me look like a Facebook Mum saying “too many snakes xx” and waiting for the deluge of people to ask “what’s up, hun?” only for me to say “I’lll DM you, babes”, I have some big news. News so big that I’m not going to talk about it until the ink is dry. Ink dries fast in 2025 right?

At the start of this year, E and I declared that it would be our year. It’s seen a lot of mad shit happen including the publication of my novel in Italy and Spain and her opening her first business.

Now, some news has come along that absolutely blindsided me. I’m going to dangle that possible carrot in front of you all for a little longer. Just know, I’m a very happy boy.

We are home and getting back into the swing of things. Well, we are awake at 3am because of the time difference but that’s basically the same thing.

For the last couple of weeks, we have been lucky enough to explore Vietnam, from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi. After a pretty full-on year, it was wonderful to do something that felt like such a break from the norm. We met some lovely people, had incredible food and the sights we got to see, god, I wish you could have been there.

Starling out in HCM/Saigon, we had a wonderful dinner as soon as we landed. I had Vietnamese steak and eggs (bò né) which were out of this world. The name literally means “dodging steak” because it’s served on a hot skillet and spits at you.

The next morning, we went for a bike tour of the city. We then had lunch at an experimental organic restaurant that trains kids in the service industry, teaching them to cook and serve food. Everything we had was exceptional.

We also got to tour the Cu Chi Tunnels, used by the Viet Cong to defend their land against Americans. As someone who is very interested in 20th century history, and previously studied The American War (as it’s quite rightly known there), it was a deep stare into how difficult that life must have been and the casualties from the period. Their use of tunnels and traps was fascinating.

Next up was Hoi An where we had our first banh mi – one of Vietnam’s most famous foods, a baguette (thanks colonial French rule) filled with beef, pate and fresh greens, that blew us away.
We had a tour of the old town including visiting a traditional house and several temples before finding ourselves getting measured up in a tailors. I’ve never had anything tailor-made before so the opportunity was much appreciated.

For lunch, we visited Oodles of Noodles, a project that takes kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and teaches them to cook. They taught us how to make different types of rice noodles and we had an incredible lunch with the students there.

We then went on another bike tour of a nearby organic farm where we were able to have a go at watering the crops with the traditional setup. The herbs were fresh and smelt incredible. It’s easy to see how Vietnamese cuisine is amongst the best in the world.

Later, we got taken out on coconut boats across the river. In recent years, these have become mandatory for any backpacker looking for an Instagram post. It was fun but very heavily driven towards tourists, which I recognise that we are. It had the integrity of It’s A Small World.

The next morning, we visited a yoga studio and coffee shop (because this is very much a busman’s holiday) and then visited the Banh Mi Queen for lunch before a bus ride via the cold water lagoon where pearls are collected and on to Hue.

For dinner, we turned to Anthony Bourdain for advice. In 2017, he visited Hue as one of his cities in his series, Parts Unknown. In particular, a woman working in Dang Ba market who makes bún bò Huế – a dish consisting of rice noodles with slow-cooked beef shank, crab meat dumplings, pig’s feet, and blood cake. It was absolutely out of this world. We made friends with the locals who were dining on low chairs in front of this incredible woman who has been making the dish since she was twelve-years-old.

The next morning, we got up early and went for a run. What struck us (during early morning outings and bus rides in and out of cities) is that a lot of people were up between 5am and 7am, exercising and enjoying their local open spaces. It’s normal for people to go for a run, use the free gym equipment in the park or join a tai chi class. In the west, we could never. Maybe we don’t deserve nice things. It wasn’t a massive distance but we had a good run along by the water.

After breakfast, we biked out to the citadel and then visited a pagoda for a vegan lunch, which again, was incredible. I’m going to run out of adjectives for the food we had. After going shopping for supplies, we then got the overnight train to Hanoi, sleeping in bunk beds and making ourselves bowls of ramen and being gently rocked to sleep with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino (in Heat) on in the background.

The train got into Hanoi at 5am and we then got a bus into the mountains for a home stay in Mai Chau, a village of 350 souls, plenty of dogs and infinite rice paddies. We went for a hike that ended in a wonderful downpour, prompting us to sing Natasha Beddingfield on a loop. That night, the grandmother of the house cooked a wonderful dinner for us. We had the most stressful Thai massages of our lives and fell asleep happy and fulfilled, with the triple threat white noise of a fan, rain and crickets to contend with.

Took a bike ride out to the next town and had a lesson in using a traditional loom, used to make blankets and clothes. We also learnt some traditional dances, and laughed a lot. The hills and mountains were impossibly green which made cycling as far as we did a feast for the eyes. It was like living in a desktop background.

After a bus back to the city, we had a food tour with a local guide which included bun cha, a sweet pork broth with rice noodles, banh mi, coconut ice cream and an egg coffee. Some may be sceptical about egg coffee but until you try it, you don’t understand how close to a tiramisu it is possible to get a coffee. We finished the night on Train Street, a garishly-lit influencer nightmare of a place, where beer is at least three times the cost of anywhere else and you’ll be put in the back row if you don’t pout hard enough. Saying that, it was another must-do and when that train came by, you know I was pouting and flying the peace sign like my contemporaries.

After a drive to Halong Bay, we spent a night on a converted junkboat, sailing out amongst the nearly 2,000 islands. We took a kayak out to explore further.
After an incredible dinner came the karaoke. With the sound bouncing off the water, I hope my versions of Sweet Home Alabama and Country House made it far and wide. Slept like a baby.

The next morning, we went swimming in the sea then back to Hanoi for our last night. Stopping in a bar, we asked the barman for his recommendation on places to eat. He sent us to Phố Tống Duy Tân where there were a number of street food places. We sat amongst locals and tried different dishes – a black chicken with medicinal herbs, crispy crab spring rolls, pork dumplings and then a post-match banh mi for the walk back to our hotel.

The more we saw, the more we wanted to see. It felt very whistle-stop but inspiring at the same time. The people of Vietnam were so warm and welcoming. Given how “developed” we consider our part of the world to be, it’s interesting that the majority of life at home can seem so overwhelmingly fraught and drab when those we would perceive as not having a lot seem much happier. It was a lesson in gratefulness and the limits that abundance gives. While I appreciate we were there as tourists, it was a refresh of what is important. What a gift that is.

Last week, I gave my mum away.

Wait, that should be, we gave our mum away.

That seems a little obtuse.

Better still, our mum got married. My brothers and I had the absolute pleasure of giving her away. Not because it was nice to get her off our hands (which it obviously was and best of luck to him) but because she’s found a good man and it’s so nice to see her happy.

This is weird to write because it’s likely she will read it, and possible my dad will read it. Put it this way if you do happen across this, Simon. The stag do we threw you was a lot more hedonistic than the hen do we threw her.

A year ago, my partner (E) was asked to cater the wedding. We were honoured to be asked and it seemed like a lovely gift. Food being the music of love after all. What followed was one of the most stressful weeks as we fought against the clock to get everything in place for the event. Even with my partner’s incredible mum (also a chef) moving in to our apartment to help us, it was tight. But fuck me, did they pull off a buffet that we will be talking about still when my niece gets married.
Listen up Pixie, we aren’t going to be catering that!

All I had to do was pack up the food, drive the food and unpack the food, staying out of the way as they did their magic. That was enough to give me an ulcer on the inside and a hernia on the outside. I have no idea how anyone works in the service industry, catering or anything else where you have to deal with the disgusting public. I take off whatever hat I’m wearing to you.

It was only when I got a message that my mum and brothers were in a car on the way that I ran into the toilets to get changed. The worst Superman quick change you’ve ever seen in your life (although still very Jewish).

I rushed out to meet them and walk Trace in. She looked beautiful. After all the cacophany and the chaos, it dawned on me how much of a big deal it was. Not just because Dawn, our cousin, was taking photos as we pretended to share a joke so she could catch the magic faux-ment (faux moment) on camera. This was a big deal. This is what father’s do. Other than when it comes to Herb, our pomeranian, I am not a father. My brothers both are, to human children.
On my wrist, very loosely in fact, was a silver bracelet that had belonged to my grandfather. It was for him that I was named. Not Paul. That was because of Paul Newman, and someone that my mum was shtupping in her erstwhile twenties, but my middle name. Martin.

A man who used to call us his “three geniuses”.
A hero to few.
A grandpa who once told me that I should marry a woman with small hands because she’d be grateful and so would I.
A wry comedic genius who introduced me to The Goons, Marty Feldman and Jerry Seinfeld.
A weekday golfer who taught us how to drive off of the tee – only giving us the single shout of “shot” if we sent it straight and true down the fairway.
A gent of a particular era that meant he was always immaculately put together to the extent that we assumed he had “connections”.

He should have been the one honoured with this role. Instead it was passed down the line to boys with anxious disorders, varicose veins or kidney stones. We felt like the baby from the Velvet toilet tissue advert – “soft, soft, soft” – dressed up in suits and with fat bald heads. We had jumped up the wedding running order. This wasn’t supposed to be for us.

I love being silly with my brothers. There wasn’t going to be any exception. By the time the celebrant asked for the ring bearers to present the rings, I had my Doc Martens up on the table to show my brothers my socks. The whole congregation (obviously not that word, because it was a non-religious ceremony but it evokes the idea) was staring at our table.

Then the three of us helped E and her mum cart food out for eighty people. Well, we carted out food for 40,000 people but there were only eighty there. E was finally able to get out of the kitchen. We danced together alongside the first dance and then sat and ate – the first thing we had been able to put away that day. There’s nothing quite like the sweat and panic of a day’s hard work in service where you can’t bear the sight of food only to sit down with a job all done to try and stomach something. It’s the best/worst appetite suppressant I’ve found.

It was great to see old friends of my mums and to catch up with my cousins and extended family but it was far too brief. Before I knew it we were sweeping food off of the tables again and trying to work out what could be salvaged. Wrapping the evening in foil and clingfilm to put it all away again.

We drove home exhausted and vibrating from the energy of the day.

I am very excited to announce that El falsificador de Auschwitz is now available in Spain. I will be forever in debt to my agent and my Italian/Spanish publisher for getting me to this point.

Whenever I post something about ironically taking over Europe, the next question from my friends and family is about the UK publishing. I promise that there are ongoing conversations on this. I’m very excited about where it’s all headed and the support that I have had; from Watson Little, from Newton Compton, from Italian readers and bloggers and now Spanish readers and bloggers, means the world to me.

For my little story to have taken on this life of its own is incredible.

Thank you for everything.

While all of this is going on, I’m working on what comes next. I’m very excited to be able to share it with you soon.