Honour amongst thieves

Anyone dropping by recently might have noticed the number of tweets railing against a recent book I’ve been reading. In short, it was a terribly written novel, published in a genre that I have some affinity with, by a respected publisher and by an author who has written enough books to know better.

I’m torn between writer and reader right now. You see as a reader I want to warn anyone off buying this, not because it’s just my opinion that it’s rubbish but I get the awful feeling this has been written purely for commercial reasons and readers aren’t going to get much out of it; judging by the reviews, the ending is a cop-out and has been written expressly to be turned into a series of books AND films (of which the first is already going into pre-production and was announced even before the book was published which had the alarm bells ringing from the beginning) – which I suppose is no reason to slag-off a book if it was well-written and remotely original. In this case it is not. In fact there is nothing positive I can say about this book, other than it was mercifully short – perhaps another reason why readers would feel pissed off shelling out eight quid for something that reads like an over-inflated novella.

But as a writer, there’s something about ‘honour amongst thieves’ that has stopped me from coming out with the title of the book. On the internet there is no shortage of writers published or not, who have no qualms about slagging off other authors, sometimes personally, but I’m not one of them. I’ve seen writers attacking bloggers and vice versa, sometimes hysterically, about a review they have not agreed with, and life is just too short and too busy to fend off a lunatic novelist or their fans whose book you just didn’t like.

I also know how a bad review feels, so coming from another writer it might feel as though one of your peers is having a go, personally. I know reviews are just opinions, but they are also public criticisms. Like a guy who just can’t make a girl cheat on her boyfriend (because I’ve been on the receiving end) I just can’t give a bad review for a book. Call it chickening out if you want, but look at this way… If the book is really crap why give it more air-time than it should have.

Good books are meant to be spoken about – and spoken about often. Crap books are meant to be forgotten.

So let’s forget about it, shall we?

A Few of My Favourite Things

Over on Un:Bound there’s a new post on my bookshelves and reading habits. But I thought I’d give you a quick preview of it here. Obviously I have a shelf for my own books, books that sit on the top shelf in the lounge to remind me of my responsibilities and to feed that narcissistic desire I think all published authors have (publishing is three parts endeavour and one part vanity don’t you think?):

But my bookshelves are also about beloved books too, those that feel personal to me:

This is a just a selection of my few signed books that have inspired me over the years. People have often asked me what is so important about a signed book and I think it’s all about bridging the gap between author and reader. A signed book is a book where the author has taken their time to make the experience more personal for a fan or reader who is spending their hard-earned cash (and more importantly their hard earned time) to keep the faith in one’s work. It’s important to some readers to meet their authors, and if it’s important for the reader, it’s just as important for the author. I’ve never understood any writer who refuses to sign books. It’s worse than elitism, it smacks of laziness and resentment. Fans keep writers going. Without them a writer might as well get a bar job or something.

So here’s a collection of writers who believe in their readers just as this reader believes in them. As a published author, I’m still very much the fan-boy. Something, I think, will never change…

“3 Days” or “How long could you not write for?”

It's an odd question, I know, but for someone whose imagination is on constant duty, simply switching off that writing-brain is not an easy task. I haven’t written a thing today and don’t intend to write any prose until Monday, other than this short blog entry. That’s no big deal, I hear you say, but consider that I’ve never gone more that two days without writing some prose in some form - in over a year - and a break, however short, is going to be hard for me.

(Even if that break is only 3 days.)

So how long could you not write for?
I guess you could say that in any given year I will write for about 10 hours a week, and average around 10,000 words in that week. That’s about 520,000 words a year, or 500,000 words a year if you ignore holidays… and yes, that does mean for about two weeks in a year, I’m not writing something, as well as working a 30 hour day-job, being a husband to a beautiful wife and father to a demanding, yet lovely son. It’s obsessive, and I do recognise that I am wholly addicted to my imagination - so a break, however short, is a big deal to me.

(Even for 3 days.)

Last year was tricky. Last year there were more breaks because of Daniel, and breaks where I wasn’t writing anything – or so I told people. Truthfully, I was writing short stories on the quiet or researching future projects during those weeks which I promised would be writing-free. I just couldn’t help myself. I even started tinkering with The Black Hours when I should have been relaxing after another sleepless night caused by our three month-old son. But that was okay – I wasn’t burning myself out. I was fine. No harm, no foul, as they say. And I did take some breaks.

(But not longer than 3 days.)

From April, my life will be mental. That’s perhaps the easiest way of putting it. From April, Sarah will return to work and those 7 hours I sacrifice every week for the writing will be sacrificed for our son and his childcare. So that’s 7 hours lost but I still plan to write 10,000 words a week during weekends and evenings.
It’s going to be tough, I have no doubt. Tough on my rapidly disappearing social life. Tough on my family. Tough on me. If I’m stupid, I’ll burn myself out, but I think I know what I’m doing. As Frances said in the comments to a previous post, what do I do with my creative energy? How do I manage it? The truth is, my writing has its own momentum and the moment I stop for longer than 3 days is the moment I fear I will stall. After 3 days, I fear my writing will go stale and I will lose the motivation, the discipline and the momentum to keep writing. So I keep writing. Not the same thing all the time. It could be a short story. It could be a new novel. Anything. And maybe a break, now and then.
For 3 days.
Or as the Pythons say, “One more than 2 and no more than 3."
"4 is right out.”

So then… 3 days is the maximum...
(…and after that I am a willing slave to my imagination.)

And while we’re talking about German editions…

I got these this week… the German editions of The Hoard of Mhorrer. And very nice they are too:

I still love the logo design for my books and even though I'm proud of the English editions, the German books are the ones that get me excited the most.

It's just a pity I can't read German very well...

Doing that thing that writers should do

Last month a few people contacted me by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other places to ask “just what the hell is going on?” and “when’s the next Secret War book coming out?”

I’ve assured them all by saying, “yes, I will be working on book 3 soon, but no, there’s no fixed date for publication”. That would pre-suppose I’ve nailed a publisher to a lucrative contract to publish all the Secret War books. That hasn’t happened, and I’ll be honest – I haven’t approached anyone yet.
At the moment, I don’t wish to deal-in with a proposal until I know what my cards look like, and so far while I have a strong hand, I know I can make it stronger. Once the fourth draft of The Black Hours is completed at the end of this month - in advance of the World Horror Convention in Brighton - I will approach an agent or two, to seek representation possibly, and to see how far away I am to getting a deal that will keep me writing for the next 3-4 years. The Black Hours will be part of that deal, as will the already-published books 1 & 2 of The Secret War series. I’m still with Random House, Germany, which could mean – strangely – that book 3 of the Secret War series may see publication in German before the English version. But stranger things have happened in the peculiar world of publishing…

So what about my next projects and where does the Secret War series figure? Well, my immediate writing schedule is already planned out. 2010 will be the year I complete The Black Hours and make headway on The Traitor of Light, and I expect to complete book 3 of The Secret War by the summer 2011. It won’t be a long book (about 300 pages) though it will require my customary 4 to 5 drafts, so it will take some time, folks. Depending on whether I have a publisher by then, it will be edited professionally and then sent to Random House Germany, and hopefully an English publisher too.

After that, I plan to write another stand-alone novel, either The 22nd Floor or The Fixer of Clocks, before embarking on the fourth Secret War novel. The Fortress of Black Glass is all there waiting to be written, I just want to give it all my attention rather than leap into it as I did last year at the request of my former publishers. I’ve since learnt you can’t rush these things, especially for a book that could be as long as 600 pages.
After Fortress, I’ll be taking a short break from series-writing with another standalone novel, probably whichever book I didn’t complete in 2012. And this will bring me nicely to 2015.
After then…? Well, there’s 20 more books that I have plots and characters for, including those mentioned on the website. It will all depend if I’m writing full-time by then and whether all my attention is fixed on completing those projects. There are plans for more Secret War books (there were 12 in all), but other projects may intervene by then. We’ll have to see - I don’t want to short-change my readership, and I don’t want to string out a series that shouldn’t progress beyond four books.

So, to summarise what’s happening on the book front for the next five years:

The Black Hours (400-500 page stand alone historical thriller) – to be completed 2010
The Traitor of Light (300 pages; third book of The Secret War series) – to be completed 2011

And in no particular order…

The 22nd Floor (300 pages; stand alone horror novel)
The Fortress of Black Glass (600 pages; fourth book of The Secret War series)
The Fixer of Clocks (300 pages; stand alone science-fiction thriller)

Add to that a short story every month, and this should keep me out of trouble for the next five years, shouldn’t it?