It may be a heresy to question the value of all this social media stuff. But I can’t help wondering. It’s all part of the package for a new author. In years gone by, a gentleman of letters would drop his goose quill into the roaring log fire, and sit back thoughtfully stroking his muttonchop whiskers, before packaging his finished manuscript up in brown paper and string, and dispatching it to a suitable London publisher. That was it, presumably. That’s certainly not the way it is now.
{Read more about: Social media, sigh...}
Social media, sigh...
27 January 2012
Breakfast for fishermen
19 January 2012
I put one of these up here a while ago and it gave a few people a laugh. So here's another one.
Goodbye, tunes.
16 January 2012
This blog has been sadly neglected since I was invited to contribute to the International Authors’ Reality Check, what with its familiar deadlines and whatnot. That’s the price of freedom and not having an editor breathing down your neck.
Anyway, music. It’s a sad little tale sparked by the news of a new Half Man Half Biscuit album that has completely passed me by. {Read more about: Goodbye, tunes.}
Anyway, music. It’s a sad little tale sparked by the news of a new Half Man Half Biscuit album that has completely passed me by. {Read more about: Goodbye, tunes.}
Cold Comfort
9 January 2012
It’s something of a big day. Cold Comfort, my second published novel, hits the bookstore shelves tomorrow, the 10th of January. That’s the US hardback version, published by Soho Crime. People on the eastern side of the big pond will have to wait for the paperback version to be published in the UK on the 15th of March.
There have been a couple of respectably decent reviews already, from Publishers Weekly and Beth at Kingdom Books. Fingers crossed and here’s hoping they stay positive.
A book is roughly a year’s work from start to finish, from the moment the initial ideas are scribbled on the back of envelopes or in tatty notebooks that are illegible after a week or two. Then there’s the long writing process, the first draft and plenty of scrawls and red biro all over it, crossings out and re-jigging things. Then the second and third drafts, and it goes off to a copy editor (the marvellous Imogen), and then there’s finally something that’s fit to be read.
Cold Comfort follows on from Frozen Out/Assets, but now Gunna is working in Reykjavík but still living in Hvalvík. There are some characters that it was a ball to write; Long Ommi, Helgi the sidekick, the revolting Bjartmar, Jón the Plumber, Svana, the cause of all the fuss – she just turns up dead, as well as some of the characters who were also in Frozen Out. But not Fat Matti the taxi driver. A lot of people have asked about Matti and I think I’ll have to bring him back. Book 3 (working title: Chilled to the Bone) is almost finished now, but maybe I can find a role for Matti in Gunna #4.
Soho have come up with a great cover for Cold Comfort, very menacing. Constable came up with their own cover for the UK paperback and I’m not sure which one I prefer.
Warhorses, January 30th, 1965
5 January 2012
Three of four old men, the legs of their seldom-worn suits showing beneath herringbone overcoats, sat upright and alert around chipped formica and an equally chipped teapot. The fourth hunched forward in his chair, looking down at the table in front of him with eyes watering after the bitter wind they had escaped.
{Read more about: Warhorses, January 30th, 1965}