Announcing a Savage Generation

It always seems like the really big news you have to sit on forever and a day!  But okay, the cat's now out of the bag: The Bad Neighbour wasn't the only novel I sold to Flame Tree Press last year.  There was a second, and now it has a cover and it's up on their website, so I reckon I'm okay for me to announce it.

The book now known as A Savage Generation has been through rather a lot of titles and iterations since I wrote the first draft the better part of a decade ago.  For a long while it was just Funland, the first novel I wrote full time and the only one I've ever blogged regular progress reports on, what feels like half a lifetime ago.  Then it became War For Funland and sat on the metaphorical shelf for a long time, as the sale of Giant Thief and the need to write its sequels absorbed all my attention.  When I returned to it soon after I packed in the day job for good, it was with another new title, Degenerates, and a good deal more experience.  I wasn't wholly happy with what I found, but there was a ton of stuff that worked - so the only way forward was to tear what I had down to its foundations and build it up again.

Under any other circumstances, I'd feel wary about a novel that had gone through such tumultuous growing pains.  In this case, I genuinely think the result is something I couldn't possibly have written in any other way.  it's a sprawling, complex novel, stuffed with characters and ideas and plot threads, some of which belong to a much younger me, some of which came in later.  Perhaps it's not the most cohesive thing I've ever written, but it has an energy and sprawling ambition that I'm not convinced I could replicate if I just sat down and tried.  Possibly it's even two books by two different versions of me mashed together, but if so, I spent many a month neatening the seams until I was certain the results stayed glued!  In short, it's a crazy goddamn thing, but I'm proud of it, and I've glad it's found the home it has.

And here we are and I haven't said one word on what it's about, so here's the blurb:

Sickness is ravaging America, driving the infected to savagery.

Petty criminal Ben Silensky is determined to get his girlfriend Carlita and son Kyle free of the quarantined city they live in - determined enough to risk a foolhardy crime and then to team up with Carlita's equally desperate cop cousin Nando.  Once they're out, Nando is certain they'll find a safe haven in the prison, White Cliff, where his uncle works.  But unbeknownst to him, White Cliff has already become a survivalist colony named Funland under the management of entrepreneurial convict Plan John.

In Funland itself, guard Doyle Johnson is shocked when his ex-wife abandons his son Austin into his care.  Fearing the vulnerable position he's been placed in, he recruits the help of Katherine Aaronovich, the prison's doctor.  However, Aaronovich's traumatic past has left her with vulnerabilities of her own, along with a radical theory on the nature of the epidemic that will place all their lives in jeopardy.

As the last vestiges of civilisation crumble, Funland may prove to be the safest or the most dangerous of places, depending on who comes out on top - and what can't be held together will inevitably be torn apart.

Oh, and the fact that it ended up under yet another new title?  That's just because Flame Tree weren't thrilled with the previous one.  But hey, I'm happy with what we settled on, and it surely does look cool in bright blood red, smeared across that image, doesn't it?

Writing Ramble: On Writing What You Know

I've come to think most traditional writing advice is terrible.  This is one of the weirder lessons you learn as you go on: it's largely nonsense spread by liars.  Case in point, that most idiotic adage, which endless authors of countless tiresome, basically autobiographical novels have followed: "Write what you know."

Are you an astronaut?  A ninja?  A rogue brain surgeon who's a secret agent by night?  A super-intelligent orangutan pirate?  Or any combination of the above?  No?  Then don't write what you know.  Most people's lives are boring to other people, which is the precise reason most dinner parties are awful and we had to invent books in the first place.  Even interesting people don't spend the majority of their time doing interesting things interestingly.  The point of fiction is not that we can describe our adventures in doing the washing up and taking the kids to school and that time we got our head stuck in the railings and had to be rescued by the fire brigade.  One of the purposes of fiction is to transcend and so make a modicum of sense of the messy, tangled, nonsensical matter of human existence.

But that's not really my point.  My actual point is, "Write what you know" is dreadful advice, but it doesn't take a lot of tweaking to be make it excellent.  This also took me a while to figure out.  The correct advice, obviously, should be "Use what you know to make stuff up better."  Which is to say, tear your life up mercilessly, since it's your job as a writer is to use every available resource in the service of creating good fiction.  Go at your memories with the sharpest scissors you have, pluck them apart, squash them like plasticine, burn out the ones that don't work with a soldering iron.  Wait, no, maybe not that last bit.  But the rest definitely.

Yet again, it took me rather too long to work this out.  Looking back at some of my earliest work, there are definite absences and vagaries that could have done with a bit of an injection of personal experience.  But I think that's true of most writers, and at least I reckon I'm getting it down now.

Case in point #1: My story The Only Way Out Lies Farther In*, recently published to a surprising (for me anyway) degree of acclaim in top horror market The Dark.  An awful lot of personal experiences went into that one: the maze and country house setting that open it were drawn from a recent holiday, the overriding theme of believing a childhood rupture has left you adrift in a broken reality pulls on a nasty bit of trauma from after my parents' divorce, and there's plenty more in there as well.  But getting it to work as narrative, and a narrative I personally could tell without my brain exploding, meant mashing a lot of elements together from all across my life, then mixing in a good deal of fiction, and most importantly, taking it all out of my own head and stuffing it into that of someone I'd made up.  It sounds simple put like that, and actually it sort of was.  Sometimes things make a certain intuitive sense, even when they don't make much actual sense.

Case in point #2: I've said in various places that my just-out novel The Bad Neighbour contains a lot of autobiographical components, and that's true, but it's also a lot less based directly on my own life than people have occasionally assumed.  There are bits and pieces aplenty, but crucially they're mostly not the bits and pieces anyone would assume.**  There are, I think, only two elements that are drawn unedited from personal experience: one is a catalogue of house-hunting horrors, all of which are described exactly as they happened, and the other is a fairly minor detail that was the genesis for the whole book.  Spiraling out from those ingredients, everything is a mishmash of my experiences and those of friends and those of friends of friends and total fabrication, in no clear order.  It's all grist for the mill, as they say.

I guess I should finish up by admitting that I'm not being entirely serious.  Obviously we'll always need writers who can make the mundane fascinating, who can conjure up the minute and intimate in a way that makes us feel understood.  That's yet another of the amazing things fiction is capable of, and sometimes that means sticking awfully close to personal experience.  But on the whole, for most people writing most kinds of fiction, I do think my version's better: those personal experiences are great material, but they're only a fraction of what's out there for you to draw on.





* Another bit of awesome writing advice no-one ever gives you: making up absurd titles is weirdly therapeutic.

** Interestingly, most of what the one or two more negative reviews found implausible was basically true.  It turns out that people with not a lot of money to spend really do buy houses they know have problems.  Who'd have thought it!

Bad Neighbour News

I've been a bit rubbish at talking about The Bad Neighbour here since it came out, mostly due to unfortunate timing: it was released as I was hammering to get the final draft of the third Black River Chronicles book done, and then I was on holiday, and honestly, it's all been a bit horrifically busy and chaotic for the last couple of months.  Yes, even the holiday.  There were wasps.  I'm not kidding.

With all of that, I haven't kept track of every review, though thankfully I've seen enough to know that they've been mostly positive so far.  However, a couple of real standouts stuck with me enough that I managed to make a note of them.  My favourite, the one I've been quoting all over the place, comes from Linda Wilson at Crime Review, who says that "The Bad Neighbour was all too real and all too depressing and certainly deserves the appellation northern noir.  It is also a well-written and cleverly imagined crime thriller with a knife-sharp edge."  Meanwhile, in the only local paper to have thus far picked up on the Yorkshire connections, Sally Clifford at Bradford's Telegraph and Argus says, among other nice things: "Exciting, gritty, and dramatic, this book has it all."

Obviously, that doesn't tell you a great deal about what The Bad Neighbour's actually about - though the Telegraph and Argus review does go into quite a bit of plot detail if that appeals.  However, I've been all over the place talking about the whys and wherefores of the story, so if you want to get a feel for it without risking plot spoilers then there's plenty out there.  A couple of pieces that I've mentioned already, because they were in my blog tour, are the interview I did with Lucy Hay and an article I put together for Random Things Through My Letterbox where I discuss eight books that have had a huge influence on me and my writing.  But since then I've also taken part in a Q&A with Anne Bonny over on her website and, perhaps the ideal starting place if you're wondering if the book's for you, written a piece introducing my protagonist (though, as I insist on pointing out, definitely not hero!) Ollie Clay.

Last but self-evidently not least, I've done my first proper interview in a while, with Paul Stretton-Stephens of the Crime Fiction Lounge podcast.  This one was a real pleasure, partly because Paul's a thoroughly nice bloke and partly because it was a joy to actually, really talk a bit about The Bad Neighbour rather than just writing about it in one form or another.  And also to get diverted onto totally unrelated topics that I'm nearly as enthusiastic about, like the impossible task of trying to pin down my favourite movie and my struggles to learn Japanese.

And that's it for the moment, I think, though there's more on the way.  And if any of that made you want to grab a copy of The Bad Neighbour - you do, right? - then it's in all of the usual book-selling places, in a dizzying choice of paperback, hardback, e-book, and audio formats.  Personally I'd go for the hardback, because it's lovely.  I mean, as lovely as a grim and gritty Northern crime thriller with a "knife-sharp edge" can be, anyway!

The Bad Neighbour is Out Today

Today sees the release of my sixth novel, The Bad Neighbour - also known as The Bad Neighbor, since I was fool enough to come up with a title that wouldn't work on both sides of the Atlantic!  It represents a lot of firsts for me, and a huge departure from everything that's come before.  My first standalone novel.  My first novel to get a hardback release.  My first serious stab at writing a thriller, and my first significant dabbling with writing crime.  My first book to be set wholly in the real world, and my first to draw significantly on aspects of my own life.  In fact, The Bad Neighbour is a good deal more personal than anything I've put my name to before now.  One of the early reviewers found it a little implausible that somebody would spend all of their money on buying a run-down house in an unfamiliar, impoverished area, as my protagonist Ollie Clay does, but that's exactly what I did seven or so years ago, and the reason I had a base from which to write this very book.  Of course, it worked out a hell of a lot better for me than it did for Ollie.  My neighbours haven't always been brilliant, but I've never had to deal with anyone like Chas Walker, the right wing thug who makes Ollie's existence a living hell, and I've certainly never gone quite so far off the deep end as Ollie ends up doing.

Which reminds me of another first: I don't know that anything else I've written has addressed current affairs quite so directly.  I wrote The Bad Neighbour in what seems, now, to be a very different and rather more innocent time.  When I conceived the book, and when I decided to write in a small way about some of the toxicity I saw bubbling away beneath the nation's surface, Brexit wasn't even a rumour, and I'd no way to guess how much of that bile would soon be gushing forth.  Less than a year after finishing the final draft, I came home from holiday to find out that my local MP, Jo Cox, had been murdered in the street by a far-right domestic terrorist, and suddenly what I'd written didn't seem half so dramatic or implausible.  Ollie's story has become, for the most part, shockingly likely, though I dearly wish it wasn't.

On a far happier note, one last first: this is also my debut with a new publisher.  Indeed, a new publisher in both senses: today marks the true birth of extremely exciting upstart Flame Tree Press, who also happen to have five other books out today, the first wave of what's set to be a truly astonishing catalogue.  So you might want to grab a copy of Tim Waggoner's The Mouth of the Dark, J. D. Moyer's The Sky Woman, Hunter Shea's Creature, Jonathan Janz's The Siren and the Spectre, or the legendary Ramsey Campbell's latest, Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, while you're shopping for The Bad Neighbour.

Which is totally a thing you should do!  You can pick it up from Amazon UK and Amazon US in paperback, hardback, e-book and audio formats, and Waterstones have it here.  And as ever, early sales are especially crucial, so if you fancy it, don't wait!

My First Blog Tour

For a long time indeed, blog tours have been something that those cool author kids did, and I gazed from the sidelines, vaguely puzzled by the use of the word "tour" to describe something that didn't involve any movement in physical space.  Well, no more!  In your collective faces, cool author kids!  I have a blog tour of my own, for my imminent crime debut The Bad Neighbour - and unbeknown to the bloggers, I've even been camping out outside of their respective houses on the relevant days out of a misplaced sense of literalism.  Fortunately, two of the posts are effectively by me, which meant I got to stay home and get a bit of work done on those days.  Still, it's been pretty hectic all told, and frankly, while I'm grateful for all the excitement, it's nice to have everything back to normal.

So here's where I've been, both spiritually and physically, over the last week:

• Monday 20th August: Audio Killed the Bookmark (Review)

• Tuesday 21st August: Ebookwyrm's Blog Cave (Review)

• Wednesday 22nd August: Don Jimmy Reviews (Review)

• Thursday 23rd August: CBailey31 Books and Blogs (Review)

• Friday 24th August: Blog of Lucy V Hay (Interview)

• Saturday 25th August: Loving Life Everday (Review)

• Sunday 26th August: Random Through My Letterbox (Eight books that influenced me.)

A huge thank you to everyone who was involved, and especially to Maria Tissot at Flame Tree for getting the ball rolling, and especially especially to Anne Cater, who seems to have been the guiding force behind the whole business.  Joking aside, it's been really cool to have a whole week of people talking about my book.  The Bad Neighbour (or The Bad Neighbor if you're of a more American persuasion) is out in paperback and hardback on the ninth of September.

Lastly, it should be noted that this is only one chunk of a much bigger Flame Tree Press tour, which also takes in Hunter Shea, Tim Waggoner and Jonathan Janz, and which you can read about here.  Oh, and here's all of that information above, except in a cool banner thing:

The Bad Neighbour Available to Pre-Order

September seems like a long way off, but it really isn't, is it?  In fact, in about four months' time my sixth novel - and my crime debut - The Bad Neighbour will be out to buy as part of Flame Tree Press's exciting opening line-up, which also features a whole host of impressive fantasy, SF, and horror names, including Tim Waggoner, Ramsey Campbell, and John Everson.

Fortunately, Flame Tree are a bit more aware of the calendar than I am, as I recently discovered via Michael Wills, my editor over at Digital Fiction Publishing.  Probably that's not how these things are meant to work, but hey, the important point is that The Bad Neighbour is available for pre-order in a whole host of exciting places.

I will, of course, be going into greatly more detail on the book the closer we get to the release date, and about why I think it's great and you really ought to read it, but for the moment, here's the blurb:

When part-time teacher Ollie Clay panic-buys a rundown house in the outskirts of Leeds, he soon recognises his mistake. His new neighbour, Chas Walker, is an antisocial thug, and Ollie's suspicions raise links to a local hate group. With Ollie's life unravelling rapidly, he feels his choices dwindling: his situation is intolerable and only standing up to Chas can change it. But Ollie has his own history of violence, and increasingly, his own secrets to hide; and Chas may be more than the mindless yob he appears to be. As their conflict spills over into the wider world, Ollie will come to learn that there are worse problems in life than one bad neighbour.

Needless to say, pre-orders are a huge deal in publishing, and it will do the book no end of good to get a few - so if you're planning to grab a copy then now would be a terrific time to do so.  You can find The Bad Neighbour on Amazon UK and Amazon US, at Waterstones, and very likely at any other online bookseller of your choice as well.

Breaking Into the Glass Slipper

It's been an age since I last did a live interview, and they're a ton of fun, so when Charlotte Bond asked me if I'd like to sit down with her and discuss the Black River Chronicles and any other stuff that came to mind, I jumped at the opportunity.  For those who've never encountered it, Breaking the Glass Slipper, the podcast that Charlotte co-hosts with novelist Lucy Hounsom and writer and critic Megan Leigh, has become a terrific resource over the last few months for digging into the feminist issues surrounding genre fiction in a fun, accessible, smart, and somewhat nerdy fashion.

With all of that said, probably neither of us had guessed what a multitude of weird tangents would end up being covered under "any other stuff"!  In fairness, I'm probably to blame; I mean, the lengthy digression about my cross-dressing habits in the Dark Souls games was definitely my fault, and so was the excitable speculation about a live-action Lilo and Stitch movie.  All told, though, for a half hour interview, I think we managed to touch on a few really intriguing subjects - which, needless to say, had more to do with Charlotte's questions than my answers.

In amid the ramblings about Disney movies and video games, the biggest pleasure was getting to discuss the Black River Chronicles in real detail for the first time.  If you're a fan of the books, there are lots of juicy details here, including a discussion of how the series first began and debate over the crucial issue of why we haven't seen any romance blossoming yet.  And towards the end we got onto the topic of The Bad Neighbour, my imminent crime debut from Flame Tree Publishing, which was also really exciting for me, since I've basically said nothing anywhere about that one until now.

But why am I writing about what I said in an interview when I can just post a link?  This is pointless even by my standards!  So I'll shut up now and simply suggest that you go have a listen here.  And while you're at it, why not try a few more episodes?  Judging by the ones I've sampled, Breaking the Glass Slipper is a reliably excellent listen.

The Bad Neighbour Sold to Flame Tree Publishing

I think I mentioned in my end of year round-up that there was big news on the way, of the sort that I couldn't reveal at the time.  Well, now I can, and it's of the immensely good sort: Flame Tree Publishing, as part of their opening foray into novel publishing, have picked up my crime debut The Bad Neighbour.

But let's unpack that a little, since it's all sorts of exciting beyond the basic level of "I've sold another novel and people are going to get to read it."  Flame Tree first: I've talked about them a few times here on the blog.  We ran into each with their Gothic Fantasy anthology series, which I've been in a couple of now, and which are also the two single loveliest books I own.  I mean, they're beautiful; they're the books that I show off to visitors, even if you've only come to read the electricity meter or deliver the post.  They're the sort of books that, when you find out that those same publishers are opening to novel length fiction, you make damn certain you have something to put in front of them and hope that they'll bite.

They bit.  And on a book that - this is the other exciting part, by the way - is absolutely nothing like what anyone might consider a 'David Tallerman book.'  If you're one of those people who's followed my career through it's many twists and turns then, firstly, thank you! and secondly, this one's still going to come as a shock.  And I mean that, I hope, in a good way.  It's an exciting prospect as a writer to get to move wholeheartedly into a genre you've hardly more than glanced at before.  That genre, in this case, being an urban crime thriller, one set in present day West Yorkshire and drawing on elements of my own life and experiences.

I've never been much for writing what I know, not when I can make stuff up and get paid for it.  However, I'd been thinking that I wanted to try my hand at writing crime for a long time, rather than merely flirting with it as I had in the Easie Damasco books and elsewhere.  And a number of factors, including a surprising discovery about the house that I bought back in 2011, happened to come together and form the seeds of a story that I knew I really, really wanted to tell, and sooner rather than later.  Thus was born the tale of Ollie Clay, the twenty-something supply teacher who makes a dreadful mistake when he invests an unexpected windfall into a battered terraced house in the outskirts of Leeds without pausing to wonder just who he might find himself living next-door to.

But let's not say any more than that; it's early days, after all.  While we already have that splendid cover up in the top right, there's still a long way to go with The Bad Neighbour, and though I'm expecting it to be out this year, I don't have a solid release date as yet.  More news as I get it, then, and expect me to be talking about this one a lot in the coming months!