To End All Wars Out Today

Happy book birthday to me!  2020 may not have brought much to celebrate, but I'm thrilled that To End All Wars, the third of the three novels that I wrote way back when I first put my day job behind me, finally gets to see the light of day.

To End All Wars is the most personal book I've written.  That seems an absurd statement on the face of it, when The Bad Neighbour is set around where I live and even draws upon a few of my own experiences.  And perhaps what I really mean to say is, more of me went into To End All Wars than anything else I've written.  Nothing I've done better reflects my interests, my opinions, or the topics that fascinate me, and perhaps that's most apparent when I try and talk about what genre it belongs to.  Clearly it's a historical novel, because it's set during the First World War, with the opening chapters taking place in the trenches of the Western Front and in No Man's Land.  But then there's the question of the strange encounter my protagonist Lieutenant Rafael Forrester has when he's out there, and which leads him ultimately back to his homeland and a country house hospital in the north of England, where yet stranger experiences await; that's definitely the stuff of genre fiction, and that hospital, with its inexplicable rules and weird ambience, has more than a little of The Prisoner about it.  Only, from there, To End All Wars will go on to be a thriller and an adventure novel, will toy with horror, will even tell a love story or two...

I realise I run the risk of making it sound like a crazy mishmash of ideas and genres, and I'm not going to claim it isn't that.  But in many ways, To End All Wars may actually be the most focused of my novels.  Ultimately, it's the story of Rafael Forrester, who begins the book doubting himself and the war he's fighting in, and ends it ... well, let's just say, in a very different place.  And part of why I hope the sheer amount of ingredients that went into it didn't lead to an almighty mess is that I put an inordinate amount of work into getting the details right.  I'm sure I drove my editors at Aethon nuts with the degree to which I wouldn't let go until I was as sure as I could be that I was happy with every last word!  Nevertheless, I've no regrets; I love this book.  And I hope, perhaps more than with anything I've written, even including my debut Giant Thief, that others will love it too, or at least be challenged and haunted and affected by it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  Obviously, it's early days yet, but there have been a couple of highly positive responses.  Ros Jackson reviewed To End All Wars on her site Warpcore SF here, and concluded both that it's "...a gritty story that balances action with moral questions, and mixes credible history with the fantastic" and that it's "...well researched and enjoyable" (though actually, Ros's observation that bits of the dialogue reminded her of how her grandfather used to talk was by far my favourite part.)  And a fellow author you might have heard of, the multi-award-winning Adrian Tchaikovsky, was kind enough to take a look and concluded that To End All Wars is "thoughtful and atmospheric" and "a haunting story about loss, empathy and the human soul."  So that's nice.

Should that suffice to whet your appetite, you can buy To End All Wars in e-book and paperback, as you'd expect.  But if you want to experience the story at its very best, I heartily recommend having a listen to the audiobook.  Audiobooks are something of a speciality for Aethon, and they went all out on this one; from the samples I've heard, actor MacLeod Andrews has done an exemplary job of bringing the text and its characters to life, and his remarkably good impression of an English accent will now and forever be the voice of Rafael Forrester in my head.  Also, I think I like that gorgeous cover art slightly more in its square incarnation!

And there we have it.  You can pick up To End All Wars online in all the usual sorts of places, including Amazon UK and Amazon US.  With Aethon being a somewhat smaller press and me being far from a big name author, those week-one sales really count, so if you'd like to support us along with reading / listening to a book that hopefully you'll thoroughly enjoy, now's the time to grab a copy.

Everything I Have Out On Audible

It struck me recently that I have an awful lot of books available on Audible, and that maybe people don't realise just how many of my books are on there, since I myself didn't, or indeed that almost everything of any length that I've written is out in at least some kind of audio format, (as is a good chunk of my short fiction, but that's probably another post!)  And what got me thinking about this is that my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, recently released in a rather nice CD pack by studio Circle of Spears, is also now out there in download format.  But more on that in a minute!  Because there's all this other stuff what I wrote too...

The Bad Neighbour

Honestly, I haven't even received a copy of this one - in fairness, I only got round to asking today! - but I have heard a sample of Paul Tyreman's reading and he's certainly a terrific fit.  I do believe he's from Leeds, if the internets aren't misleading me, and if he isn't then he certainly does a damn fine impression of a Yorkshire accent.  Anyway, what else can I say about The Bad Neighbour?  It's my newest book, my first foray into crime-writing, and I'd love for more people to be experiencing it in whatever manner they see fit.  A recent review that described it as Northern Noir pretty much hit the nail on the head, so if that sounds like your sort of thing, or if you just fancy what that same review described as "a well-written and cleverly imagined crime thriller with a knife-sharp edge" then why not give it a go?

Giant Thief, Crown Thief and Prince Thief

I've often joked that my perfect reader for the Damasco books would have been Inigo Montoya actor Mandy Patinkin, and okay, I wasn't really joking, he would be perfect.  But in the absence of Mandy Patinkin, my second choice would have been James Langton, because that's who I got and he absolutely owned it.  Listening to James elevate Easie Damasco's adventures and make them more witty and charming than my writing alone ever could was my first inkling that I was going to be pretty damn lucky with narrators, and so it's consistently proved.

Patchwerk

There's basically only one occasion when I get to listen to audiobooks, and that's when I go on holiday somewhere in the UK and have a really long drive to get through.  So it was that poor Patchwerk languished for years waiting for a suitable break, and finally got the attention it deserved this summer, when I went kayaking for a friend's birthday.  Anyway, nobody really needed to know that!  But it explains why I didn't get more excited by this at the time, because it really is an exciting adaptation.  Patchwerk's reality-hopping was a heck of a challenge for any narrator, and Tim Gerard Reynolds goes well beyond the call of duty, adopting a fresh (and reliably convincing!) accent for each section.  Honestly, it's so much fun to listen to, and I can't believe I haven't gone on about it more before now.

The Black River Chronicles: Level One

Another one that I haven't had a listen to, though it's entirely my fault this time; in the absence of a CD version, I'm yet to figure out a way to get through it in the car, with it's lovably old-school technology.  But I really do need to figure something out, in part because Alan Ross is my first (and so far last) American reader and that's sort of exciting in itself, but mostly because - and I'm probably not allowed to announce this, but what the heck, right? - there's an adaptation of The Ursvaal Exchange on the way in the not-too-distant future, and you can only get so far behind on listening to your own series.

The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories

And here we are, back to where we started, with The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories and Tracey Norman and Sam Burns of Circle of Spears Productions doing an absolutely splendid job of bringing my first short story collection to life.  I talked about it a fair bit recently here, and there's not a great deal to add, except perhaps that of all my books I think this is the one that's gained the most from the translation into audio.  And, given that it's coming from a smaller outfit rather than the likes of Angry Robot, Tor or Flame Tree, I guess also the most worthy of support!  So despite appearing at the end of the list, maybe this is the place to start?

Level One Recovered

I remember writing a while back about how I've always been insanely lucky with audio adaptations.  If anything, I've been even luckier with covers.  To have seven books (and a comic) out and not have a single one I wasn't totally happy with is quite the thing.  Heck, even the covers to the German editions of Giant Thief, which had barely a thing to do with the actual book, were still pretty cool.  And really, who's to say that Easie Damasco doesn't look like a sexy ninja guy?  Not me.

I was thrilled with the original cover to The Black River Chronicles: Level One.  That's probably the one the most discussion went into, as Mike and I worked with Xerx to figure out exactly how these characters would look, even down to the sorts of little details that probably only we would ever notice.  It was a cool image, and it got right so much that was crucial to the book.  More than anything, I liked how nervous the gang looked: these weren't hardened fantasy heroes, they were basically a bunch of kids, and while they were trying to act tough, they weren't altogether succeeding.

But like I said, I'm insanely lucky with covers.  And now Level One has a new one, by the magnificently talented Kim Van Deun, and it's really a thing of beauty.  I mean, it's right there, I don't need to tell you!  I can guarantee it won't get any less great, too, because I've been staring at it off and on for the last two weeks and it's still really great.

I love how Tia's being all too cool for school there in the background.  I love how Hule's looking off in just the wrong direction, like that kid in the school photo who got distracted by a bee.  I love how Pootle looks like a crazy flying eyeball!  But maybe the biggest difference is that this time we get to see the gang out in the wilds, and somehow that feels exactly right to me.

To close, here's a look at the full image in all its glory.  And as ever you can purchase The Black River Chronicles: Level One from Amazon UK here and Amazon US here.

Narrating is Hard, Who Knew?

It's not like I haven't always had a ton of of respect for narrators.  And I've had reasons enough to listen to them.  For some unaccountable reason, a disproportionate amount of my work has found its way into podcast or audiobook: all four of my novels, novella Patchwerk, and a dozen of my short stories have all had the audio treatment, and to the best of my recollection not once have I been less than thrilled with the results.  I've been really lucky on that front, and maybe that's one of the reasons I quickly started to notice how tough reading fiction out loud was, let alone doing so without stumbling over every other line, let alone while bringing genuine emotion and life to the work.

Still ... when you try it yourself, you discover that narrating is really damn tough, and that the people who do it professionally are really damn talented.  I mean, it's not like I've never had to read stories out loud, and sometimes I've even done so in front of quite large groups of people.  But if you fluff that then you can blunder through or make a joke about it, and really volume tends to be the main thing that matters in those situations, so if any actual subtlety or drama creeps in then I feel like I've done a decent job.  Actually making a recording of a story, though?  That's a whole other thing.  One significant mistake and you've had it and - as I discovered to my cost - just going in without the right amount of joie de vivre is enough to make for a rubbish end result.  Reading for thirty-five minutes without major slip-ups and without letting your energy flag is a heck of a challenge.

About now is when I should explain why I was even trying, right?  Basically, the answer is, because the folks at Great Jones Street asked me to, and those guys are cool enough that I didn't mind giving it a go.  If you haven't downloaded the GJS app by now, you really should; it's a huge library of short fiction by a ton of big name (and not quite so big name!) authors, and it's completely free.  More to the current point, it contains four of my stories: Jenny's Sick, Great Black Wave, and my two tales following master assassin Otranto Onsario, Ill-Met at Midnight and A Killer of Dead Men.  And the folks at GJS decided that it would be neat if their readers could be listeners too, so long as what they were listening to was authors reading out their own fiction.

In fairness, I should admit that I was largely extent imposing my own difficulties: Great Jones Street didn't ask for flawless renditions, and indeed specifically requested the exact opposite, suggesting that their audience would much prefer more warts-and-all renditions.  But, you know, you can tell a perfectionist not to try and get things perfect until you go blue in the face and it won't make a damn bit of difference.  Fortunately for my sanity, what did was sheer lack of time, not to mention a good deal of luck - otherwise I'd have been at this all year.  As it was, I managed to get by with only a few minor hiccups and one fairly major one, too far into A Killer of Dead Men for me to start over yet again.  What can you do, right?  "City" and "roof" sound awfully similar.

Anyway, for anyone who's curious, here's me reading out Great Black Wave, which is perhaps my favourite of the four stories and, not at all coincidentally, probably the one I did the best job with.

And, again, you can find the Great Jones Street app and so listen to all four, as well as lots and lots of other stuff, here.

The Sign in the Moonlight: Launching at Edge-Lit

 I think that the last time I had a book launch was for my first novel Giant Thief, five or so years ago, and that wasn't much of a thing all told - more of a book hermitage, really - so there's no shortage of reasons for me to be looking forward to this coming Saturday.

The thing is, as I never tire of pointing out, it's not so long ago that it seemed as though The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories was never going to happen, as the collection I'd spent three years trying to make a reality swam around the edges of the sucking whirlpool that was the demise of Spectral Press.  Then, when I found a home for the paperback early in the year with the wonderful Digital Fiction Publishing, I had to try and accept that the hardback edition - which had been my dream for the project all along, and the reason I persuaded Duncan Kay to provide his gorgeous illustrations - was going to fall by the wayside.  Then, somehow, I convinced Ian Whates, head honcho of perhaps my favourite UK small press, NewCon, to pick up the project, and not only that but Ian fell in love with it enough to give the book the sort of deluxe treatment I'd barely dared dream of.  And now here we (nearly) are and it's my second ever book launch, and the book in question is a thing of almost obscene beauty.  Oh, and I'll be launching beside one of my favourite authors, Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose collection of short fiction from perhaps my favourite ever series, The Shadows of the Apt, will also be out from NewCon on Saturday, which makes a nice sort of poetical sense given that Adrian was kind enough to write the introduction for The Sign in the Moonlight.

Phew!

So that'll be happening between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., and alongside mine and Adrian's books are a collection from V. C. Linde and one from Mr. Whates himself, released by the ever foxy and ever spirited Fox Spirit.  Oh, and there'll be free wine.  Wait, I wrote that in lower case, didn't I?  What I of course meant to say was, THERE'LL BE FREE WINE.

Damn it, there must be a way to do flashing text in blogger.  No?  Really?

So do come along, please.  Even if you can't afford to buy anything, it's not often that getting drunk in the daytime at someone else's expense can be passed off as supporting the arts - but in this case it clearly is, and moreover it might be another five years before I get to do another of these things and I'd like to make this one count.

Oh, and if you really can't make it, please do consider picking up a copy here!  You'll miss out on the free wine, but you'll still get a gorgeous, fully illustrated book full of some of the finest short fiction I've penned, so there's that.

February is Not National Novel Writing Month

A few weeks ago I was determined - for reasons I'm sure we'll come back to one of these days - to try and write the first draft of a novel in the space of about a month.  Like, the whole thing, start to finish, in one month or thereabouts.  Wouldn't that be something?  Maybe not necessarily a good something, but it would certainly be one to cross off the bucket list, assuming that your bucket list consisted primarily of masochistic writing challenges.  Which is to say that I realised it wasn't such a great idea, for me or for the book, and one month ended up spreading into just under two.  That still being, I feel the need to point out, pretty damn quick for writing the entire first draft of a novel!  I mean, at times like this I need to remind myself that the first draft of Giant Thief took me something like three years...

If we're talking in National Novel Writing Month terms, however, I should be more than up to the challenge.  This last couple of weeks I've been writing between 2000 and 3000 words a day, and that's set to err towards the higher end for the rest of the month, now that the final proofs of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories are out of the way.  My capacity for getting the words down has been steadily rising ever since I began writing full time, with no noticeable drop-off in quality, and I'm also getting more comfortable with writing flat out for longer periods, at least partly because I'm getting better at organising my days.  My pre-planning has also improved by leaps and bounds, to the point where I'm able to just get on and write without too much risk of growing severely stuck or having to go back and make significant changes.  On which front, I'm also much more confident in my ability to remember what I got wrong in the first draft and fix it in the second.  In short, its definitely been a confluence of factors that's brought my daily word count up to this level - which, as a friend recently pointed out, is still small potatoes for a lot of writers, but for me is quite an achievement.

I suppose that I'm mentioning this, here and now, because a small part of me has been wondering ever since I first heard of NaNoWriMo whether I'd ever be capable of writing a novel in a month - or rather of writing 50'000 words in a month, since as I've inadvertently illustrated, the two are far from being necessarily the same thing.  By the end of February, unless something goes terribly wrong, it looks as though I'll have proved to myself that the answer is yes - with the sizable proviso that it took me years of honing my technique, not to mention packing in my day job, to get to this point.

I'm not sure what the moral is here, except to say that I'm a little bit more convinced than I already was that if you're serious about becoming a professional writer then NaNoWriMo isn't the most productive of exercises.  Because, yes, I could have just written this fast eight or whatever years ago, when I was just starting out, and maybe I could have even managed 50'000 words in a month without my face exploding, but would I have learned even a tenth of what I've learned doing it the long way?  I think not.  Which isn't to say that NaNoWriMo can't be a meaningful or a fun exercise - plenty of people have assured me that it is, and why would they lie? - just that I'm not persuaded it's a shortcut past years of graft, because I'm not convinced that any such shortcut exists.  Then again, perhaps I'm the only one who ever imagined it was supposed to be, and I'm entirely missing the point.

On a side note, in the actual National Novel Writing Month, November, I'll be writing - assuming my schedule hasn't changed in the meantime, of course - a measly forty thousand words or so, meaning that, in the first year I might have seriously considered giving it a go, I still won't.  But who knows?  Maybe in 2017!

Book Ramble: In the Shadow of The Shadows of the Apt

I really don't read epic fantasy.

This has nothing to do with how much I like or don't like epic fantasy, but everything to do with a lack of hours in the day, or at least a desire to read as diversely as I can in the limited time that I have.

So it was that when I picked up Adrian Tchaikovsky's debut novel Empire in Black and Gold, it wasn't with any intention of reading beyond that point.  I didn't know Adrian back then, I wasn't familiar with his work because I was hopelessly ignorant of the publishing scene in general, but he'd been kind enough to provide a blurb for Giant Thief and I had an idea of thanking him in a small way by picking up one of his books.  It seemed like about the least I could do; but not being a reader of epic fantasy, I fully assumed that that would be the end of it.

Yet here we are, however many years later, and I just finished Seal of the Worm, book ten in the series that Empire began.  So clearly something went very wrong.  Or very right.  Or perhaps a bit of both.

First up, I feel obliged to point out, if only to myself, that The Shadows of the Apt isn't really epic fantasy at all.  I mean, yes, it's epic and yes it's fantasy, but ... okay, maybe it sort of is.  But that's about the lowest level it's operating on; epic fantasy is SotA when it's idling, and how many such series can claim that?  It's the premise, that's the thing: a reality where humans have acquired what amount to superpowers by emulating various insect species, and then are further divided into the technologically able Apt and the magically inclined Inapt, who understand so little of machinery that they can't so much as pull the trigger of a crossbow.  It's a setting that works equally well as science-fiction and fantasy, and SotA treads a hair-thin line between the two, but those twin central concepts have advantages well beyond that.  They lead to a world, for example, that can still offer surprises all the way into its tenth book, as we're drip-fed new insect-kinden with new, crazy powers, but also entire new cultures, each detailed with loving affection.  Those two marvelous notions collide against each other in endlessly interesting ways, and while perhaps neither alone could warrant seven thousand and some words, somehow the two in combination provide an all but limitless scope.

(I'll admit it here, slightly shamefacedly: I got to the end of book ten and found myself wanting more.)

If that was all SotA had going for it, however, I suspect I'd have drifted away, a little sadly, somewhere round about book four or five.  The thing is, The Shadows of the Apt is also an alternate history of about two hundred years of human progress, twisted and reshuffled but still potently reminiscent of our own recent triumphs and misdeeds.  At the risk of slight spoilers, the world of the Apt sees its own blitz, its own industrial revolution, even its own terrible equivalent of the holocaust.  And only as I got towards the end of the series did I fully appreciate how much that was what kept me reading: beneath the magic, the fantasy, the intriguing alternate technologies, there is in these ten books a deconstruction of our own development as a species, at our worst and our best.  The results are sometimes devastating and sometimes hopeful; Adrian's bug-people aren't quite us, and often they avoid our mistakes, or else manufacture even worse horrors of their own.  Still, there was rarely a point when I felt I was reading a work with nothing to say about my own reality and its bloody, tragic, occasionally marvelous history.  In the end, these books aren't escapism; instead, they're a side step into a might-have-been world with all the frailties and potentialities of our own, one that in turn has no end of things to say about the ways we've chosen to make ourselves and each other suffer, how we might have done better, how we might do yet.

There's plenty more I could talk about here - Adrian's Miyazaki-like refusal to give us villains who are anything less than fully comprehensible human beings certainly warrants an essay all of its own - but in the end it's perhaps enough to just point out that these are tremendously good books, works of exceeding cleverness and imagination, and you should absolutely give them a go if you haven't already.

Just be prepared for the fact that once you start, it might be a while before you stop.

The Sign in the Moonlight: Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams & A Twist Too Far

A brief note before we begin: I was recently reporting The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories as to be out earlier this month, and the attentive will notice that it hasn't materialized yet.  The new release date is, touch wood, the 15th of January, with the hardback edition due by the 15th of April at the latest...

The thought that first springs to mind in regards to Caretaker in the Garden of Dreams is that it came out of the same bout of insomnia - or maybe, rather, waiting-to-fall-asleep-weirdness - that produced my first novel Giant Thief, and so its sequels, and so basically my entire career as it now stands.  Which is quite a lot of emotional weight to lay on one fairly short short story!

Of the two, though, Caretaker is without a doubt the piece that feels like it was cobbled together out of random bits of cerebral flotsam on the very verge of sleep.  Which is to say, it's downright odd; so odd that I find it odd and I wrote it.  It was a late addition to the collection, added in when I was thinking that maybe a few more thousands words wouldn't go amiss and realised that, hey, a freakish Dark Fantasy story based on a nearly-dream wouldn't be altogether outside the parameters of what I had in mind.

A side note: isn't one of the cool things about horror is that it's where the monsters get to have a voice?  I think maybe that's so.  Certainly the pleasure of writing this one, other than how fundamentally strange it is, was that I got to describe some horrible things from a perspective so divorced from our own that you barely realise how nasty much of what happens is until you step back and think about it.

Of A Twist Too Far, I feel like all I should really have to say is, how creepy are contortionists?  I mean, not as people, I'm sure they're lovely people, or at least only creepy in the normal human ratios of creepiness to non-creepiness.  But as a medium of entertainment, contortionists are pretty creepy.  And it's plain amazing that there aren't more horror stories written about them.  Which, perhaps needless to add given all the introduction and that title, this one is.  It sprang out of some similar impulses to The Facts in the Case of Algernon Whisper's Karma, in that once again the narrator is a Watson to the protagonist's Holmes, looking on in awe, bafflement and eventually in horror as they go further and further beyond the pale.  In a A Twist Too Far, however, the object of the narrator's fascination is a genuinely extraordinary individual - and one who only gets more extraordinary as the story progresses.

Here's a sample:

Fortesque took it upon himself to educate me on the intricacies of contortionism: of the subtleties of frontbending and backbending, of enterology and the professional's disgust at dislocations and other such cheap tricks.  I soon discovered that contortion, like any trade perhaps, has unfathomable depths beneath a surface of simplicity.  I learned too that even then, amongst his peers, Fortesque was an athlete of remarkable ability.  It wasn't for nothing they called him the Human Knot.  He could flow like water in a breeze; rearrange himself as though his limbs were some puzzle carelessly manipulated.

Yet he was not happy.  I saw that the moment we met, and the certainty only grew upon me.  His eyes were haunted.  His moods were fiercely changeable.  He would drink, sometimes, as though he fervently wished to be dead.

I would try to question him, of course.  "Frederick, something bothers you."

"What?  No Victor, just this miasmal London weather."

"You seem perturbed."

"I'm nothing of the kind."

Fortesque, it struck me, was a man in great need of a confidant.  Yet however much I probed or expressed my concern, he did not confide.  I had lost a brother-in-law to monomania some years before, and knew enough to recognise the symptoms.  He was in the grip of a commanding fervour, and I felt earnestly that without my aid it might consume him.

Degenerates Regenerated, and Other Novel News

Once upon a time there was a novel called Funland.  It had a tough gestation, one that I documented at length in what feels like another lifetime and can hardly believe was only five years ago, and for its troubles it ended up with its name changed, to the less blunt but perhaps sillier War For Funland.  Then it sat for a long, long time on my hard drive as I got diverted by the adventures of a certain Mister Easie Damasco, rapscallion and thief of giants.  Then I came back to it and decided that War For Funland should be called Degenerates, for a whole lot of reasons but mainly because it was a much better title, and rewrote it again and again and again.

Novels don't always come easily.

But hammer away at them for long enough, as if your life depends on it enough, and they do eventually get finished.  As such, I'm declaring Degenerates, nee Funland, temporarily War For Funland, to be finally done.  Because it is.   And now, after five and a bit years, I get to the really difficult part, which is trying to sell the thing.  But I don't want to think about that, let alone talk about it here - so let's move on spryly to happier pastures.

Because elsewhere, my sixth novel and first stab at writing crime at any length, The Bad Neighbour, should be finished early in December, and I felt good about the second draft so I'm not expecting too much in the way of unexpected horrors.  (Though I suppose it's fair to say that the thing about unexpected horrors is that you don't expect them.)  Meanwhile I'm maybe three weeks off completing the first draft of White Thorne, my medieval witch detective novel*, and book number seven - eight?  Hell, I've actually lost count - is comfortably hovering near to its first draft midway point.  That of course being as good a reason as any to start plotting the next one, which I'm scheduled to begin at the start of December, assuming that the novella I'm writing in the meantime doesn't overrun.

And yes, in case you're wondering, I'm now officially working on too much stuff.  For some reason that possibly involves bad planning or maybe makes no sense at all, everything seems to be falling out at exactly the same time.  Then again, the flip side of that is that there's an imminent point - in January, to be precise - when I'll be working on a mere two novels.

That's going to be really weird.





* As in, she's a witch who becomes a detective and it's set in the Middle Ages.  I really need to find a way to phrase that better.

Unexpected Birthday Presents

One of the nice things about being a writer is that every so often, out of the blue, people send you exciting things in the post.  And statistically I suppose that the longer you go at it, the more of a chance there is that those things are going to arrive on your birthday.  Still, it was a nice surprise when not one but two parcels containing contributor copies arrived just in time for me to pretend that they'd been sent to celebrate my successfully surviving another year.

I've already talked plenty about 01 Publishing's anthology of Lovecraftian Horror Whispers From the Abyss - and rightly so, it's really good - but I tell you, however good it was as an e-book, it's a whole lot better in print.  And this isn't just my weird, old-man affection for books that are made out of dead trees talking, either; in fact, it's got a lot more to do with my weird, old-man affection for additional artwork and sexy formatting and books that are generally really nicely put together.  Honestly, I wish I could show you how great this thing looks on the inside ... and I could, quite easily.  But it would involve taking more photographs, or scanning or something, and honestly, I'm bored with both of those things right now.  You'll just have to take my word for it.

Anyway, as exciting as getting print copies of Whispers From the Abyss was, it wasn't quite so exciting as what Spectral Press head honcho Simon Marshall-Jones sent me.  A little back-story: in 2012 I won a competition with small press Horror publisher Spectral to have a story produced as a chapbook, a competition I only entered because I'd had my eye on them for months as potential publisher for that particular story, The Way of the Leaves.  As well as getting tWotL chapbookised, my prize for winning was a copy of every chapbook Spectral put out henceforward, which was pretty cool because - more so that it has any right to have done for what's still a relatively new imprint - Spectral has become one of the lynchpins of British Horror over the last three years.

Actually it seems an age since I've talked about The Way of the Leaves, and perhaps when it was released it got neglected a little, falling as it did between Crown Thief and Prince Thief coming out.  (Though, that was also partly because it sold out pretty quickly.)  I don't remember even posting any  reviews, and it got some particularly solid ones: Morpheus Tales even reviewed it twice, with J. S. Watts calling it "...haunting, dark and lyrical..." and Stanley Riiks pointing out that it's "...a soul-chilling tale worthy of the Spectral name," that "...builds into a heart-wrenching urban fantasy..."

So, short story long, what Simon sent me was the gorgeous boxed set of the first eight Spectral chapbooks (including my own, obviously) pictured above, which is a pretty great birthday present by any definition.  I mean, look at it!  It's like someone painted the monolith from 2001 red and then it spewed chapbooks.

As a postscript, it would be great to end by mentioning that there were plans in motion that would mean more people got to read The Way of the Leaves, what with it being one of the better things I've written and only having appeared in a limited edition and all.  And maybe there are even plans afoot in that direction.  But if there were then I obviously wouldn't be able to talk about them.  
So I won't.

Nine Worlds 2014: Part 1

I mentioned in my last post that, although I'd definitely had a mostly-good time, I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about my Nine Worlds experience.  A couple of days on and I'm clearer, though perhaps still not entirely there.  Part of the problem, I think, is that I was just expecting too damn much - the excellence of last year but with the rough edges shaved off, basically - and that was not entirely reasonable.  Part of the problem, too, was that there was some last-minute personal stuff that made the whole experience a bit more stressful that it might have been.  However with a couple of day's perspective I suspect that the remaining part is that it was just the teeniest bit disappointing; probably as good as last year's Con, which lest we forget was pretty damn great, but without those refinements to the formula I'd hoped the intervening year might have produced.

Now out, Germany.

Anyway, I'm preempting myself here, so maybe I should just talk about what actually went on instead.  The day got off to a pretty good start when I traveled from Leeds to London on a freebie first class ticket that East Coast had given me to apologize for once making me two and a half hours late, and I arrived in King's Cross with a proper breakfast in me and my socialist ideals somewhat tarnished.  From there I made a brief trip up the Northern line to visit my agents, Zeno, who were holding some copies of the just-out paperback release of the German edition of Giant Thief for me.  Then, with yet more books in my rucksack - I think I was up to sixteen by this point - I headed back south and picked up the Piccadilly Line for Heathrow.  From there I hurried to Nine Worlds, checked in, rushed on to my guest house, checked in there too, had a quick and much needed shower and dropped off my bag and headed back to the conference hotel - and then kept going, to grab a sandwich from the nearby garage - and finally, finally, properly arrived at Nine Worlds at somewhere around three o'clock.

Thus began a rather irritating trend that would end up being one of my few gripes with the convention, as I dashed to the Archeological World-building talk only to be turned away because the room was full.  (In the end this happened three times over the course of the weekend; as Oscar Wilde famously said, to misjudge the audience size for one panel may be regarded as a misfortune; to misjudge three looks like carelessness.)  Oh and hey, let's get most of the grumbling out of the way right here, shall we?  As someone who believes in sustainability, not to mention not carrying around loads of crap I don't want, I really don't want a plastic carrier bag full of books I'll never read and adverts and booklets and little plastic tokens that don't look even slightly recyclable.  Seriously, I get that everyone does this, Nine Worlds, but you guys know better.  And in fact, what with the millions of plastic cups floating about and a few other things, things were pretty crummy on the giving-the-slightest-crap-about-the-environment front.  Please will someone in the Con scene set a precedent for not getting this so wrong?  And since no one else seems even close to trying, please could it be Nine Worlds?

Okay, done grumbling!  (Well, mostly.)  So, denied enlightenment on the Archeological World-building front, I gave in to my baser Con-going instincts and retired to the bar to meet my friend and bestselling-author-to-be Dan Scrivener, and sometime after that my friend Jobeda Ali.  And both of them were nice enough to buy my drinks, which - not being an oil baron - I would otherwise have struggled to afford.  (Damn it!  Okay, now I'm done.  For this post anyway.)

All of this afternoon drinking was in fact just psychological preparation for early that evening, when came my third-ever stab at panel moderating: the Writing Trans-Media panel.  This time around, however, what with the whole 'writing being the day job' thing, I had one advantage I'd never had in the past: I was shockingly over-prepared.  I mean, 'two pages of questions with sub-questions, having researched my panelists and even prepared specific questions for them' over-prepared.  And having done it that way once I'm convinced it's the way to go in future, because once we got started I wasn't a bit nervous, things went unexpectedly brilliantly, and my panelists - Barry Nugent, Anna Caltabiano, Simon Guerrier and Adam Christopher - were every one of them completely great.  If you happen to read this, thank you everyone, you made a scary thing painless to the point of being actual fun.

After that, of course, it was back to the bar. This being my third Con near Heathrow and my second in that particular hotel, I now know the area distressingly well, so I dragged Dan to a half-decent pub nearby and then back to the hotel bar, where we eventually ran into Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ian Whates and - it being a bar - lots of other people.  But because I was determined to learn the lessons of all the conventions I've made a hash of in the past, I retired at the entirely sensible hour of midnight to my guest house cell.  (I mean this in the monastic rather than the prison sense.  It was spartan, but there were no bars on the windows.)

Thus ended Friday.  Next: Saturday!  Sunday!  Less griping!  More drinking!

Adventures in Copyright Infringement, Part 1

There aren't many careers these days where people can rob you so casually, so effortlessly or so unapologetically as fiction writing.

To put that in perspective, the first pirated e-book copy of my first novel Giant Thief went live on the evening of the day it was released.  (I know this because I got an e-mail from the the Google alert I'd set up while I was drinking celebratory champers with Lee and Marco from Angry Robot.  Cheers, pirates.)  Now I'm not going to get into the piracy debate here, partly because it's not what I want to talk about and partly because if you happen to be pro-piracy and ever find yourself in a position where your livelihood depends on people having the decency to not steal your work then I'm confident you'll come round to my way of thinking pretty quickly.  No, this post and it's sequel - because, be warned, this is a long story I'm about to tell here! - is about one particular incident, and I'm telling it for educational purposes only.

The lesson is: writers are not powerless to defend their work.  And also, if you're a writer then yes you have powers but use those powers carefully, and for good rather than evil, lest the whole thing explode in your face.

Late last year I stumbled across one of my stories on the internet.  It was one I'd sold to a good market a few years before - actually, I don't know why I'm being coy here, it was The Desert Cold in Flash Fiction Online - and the place I'd found it was certainly not the one I'd sold it to.  Oddly, it was accompanied by the bio I'd used back then, which was some years out of date, and more worryingly the webpage attributed copyright to the site rather than me and had buttons encouraging readers to share my story through a variety of online routes.

I wrote a polite e-mail to the publisher asking that they either take the story down or pay me appropriate for using it.  The publisher wrote back and said that it was okay because another page on their site gave the contradictory information that copyright remained with the author and that when I'd submitted my story I'd chosen to waive the option of payment.

I wrote back and explained that I hadn't submitted my story and explained how and where it had originally been published, explained too that the bio was desperately out of date, explained that the copyright notices were at best contradictory and stated that (having checked their pay rates and found them to be a princely sum of $3 a story) I'd rather have my copyright not being infringed than be paid.

When I week and a half later I hadn't had an answer, I wrote again.  The publisher wrote back apologizing and said that they'd removed my story.  I checked and all they'd done was take the link off their home page, leaving the page with my work on untouched.  I wrote back explaining this.

This time I didn't get an answer, and just couldn't be bothered at the time to press any further.  I'd written four e-mails, I  dislike writing e-mails at the best of times, and writing e-mails to people who are pirating my work and claiming my copyright and don't understand piracy, copyright or how to take things off their own website is just a whole lot of a slog when you have better things to do.

I mention this only as partial justification for what I did next ... which we'll cover in part 2, when the kid gloves come off, doors are opened with hand grenades and lessons are learned, not all of them for the better.

No Rest For the Death God's Chosen

No one warns you of this, but sometimes there's a staggering amount of patience involved in selling short fiction.  I say this from bitter experience - and also, I guess, lots of not-bitter experience, because that patience does tend to get rewarded if you're only patient enough.

But I'm talking patience epochs here.

Case in point: No Rest For the Wicked.  No Rest was the result of two decisions that subsequently turned out to be pretty lousy: writing a sequel to a story I hadn't yet sold and then, when I couldn't sell either separately, combining them into one really long story.  Don't get me wrong, I liked the results, but the results also happened to come to 9000+ words, and a rather crazy, episodic 9000+ words at that.

So I was immensely pleased when I finally managed to sell it way back in 2009, less so when the editor failed to publish it or pay me or answer my e-mails asking when he might do either of those things ... the moral apparently being to never trust anyone calling themselves Santa.

Then ... well, time passed.  Rejections piled up.  Years passed.  Four of them.  See what I mean about patience?

So with all that you can imagine how pleased I was when James Tallett's Deepwood Publishing put out a call for stories about necromancers - here I'm assuming you know that No Rest For the Wicked is a story about a necromancer, which you didn't because I forgot to mention it but you do now -  and how much more pleased I was when it got accepted.  And how much more pleased than that when it actually came out, and had that lovely cover up there.

I haven't have a chance to more than flick through Death God's Chosen yet, but it looks like plenty of fun, with a nice old-school Sword and Sorcery vibe to it.  No Rest For the Wicked definitely falls into that category, though it's particularly light-hearted, more Leiber than Howard.  It's perhaps a bit of a prototype for Giant Thief, in fact, and also the single longest thing I've had published outside of novels.  If any of that sounds up your alley then you can pick up an e-book copy from Barnes and Noble, Kobo or Amazon.

To End All Wars: The End of the Beginning

There was something strangely anticlimactic about finishing To End All Wars.

A week (and a wonderfully relaxing week off in the Cotswolds) on, I'm still not sure whether that should have been the case.  It's hard to say that finishing your fifth full novel*, or for that matter your first science fiction novel, or even your first heavily researched historical novel, should be anything other than climatic.  You might even expect it to be one of the most climatic things you could hope to do.

But research aside, it took me five mostly quite pleasant months to write, and when you're used to novel writing being a more traumatic, gut-wrenching experience, that's just very hard to get your head around.  To put it in perspective, the first draft of Giant Thief took me over two years, and while the first drafts of Crown Thief and Prince Thief took a mere six months each, they were six months of pain and borderline terror and thinking I'd never, ever make my deadline - whereas TEAW, by comparison, was pretty much a breeze.  Except for a slight hiccup with the final chapter, which necessitated a last minute wave of extra research, (and let's face it, final chapters aren't supposed to come easily), I never strayed far from the timescale I set down at the start of the year, and even ended up finishing a day early.

It also might just be the best novel I've written.  I'm pretty sure it is.  There are some issues, there are always issues, but I'm pleased with it, and given that To End All Wars was a whole order of magnitude more ambitious than anything I've tried before, that's more than I had any right to expect.  I'm hopeful that, a couple of drafts down the road, it will be something exciting, and also something unique.  When your influences range from The Prisoner to Rogue Male to Regeneration, surely the end result has to be a little unique?

So anticlimactic, it turns out, may not be such a bad thing after all.  If anticlimactic means minimal stress, no last-minute panicking and things working out about how you'd hoped they would then, hey, I'm happy if everything I do from hereon is this much of an anticlimax.

And now I realise, belatedly, that I've done yet another To End All Wars post without talking even slightly about what it's actually about.  Well, maybe next time, when I finish the second draft come November time.  And maybe that time I'll finally break out the champagne too.





* Or possibly fourth, depending where you place War For Funland, currently being radically overhauled as The Novel Formerly Known as War For Funland.

Auditory Self-Indulgence, Part 2

I think I've accumulated enough retrospect by now to say that my favourite thing about the Easie Damasco trilogy and their publication is that they ended up as three wonderful Brilliance Audio audiobooks that I then got to listen to.

Because, yes, I listened to the audiobooks of my own novels.  Wouldn't you?  The thing is, if your books get made into audiobooks then, if you close your eyes, (and admittedly this isn't such a good idea in rough parts of town or while driving in heavy traffic), you get to imagine that someone's made a film of them, or at the very least put on an energetic stage adaptation.  You get to experience them in a whole new way, through new eyes, and in a new voice, a voice that makes the weaker bits seem entirely decent and the good bits seem completely brilliant.

At least, that's my experience.  It may have a lot to do with the fact that I was lucky enough to get James Langton reading, and that James Langton is absolutely marvelous at this sort of thing.  By the end of Prince Thief, I was in awe of the range of accents he'd pulled off over the course of three books, (and the fact that not one of them ended up sounding ridiculous), the fact that he put meat on the bones of even minor characters, made major characters seem like real people, and in particular brought scoundrelly, possibly-just-slightly-loveable rogue Easie Damasco to life in a way I'd never have dreamed possible.

I guess what I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that what James did wasn't just reading but acting; he literally, single-handedly acted out three books and dozens of characters, and that's just plain astonishing.  I'm very glad I got to be the author of those three books, and that I then got to listen to James's take on them; it was a pleasure from the beginning of Giant Thief to the end of Prince Thief, and I'm not sure I'll ever get quite so lucky with a reader again.  Many thanks to James and to the people at Brilliance who made it happen, not to mention the Angry Robot guys for putting the whole thing together in the first place.

Lastly ... I couldn't possibly pick a favourite character from the trilogy, but I think it would be okay to pick a favourite from the audio adaptations.  And if I did it would surely be Malekrin, the sort-of-star of Prince Thief.  There wasn't a single character I felt James got wrong, but Malekrin would have been awfully easy to mess up and James absolutely didn't: he captured all of Malekrin's early, youthful frustration and - let's face it! - total obnoxiousness, and then conveyed his growing pains across the course of the book, ending in a climatic scene that played out just the way it had in my head and got me a little bit emotional. 

Which would have been all well and good had I not been walking down the high street of my grim northern home town.  Still, I'm sure it's not the first time the good folk of Batley have seen a grown man get a little teary over the audiobook performance of a character he wrote.

2013: Or, Phase IV

I've been a little troubled at the prospect of putting together my end-of-the-year round up, truth be told.  I try to be positive here at Writing on the Moon, because I fervently believe that writing is a thing to be positive about, but the flip side of that is that I've always intended this blog to be an honest account of my career and there are some things that are just very difficult to put a positive spin on.  For me, for the most part, 2013 has been one of those things.

It certainly got off to a difficult start.  Of the three Damasco books, the writing of Prince Thief had been by far the hardest; I've no doubt it's possible to write a book in a year around a regular job without suffering any serious ill-effects, but when that day job involves things like twelve hour night shifts and inordinate amounts of travel it becomes, frankly, pretty tough.  And when you live like that for month after month, working up to seventy hours a week, doing little else and not sleeping anything like enough, after a while your health starts to suffer.  Hell, everything starts to suffer.

What made the experience just shy of impossible, though, was that I had a fair idea of what was in store for Prince Thief.  Giant Thief had performed moderately well, but not well enough for Crown Thief to receive much publisher support or attention from bloggers and reviewers, because sequels don't attract anything like the sort of interest that debuts do.  By the time I started Prince Thief, I'd been reliably informed that I should expect proportionately less again.

Looking back, that's seems a lot more like common sense than it did at the time: you'll always be preaching to the converted with the third book in a trilogy.  But at the time, the cost seemed just too much; I knew I was making myself unwell and causing distress to the people close to me to write a book that couldn't hope to achieve the sort of things you hope a book will achieve, and it broke my heart a little.

All of that was more of less done with by the end of March, but it cast a long shadow.  Even with my writing efforts dialed down I was still doing at least one and a half jobs, the exhaustion never quite went away, and things continued to be a struggle.  In retrospect, I might have done better to slacken the pace a little more; as it was, I spent the next few months feeling like I was doing far less than I should have been.  I'd have liked to have worked much more to promote the launch of Endangered Weapon B;  I enjoyed coming up with my first novella, insane sci-fantasy oddity Patchwerk, but it cost more in time and effort than I'd been expecting.  It was really only when I put the day job once and for all behind me in October that things began to settle down, and only in the past month that I've felt like everything was more or less back under control.

-oOo-

For all that I've sure as hell done it in this post, I don't like moaning.  I still remember with perfect clarity what it's like to be an unpublished author, as I imagine some of the people who'll read this will be, and I know that I've been very, very fortunate to make it as far as I have, in the ways that I have.  I wanted more than anything to have a book published and now I have five out there, in various shapes and sizes and - regardless of how hard I worked for it, regardless of anything - that is a thing of utter awesomeness.  As is the fact that I've finally achieved my other lifetime goal this year, to make writing my day job.

So, for all of those reasons, and because sometimes it's nice to remind yourself of all the good stuff, here's a list of the things that happened in 2013 that were actually pretty amazing:

• I sold a story to Clarkesworld and, with the year nearly out, to Interzone, two markets I've been chasing ever since I started writing seriously.  It was, in fact, a pretty great year for short fiction sales, all told.

• In the end, I finished one novel, two graphic novels, one novella, a novelette and three short stories. Under the circumstances, that doesn't feel like a bad haul.

• I completed my first trilogy.  The Tales of Easie Damasco are out there now, and I'm very proud of them.  They have stunning Angelo Rinaldi covers.  They're read wonderfully by James Langton in the superb Brilliance Audio audiobook adaptations.  They exist in the world, they're finding readers and listeners, and the more time goes by, the more I appreciate that fact.

• Endangered Weapon B is out there too, after some five or so years of trying to make it a reality, and I love it to pieces.  Of the many things I have to be thankful for, high on the list is that I've been able to work with Bob Molesworth, a great artist who I have no doubt is going to become an extraordinary artist over the next few years.

• I'm now writing full time. It's impossible to exaggerate just how much even typing those words feels like a gigantic weight coming off.  2014 is the year when I get to start writing the way I want, instead of the way I can somehow manage to fit around my day job.  2014 is the year when producing a book a year is suddenly the absolute least I can do, and when I get to put together some of the projects I've had to tread water on these last couple of years.  And, since this is the stage of my career that I've long been referring to as phase 4 in my Stalinesque ten year mental plan, 2014 is also, quite possibly, the year when ants take over the world.

         If that's not something to look forward to then I don't know what is.

Giant Thief ... Closing Thoughs

Ever since I read a piece by Aliette de Bodard analyzing what she felt she got wrong and right in her "Obsidian and Blood" trilogy*, I knew I wanted to do something similar.  In fact, let's be honest, I knew I wanted to shamelessly rip it off.  So now that the Tales of Damasco are complete and out to buy, and now that I've had time for all the emotional dust to settle, here are my thoughts on where I messed up and where I can conceivably claim to have nailed it in my first novel Giant Thief.

Let's get the bad out of the way first, because then I get to finish with all the good stuff:


THE BAD

• There are a couple of overly slow chapters in Giant Thief, a couple of places were the plot doesn't move on as swiftly as it should, and in general the pacing is a bit off.  It was bad planning, basically, and I think it's the one area in which Crown Thief and Prince Thief are unquestionably better books.  That said, I do like how damn fast the thing moves, how little it lets get in its way, how blindly determined I was to throw in action at every opportunity.  I'm glad, on the whole, that I wrote a fast paced, action-packed first novel with a couple of slow patches than the other way round.

• I overestimated the tolerance readers would have for an obnoxious protagonist.  I wanted Easie Damasco to be unconventional, and the convention I had my eye on was the lovable rogue.  Rogues, in my experience, are anything but lovable, and I wanted to write a thief who was every bit as despicable, immoral and self-centered as a real life thief would be.  But while I still feel that that was a worthy intention, I see now that I should have leavened all those flaws with a few more virtues, so as to make Damasco slightly more pleasant company (although, see the successes for more thoughts on this.)

• I should have found a way to get more of my villain Moaradrid's back-story and motivation into Giant Thief.  I knew it, bits of it were implied, and it almost all gets told in Crown Thief and Prince Thief, but that isn't good enough, and it weakened an otherwise strong character.  I like Moaradrid, I think he's an interesting portrait of how good motives can be warped in a moral vacuum and he gets some cracking lines, but I can see how his apparent lack of character logic frustrated a few people.

THE GOOD

• I'm proud of my core cast.  One or two reviews suggested that they're mostly archetypes, and that's not entirely unfair - there's the witty thief, the harsh-but-fair guard captain, the kind-hearted monster, amongst others - but I think that misses the point of what I tried to do with those archetypes.  Every character, even the ostensibly heroic ones like Estrada and Alvantes, have deep flaws, and it's those flaws more than their virtues that define where they go after the first book.  But of everyone, I'm proudest of Castilio Mounteban, a man who does something irredeemable in Giant Thief and then spends Crown Thief and Prince Thief striving to be redeemed anyway, mostly in the worst possible ways and all in the name of love, albeit a deeply warped interpretation of it.  To me, that's one hell of a character arc.

• Following on from that, and perhaps a slight cheat since it doesn't really come to the foreground until Crown Thief, but I like the degree of moral complexity in the Tales, and all the more so because I was writing in a genre that isn't particularly known for moral complexity.  Plenty of people do awful things, and few more so that Easie Damasco himself, but nobody once does anything that they can't justify to their self, (except the once, and I just covered that, above.)  Perhaps more interestingly, characters frequently try to do right and end up doing considerable harm, and no good deed goes unpunished.  It's not easy to do the right thing in real life, so why should it be in fiction?

• I'm glad that I didn't write about white men running around a thinly veiled misinterpretation of medieval Europe.  We've had that book too many damn times, and I sleep a little easier at night for knowing that, whatever else I got wrong, I didn't add to the Tower of Tolkien.  By Prince Thief, I have an almost entirely non-white cast** and two well-rounded female characters who get to do things like run towns and entire countries without, necessarily, being Strong with a capital 'S'.  None of that necessarily makes it a good book, of course, and I feel a little bad even bringing it up because in a perfect world the art we create would represent the diversity of our species and we wouldn't even have to talk about it ... but, this world not being that one, I'm glad that I get to be one of the tiny handful of authors in 2013 (perhaps the only?) with a black and an Hispanic protagonist sharing their cover.

So those are my thoughts, anyway.  If you strongly disagree, with the good points or the bad or both, then I've love to hear about it.



* Which I now can't find for the life of me.  Anyone remember where it was published?
** The arguable exception being the giants, who are sort of grey.

Giant Thief: The Unseen Trailer

With Prince Thief out and the Tales of Easie Damasco officially complete, I thought this might be a nice opportunity to blog about something I've been itching to talk about for a while: the trailer that Jobeda, Bob Molesworth and I put together for Giant Thief.

Giant Thief had been out for a fair while before I had the time and resources to do a trailer, so it was always more of an experiment and a test-run than an actual marketing attempt.  I'd been thinking about it for a while, I'd watched a few other attempts, and taken on board what I felt to be the obvious issue with book trailers: to whit, that they tend to be a bit rubbish.

The problem, I decided, was twofold.  First, the fact that you're trying to represent a product that isn't visual in a visual medium, which often means slapping a bit of text together with a bit of music and hoping for the best.  And second, following close on the heels of number one, that not many people have the budget to do a book trailer justice, especially when there doesn't seem to be much evidence that they actually help to sell books.

My main decisions, then, were to keep it short, to be willing to throw at least a bit of money at it, and to keep the text to a bare minimum.  Fortunately, I had a couple of sizable advantages, in the shapes of a girlfriend with experience as a video editor and a professional artist friend whose style was a good fit for Giant Thief, the always-brilliant Mr Molesworth.  Music was trickier, but the internet is heaving with sites where you can download stock music for a small fee, so in the end that mostly came down to having the patience to hunt around.*

Knowing what I had to work with, I put some thought into a concept: it made sense to play up Giant Thief's unusual, Hispanic / North African-styled setting, and since we were effectively making a silent movie, the film geek in me quickly gravitated to the idea of title cards.  I wrote a short script, along with more elaborate descriptions of the individual frames for Bob, which I sent to him along with the relevant chunks of Giant Thief.  Jobeda then cut everything together, animated it, found a suitable template and created the text inserts, and drew on the help of a friend to knock together a 3D graphic of the cover.  After that, we spent time getting the pacing and rhythm right, making sure the text was up long enough to be readable, syncing everything with the music and generally tweaking until it felt right.

The final budget came out at around £100.  Like I said, it was an experiment, and one I never expected to do anything but lose money on.  Could it have been worth it, though, had I actually released the trailer before the book came out?  For me, I doubt it.  If I'd self published and done much more work to push it out there then maybe.  But was it fun?  Yeah, it was.  I ended up with my own adorable Giant Thief movie, which I'll always have to watch and to get that horrid, marvellous little earworm of a tune stuck in my head again; that's worth a hundred pounds right there.

*It's worth noting, too, that you can pay drastically different rates on different sites for the same music ... shop around!