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The Year We Make Contact
Letting out a little of the steam was the good news today that THE TOMB OF HERCULES and THE SECRET OF EXCALIBUR have been sold to publishers La Factoria de Ideas in Spain. Compared to the snow in Bournemouth, sunny Spain seems a good place to be right now - as a friend gloatingly informed me via Facebook. I've also won an award at Megalith: 'Most Underrated Author' of 2009, thanks to my books only recently having been published in the United States. Hopefully in 2010 I'll be up for 'Best Author' - and not 'Most Overrated'!
China, In My Hands
Stumped For A Macedonia Pun
Trans Europe Express
Me Versus Steve Wright
It was a fun experience, even if being in a studio for the first time was slightly odd; for whatever reason, Charlie the DJ was on one side of a high partition in the studio and I was on the other, so I could only see her peering over the top of it, Chad-style! Maybe the BBC worries about guests leaping across the control desk to attack the turn, or vice-versa. I also had, in the words of those celebrated musical poets Limp Bizkit, a mic pointed at my grille like a gun, so I had to lean sideways to see anything at all round the pineapple-sized cover. It was interesting to see how everything works, though, and I think I came across as far more relaxed and confident than I did on my TalkSport appearance a year or two ago!
On The 46th Anniversary Of Doctor Who
Both THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS and THE TOMB OF HERCULES are just outside the New York Times bestseller list this week, ATLANTIS having gone back up the charts following the publication of the second book in the US. Fingers crossed for one (or both!) to go higher next week!
I've (finally!) reached another milestone on THE VAULT OF SHIVA, having just minutes ago finished the first edit of the first draft, cutting a mammoth 50,000 words out of it. There's still plenty to do, like writing new sections to bridge all the bits that got cut (entire chapters, in some places), but my 'to do' list is down to two pages of bullet points, and by far the most horrible stage of the writing process is over and done with. Which as far as I'm concerned is definitely something to celebrate!
E(book)s Are Good
As part of a rolling programme of making my website more informative-y, I've updated my bio page, so should you have the urge to learn more about me, click the link to the left. I haven't gone so far as to list such things as my favourite colour, aquatic bird and celebrity bottom, but for the record they are: orange, the mallard and Rachel Stevens'. So now you know!
And I'm Spent
Shiva Week 8: Almost Done...
I should be used to my books going overlength by now, but it still gets a little dispiriting when I pass a milestone like 150,000 words and realise I've got a fair way to go; this past Sunday, in particular, was a constant battle to stay focused, as I would type a sentence, decide I didn't like it, retype it, delete it again... Nevertheless, I met my self-imposed target of 3000 words for the day, so I was quite pleased with myself for that. (How many of those words will remain untouched in the edit is another matter.)
But I've been buoyed up by people congratulating me over the Stateside success of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS, which spurred me on no end over the last few days. And for all that parts of the job can sometimes feel a bit of a trudge (you try working seven days a week for eight weeks without a break and see if you can maintain a state of perky enthusiasm!), overall it's still a fantastic way to earn a living. I mean, I write Hollywood blockbuster-style adventure thrillers - and lots of people all over the world enjoy reading them. How great is that?
If I Can Make It There...
To mark the occasion, I've decided to give this Twitter thing a try, so if you want up-to-date (ish) news about what I'm up to, visit my Twitter page. I'll try to keep things interesting and related to my books; I doubt anyone would care about the timing of my coffee breaks or what I'm watching on TV!
Shiva Week 7: Miner 49er
The early US sales figures for THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS have been very good; it's just outside the New York Times bestseller list, which for a debut novel by an unknown Brit is pretty impressive. Fingers crossed for next week...
Shiva Week 6: On The Buses
Also interesting saleswise is that the American edition of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS has been climbing quite well up the Amazon.com charts in its first couple of weeks on sale... but it's the Kindle edition that's really been flying off the shelves. Er, through the ether. Whatever. Maybe there's something in this ebook malarky after all...
The writing of THE VAULT OF SHIVA is still going strong - and Nina and Eddie have now finally reached, yes, the Vault of Shiva! The only thing standing between them and another incredible ancient treasure is the world's most fiendishly complicated lock, which I (okay, not me personally because my brain would burst long before coming up with an answer, but the Wolfram Alpha mathematical search engine) worked out would have 10^1408 possible combinations - or as Nina puts it, if you could try one combination a second for the rest of time, the sun would explode in five billion years before you'd tested one per cent of them. (Before anyone writes to point out that the sun will go nova rather than explode, Nina's an archaeologist, not an astrophysicist. So nyah.)
Then once she and Eddie get through that, a deadly Hindu goddess awaits them inside, and even if they can outwit her, there's a small army of bad guys on their tail... Still, if their lives were easy, it wouldn't make for very exciting books!
Shiva Week 5: Of A Certain Age
I'm still keeping up to my 3000 words a day target as I write THE VAULT OF SHIVA (even with the distraction of the Grand Prix at the weekend), but this week was one of those annoying times when no sooner had I finished writing a big chunk of the story than I realised I'm going to have to junk it. An action sequence (or rather, a series of them, where Nina and Eddie have a frying pan/fire/surrounded by landmines/in a bigger fire progression) ended up just getting too big, lasting over five chapters before they finally escaped. Even as I was writing I knew it was running far too long, but I pressed on because I couldn't think of a way to get them out of it sooner, and also because the end of the sequence gave one of the secondary characters a chance to show off their badassery. Literally within five minutes of my ending the last chapter, though, I worked out a way to cut the entire sequence by at least a quarter, and how to move the character's big moment to an earlier part of the story.
Now why the hell couldn't I have thought of that before I started writing the novel? Oh well, at least now I know how to fix it when I start editing!
Shiva Week 4: American Pie (And Canadian Bacon)
However, bigger news is that tomorrow - 29 September - marks the long-awaited North American publication of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS! As well as the paperback, it's also being released in new-fangled ebook formats, so if you fancy saving some trees you can read it on your Kindle or iPhone or Blackberry. Fingers crossed that it does as well over there as it did over here!
Shiva Week 3: In Theory
As a sidenote, I'm currently checking the final final proofs - the actual printed pages as they'll appear in the book - for THE CULT OF OSIRIS... and damn, I'm really enjoying the story! I know I wrote it and so should know exactly what happens, and have read it more times than I care to remember in the past six months, but for some reason reading it as a novel rather than a bunch of unformatted, double-spaced A4 pages really puts it in a new light. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm supposed to be scouring it for typos, rather than actually getting caught up in the narrative. Which is hopefully a good sign if even the jaded author can't stop turning the pages!
Dan Whooo? The Lost Whaaat?
Since the next couple of months will see a flurry of activity with THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS and THE TOMB OF HERCULES coming out in North America, and THE CULT OF OSIRIS hitting British shelves in November, I thought it was time to update the front page as well, which hopefully you've seen. Too brash? A bit blunt? Meh, my novels are hardly known for their subtlety!
Shiva Week 2: Fun And Frolics In Sunny Nicaragua
I did, however, have to do something I normally wouldn't while writing the first draft: go back and change something. My usual approach at this stage is "never look back", working at full speed without doing any revisions until the whole thing is finished. This time, though, I'd finished a chapter and happily moved on to the next, getting engrossed in another of my trademark mega action sequences... when I suddenly realised that I had somehow completely forgotten to write an entire section utterly vital to the plot! That was a real head-smacking moment, and this time I had to backtrack and add it in. It'll hopefully teach me to check the synopsis before I start work for the day, I suppose.
I'll end with a reminder that the paperback of THE COVENANT OF GENESIS is published this Thursday in the UK. Right after the new Dan Brown. Hmm, not sure if that's good or bad timing! But if you're in a bookshop to pick up The Lost Symbol, why not buy a copy of THE COVENANT OF GENESIS to go with it? It really is rather good! (And if Eddie Chase were ever to be threatened by a tattooed Freemason, said Freemason would be clutching his broken nose about two seconds later...)
Relief Beyond Belief
Shiva Week 1: The Streets Of San Francisco
Although there's one part of it I love considerably less than others, and that's checking the final proofs, a drudge of a task at the best of times... and nightmarish when you have to do it all over again from scratch. Why do I have to do that? Because it looks like the bloody Royal Mail has lost the first set! (Insert fist-shaking emoticon here.) A replacement is on the way from Headline, so unless Postman Pat can pull a miracle out of his sack I'll be spending the next several evenings after I finish writing for the day going through a 460+ page manuscript page by page, line by line, word by word with a red pen, trying to remember all the changes I made the first time. Joy!
On the other hand, if I'm working more, I'll be drinking less, so there's a silver lining in there somewhere!
Ready For Action
It's taken a couple of months longer than I hoped, for various reasons, but everything is now planned out and ready to go. The action this time takes place in Italy, Nicaragua and India, to name but a few of the exotic locations, and I'm really looking forward to writing it. I'm even going to try something a little different; while there'll be, as always, loads of action, one sequence will be heavy on... suspense. Shocking, I know! How will my fans react?
Incidentally, I recently found out that I have fans, with groups and pages on Facebook! So hi to all of you, and I hope you keep on enjoying my books. I might even drop by sometime!
Ch-ch-changes
As you can see, the GENESIS cover is almost identical to the UK edition, but the one for EXCALIBUR is very different - and also very striking, I think!
And The Next Book Is Called...
THE VAULT OF SHIVA.
It'll be a few weeks before I can start writing it, but planning is well under way - I spent today working out the details of a spectacular opening sequence in which one of the world's greatest art treasures is stolen. All I have to do now is make sure that everything that follows is even more thrilling - and with the story I've devised, I think it will be!
All Greek To Me
I've given a synopsis of Book 6 to my editor, and she likes it, so when all the final details are worked out I should soon be able to start writing it. If Headline approve the working title (it follows the series format of THE [SOMETHING] OF [SOMETHING], you probably won't be surprised to learn...) I'll announce it here shortly!
Incidentally, following on from the previous update, Headline sent me a copy of the glossy publicity pack they'll be using to promote THE CULT OF OSIRIS and the paperback of THE COVENANT OF GENESIS in the autumn, and according to that my conservative estimate of a quarter of a million sales worldwide was actually quite a bit short! So, half a million sales is my next big target... wow!
The Leaning Tower Of Paper
So inevitably, what started as a reshuffle soon turned into a throw-out. And one of the things that ended up going was... this.
What's that, you may ask? That is something like 4000 pages of A4, standing the better part of three feet high and weighing enough to need three trips to the recycling bin. (Did I mention that my flat is on the top floor? And the building doesn't have a lift? And it's really hot today?) It is also the printouts of every draft of every novel I've written - not just the five Wilde/Chase stories to date, but all the others that never made it: Manta, White Van and The Nexus Imprint, to name but three. Pretty much a decade's worth of work.
And, after the aforementioned contemplation, I chucked it all out.
Now, if you're reading this on some Internet archive via HoloGoogle in the far future and reacting in horror to the idea of one of the 21st Century's best-selling novelists (who famously died smiling in bed aboard his private jet at the age of 97 in the company of many beautiful ladies) throwing out all those papers that could have been the centrepiece of the Andy McDermott Memorial Library & Wine Bar, I apologise. But it did make me think. Initially I was going to keep the lot and just move them out of the way, then I was only going to keep the first drafts... and ultimately I decided to get rid of them all.
I'm not unsentimental; if I were, there wouldn't have been a middle step there. But it struck me that the various drafts aren't the originals, in the way they would have been when I first learned to type on my mum's old manual typewriter and a rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. (Showing my age, there.) The originals never existed physically, only as digital files - the three feet of pages are just glorified notes, intermediate pupal stages of the developing stories. So long as I keep them backed up, I can re-read the earlier drafts whenever I like. The only paper versions that ultimately matter are the ones that you, the reader, can hold in your hands.
And those are going to stay around longer than any printed drafts I might have chosen to preserve. I found out yesterday exactly how many copies of my books have been sold in the UK - I won't give the exact figure, because my publishers will be cross and tell me off, but suffice it to say that for a guy who barely a year and a half ago was totally unknown, it's good. It's "Holy crap!" good. But by taking that number and doing a bit of back-of-the-envelope maths to add the numerous international editions, even at the most conservative estimate I reckon I've sold... over a quarter of a million books worldwide.
Yes, I was fairly gobsmacked too. But it means there are a lot of people all over the world who like my books, and it also means, in a roundabout way, that my carpets will be cleaner tomorrow. And both those things make me happy - though obviously, one more so than the other!
(They're) After Eight
Also, here is a triptych of international covers: the Norwegian edition of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS, the Czech THE TOMB OF HERCULES and the Polish version of THE SECRET OF EXCALIBUR, all looking rather sharp!
Summer Holiday? What's That?
Winging my way from Italy is the Longanesi edition of THE TOMB OF HERCULES, which like their cover for THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS is very stylishly done. From the country that brought us Armani and Ferrari, I'd expect nothing less! Because I liked it so much, I've put up two versions here - the flat artwork and a photo of the book itself, complete with a cover band proclaiming me as "The new master of adventure". Yep, I'm pretty happy with that!
Opoo
On a sidenote, being an author has its perks (such as being able to reply to the question "And what do you do?" with a Roger Moore-style smug smirk and raised eyebrow as you answer), but I found out today that it also has its drawbacks: namely being regarded by large corporations as penurious and untrustworthy for the crime of (gasp!) being self-employed. My old cheapy-cheap mobile recently packed up, so I decided to treat myself and splash out on an iPhone contract. Doing so required a credit check, which went fine until the part where I had to give my occupation. Sirens and flashing lights went off (metaphorically; phone companies aren't that obnoxious... yet), and the end result was that for the privilege of giving O2 money every month for the next two years, I was expected to furnish a deposit so large that I could have bought an iPhone outright. Thanks, but no thanks.
So now I'll just blow the grand that would have gone into O2's pockets on blackjack and hookers (metaphorically), and pick up another cheapy-cheap phone from someone else. Maybe I'll go with Orange. Since they sponsor assorted literary endeavours, they're hopefully a bit more friendly towards authors!
Wootery
I've just finished checking the proofs for the American edition of EXCALIBUR, which is published next January, and am currently finalising the outline of Book 6 as I await my editor's notes on THE CULT OF OSIRIS. There'll be at least one more round of revisions on OSIRIS, partly because I need to plant the seeds for a plotline that will run through Books 6 and 7, and partly because New York City just last weekend turned large sections of Broadway around Times Square into pedestrian precincts - which affects an action scene I set there! Still, at least nobody will be able to say my books aren't up to date...
America, F*** Yeah!
I think they look absolutely fantastic, so well done to everyone at Bantam Dell. Can't wait to see them actually wrapped around the finished books!
Rubbing Shoulders With The President
Bold The Front Page!
I also finished editing THE CULT OF OSIRIS yesterday and submitted it to Headline, so that's something else for me to celebrate. Want to see an exclusive preview of the rather spiffy cover? Okay, you twisted my arm...
Also, don't forget to vote for me at Megalith on 15 May!
Meanwhile, Half A World Away
April Came And Went Like A Spring Breeze
So what's been going on? Well, THE TOMB OF HERCULES and THE SECRET OF EXCALIBUR have both been sold to Bulgaria (good), I was a victim of credit card fraud (bad), my credit card company thought the activity on my account was "suspicious" and froze it before too much damage was done (good), Monkeyman is gone (only people who know me personally will understand what that means, but trust me, it's very good) and I've finished the rewrites on THE CULT OF OSIRIS (very, very good). So on balance: a positive month!
In addition, I'm being interviewed in the June issue of the excellent First Edition magazine, and the large print edition of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS is out. (I could have made the text twice the usual size as a cheap joke, but I refrained...) Here's the cover:
So for the next week or two I'll be busy with one final polish of OSIRIS before I deliver it to Headline, which will bring me neatly up to the release of the paperback edition of EXCALIBUR and the hardback and trade paperbacks of THE COVENANT OF GENESIS on 14 May. Which I still find somewhat weird - since November 2007, less than a year and a half ago, I've had four novels published. No wonder I haven't had time to take a holiday!
Oh, and one other thing: the thriller site Megalith is doing a light-hearted (at least, I hope it's light-hearted...) knockout contest of action thriller authors in May, in which on 15 May I've been initially placed in a face-off against Jeremy Robinson - who I have to admit I'm not familiar with, so for all I know might be the Joseph Heller or Umberto Eco of the adventure genre. Oh god! I could be knocked out in the first round! It's like being back at school... (Kidding aside, Megalith is well worth checking out if you're a fan of adventure thrillers. Tell 'em I sent you.)
Cover Flow
I'm still bashing away at THE CULT OF OSIRIS; the first three chapters have been heavily rewritten, and next on the agenda is a later chapter that I knew even as I was writing it would need major reworking, because everything was just too easy for the good guys. I've also, to my dismay, realised that I'm almost certainly going to have to cut a scene that was in my mind for the story right from the very beginning. It's a shame, because it's a wild, funny sequence, but the setup is a little bit too convoluted to be believable, and the end result can be achieved in a much simpler (and shorter) way. So that's one Roger Moore homage that'll probably never see the light of day... unless I can figure out a way to work it into a later novel!
The Triumph Of The Red Biro
But the worst is now over, which means I can get back to being creative again! THE CULT OF OSIRIS is down to 125,000 words, so even with the new material I need to add it should end up being about the same length as my first three novels. (Although Headline actually wants it to be shorter than them, so there's still some way to go...)
Czech, Please!
I'm busily bashing away at the first edit of THE CULT OF OSIRIS, which at this stage involves taking a red pen and crossing out everything that's not essential to the story. It's turning out to be harder than the previous books; not only did my deliberate attempt to keep the length down mean that this time there are no action sequences that can be cut (I could probably make an entire book out of deleted set-pieces from the first four novels... hmm, there's a time-saving idea!), but always at the back of my mind is the knowledge that however much I trim now, I still have to add in whole new scenes, even chapters, in the next draft! But I'll get there in the end...
Book Five Is Alive
"Wait, isn't 'being finished' pretty much a binary, yes/no situation?" you may ask. "Like being pregnant. You can't be 'more or less' pregnant." Well, yes; what it means in this case is that today, I typed "THE END" as the last line of the manuscript... but there's one little bit I need to go back in and write. Namely, er, the final confrontation with the bad guy. I know where it's going to happen, I know what's going to happen, but I never quite had the chance to plan all its complexities out step by step. While I was writing, I kept thinking I'd have plenty of time to do that, but for one reason or another I didn't get round to it. So, there's one of my writing secrets revealed: I'm a big ol' cheat who goes back and puts things in later. (Don't tell anyone, okay?)
Anyway, I now have a 191-page, 145,000-word printout sitting beside me that needs about 25,000 words cutting out, along with an additional three-page printout of things I need to change, remove or add during the editing process. That's a lot of bullet points. But still, completing the thing in 48 days is pretty good going - and I even managed to meet my self-imposed target of 3000 words every single day. Next step: crack open the champagne!
Dune Buggy Attack!
Speaking of both those books, I had a pleasant surprise when I saw this morning that the trade paperback of COVENANT was in Amazon's adventure stories chart - three months before it even comes out! That's got to be a promising sign if the pre-orders are that strong... OSIRIS itself is progressing well, as I'm now writing the penultimate action sequence (from which this update's title is derived - though dune buggies are the least of the vehicles involved). As usual, by this stage - 43 straight days of work - I'm feeling the grind a bit and finding more ways than normal to procrastinate. Make another coffee! Have a biscuit! Go for a walk! Check the news! Look up how my books are selling on Amazon, for the 15th time today! Still, knowing that my traditional celebratory bottle of Piper-Heidsieck Red Label (already bought) will soon be popped pepped me up quite a bit today, as did the knowledge that some spectacular bad guy deaths are on the way!
Something else that pepped me up was the news that THE TOMB OF HERCULES has been sold to an Indonesian publisher. Nina and Eddie's world tour continues...
Jason Takes Monaco
Cult Fiction
THE CULT OF OSIRIS.
It will be published in the UK by Headline in hardback and trade paperback in November 2009, and as a mass-market paperback in May 2010. Start the countdown...
The Least-Loved Month
I also have a couple more cool European covers to show off: the Portuguese and Hungarian editions of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS. (Thanks to Marta for sending me the latter.)
The still-unnamed Book 5 is coming along very well, dead on my 3000-words-a-day target, with Nina and Eddie just arriving in Monaco... while the Grand Prix is being held. What a coincidence! Chances of the race being disrupted in some outrageous way: pretty high.
On a non-me front, the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica, 'The Oath', was jaw-droppingly good. If you haven't watched this show, whether because of bad memories of the ultra-campy 1978 original or just because "I don't like sci-fi", then get past both those things and try it, preferably right from the start - and better yet, while avoiding all spoilers. It really is worth it. Even if it can be astonishingly grim at times - but then, you'd expect that in a story that begins with the thermonuclear extermination of 99.99% of the human race. (Oops, spoiler!)
Stars And Stripes And Maple Leaves
Living With A Death Sentence
I also gave some more thought to the following books, without even planning to. I don't know if this is the case for other writers, but for some reason I find that ideas have a habit of springing into my mind unbidden while I'm performing some utterly mechanical, no-brainer task like doing the washing up or cleaning my teeth. Today it was while I was showering, and an idea - or more a realisation - hit me. The second I was dry (and dressed - don't worry, I don't work in the nude) I ran to my laptop, opened the file containing my notes for future stories, and typed the following line:
"[CHARACTER NAME] HAS TO DIE!"
In caps and everything. (The actual name is being withheld for obvious reasons...) My intention for Books 6-8 is to write a loose trilogy of sorts; each individual novel will be a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end, but there will be subplots running through them all that come together in the final novel. And my shower realisation was that for one of these subplots to be effective and dramatic and powerful, the bold text above has to come true. Which will not only be very bad news for the character in question, but for those closest to him. Or her. (I'm not going to give anything else away...)
It won't be the first time I've killed off a major character in something I've written - but it's the first time I've realised so far in advance that I'm going to have to commit literary murder. And it also means I'll have to be careful while writing this character in the meantime not to give anything away or change how I portray them: I might know that he (or she) has the Sword of Damocles dangling over them, but she (or he) has to remain blissfully unaware!
So who is doomed? Not telling! I haven't even yet worked out the specifics of where and how, but I do know the situation that leads to his/her death... and at whose hands. Ominous, huh? Maybe even worthy of a sinister "Muwah hah hah!"
We're Running Out Of Time!
Ahem. Anyway, the first two episodes of Day 7 were on Sky last night, and today I watched the next two by, er, other means. (Come on, I wasn't going to wait a whole week. We're not in the Dark Ages of the 20th Century any more.) So far, the way the Bauer Bingo card is filling up, it's as if the writers are well aware of the show's cliches and are deliberately including them right up front for laughs. Mole? Check. Perimeter set up, then easily breached? Check. "He's our only lead!"? Check. Jack screaming "TELL ME WHERE THE [MACGUFFIN] IS!" into someone's face? Check. Unfortunate Bauer fashion choice (this year, a flasher mack)? Check. Yet despite this, I still watched all four episodes with a big goofy grin, just because I was so stoked to have it back.
I've been a huge fan of 24 right from the start, even though its quality has ranged from awesome (Day 5) to awful (Day 6) and it's utterly ridiculous if you spend so much as a second actually thinking logically about the plot, because it so effortlessly manages to be something that few TV shows are: thrilling. And as you'll know if you've read my books, I'm all about the thrills... So welcome back, Jack. Long may you continue to torture, chokehold and turn common household objects into deadly weapons!
And So It Begins... Again!
I quite often get asked about my writing 'system', so here it is; every writer I've ever met has a different one, but trial and error has produced one that works for me, which is to plan the whole story out in a fair amount of detail, then sit down and aim for a target of 3000 words a day, seven days a week, until the first draft is done. The intention is for Book 5 to be slightly shorter than my previous novels (somewhere, a tree is breathing a sigh of relief), so in theory I should be finished early in March... although for the first time, I've started work on a novel with a couple of gaps still in the outline. Gulp! But I should be able to work out what's going to fill them before I have to start making things up on the fly. I hope. (It feels a bit like driving a train while knowing that somewhere ahead, the track's still being built...)
A little behind-the-scenes factoid about Book 5: it was originally going to be Book 6! I had a completely different story planned for Nina and Eddie's fifth adventure, until I learned that one of Headline's other authors was working on a novel using the same ancient legend as its background... and his would be published a few months before mine. D'oh! So it was a good job I'd been planning ahead and had another story idea in the works - and that I found out early enough to change things!
Happy New Year!
As for what I'm doing now, I'm getting ready to start writing the fifth, as yet untitled Nina and Eddie novel! The story is more or less worked out; I've just got to finalise some of the action scenes (including the minor detail of the climax to the whole thing...) and I'll be good to go. I did actually want to be ready to start today, which would have been three years to the day after I started writing THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS, but there was no point rushing things just to meet some arbitrary anniversary. Besides, my flat's too bloody cold to work in today!
What can I tell you about the fifth book? Not a lot at the moment, as it would give away too much about what happens in the fourth book, THE COVENANT OF GENESIS, which isn't published until May! I can say that Nina and Eddie's lives have changed as a result of the events of the previous book, and that the country in which a lot (but by no means all) of the adventure takes place is famous for its large and pointy monuments... |
