Steven Savile's Blog: The Erratic Mumblings of Steven Savile, page 2
October 22, 2012
Freebies n New Stuff
Just wanted to very quickly stick a note up to say that VIRAL, the CIA-political-thriller novella series I masterminded is, right now, this minute, free on Amazon. It's only going to be free for 36 more hours, and then it's 4.99 again...
In the UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Viral-ebook/d...
And in the US:
http://www.amazon.com/Viral-ebook/dp/...
I mean, it's free...
And if you're feeling excited about all that free goodness... the UK edition of WARGOD just went live this morning:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WARGOD-Ogmios...
ANNNNND as if that wasn't enough, the ebook and paperback of London Macabre also went out just a short while ago:
In the US:
http://www.amazon.com/London-Macabre-...
And in the UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Macabr...
Blatant self-promotion mode/off
Normal service will resume now that I've just finished writing a couple of Top Trumps books for Penguin... Ahh the fun life of a writer!
In the UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Viral-ebook/d...
And in the US:
http://www.amazon.com/Viral-ebook/dp/...
I mean, it's free...
And if you're feeling excited about all that free goodness... the UK edition of WARGOD just went live this morning:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WARGOD-Ogmios...
ANNNNND as if that wasn't enough, the ebook and paperback of London Macabre also went out just a short while ago:
In the US:
http://www.amazon.com/London-Macabre-...
And in the UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Macabr...
Blatant self-promotion mode/off
Normal service will resume now that I've just finished writing a couple of Top Trumps books for Penguin... Ahh the fun life of a writer!
September 25, 2012
Something of Value
There's one question I've been asked more than any other, and it's not 'where do you get your ideas?' it's 'What are you passionate about?' which translates to what do you want to write about.
Oddly.
Frighteningly.
I never have an answer for that. I don't want to think I'm not a passionate man. I mean Shadow of the Jaguar (Primeval) and Black Water (Torchwood) were different takes on ecology and environmentalism - and the pitch I've just turned in to my agent, The Harrowing, is another environmental/ecologically driven storyline. Jaguar was the trafficking of endangered species, Black Water was a thinly veiled oil story. So perhaps ecology and the environment is my thing? I mean, there's Father London in London Macabre, which is battled by a golem-spirit whipped up in the 1800s from the thick smog polluting the air. In Tau Ceti it was the terraforming of a new world in the shadow of an oppressive regime. With Slaine the land was being soured and drained of magic. In Laughing Boy's Shadow the city of Newcastle itself was a living breathing entity, being torn apart by the depression of the 90s.
So, yeah, maybe that's my thing.
It may sound flippant, but you might be surprised to know it's actually taken me years to work this out.
So, next time I'll have an answer about what I'm passionate about.
Will you?
Oddly.
Frighteningly.
I never have an answer for that. I don't want to think I'm not a passionate man. I mean Shadow of the Jaguar (Primeval) and Black Water (Torchwood) were different takes on ecology and environmentalism - and the pitch I've just turned in to my agent, The Harrowing, is another environmental/ecologically driven storyline. Jaguar was the trafficking of endangered species, Black Water was a thinly veiled oil story. So perhaps ecology and the environment is my thing? I mean, there's Father London in London Macabre, which is battled by a golem-spirit whipped up in the 1800s from the thick smog polluting the air. In Tau Ceti it was the terraforming of a new world in the shadow of an oppressive regime. With Slaine the land was being soured and drained of magic. In Laughing Boy's Shadow the city of Newcastle itself was a living breathing entity, being torn apart by the depression of the 90s.
So, yeah, maybe that's my thing.
It may sound flippant, but you might be surprised to know it's actually taken me years to work this out.
So, next time I'll have an answer about what I'm passionate about.
Will you?
September 23, 2012
Take 2
So last night I hit a page in James Herbert's ASH which really disturbed me -- and yes I am fully aware it's a horror novel and is meant to be disturbing, but not like this. This was cheap.
Y'see, Herbert's cutesy-ludicrous assassin Cedric Twigg and his apprentice Nelson Eddy-erm Eddy Nelson- wind up taking responsibility for a botched assassination. No worries there. But Herbert names the victim and describes the circumstances. David Kelly, found to have committed suicide by the Hutton Inquiry. It mimics the manner of Kelly's tragic suicide at Harrowdown Hill.
David Kelly was a British scientist and expert on biological warfare, employed by the British Ministry of Defence, and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003 when an unauthorised discussion he had off the record with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan—about the British government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—was cited by the journalist and led to a major controversy. Kelly's name became known to the media as Gilligan's source, and he was called to appear on 15 July before the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee, which was investigating the issues Gilligan had reported. Kelly was questioned aggressively about his actions. He was found dead two days later.
The second trip was from 5 June 2003 to 11 June 2003, when Kelly went to view and photograph two alleged mobile weapons laboratories as a part of a third inspection team. Kelly was unhappy with the description of the trailers and spoke off the record to The Observer, which, on 15 June 2003, quoted "a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq." The expert said:
They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.
Kelly was the source of that quote.
The family have already been subjected to crackpot conspiracy theories. The book The Strange Death of David Kelly was serialised in the Daily Mail before publication in November 2007. Family members of Kelly expressed their displeasure at the forthcoming publication, the husband of Kelly's sister Sarah saying, "It is just raking over old bones ... I can't speak for the whole family, but I've read it all [Baker's theories], every word, and I don't believe it." In his book Baker argued that Kelly did not commit suicide and examined the many unanswered questions he says surround the incident.
So, Herbert has decided that it's fair game to rake over not-so old bones, and rather distastefully had his 'inner circle' botch the assassination. This leaves me feeling like a hypocrite for pondering if 9/11 should be fair game, or answers my own question, because upon reading this drivel my first response was to close the book. I don't really feel like picking it up again.
Already we've had Diana's car wreck and the obvious conspiracy crap about a baby inside her. Now Kelly. It feels like in a desperate need to be edgy and relevant James Herbert has just lost distance and sense of what it means to be a story teller.
But at least I have answered my own question about when something can be considered fair game. With people still campaigning for a proper inquest into Kelly's death the answer in this case is not yet.
Y'see, Herbert's cutesy-ludicrous assassin Cedric Twigg and his apprentice Nelson Eddy-erm Eddy Nelson- wind up taking responsibility for a botched assassination. No worries there. But Herbert names the victim and describes the circumstances. David Kelly, found to have committed suicide by the Hutton Inquiry. It mimics the manner of Kelly's tragic suicide at Harrowdown Hill.
David Kelly was a British scientist and expert on biological warfare, employed by the British Ministry of Defence, and formerly a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003 when an unauthorised discussion he had off the record with a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan—about the British government's dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—was cited by the journalist and led to a major controversy. Kelly's name became known to the media as Gilligan's source, and he was called to appear on 15 July before the parliamentary foreign affairs select committee, which was investigating the issues Gilligan had reported. Kelly was questioned aggressively about his actions. He was found dead two days later.
The second trip was from 5 June 2003 to 11 June 2003, when Kelly went to view and photograph two alleged mobile weapons laboratories as a part of a third inspection team. Kelly was unhappy with the description of the trailers and spoke off the record to The Observer, which, on 15 June 2003, quoted "a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq." The expert said:
They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.
Kelly was the source of that quote.
The family have already been subjected to crackpot conspiracy theories. The book The Strange Death of David Kelly was serialised in the Daily Mail before publication in November 2007. Family members of Kelly expressed their displeasure at the forthcoming publication, the husband of Kelly's sister Sarah saying, "It is just raking over old bones ... I can't speak for the whole family, but I've read it all [Baker's theories], every word, and I don't believe it." In his book Baker argued that Kelly did not commit suicide and examined the many unanswered questions he says surround the incident.
So, Herbert has decided that it's fair game to rake over not-so old bones, and rather distastefully had his 'inner circle' botch the assassination. This leaves me feeling like a hypocrite for pondering if 9/11 should be fair game, or answers my own question, because upon reading this drivel my first response was to close the book. I don't really feel like picking it up again.
Already we've had Diana's car wreck and the obvious conspiracy crap about a baby inside her. Now Kelly. It feels like in a desperate need to be edgy and relevant James Herbert has just lost distance and sense of what it means to be a story teller.
But at least I have answered my own question about when something can be considered fair game. With people still campaigning for a proper inquest into Kelly's death the answer in this case is not yet.
September 19, 2012
The Terrible Twos
*This appeared earlier this week as a guest post on the megalith book review blog
Here we are again. It’s been a few years. Lots of things have happened in that time. Not least Brad Thor slayed me in a mighty smack-down last year where I think we managed to get about 300 people to vote for us. I was quite proud of that. I mean, Brad’s a giant in the best possible way, and his readers are rabidly loyal and a very decent bunch. That was a lot of fun. Of course, last time I was invited to chat it was about Silver, my first thriller, which was just coming out so I guess we’re looking at Jan 2010, the best part of three years ago. So, anyway, it’s nice to be here again.
There’s a note in the back of the hardcover that says GOLD coming Jan 2011…
That’s what this little visit’s all about. The dreaded sequel.
I remember when a friend read Silver he said ‘it’s great, but it’s not your best book, and if you never write Gold it’ll just be a so-so unfinished tale’. That email has stuck with me for the last 3 years. It’s been like the email of Damocles hanging over my head to be honest. I mean, look at where we are. September 2012. And there’s no Gold on the shelves. Silver’s being forgotten about by readers and with good reason. It’s been a long time.
Now, let’s make no bones about it, following up anything is difficult if you’re like me. You want to purge yourself of the characters, do new stuff, develop. But it’s not as simple as all that. Sometimes the real world gets in the way, Sometimes it’s pressure, sometimes it’s completely external that you have absolutely no control over.
So, the terrible twos…
Let’s look at the evidence: The UK digital edition of Silver was listed as the #26 bestselling digital book of 2011, it sold into hardcover into Germany, France, Poland, Turkey and Spain and did pretty well everywhere but Germany, but then I wasn’t particularly kind to Berlin in the book so perhaps I did that to myself. It’s by far my most successful original novel and is neck-and-neck in terms of sales with my most successful media novel, the Von Carsten Vampire Wars series for Games Workshop.
At the time I did a lot of blog tour stuff talking on indie sites about thinking of yourself as a brand, and thinking about your product and brand identity. So any right-thinking chap would obviously sit down and dive straight into Gold, right? What can I say? It’s amazing how many bad decisions one man can make. Especially after leaving the book on the mother of all cliff-hangers (I didn’t really, honestly… I finished the book the chapter before and the last part that got everyone so frustrated was actually just setting up the next book). It’s the smart thing, right? So what did I do? I wrote London Macabre, vast sprawling novel of fantastic Victoriana (most certainly not steampunk) and then sat down to start Gold having cleansed my palette. You see, I have got this kind of magpie brain that just gets attracted to shiny ideas and because I work everyday, and work at least 6-8 hrs every single day, I am writing a lot, meaning I can explore these shiny ideas… so when I was commissioned to write a short novel (40,000 words) called London Macabre I figured it’d be about 6-8 weeks work and a nice break from the intensity of Silver. It wasn’t. It took me almost an entire year working unpaid on a speculative project. It was the worst possible business decision I could have made, and I’ve really been paying for it for the last 2 years. Even so, I ploughed on and finished the most complex novel I’ve ever written—which we couldn’t sell. It’s just come out now, actually, in ebook as an exclusive for Barnes and Noble here and print via a small US publisher, Crossroad Press, who in general do a lot of reprints of successful books so it’s a bit of a step in another direction for them. But it meant there was no Gold. The book everyone was writing to me about.
I wasn’t worried. I had a story in mind that was really worthy of following up Silver. I was bursting to write it.
And I managed 50,000 words, or about a third of the novel, before I threw it out.
And I really do mean threw it out. It’s gone.
Now obviously everyone thinks I must be barking mad, but let me explain. It was a lot of work and there was a lot of good stuff in it. So why throw it out? Honestly, because it was exactly the same formula as Silver. It wasn’t deliberate. I don’t quite know why or how it happened but I was subconsciously following an identical beat-sheet in my head. Open with a spectacular and sinister disaster/threat, go to Nonesuch for debrief, scatter the group to follow clues… heck there was even a scene with Noah visiting Margot, just the same as Silver. None of this was deliberate, but I found myself reading back through it and just going cold. I mean, I really don’t want to be the kind of thriller writer who by book two has fallen into an identifiable pattern. So I tossed it all.
That put me more than 12 months behind schedule. More like 16 months.
At this point it was probably around Feb 2011, or a month after Gold was due to hit the US in hardcover. It’d come to the realisation there was no way back from that.
The Internet’s changed the way we can interact with and approach authors. I think at that point I was getting maybe 5 or 6 letters a day asking ‘Where’s Gold?’ The other mails asked ‘When’s the final Slainé novel coming out?’ and I didn’t have a good answer for either, because by then Gold was feeling like a dim and distant dream.
I worked really hard for about 4 more months, researching heavily, and finally decided on my new plot line – and it was a good one. A really good one and I was about to dive in when I got a phone call from DICE – a division of Electronic Arts – asking if I’d be interested in helping them out on something called ‘Project Venice’ which had failed to get through the gate. Meaning they’d spent millions on it and it hadn’t been approved to go into the final stages of development. They wanted a story, and because of the similarity between what I’d done in Silver and what they wanted to do with Venice (Battlefield 3) they thought I was the man to help pull it all together. I ended up in about 2 months of non-stop meetings discussing terrorism and what I would do if I were a terrorist, how I’d go about inspiring fear, and another month writing full time on it. I wound up scripting a lot of little details for the Dima character, who let’s face it, is extremely close in style to Konstatin Khavin, working out what exactly the terrorist threats should be, and crafting what I think are still the most powerful scenes in the finished Battlefield game – which take place in Paris around the Euronext Stock Exchange and the moral dilemma of chasing a terrorist on foreign soil while the Gendarmerie try to stop you. The core of this was all harking back to Bin Laden’s last video urging the young men to rise up against the nodes of economy because the United States economy was a Paper Tiger that could be brought down just like Russia’s.
There was an inevitable cross-pollination of ideas, after all I’d just spent 4 months researching counterfeit culture and how to bring about an economic collapse through terrorism. That was when we hit the first major problem with Gold – I couldn’t do anything with the plot I’d come up with because it walked a very similar line to BF3 and the nature of computers and the punitive contract I’d signed meant that basically every idea I’d had on the project DICE owned lock-stock and two smoking barrels. It would been easier if I’d stayed with the project to the end, but I didn’t. I wrote the storyline, came up with the actual structure around it, building two layers of story simultaneously with a 24-style NOW interspersing the unfolding backstory. Someone else was brought in to write the video cut-scenes and character dialogue. What this meant was that I could never really know what was being used and where the game had evolved beyond our meetings and my storyline. The last thing I wanted was to be sued for ripping off myself.
So Gold sat in a weird stasis for a period while I looked at October 2011 as liberation day – BF3 would come out and I’d know for sure what had and hadn’t been used. Only it didn’t work like that because suddenly I heard rumours of an Andy McNabb novel featuring Dima as the lead character and I was left thinking crap, does this mean stuff they didn’t use in the game could serve as the story for Dima? As I said, a lot of my input for Dima was stuff that could quite easily have been stuff for Koni. So I had to wait to read the novel to work out if there was anything else that had become off-limits. And then there were download extensions, and it felt like the whole thing was never going to end.
In the end, and for the second time, it was just easier to chuck everything out, because this crap could just go on and on forever and it was doing my sanity no good. By now though Silver had exploded in the UK, with over 40,000 ebooks sold in a couple of months, hitting #2 and staying top #10 for 3 months. Suddenly there was a very vocal audience for a book that just didn’t exist. And I didn’t have a new storyline worthy of the team.
It was, all in all, my worst nightmare. Screwed by my own success. Because people wouldn’t wait forever, and my friend’s prophetic ‘if you never write Gold’ was really starting to ring in my ears a little too loud and clear for comfort.
To make matters worse there were rumblings. Variance, who put the hardcover edition out in the US, hadn’t put out a new title in getting on for 12 months. Was I about to dedicate 9 months of my life to write a book where there’d be no publisher at the end to actually get it to readers? Were they still excited by the story? Were they even going to be around in 12 more months when it was done and dusted? Lots of questions to worry about that took me further and further out of the actual writing process. And in the middle of all this I’d been contracted to write a novel for Guild Wars 2, Sea of Sorrows, which had gone sour when my editor Will McDermott, was fired from Arena. The whole thing started to take a toll. The stress of making mortgage payments, the expectancy of readers, all of it, just served to really drag me down and it was Gold that was suffering. Big time.
So I had to get over it, pick myself up and start again. No choice. No time for feeling sorry for myself. But I didn’t dive straight into Gold. Instead I had an idea for something a little different – tangential. I needed to get the team moving again, having adventures. And I had some ideas that linked into the opening part of Silver where the team are described as treasure hunters working under cover in dangerous territories. We needed to see these things. I needed to write them. So I started plotting three short novels, Solomon’s Seal, WarGod and The Prophet. These are ‘Ogmios Origins’ novels, letting us meet the team doing what they do best.
This week sees the release of Solomon’s Seal (in the US here:here and the UK here: here) co-written with one of my best friends and long term writing partner’s Steve Lockley. It focusses very much on the events of Jenin, the refugee camp in Palestine where Orla, the female member of the team, was abused and tortured pre-Silver. It’s a fundamental part of the story that I really wanted to tell. With the discovery of the long lost Seal--real or not--Konstantin and Orla find themselves in Jerusalem and Palestine fighting for their lives in a desperate race to stop all hell breaking lose. They don't know who they can trust. They don't know which way to turn next. All they know is they have to find the Seal and divert the detonation of a dirty bomb at one of Jerusalem's most holy sights in the process. It’s a proper balls to the wall thriller. I’m really pleased with it. I think readers will be too, because it fills in a lot of blanks.
Then there’s WarGod coming next month, which was written with up-and-coming adventure writer Sean Ellis, which is about Julius Caesar’s legendary sword, Crocea Mors, and is very much Ronan Frost up front and centre, and the final one of the set, The Prophet, which is about the lost Templar “treasure” the head of Baphomet. That’s a Noah-Orla tag-team effort with Rick Chesler.
And then we get Gold. I’m reluctant to put a release date on it. It feels honestly like it’ll be summer next year.
The fact is it’s actually really hard to write a sequel to a successful book – harder by far than I expected, and made harder because it was successful, when you realise that what you’d been doing was in fact write the same book again. Hell, even the internalised pressure increases exponentially, I want to it to be the best it can be. I want it to be thrilling. And the thing is, real life has changed me in the years since writing Silver. We all change, obviously, but even the way I think has changed in part. I mean, I’m suddenly aware that there are new things to be frightened of, intimate things, so Gold isn’t going to be so much about the spectacle of fear like Silver was, it’s going to be much closer to home. One reason for this is actually something that happened to a family friend. He’s a journalist. Actually a respected journalist who works for newspapers like The Times in London. His sister works with my better half. 14 months ago Martin was found guilty of terrorism in Ethiopia and sentenced to 11 years in prison. It was a trumped up ‘crime’ and we’ve all been sitting and praying he’d come home while the politicians have been locked in silent diplomacy to bring him and his partner Johan back to Stockholm. It’s funny how even as an outsider this stuff changes you. It does. I’ve found myself thinking about Greta, Martin’s sister. About how it feels to be the one left behind, not knowing. This reality impacts on Gold in ways you wouldn’t expect, but in ways that will make it much more powerful, I think. More intimate and real.
So that’s it, the terrible twos, and why it was easier to give birth to triplets than write a sequel to a successful book.
Remind me never to do this again.
Here we are again. It’s been a few years. Lots of things have happened in that time. Not least Brad Thor slayed me in a mighty smack-down last year where I think we managed to get about 300 people to vote for us. I was quite proud of that. I mean, Brad’s a giant in the best possible way, and his readers are rabidly loyal and a very decent bunch. That was a lot of fun. Of course, last time I was invited to chat it was about Silver, my first thriller, which was just coming out so I guess we’re looking at Jan 2010, the best part of three years ago. So, anyway, it’s nice to be here again.
There’s a note in the back of the hardcover that says GOLD coming Jan 2011…
That’s what this little visit’s all about. The dreaded sequel.
I remember when a friend read Silver he said ‘it’s great, but it’s not your best book, and if you never write Gold it’ll just be a so-so unfinished tale’. That email has stuck with me for the last 3 years. It’s been like the email of Damocles hanging over my head to be honest. I mean, look at where we are. September 2012. And there’s no Gold on the shelves. Silver’s being forgotten about by readers and with good reason. It’s been a long time.
Now, let’s make no bones about it, following up anything is difficult if you’re like me. You want to purge yourself of the characters, do new stuff, develop. But it’s not as simple as all that. Sometimes the real world gets in the way, Sometimes it’s pressure, sometimes it’s completely external that you have absolutely no control over.
So, the terrible twos…
Let’s look at the evidence: The UK digital edition of Silver was listed as the #26 bestselling digital book of 2011, it sold into hardcover into Germany, France, Poland, Turkey and Spain and did pretty well everywhere but Germany, but then I wasn’t particularly kind to Berlin in the book so perhaps I did that to myself. It’s by far my most successful original novel and is neck-and-neck in terms of sales with my most successful media novel, the Von Carsten Vampire Wars series for Games Workshop.
At the time I did a lot of blog tour stuff talking on indie sites about thinking of yourself as a brand, and thinking about your product and brand identity. So any right-thinking chap would obviously sit down and dive straight into Gold, right? What can I say? It’s amazing how many bad decisions one man can make. Especially after leaving the book on the mother of all cliff-hangers (I didn’t really, honestly… I finished the book the chapter before and the last part that got everyone so frustrated was actually just setting up the next book). It’s the smart thing, right? So what did I do? I wrote London Macabre, vast sprawling novel of fantastic Victoriana (most certainly not steampunk) and then sat down to start Gold having cleansed my palette. You see, I have got this kind of magpie brain that just gets attracted to shiny ideas and because I work everyday, and work at least 6-8 hrs every single day, I am writing a lot, meaning I can explore these shiny ideas… so when I was commissioned to write a short novel (40,000 words) called London Macabre I figured it’d be about 6-8 weeks work and a nice break from the intensity of Silver. It wasn’t. It took me almost an entire year working unpaid on a speculative project. It was the worst possible business decision I could have made, and I’ve really been paying for it for the last 2 years. Even so, I ploughed on and finished the most complex novel I’ve ever written—which we couldn’t sell. It’s just come out now, actually, in ebook as an exclusive for Barnes and Noble here and print via a small US publisher, Crossroad Press, who in general do a lot of reprints of successful books so it’s a bit of a step in another direction for them. But it meant there was no Gold. The book everyone was writing to me about.
I wasn’t worried. I had a story in mind that was really worthy of following up Silver. I was bursting to write it.
And I managed 50,000 words, or about a third of the novel, before I threw it out.
And I really do mean threw it out. It’s gone.
Now obviously everyone thinks I must be barking mad, but let me explain. It was a lot of work and there was a lot of good stuff in it. So why throw it out? Honestly, because it was exactly the same formula as Silver. It wasn’t deliberate. I don’t quite know why or how it happened but I was subconsciously following an identical beat-sheet in my head. Open with a spectacular and sinister disaster/threat, go to Nonesuch for debrief, scatter the group to follow clues… heck there was even a scene with Noah visiting Margot, just the same as Silver. None of this was deliberate, but I found myself reading back through it and just going cold. I mean, I really don’t want to be the kind of thriller writer who by book two has fallen into an identifiable pattern. So I tossed it all.
That put me more than 12 months behind schedule. More like 16 months.
At this point it was probably around Feb 2011, or a month after Gold was due to hit the US in hardcover. It’d come to the realisation there was no way back from that.
The Internet’s changed the way we can interact with and approach authors. I think at that point I was getting maybe 5 or 6 letters a day asking ‘Where’s Gold?’ The other mails asked ‘When’s the final Slainé novel coming out?’ and I didn’t have a good answer for either, because by then Gold was feeling like a dim and distant dream.
I worked really hard for about 4 more months, researching heavily, and finally decided on my new plot line – and it was a good one. A really good one and I was about to dive in when I got a phone call from DICE – a division of Electronic Arts – asking if I’d be interested in helping them out on something called ‘Project Venice’ which had failed to get through the gate. Meaning they’d spent millions on it and it hadn’t been approved to go into the final stages of development. They wanted a story, and because of the similarity between what I’d done in Silver and what they wanted to do with Venice (Battlefield 3) they thought I was the man to help pull it all together. I ended up in about 2 months of non-stop meetings discussing terrorism and what I would do if I were a terrorist, how I’d go about inspiring fear, and another month writing full time on it. I wound up scripting a lot of little details for the Dima character, who let’s face it, is extremely close in style to Konstatin Khavin, working out what exactly the terrorist threats should be, and crafting what I think are still the most powerful scenes in the finished Battlefield game – which take place in Paris around the Euronext Stock Exchange and the moral dilemma of chasing a terrorist on foreign soil while the Gendarmerie try to stop you. The core of this was all harking back to Bin Laden’s last video urging the young men to rise up against the nodes of economy because the United States economy was a Paper Tiger that could be brought down just like Russia’s.
There was an inevitable cross-pollination of ideas, after all I’d just spent 4 months researching counterfeit culture and how to bring about an economic collapse through terrorism. That was when we hit the first major problem with Gold – I couldn’t do anything with the plot I’d come up with because it walked a very similar line to BF3 and the nature of computers and the punitive contract I’d signed meant that basically every idea I’d had on the project DICE owned lock-stock and two smoking barrels. It would been easier if I’d stayed with the project to the end, but I didn’t. I wrote the storyline, came up with the actual structure around it, building two layers of story simultaneously with a 24-style NOW interspersing the unfolding backstory. Someone else was brought in to write the video cut-scenes and character dialogue. What this meant was that I could never really know what was being used and where the game had evolved beyond our meetings and my storyline. The last thing I wanted was to be sued for ripping off myself.
So Gold sat in a weird stasis for a period while I looked at October 2011 as liberation day – BF3 would come out and I’d know for sure what had and hadn’t been used. Only it didn’t work like that because suddenly I heard rumours of an Andy McNabb novel featuring Dima as the lead character and I was left thinking crap, does this mean stuff they didn’t use in the game could serve as the story for Dima? As I said, a lot of my input for Dima was stuff that could quite easily have been stuff for Koni. So I had to wait to read the novel to work out if there was anything else that had become off-limits. And then there were download extensions, and it felt like the whole thing was never going to end.
In the end, and for the second time, it was just easier to chuck everything out, because this crap could just go on and on forever and it was doing my sanity no good. By now though Silver had exploded in the UK, with over 40,000 ebooks sold in a couple of months, hitting #2 and staying top #10 for 3 months. Suddenly there was a very vocal audience for a book that just didn’t exist. And I didn’t have a new storyline worthy of the team.
It was, all in all, my worst nightmare. Screwed by my own success. Because people wouldn’t wait forever, and my friend’s prophetic ‘if you never write Gold’ was really starting to ring in my ears a little too loud and clear for comfort.
To make matters worse there were rumblings. Variance, who put the hardcover edition out in the US, hadn’t put out a new title in getting on for 12 months. Was I about to dedicate 9 months of my life to write a book where there’d be no publisher at the end to actually get it to readers? Were they still excited by the story? Were they even going to be around in 12 more months when it was done and dusted? Lots of questions to worry about that took me further and further out of the actual writing process. And in the middle of all this I’d been contracted to write a novel for Guild Wars 2, Sea of Sorrows, which had gone sour when my editor Will McDermott, was fired from Arena. The whole thing started to take a toll. The stress of making mortgage payments, the expectancy of readers, all of it, just served to really drag me down and it was Gold that was suffering. Big time.
So I had to get over it, pick myself up and start again. No choice. No time for feeling sorry for myself. But I didn’t dive straight into Gold. Instead I had an idea for something a little different – tangential. I needed to get the team moving again, having adventures. And I had some ideas that linked into the opening part of Silver where the team are described as treasure hunters working under cover in dangerous territories. We needed to see these things. I needed to write them. So I started plotting three short novels, Solomon’s Seal, WarGod and The Prophet. These are ‘Ogmios Origins’ novels, letting us meet the team doing what they do best.
This week sees the release of Solomon’s Seal (in the US here:here and the UK here: here) co-written with one of my best friends and long term writing partner’s Steve Lockley. It focusses very much on the events of Jenin, the refugee camp in Palestine where Orla, the female member of the team, was abused and tortured pre-Silver. It’s a fundamental part of the story that I really wanted to tell. With the discovery of the long lost Seal--real or not--Konstantin and Orla find themselves in Jerusalem and Palestine fighting for their lives in a desperate race to stop all hell breaking lose. They don't know who they can trust. They don't know which way to turn next. All they know is they have to find the Seal and divert the detonation of a dirty bomb at one of Jerusalem's most holy sights in the process. It’s a proper balls to the wall thriller. I’m really pleased with it. I think readers will be too, because it fills in a lot of blanks.
Then there’s WarGod coming next month, which was written with up-and-coming adventure writer Sean Ellis, which is about Julius Caesar’s legendary sword, Crocea Mors, and is very much Ronan Frost up front and centre, and the final one of the set, The Prophet, which is about the lost Templar “treasure” the head of Baphomet. That’s a Noah-Orla tag-team effort with Rick Chesler.
And then we get Gold. I’m reluctant to put a release date on it. It feels honestly like it’ll be summer next year.
The fact is it’s actually really hard to write a sequel to a successful book – harder by far than I expected, and made harder because it was successful, when you realise that what you’d been doing was in fact write the same book again. Hell, even the internalised pressure increases exponentially, I want to it to be the best it can be. I want it to be thrilling. And the thing is, real life has changed me in the years since writing Silver. We all change, obviously, but even the way I think has changed in part. I mean, I’m suddenly aware that there are new things to be frightened of, intimate things, so Gold isn’t going to be so much about the spectacle of fear like Silver was, it’s going to be much closer to home. One reason for this is actually something that happened to a family friend. He’s a journalist. Actually a respected journalist who works for newspapers like The Times in London. His sister works with my better half. 14 months ago Martin was found guilty of terrorism in Ethiopia and sentenced to 11 years in prison. It was a trumped up ‘crime’ and we’ve all been sitting and praying he’d come home while the politicians have been locked in silent diplomacy to bring him and his partner Johan back to Stockholm. It’s funny how even as an outsider this stuff changes you. It does. I’ve found myself thinking about Greta, Martin’s sister. About how it feels to be the one left behind, not knowing. This reality impacts on Gold in ways you wouldn’t expect, but in ways that will make it much more powerful, I think. More intimate and real.
So that’s it, the terrible twos, and why it was easier to give birth to triplets than write a sequel to a successful book.
Remind me never to do this again.
September 17, 2012
I do you a Good Price
Monday rolls around again. So, let's see if we can keep this as a Monday to Friday thing between us, a relationship of sorts.
On Friday I hinted about what would come next, so, better deliver, eh? Right, a few months before I finished teaching we had a kid in my class who's dad was testifying against the Russian mafia, so I'd be happily yammering away about declaratives and imperatives and other fun stuff with a SAPO bodyguard in the back of the class looking after little Johnny... (obviously his name wasn't Johnny) I was used to having teachers assistants in the classroom, obviously, but this was the first one with a gun.
So anyway, life was pretty much 'the usual' but we're approaching the trial date and everyone's a bit antsy. Come Friday night me and a couple of the teaches decide to blow off some steam in one of the Irish bars in the town, and grab a cab. We get to the bar, the guys bail out and as I'm handing my visa card over to pay the driver turns and says: "Where I come from we take care of our own." And I realised exactly who he was talking about. For about 30 seconds I felt sure he was going to make some sort of threat, but then he turns around and gives me a business card and says "I heard what you were saying about that woman, look, you want her taken care of, we'll do you a good price for looking after our boy. 4,000 Euros, no questions, nothing comes back to you. Good men. You can trust them. Think about it. Hell, I've got friends who'd fly over from Latvia and do the job, you'd only have to cover the flights, they get to come on holiday, have some fun, drink some beer and go home."
I didn't really know what to say to that, I mean, do you really want to hire a hitman for less than the price of a second hand car? I had visions of the mark saying "Whatever he's paying you, I'll pay you double, triple," and it not even scratching into their savings...
Sometimes I think stuff like this is just more fun in a book where a. no one gets hurt and b. you get to make the character look really cool by putting all the best lines into his mouth... because the reality is more like "Er. Erm. Well. Ahh. You know. Ah. Er. Ah. No thanks. I mean it's very kind of you to offer but... er. You know."
On Friday I hinted about what would come next, so, better deliver, eh? Right, a few months before I finished teaching we had a kid in my class who's dad was testifying against the Russian mafia, so I'd be happily yammering away about declaratives and imperatives and other fun stuff with a SAPO bodyguard in the back of the class looking after little Johnny... (obviously his name wasn't Johnny) I was used to having teachers assistants in the classroom, obviously, but this was the first one with a gun.
So anyway, life was pretty much 'the usual' but we're approaching the trial date and everyone's a bit antsy. Come Friday night me and a couple of the teaches decide to blow off some steam in one of the Irish bars in the town, and grab a cab. We get to the bar, the guys bail out and as I'm handing my visa card over to pay the driver turns and says: "Where I come from we take care of our own." And I realised exactly who he was talking about. For about 30 seconds I felt sure he was going to make some sort of threat, but then he turns around and gives me a business card and says "I heard what you were saying about that woman, look, you want her taken care of, we'll do you a good price for looking after our boy. 4,000 Euros, no questions, nothing comes back to you. Good men. You can trust them. Think about it. Hell, I've got friends who'd fly over from Latvia and do the job, you'd only have to cover the flights, they get to come on holiday, have some fun, drink some beer and go home."
I didn't really know what to say to that, I mean, do you really want to hire a hitman for less than the price of a second hand car? I had visions of the mark saying "Whatever he's paying you, I'll pay you double, triple," and it not even scratching into their savings...
Sometimes I think stuff like this is just more fun in a book where a. no one gets hurt and b. you get to make the character look really cool by putting all the best lines into his mouth... because the reality is more like "Er. Erm. Well. Ahh. You know. Ah. Er. Ah. No thanks. I mean it's very kind of you to offer but... er. You know."
September 14, 2012
The Reason
What reason you ask? The reason I never keep a blog for very long, that's the reason. And it is because I'm really not all that interesting. I mean, I sit at a desk most days or in a cafe drinking over-priced lattes and trying to make stuff up rather than going out and experiencing stuff. That doesn't make for very stimulating chat. I mean, who wants to hear 'oh guess what I made up today?'
I know we're supposed to reveal more of ourselves in this modern age, right? We're supposed to let people in on the quiet machinations of our minds, what makes us tick, what makes us go hmmmm, but the fact is I genuinely find that a bit uncomfortable. I'm a fairly quiet guy (right, everyone who knows me just burst out laughing at that point but it's true), so how do I entertain and amuse here? Every day?
I could tell you it's raining outside. I love the rain. I noticed once that in everything I wrote for years there was a reference to it, something like 'it really ought to have been raining' or 'he loved the sound of the rain' but then that suited the mood of a lot of the stuff I was writing back then. There was a movement in Britain that called itself the Miserablists. This was the early to mid-90s. That was when Laughing Boy's Shadow was written, and it is at its core a prime example of miserablism. No happy endings. The lead character dies on page 60.
And I'm not sure about giving 'writing advice' because frankly even though I've been doing this for most of my adult life I'm not sure I'm close to doing it right or being in a position to say 'hey, listen up, this is stuff you need to know'. I've been lucky, I've been unlucky, most of all I've been stubborn. I've made good choices, I've made bad choices, but every day I've made choices. That's pretty much been my writing life. So I don't think that makes for an interesting blog either.
I could offer snippets of other people's inspiration, poetry and postcards, but other people do that far better, so I don't think that'd be worth seeing either, at least not more than once.
Or I could tell you what I'm reading - but that's what the reviews feature's for, right?
So...
One of my friends insists I should write about football, because I'm so passionate about the subject and relatively well educated about it, but that'd alienate most of you, I mean it's not like you're all die-hard Spurs fans like wot I is...
So again...
It could be a commentary on the news - after all there's horror happening every day. Today's a big day for a friend of ours, Greta. Her brother is coming home. Why's that news? Her brother is Martin Schibbye. Martin was sentenced to 11 years in Ethiopian prison for terrorist crimes. Martin's a respected Swedish journalist who has spent the last 14 months along with Johan Persson. I can't begin to imagine how Greta's feeling today, or what Martin and Johan have been through. These are guys who have written as foreign correspondents for The Times and Bild and other papers. They kept detailed diaries of every day of their captivity and treatment which were confiscated by the Ethiopians. The truth of it all will come out now that they are no longer on Ethiopian soil. They don't have to live in absolute fear of saying the wrong thing.
Or it could be something else completely different. Maybe I could mention my new book just came out in the US this week right here. But that's a bit tacky. We're just beginning to make friends, right?
So... what I'll say is this... I have no idea what'll appear here over the next few months, but I'll try to make it interesting, or at least personal. That much I can do.
Maybe I'll prattle on about being an exile. Or tell you about the time a taxi driver offered to hook me up with a Latvian hitman for 4,000 euro to take out anyone I wanted.
I know we're supposed to reveal more of ourselves in this modern age, right? We're supposed to let people in on the quiet machinations of our minds, what makes us tick, what makes us go hmmmm, but the fact is I genuinely find that a bit uncomfortable. I'm a fairly quiet guy (right, everyone who knows me just burst out laughing at that point but it's true), so how do I entertain and amuse here? Every day?
I could tell you it's raining outside. I love the rain. I noticed once that in everything I wrote for years there was a reference to it, something like 'it really ought to have been raining' or 'he loved the sound of the rain' but then that suited the mood of a lot of the stuff I was writing back then. There was a movement in Britain that called itself the Miserablists. This was the early to mid-90s. That was when Laughing Boy's Shadow was written, and it is at its core a prime example of miserablism. No happy endings. The lead character dies on page 60.
And I'm not sure about giving 'writing advice' because frankly even though I've been doing this for most of my adult life I'm not sure I'm close to doing it right or being in a position to say 'hey, listen up, this is stuff you need to know'. I've been lucky, I've been unlucky, most of all I've been stubborn. I've made good choices, I've made bad choices, but every day I've made choices. That's pretty much been my writing life. So I don't think that makes for an interesting blog either.
I could offer snippets of other people's inspiration, poetry and postcards, but other people do that far better, so I don't think that'd be worth seeing either, at least not more than once.
Or I could tell you what I'm reading - but that's what the reviews feature's for, right?
So...
One of my friends insists I should write about football, because I'm so passionate about the subject and relatively well educated about it, but that'd alienate most of you, I mean it's not like you're all die-hard Spurs fans like wot I is...
So again...
It could be a commentary on the news - after all there's horror happening every day. Today's a big day for a friend of ours, Greta. Her brother is coming home. Why's that news? Her brother is Martin Schibbye. Martin was sentenced to 11 years in Ethiopian prison for terrorist crimes. Martin's a respected Swedish journalist who has spent the last 14 months along with Johan Persson. I can't begin to imagine how Greta's feeling today, or what Martin and Johan have been through. These are guys who have written as foreign correspondents for The Times and Bild and other papers. They kept detailed diaries of every day of their captivity and treatment which were confiscated by the Ethiopians. The truth of it all will come out now that they are no longer on Ethiopian soil. They don't have to live in absolute fear of saying the wrong thing.
Or it could be something else completely different. Maybe I could mention my new book just came out in the US this week right here. But that's a bit tacky. We're just beginning to make friends, right?
So... what I'll say is this... I have no idea what'll appear here over the next few months, but I'll try to make it interesting, or at least personal. That much I can do.
Maybe I'll prattle on about being an exile. Or tell you about the time a taxi driver offered to hook me up with a Latvian hitman for 4,000 euro to take out anyone I wanted.
September 13, 2012
The Truth
Words have power. They do. And written words carry an added dimension of truth with them. People believe what they see written down. Somehow it feels more real than what they hear. I couldn't tell you why.
A few years back I was in the security queue at the airport and an over zealous Homeland Insecurity guard wanted to search my bag. I had 4 things in there. The laptop to work on the plan, a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a pen and a small moleskine notebook. The guard took the book out of my bag and started to flick through it, then cracked the spine on the brand new paperback and really started pulling at the pages.
I've got a smart mouth sometimes. I remember the conversation well. Actually it wasn't so much a conversation as a diatribe. It went something like this: "Dangerous things, books. They contain words. Words make up ideas. Ideas make people think. People start thinking for themselves instead of thinking what they're told to think and you get revolutions. Revolutions can change the world. You're right to be frightened of that book. You don't want to let it into you country because you can't afford to have people thinking for themselves. You know what they say? The pen is mightier than the sword. But here's the thing, if I really wanted to do some damage on that plane the most dangerous thing in my bag is that pen. It's a steel tipped fountain pen. Thrust hard enough it could easily be plunged into someone's neck making it a lethal weapon, but you keep on worrying about the book."
Needless to say everyone around me looked on with first mild amusement and then a little horror as the mouth just wouldn't stop.
But the thing is it really irritated me. I mean really.
This morning most Brits have woken up to the headline in the daily newspaper of The Real Truth. This is in response to a similar headline run in 1989 four days after the events of Hillsborough. Americans reading this probably have no idea what Hillsborough was, but for every football fan in Britain there's an element of 'it could have been me' about it. As a Spurs fan, doubly so because only a few years earlier in the same stadium at the same stage of the FA Cup police HAD opened security gates at the Leppings Lane end to allow us onto the field as we were being crushed to death inside the stands. That should have been a salutary lesson to the police and the FA and Hillsborough should have been removed as a semi-final venue because it quite simply couldn't cope with the volume of support.
96 people died that day.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember I was out shopping with the then girlfriend in the Metrocentre in Newcastle and had stopped to watch the preview moments in the window of the electronics store. It was a bit of a ritual, most men would watch the teletext results or the vidiprinter scrolling through the scores on a saturday in the 80s. You'd see them crowded around the shop windows just waiting, then see the air punched and a grin and a yes, or you'd see shoulders slump, some muttered 'bollocks' and people shuffle away to finish shopping with their partners. The crowds in the previews looked bad.
Then when we got home to watch the match we saw them spilling onto the pitch, trying to climb over the barriers caging them in, passing kids forwards, and we saw bodies lying on the pitch and a single ambulance and one paramedic because at 3:15 the police ordered the ambulances to stay outside. They told us everyone who had died was deceased by that point. They chose that time.
Four days later The Sun newspaper ran a headline: THE TRUTH and it claimed that the Liverpool fans had not only been complicit in the 96 deaths but solely to blame. Reading the paper you'd think these people were scum. It claimed they robbed the bodies of the dead. It claimed they pissed on the policemen trying to help the wounded. It claimed some fans beat up the police as they tried to give the kiss of life to dying kids.
It was a gross lie masquerading under the title THE TRUTH. It was nowhere near approaching the truth. It was a manufactured cover-up to mask the failings of the police force at the time, who treated those people like scum in the wake of the Heysel Stadium disaster four years earlier in which 39 fans died as a wall collapsed due to a large group of football hooligans breaching a fence. That along with the political climate, the working class revolts of the 80s and dissatisfaction with the Thatcherite government meant it was all too easy to smear these people. The police tested alcohol levels on the children who died, for instance. Anything they could do to smear the dead and protect the culpable.
People believe what they read. Last year in the minute's silence at the FA Cup final Chelsea fans chanted 'murderers' at the Liverpool fans in attendance.
Long before the documents were finally released yesterday football fans already knew the TRUTH, that the disaster was due to the catastrophic mistakes made by the South Yorkshire police. We suspected that the deception of all deaths occurring before 3.15pm was a lie that would let the authorities off the hook, because it meant that their subsequent actions of keeping the paramedics out of the ground wasn't a contributory factor in any of the deaths.
But what the release of those documents yesterday did was reveal how in the days and weeks following the tragedy, the authorities - and most particularly the senior officers in the police - didn't show any sign of humanity. They didn't care about the scores of dead people or grieving families, they simply wanted to cover their arses and keep themselves out of court so they instigated the largest cover-up in my life time, from the top down. And three of the leading policemen behind it have since been knighted.
The release of documents is too late to be called justice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good it is happened, and it had to happen in the end, but there was no justice for the 96 on the day of the tragedy or in the ensuing years, and that for me is a permanent stain on the authorities whatever they do now to try and make amends.
David Cameron issued a heart felt apology, Kelvin McKenzine, the editor of the newspaper who declared 'The Truth' ... has spent a good amount of time covering his arse and squirming rather than just saying, look, I lied because those people were easy targets. But in writing those headlines and making those claims he did change the world for nearly 25 years. He changed the world for the families and friends and loved ones of those 96 dead people. He made it a living hell in which they had to fight to get the REAL TRUTH out.
Those documents confirmed that the police deliberately tried to smear the fans and falsified statements to cover their incompetence. the police checked the police records of those who had died to try and find reasons to put the blame on them. Reprehensible. They proved the 3.15 threshold was a falsehood. The lives could and should have been saved. They proved large scale criminal corruption by the people meant to protect us.
The officers' initial crimes on the day were primarily negligence and incompetence. Whilst they are criminally responsible for these, there is no suggestion of mens rea. The police officers' actions to change statements and fabricate a case against Liverpool fans after the event however are very much pre-meditated, malicious and intended to pervert the course of justice. Those are the crimes should be tried.
It wasn't journalists who finally gave us the truth. It wasn't diligent detective work of the police. It was the families of the victims. Ordinary people. It takes a lot of heart-ache and a lot of resolve in the face of let-down after let-down to keep pushing year after year after year to get at the truth. Ordinary people who wouldn't give up.
Words have power. Especially ones that are written down. Especially ones that appear presented as the truth in the newspapers we buy. It takes something incredible to overturn them and show the real truth. This isn't finished. And it shouldn't be until those proven to have lied and deceived are found guilty and condemned by the real truth.
A few years back I was in the security queue at the airport and an over zealous Homeland Insecurity guard wanted to search my bag. I had 4 things in there. The laptop to work on the plan, a copy of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a pen and a small moleskine notebook. The guard took the book out of my bag and started to flick through it, then cracked the spine on the brand new paperback and really started pulling at the pages.
I've got a smart mouth sometimes. I remember the conversation well. Actually it wasn't so much a conversation as a diatribe. It went something like this: "Dangerous things, books. They contain words. Words make up ideas. Ideas make people think. People start thinking for themselves instead of thinking what they're told to think and you get revolutions. Revolutions can change the world. You're right to be frightened of that book. You don't want to let it into you country because you can't afford to have people thinking for themselves. You know what they say? The pen is mightier than the sword. But here's the thing, if I really wanted to do some damage on that plane the most dangerous thing in my bag is that pen. It's a steel tipped fountain pen. Thrust hard enough it could easily be plunged into someone's neck making it a lethal weapon, but you keep on worrying about the book."
Needless to say everyone around me looked on with first mild amusement and then a little horror as the mouth just wouldn't stop.
But the thing is it really irritated me. I mean really.
This morning most Brits have woken up to the headline in the daily newspaper of The Real Truth. This is in response to a similar headline run in 1989 four days after the events of Hillsborough. Americans reading this probably have no idea what Hillsborough was, but for every football fan in Britain there's an element of 'it could have been me' about it. As a Spurs fan, doubly so because only a few years earlier in the same stadium at the same stage of the FA Cup police HAD opened security gates at the Leppings Lane end to allow us onto the field as we were being crushed to death inside the stands. That should have been a salutary lesson to the police and the FA and Hillsborough should have been removed as a semi-final venue because it quite simply couldn't cope with the volume of support.
96 people died that day.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember I was out shopping with the then girlfriend in the Metrocentre in Newcastle and had stopped to watch the preview moments in the window of the electronics store. It was a bit of a ritual, most men would watch the teletext results or the vidiprinter scrolling through the scores on a saturday in the 80s. You'd see them crowded around the shop windows just waiting, then see the air punched and a grin and a yes, or you'd see shoulders slump, some muttered 'bollocks' and people shuffle away to finish shopping with their partners. The crowds in the previews looked bad.
Then when we got home to watch the match we saw them spilling onto the pitch, trying to climb over the barriers caging them in, passing kids forwards, and we saw bodies lying on the pitch and a single ambulance and one paramedic because at 3:15 the police ordered the ambulances to stay outside. They told us everyone who had died was deceased by that point. They chose that time.
Four days later The Sun newspaper ran a headline: THE TRUTH and it claimed that the Liverpool fans had not only been complicit in the 96 deaths but solely to blame. Reading the paper you'd think these people were scum. It claimed they robbed the bodies of the dead. It claimed they pissed on the policemen trying to help the wounded. It claimed some fans beat up the police as they tried to give the kiss of life to dying kids.
It was a gross lie masquerading under the title THE TRUTH. It was nowhere near approaching the truth. It was a manufactured cover-up to mask the failings of the police force at the time, who treated those people like scum in the wake of the Heysel Stadium disaster four years earlier in which 39 fans died as a wall collapsed due to a large group of football hooligans breaching a fence. That along with the political climate, the working class revolts of the 80s and dissatisfaction with the Thatcherite government meant it was all too easy to smear these people. The police tested alcohol levels on the children who died, for instance. Anything they could do to smear the dead and protect the culpable.
People believe what they read. Last year in the minute's silence at the FA Cup final Chelsea fans chanted 'murderers' at the Liverpool fans in attendance.
Long before the documents were finally released yesterday football fans already knew the TRUTH, that the disaster was due to the catastrophic mistakes made by the South Yorkshire police. We suspected that the deception of all deaths occurring before 3.15pm was a lie that would let the authorities off the hook, because it meant that their subsequent actions of keeping the paramedics out of the ground wasn't a contributory factor in any of the deaths.
But what the release of those documents yesterday did was reveal how in the days and weeks following the tragedy, the authorities - and most particularly the senior officers in the police - didn't show any sign of humanity. They didn't care about the scores of dead people or grieving families, they simply wanted to cover their arses and keep themselves out of court so they instigated the largest cover-up in my life time, from the top down. And three of the leading policemen behind it have since been knighted.
The release of documents is too late to be called justice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good it is happened, and it had to happen in the end, but there was no justice for the 96 on the day of the tragedy or in the ensuing years, and that for me is a permanent stain on the authorities whatever they do now to try and make amends.
David Cameron issued a heart felt apology, Kelvin McKenzine, the editor of the newspaper who declared 'The Truth' ... has spent a good amount of time covering his arse and squirming rather than just saying, look, I lied because those people were easy targets. But in writing those headlines and making those claims he did change the world for nearly 25 years. He changed the world for the families and friends and loved ones of those 96 dead people. He made it a living hell in which they had to fight to get the REAL TRUTH out.
Those documents confirmed that the police deliberately tried to smear the fans and falsified statements to cover their incompetence. the police checked the police records of those who had died to try and find reasons to put the blame on them. Reprehensible. They proved the 3.15 threshold was a falsehood. The lives could and should have been saved. They proved large scale criminal corruption by the people meant to protect us.
The officers' initial crimes on the day were primarily negligence and incompetence. Whilst they are criminally responsible for these, there is no suggestion of mens rea. The police officers' actions to change statements and fabricate a case against Liverpool fans after the event however are very much pre-meditated, malicious and intended to pervert the course of justice. Those are the crimes should be tried.
It wasn't journalists who finally gave us the truth. It wasn't diligent detective work of the police. It was the families of the victims. Ordinary people. It takes a lot of heart-ache and a lot of resolve in the face of let-down after let-down to keep pushing year after year after year to get at the truth. Ordinary people who wouldn't give up.
Words have power. Especially ones that are written down. Especially ones that appear presented as the truth in the newspapers we buy. It takes something incredible to overturn them and show the real truth. This isn't finished. And it shouldn't be until those proven to have lied and deceived are found guilty and condemned by the real truth.
September 12, 2012
Loyal Readers and How to Kick 'em in the Teeth
I had a plan this morning, I was going to sit down and do a quick post about - well I'll save that for tomorrow. That went out the window when I got a price drop alert from a mate with the line 'mistake or cynical promotional move'. I followed the link and saw that the brand new James Herbert novel ASH has been discounted. Deeply discounted. Impossibly deeply discounted... to 20p.
Huzzah all loyal Herbert fans say! Or do they? I mean ASH is the third story featuring David Ash, Herbert's psychic investigator, and follows on from Haunted and Ghosts of Sleath. It's a novel that's been six years in the making and obviously MacMillan want it to be a rip roaring success so they're buying it a top of the chart slot with some cynical 20p digital strategy. Good for them. Not, however good for the loyal Herbert readers. Readers have been preached at by writers for years about momentum and how an intense burst of sales in the first week or so of publication is vital for chart positions - how selling 10,000 copies in one week could guarantee you a slot in the UK chart but selling the same 10,000 copies over 20 weeks wouldn't. Slow burners they call them. They're great, too, obviously, but people want to put 'bestseller' on the cover as that means something.
ASH came out on August 30. 12 days ago. Amazon have a return policy of 7 days on digital books. So MacMillan have set the 20p special five days after those loyal fans who've been preached to about momentum can return it and save a few quid.
A few quid? Actually, the digital list price of ASH was 10.79 UK, or about what, 14 US... we're not talking a few quid. It's a kick in the teeth for loyal readers. For those who put their orders in in advance to give the book the momentum it needed.
If MacMillan wanted to pull a launch stunt at price at 20p why not reverse it - why not do it for a day or two or even five days - from the day of the launch so in fact the loyal readers were the ones being rewarded for their support?
Because obviously some cynical bodies somewhere realised they'd be prepared to pay an inflated digital price given the hardcover is for sale at 10 quid, 79p cheaper than the digital edition was (despite the stamped price of 18.99).
So what's the upshot of this?
For me it's about trust - there are several digital editions on Amazon at 20p at the moment, Peter James' Dead Man's Grip, for instance, replacing Peter James' Perfect People, both published, again, by MacMillan... Perfect People was James' most recent paperback... so, I look at the MacMIllan webpage and see books coming from lots of great writers - and remember MacMillan is one imprint, the main company owns Pan MacMillan, Tor UK, Picador, Boxtree, Kingfisher and others... and I know that I can't TRUST these imprints to value customer loyalty anymore. In fact I can reasonably assume that any title the release could be cynically dropped by as much as 10 quid just 12 days after release if they're popular books they want to chart...
So what do I do?
I stop buying books in the first week/month of release...
Exactly the opposite effect the marketing gurus would want. But I'll just start to wait for them to cut their own throats and give me the books for 20p. I mean, they don't value my loyalty to their authors so why should I show any? It's like SKY when you're a sky customer there's bugger all in the way of offers, you're in. You only get improved service when you threaten to leave. But if you're not a SKY customer there's digital discount packages and enticements out the wazoo... because loyalty doesn't seem to matter any more does it?
In a day and age where people are so wound up about piracy damaging our industry it's amazing how much damage they can do to it themselves with one stupid idea.
Huzzah all loyal Herbert fans say! Or do they? I mean ASH is the third story featuring David Ash, Herbert's psychic investigator, and follows on from Haunted and Ghosts of Sleath. It's a novel that's been six years in the making and obviously MacMillan want it to be a rip roaring success so they're buying it a top of the chart slot with some cynical 20p digital strategy. Good for them. Not, however good for the loyal Herbert readers. Readers have been preached at by writers for years about momentum and how an intense burst of sales in the first week or so of publication is vital for chart positions - how selling 10,000 copies in one week could guarantee you a slot in the UK chart but selling the same 10,000 copies over 20 weeks wouldn't. Slow burners they call them. They're great, too, obviously, but people want to put 'bestseller' on the cover as that means something.
ASH came out on August 30. 12 days ago. Amazon have a return policy of 7 days on digital books. So MacMillan have set the 20p special five days after those loyal fans who've been preached to about momentum can return it and save a few quid.
A few quid? Actually, the digital list price of ASH was 10.79 UK, or about what, 14 US... we're not talking a few quid. It's a kick in the teeth for loyal readers. For those who put their orders in in advance to give the book the momentum it needed.
If MacMillan wanted to pull a launch stunt at price at 20p why not reverse it - why not do it for a day or two or even five days - from the day of the launch so in fact the loyal readers were the ones being rewarded for their support?
Because obviously some cynical bodies somewhere realised they'd be prepared to pay an inflated digital price given the hardcover is for sale at 10 quid, 79p cheaper than the digital edition was (despite the stamped price of 18.99).
So what's the upshot of this?
For me it's about trust - there are several digital editions on Amazon at 20p at the moment, Peter James' Dead Man's Grip, for instance, replacing Peter James' Perfect People, both published, again, by MacMillan... Perfect People was James' most recent paperback... so, I look at the MacMIllan webpage and see books coming from lots of great writers - and remember MacMillan is one imprint, the main company owns Pan MacMillan, Tor UK, Picador, Boxtree, Kingfisher and others... and I know that I can't TRUST these imprints to value customer loyalty anymore. In fact I can reasonably assume that any title the release could be cynically dropped by as much as 10 quid just 12 days after release if they're popular books they want to chart...
So what do I do?
I stop buying books in the first week/month of release...
Exactly the opposite effect the marketing gurus would want. But I'll just start to wait for them to cut their own throats and give me the books for 20p. I mean, they don't value my loyalty to their authors so why should I show any? It's like SKY when you're a sky customer there's bugger all in the way of offers, you're in. You only get improved service when you threaten to leave. But if you're not a SKY customer there's digital discount packages and enticements out the wazoo... because loyalty doesn't seem to matter any more does it?
In a day and age where people are so wound up about piracy damaging our industry it's amazing how much damage they can do to it themselves with one stupid idea.
September 11, 2012
The First Day of the Rest of My So Called Blog
Tuesday. The week begins not with a bang but with a whimper. Well not even a whimper really. More of thought on taboos.
See, today is September the 11th. It's a day we're told to never forget, and with good reason.
But it's also a day that as a thriller writer, fresh on the back of Silver selling into hardcover, I worked up an outline and sample document for a new book which felt like the thriller 'holy grail' - I had it in my head to do a terrorist novel about an elite taskforce of terror cell hunters formed in the wake of 9/11, and with the 10th anniversary of that haunting and heartbreaking personal tragedy that touched so many lives-including those of friends of the family. The idea was that if I were a terrorist, with the escalation of fear caused by the assault on the Twin Towers a credible threat would always surface on 11th of September 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary.
I plotted it out fairly tightly with an American co-writer who all of a sudden disappeared and the book was left to languish, the timely nature of it meaning that once a certain date past it was dead. It wasn't until about 6 months later my co-author on the project emailed to apologise and in his mail cited the fact he felt 'uncomfortable trading on tragedy'.
That really struck me as a strange reaction given the subject of just about every war novel and contemporary thriller in some way trades on the tragedy of real life events and asks 'what if?' It's not about forgetting or remembering for me. Yes real lives were lost, but does that mean as an author you can't write about World War II or the assassination of JFK or well, looking at the book charts quite a few 'root causes' that revolve around personal tragedies and shocking events. Could you never write a child kidnap story for fear of upsetting people over Madeleine McCann? Or a secret service story where an agent's family get gunned down in the French Alps? Or a novel set in a high school massacre?
Where as writers do we draw the line and say okay enough time's elapsed for that to being grist to the creative mill?
Will it ever be 'fair game'?
Should it?
Needless to say I was quite disappointed that task force novel was ditched, because I thought it had the potential to be a powerful and emotive read. But today I wonder, am I glad I didn't write it in the end?
See, today is September the 11th. It's a day we're told to never forget, and with good reason.
But it's also a day that as a thriller writer, fresh on the back of Silver selling into hardcover, I worked up an outline and sample document for a new book which felt like the thriller 'holy grail' - I had it in my head to do a terrorist novel about an elite taskforce of terror cell hunters formed in the wake of 9/11, and with the 10th anniversary of that haunting and heartbreaking personal tragedy that touched so many lives-including those of friends of the family. The idea was that if I were a terrorist, with the escalation of fear caused by the assault on the Twin Towers a credible threat would always surface on 11th of September 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary.
I plotted it out fairly tightly with an American co-writer who all of a sudden disappeared and the book was left to languish, the timely nature of it meaning that once a certain date past it was dead. It wasn't until about 6 months later my co-author on the project emailed to apologise and in his mail cited the fact he felt 'uncomfortable trading on tragedy'.
That really struck me as a strange reaction given the subject of just about every war novel and contemporary thriller in some way trades on the tragedy of real life events and asks 'what if?' It's not about forgetting or remembering for me. Yes real lives were lost, but does that mean as an author you can't write about World War II or the assassination of JFK or well, looking at the book charts quite a few 'root causes' that revolve around personal tragedies and shocking events. Could you never write a child kidnap story for fear of upsetting people over Madeleine McCann? Or a secret service story where an agent's family get gunned down in the French Alps? Or a novel set in a high school massacre?
Where as writers do we draw the line and say okay enough time's elapsed for that to being grist to the creative mill?
Will it ever be 'fair game'?
Should it?
Needless to say I was quite disappointed that task force novel was ditched, because I thought it had the potential to be a powerful and emotive read. But today I wonder, am I glad I didn't write it in the end?
September 10, 2012
Trying Something New
Hello chaps and chapesses,
Not entirely sure how this whole thing works here. Most people who know me know I'm not big on the whole blog thing but that's mainly because I always wind up thinking I'm yammering on to myself and the dust bunnies that tumble all around me.
So...
I don't have a heck of a lot to say - it's gratifying to see so many ratings on the books, makes me think at least a few are getting out there, being liked, being loathed, and earning the odd shrug of 'meh' from people. That's really all we ever ask for, I think. Not the meh, obviously.
So, this week Variance (in the US) and my own BadPress in the UK are publishing the tangental novel to Silver Solomon's Seal. Silver's been very kind to me over the last few years, having sold something like 45,000 copies in English, and a good few more in German, Spanish, French, Turkish, and Polish so far. I'm hoping people who had a good time with it will check out the new one, it's the same team, but rather than a direct sequel is the first of 3 'origins' novels that build up more of the background and really get into the characters in ways I couldn't in Silver.
Oh yeah and I get to blow things up...
Anyway. I'm planning on doing a series of blogs about things like 'The Terrible Twos' and how you deal will following up a reasonably successful book... about keeping interest and having a butterfly mind and well, lots of odds and sods, assuming people are actually interested and I'm not just chatting away to myself.
So... that's it...
And now for something completely different.
Steve
Not entirely sure how this whole thing works here. Most people who know me know I'm not big on the whole blog thing but that's mainly because I always wind up thinking I'm yammering on to myself and the dust bunnies that tumble all around me.
So...
I don't have a heck of a lot to say - it's gratifying to see so many ratings on the books, makes me think at least a few are getting out there, being liked, being loathed, and earning the odd shrug of 'meh' from people. That's really all we ever ask for, I think. Not the meh, obviously.
So, this week Variance (in the US) and my own BadPress in the UK are publishing the tangental novel to Silver Solomon's Seal. Silver's been very kind to me over the last few years, having sold something like 45,000 copies in English, and a good few more in German, Spanish, French, Turkish, and Polish so far. I'm hoping people who had a good time with it will check out the new one, it's the same team, but rather than a direct sequel is the first of 3 'origins' novels that build up more of the background and really get into the characters in ways I couldn't in Silver.
Oh yeah and I get to blow things up...
Anyway. I'm planning on doing a series of blogs about things like 'The Terrible Twos' and how you deal will following up a reasonably successful book... about keeping interest and having a butterfly mind and well, lots of odds and sods, assuming people are actually interested and I'm not just chatting away to myself.
So... that's it...
And now for something completely different.
Steve
The Erratic Mumblings of Steven Savile
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