Derek Landy's Blog, page 14

World Book Day

Just to let you know that World Book Day is this Thursday (well, it is in this part of the world, anyway) and to celebrate Alex Barclay and myself will be holding two events. The first, in Kildare, is pretty much sold out, but the second one is in Easons in O'Connell Street, Dublin, at 6 PM. We'll be there, talking about... stuff... and books... and writing... and, er... annnnnyway...

Because this is somewhat last minute, I'm not expecting that many people to turn up to the Dublin event, which means it'll be a lot more casual and chatty than usual. If you're interested, get in touch with Easons to reserve a place, and we'll see you there.

Toodles.

Book Eight

And the title of Book Eight IS...

Actually hold on, we'll get to that in a moment. I have another 15 minutes before I have to post this entry, at 9 PM, and I'm going to use that 15 minutes, dammit. Because I did things today! Things that deserve to be blogged about!

Well, I did ONE thing that deserves to be blogged about. This afternoon I interviewed Steven Moffat, head of all things Doctor Who and Sherlock, on stage at Trinity College, Dublin. I'm pretty sure it wasn't recorded, though, so you're just going to have to take my word for how brilliantly it went. I've never interviewed anyone before— I'm used to being the one interviewed— so it was very interesting to sit in the other chair for a change.

Mr Moffat turned out to be everything I'd hoped he would be— he's a nice guy and he's FUNNY. It was such an informal, casual conversation that it made asking him questions a breeze. I love the shows he makes, as did everyone there, and it was so cool to be able to talk to him about them and not feel like  a total nerd.

And for those of you who are wondering, yes, I DID ask him for Karen Gillan's phone number. NO, he did not give it to me. But I think I broke him down sufficiently that all it'll take is one more chance encounter, and then wa-heyyyyy!

Ahem.


Okay, I now have seven minutes until I have to post this entry.


Oh, I'll be doing two publicity events in Ireland on March the 7th. At 10:30 AM in the Riverbank Theatre in Kildare I'll be interviewing (because I do it SO well) Alex Barclay on stage about her new book Curse of Kings.

Later that day, back in Easons in O'Connell Street at 6 PM, Alex and I will be doing... er... some sort of event. We haven't a clue WHAT we'll be doing, to be honest, but it'll be brilliant, and it'll be funny. I swear. Probably.

At both events, we'll be signing whatever you want signed.


Two minutes!


Okay then, here we go. This title has been in my head for years. EVERYTHING in the series has been leading up to Books Eight and Nine, and this is really where it all starts to build to the (hopefully epic) conclusion.

Prepare yourself for horror! Tragedy! Hilarity! Fights! Blood! Quips! Magic! Everything that makes life worth living!

Ladies and gentlemen, coming at the very end of August, I give you

Skulduggery Pleasant: Last Stand of Dead Men.

Imagine

Ah, Minions... you weirdos...

The event at the Imagine Festival in London went very well, as I thought it would. It was the second time I was on stage talking about the movies that had influenced the books— the first time was last year, at the Mountains to the Sea Festival in Dublin.

The place was packed out and the response was fantastic. Afterwards I signed for about three hours, seeing a lot of familiar (worryingly familiar) faces in the queue... It was all so much fun, and I want to thank everyone who turned up.

For those of you who couldn't make it, here are the trailers we showed... and here are the trailers— because of age restrictions— we COULDN'T show...


Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The whole Indiana Jones series has been a huge inspiration to me (except perhaps the fourth film.. ahem...) in terms of sheer fun and adventure and character. Jones is a perfect hero because, bizarrely, he rarely succeeds... Look at the first film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and count how many times he messes up. He loses the idol, he loses Marian, he loses the Ark, he loses Marian (again), his bluff is called, he's captured... The guy never wins. But he NEVER gives up. And that's what makes him a hero.

I said none of this to Steven Spielberg when I met him, of course. I just started grinning.

But for the first book, this is exactly the kind of vibe I was going for. Fun, fantastic, and faintly frightening.

Another film that influenced the first book, and the series as a whole, is this one...


Big Trouble in Little China was a film that confused the hell out of me when I first saw it as a kid. I saw Kurt Russell and thought, okay, here we have the big strong American hero who has all the tough guy lines... and then he proceeds to bumble his way through the entire film. This is a guy who fights the bad guys at the end, totally unaware that he has lipstick smeared over his mouth.

It was only when I saw it again, years later, that I got the joke and I realised just how fantastic this film really is.

Playing With Fire is my monster movie. The Grotesquery, made up of parts of so many other creatures, is my Frankenstein's monster.


Every Saturday night I'd stay up after my folks had gone to bed, and I'd watch the old black and white Universal horrors, all the stuff from RKO... I don't know why I loved horror movies from such a young age, don't know what it was about me that responded so well, but I ABSORBED these things.


The Faceless Ones, I always say, is my whodunnit- it's my mystery book. Batu, after all, is the man behind the scenes, pulling all the strings. But this is also the first time we see the Faceless Ones themselves, which were inspired by the Cthulu stories by HP Lovecraft. The wonderful Hellboy comic is inspired by Lovecraft also, as you can see in the trailer for the movie adaptation...


(Oh, and also? Hellboy 2? They KIND of stole something from Skulduggery. Check out the poster and see if anything seems... familiar...)


(Ahem. Moving on...)

Dark Days is my revenge flick. You can't beat a good revenge flick, you really can't, and I jammed so much into this book. We have Tanith torture, we have Moloch and his vampires, we have Scapegrace becoming a zombie, we have the first real mention of Darquesse (even though she'd been in my plans from the very start) and we have the chapter entitled "Mid-Afternoon of the Dead".

Now, I could show the trailer to Night of the Living Dead, or Dawn of the Dead, or Day of the Dead, or the first two Evil Dead movies... but instead I'll show the trailer to Army of Darkness, the third Evil Dead film by Sam Raimi, and one of my favourite movies of all time...


Mortal Coil is my Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It's my The Thing. It's the book where the Remnants run wild, and you can't trust the people you know, because they may not be the people you know anymore... Behold the glory of the hairstyles of the 1970s, and one of the most terrifying films I'd ever seen...


The Thing is the second John Carpenter/Kurt Russell film on my list, and it's here because it deserves to be. A masterclass in tension. If you're old enough, watch it... and watch it ALONE.


And in the chapter "By The Sword", we get one of my many nods to wonderful movies such as The Princess Bride. This one is pretty blatant. See if you can spot it in the middle of this, one of the greatest sword fights ever put onto celluloid...


Death Bringer is my superhero story. Between this and KOTW, the whole secret identity thing really starts to become a major issue, and this is the first book where we have a fight between two people who are powerful enough to punch each other through buildings... just like in Superman 2...


And this is also the book where Val gets attacked by that guy in her house. For me, this is the book where I switched from "realistic martial arts" to "realistic fighting", both in my writing and my own training. Take a look at my darling Gina Carano in Haywire...


And now we arrive at Kingdom of the Wicked, my science fiction story, where we have unsuspecting teenagers suddenly gifted with amazing powers, and we watch as it corrupts them. For this, Akira was a huge influence.


And it was also an influence on Chronicle, the trailer we showed at the festival. I THOROUGHLY recommend this movie.


And because it was science fiction, I felt completely justified in slipping in a nod to a certain Doctor...


We ALSO have a werewolf scene, which I did my best to link to the transformation in An American Werewolf in London. I'm not going to show that clip here, because it contains some brief nudity, but if one or two of you were to search for it, you would find that changing into a werewolf is a lot more painful than it appears in Twilight...

And SPEAKING of Twilight, how could I forget the debt I owe it for certain aspects of Death Bringer? So here we are, the trailer. Oh, be warned- one case of swearing at the very beginning.


And to top it all off, a massive influence on my writing...



And now I'm going to watch Ronda Rousey defend her UFC title against Liz Carmouche, in the FIRST women's event the UFC has ever held. In Ronda's own words, it is on like Donkey Kong...

Up For Air

84,726 words.

And that's the PLOT written.

Now I go back to the very start and write the STORY. The story is different from the plot. The plot is everything that has to happen at certain points— the plot is the writer inflicting his will on the book. The story, however, is how we get to the plot. The story is what drives the characters forward. The story is what captivates US, the reader.

Naturally, there's a whole heap of overlap between the two. A lot of the time, plot is story and story is plot. But not ALL the time. And for this one, the war book, I needed to get the plot hammered into shape before I start to lather on the story.

Now I get to spend time with Val and her family. Now I get to write about Scapegrace and Thrasher. Now I get to have fun and make jokes.

If there's one thing I don't want, is to have a less-funny Skulduggery book. I like it when they're funny. The danger, as Val gets older and the books get darker, is that they lose their humour. I haven't read the first few books in a while, but I'd imagine there are a lot more jokes per page in the early ones than the later ones. I expected this, but there is still a certain ratio I have to keep. Even though you Minions respond to the emotional beats of these stories as they get more mature, no one is really wishing for a joke-free book, are they? Where's the fun in that? So now I go back and make sure that no matter how grim things get (and they DO get grim) or how dire the situation becomes (and it DOES become dire), we have enough jokes and laughing-in-the-face-of-death to see us through the darkness and out the other side.

Curse of Kings

It took me ages to get into fantasy books.

For most of my life, I had no interest. I didn't want to read about some made-up place that never existed and people running around with swords and elves and trolls and dragons and whatnot. I wanted stories set in reality, in the modern day. Fantasy films were fine, but I only had to spend two hours watching those. Reading a fantasy book was altogether different.

I never read The Lord Of The Rings. My brother did, and whenever he spoke about it I could sense the frustration in his voice whenever he talked about the endless songs and silliness. I liked the movies, of course. Well, I liked the parts in the movies where they focussed on the humans. Hobbits I could do without.

And then I read a review of a book called The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. The review said this book had blistering action and fascinating characters and the whole thing was held together by acerbic wit. And that was the thing. Wit. Humour. For me, fantasy books just seemed so incredibly po-faced, like they took themselves way too seriously.

So I picked up The Blade Itself, and I loved it. I loved everything about it. I loved every single thing about this book and it was fantasy, so I asked myself— what else have I been missing out on? And the series that was recommended by quite simply everyone was George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice— which later became known as the Game of Thrones books, thanks to the TV show. So I read that, and I loved it. I read the next one and the next one and the next one. I loved them all.

All this is a (very) roundabout way of introducing Curse of Kings, by Alex Barclay.


Alex is a friend of mine. She's a crime writer by day, and has recently become a fantasy author by night. I love her crime novels. I never know what the hell is going on until the final few pages, and I am technically in love with her main character, Ren Bryce. Ren Bryce is the most awesome woman in the world, and I don't care that she doesn't actually exist. She exists for me, and that's what matters.

Alex's crime novels are thoroughly modern and laced with one-liners and sarcastic asides, so when she told me she was writing a fantasy novel for younger readers, I was thrilled.

(Unless she's reading this blog. If you're reading this, Alex, I wasn't thrilled. I was the opposite of thrilled. I was un-thrilled. I was de-thrilled. It takes a lot more than YOU to thrill ME ands that's no mistake. Damn right. Darn tootin'. I'm going to stop talking about this now. Hell yeah.)

Curse of Kings has it all. It has kingdoms and heroes and villains and secrets and mysteries and swords and killing and monsters and monsters and monsters. Did I mention it has monsters? It does. Lots of them. And they're all... weird. Oh, and the book also has lamprey eels. Do yourself a favour. Search Google Images for lamprey eels. Go on, I'll wait. Just type it in and take a look... go on...


Yes. There are things THAT disgusting in real life.

I'm not going to go into detail about the Big Mystery in Curse of Kings, because even mentioning what the mystery hinges on could spoil it for you, and I wouldn't want to do that. Hopefully it'll take you as much by surprise as it did me.

And if all that doesn't convince you, take a look at  one of the coolest book trailers I've seen in a long time. And pay attention to the man whose quote they use on the cover. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about.

Progress

50267 words written... and Valkyrie and Skulduggery are barely in it.

This doesn't mean, of course, that they won't be taking their usual starring roles in Book 8. Of course they will. But I've had to approach this one in a slightly different way than normal.

Because this book is about, essentially, total war, I've had to think long and hard about how the different sides would fight— such as what tactics they would use in both the short and long term. It means I can't chop and change sequences like I usually would. If they're written, then they've been written for a very specific reason, and I can't mess about with that. So I figured the best way to write about these military actions is to write them FIRST. Write the skirmishes and the battles and the politics and the arguments, and get it all down on the page. Then, once I have the military aspect taken care of, I go back and write my usual Skul & Val stuff around and on top of it all.

It's an interesting way of working, to willingly ignore your main characters for large chunks of writing time. I sincerely hope it works...

Oh, and sometime in February I shall announce the title. I've had this title in mind for YEARS. Some of the early alternatives were:

Skulduggery Pleasant: The Billingsworth Continuum.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Behind Gold Eyes.

Skulduggery Pleasant: It's War, Baby.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Revenge of the Screaminator.

Skulduggery Pleasant: When Warlocks Attack.

Skulduggery Pleasant: A Very Nice Picnic.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Brain-Puncher.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Gut-Eater.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Skulduggery Goes Camping.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Things Get Nasty.

Skulduggery Pleasant: People Gonna Die.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Readers Gonna Cry.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Horace.


And amazingly, the actual title is better than ANY of those! I know, right?

Twitter Rules

Well... that was fun.

My first time on Twitter proved to be something of an avalanche. You know, in a "oh my god run run run" kinda way.

I'll be using it to tell little stories here and there. Some of them will be Skulduggery related, some of them won't- such as the cute little axe murderer story from Saturday night. Some of them may even be related to the series I'll be writing AFTER Skulduggery. Ooooooh! (But I don't know about this. I literally just thought of that right there.)

I'd like to be able to post stories quite regularly, but I'm not committing myself to anything right now. Neither am I going to be using Twitter in the normal way. Instead, I'll be typing with my toes.

No, wait, that's not what I mean. I mean, I have rules. RULES! And they shall not be broken!

RULE 1: I SHALL NOT FOLLOW!

I only follow two people, and both of those just happen to be attractive lady fighters. That's a pure coincidence, I swear.

My point is, I am not going to open up Twitter every day and see a thousand different streams of tweets from a thousand different people. This will EAT UP MY TIME, and I cannot allow this to happen.

RULE 2: I SHALL NOT RETWEET!

I've seen requests for retweets on Ronda Rousey's page, and people actually get annoyed when she doesn't do it. I'm going to cut this off at the knees before it even gets started— no RT's for me.

RULE 3: I SHALL NOT REPLY!

Again, people get annoyed if you don't reply. They think you're being rude or disrespectful. They think you're ignoring them. While all these things are quite true, replying to everyone is just impossible. Also, it will EAT UP MY TIME. And I need my time for doing the thing you want me to do. Which would you rather— that I write more books, or reply to your tweets?

No, I can't do both. I can't. Shush. Shuttup. Stop. You're making this worse. Quiet. Shhhhhhhhhh.

And here it is, the final and most important rule of all.

RULE 4: I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BREAK ANY OF THESE RULES AT THE SLIGHTEST WHIM.

I have spoken.

Stuff...

Apologies for the lapse in communication. A lot of stuff has happened/is happening and it's hard to find the time to Blog and think about business stuff and writerly endeavours. That said, I'm still hurtling through Book 8- I think I've got a third of it done, which is good news.

Let's see... Okay, on February 20th I'll be in London as part of the Imagine Festival. I''m going to be talking about the movies that have influenced Skulduggery, and showing trailers/scenes as we go. Expect a LOT of awesome 80's movies. You can book your tickets now.

On the 7th of March I'll be at the Riverbank Arts Centre in Kildare, interviewing Alex Barclay on stage about her fantasy novel for younger readers, Curse of Kings. Alex writes some of my favourite crime novels, and she's also a very good friend of mine, and you'll be hearing a lot more from me about Curse of Kings in the next few weeks.

On the 9th of March, I'll be in Derry, the City of Culture, doing... something. For 600 people. So... there's that. Book now! If you can find out what I'm doing. Because I haven't a clue.

In April, for The Maleficent Seven release, I'll be in Dublin and Cork and Galway and Stratford and Milton Keynes and, ulp, Norwich. Where SHE lives.


Oh, and last but not least, Twitter. Here is the official announcement:

I will tweet this Saturday, the 19th, at EXACTLY 9 PM Irish time.

399

399 followers on Twitter and I never tweet.

But you know what?

At some point over the next few weeks... I WILL tweet.

But it's not going to be what you expect.

A New Post

"Write a new blog post," they say. Like it's that easy. Like it's that simple.

And what if I have nothing to talk about? What if there is nothing I WANT to talk about? Don't I get a say in any of this? Doesn't my opinion MATTER?

And of course the Twitter people are nudging me. Every. Single. Day. I can't escape them. They're getting into my head.

They're in my DREAMS...

I'm all achey. I've had a long day and I'm tired. All I want to do is go to bed- and yet going to bed before 2 AM always seems like a waste of time. Like there's something I could be doing, some work I could be getting done...

33,000 words done on Book 8, by the way.

This time last year (January 6th) I started KOTW. I had been hideously delayed because of work to the house I'd been having done, and the deadline was fast approaching. So this year, having 33,000 words done by this stage is something of a relief. I am, of course, assuming that I can continue writing at the same rate. So, er, hopefully I can.

Wrote a cool scene yesterday. It involves Fletcher. It involves blood. It involves AWESOMENESS.