Derek Landy's Blog, page 18

Oz

Australia, eh? Lovely country, full of weirdoes...

I'm sitting in my hotel room in... where am I? Melbourne? Adelaide? Wherever. Anyway, here I sit, tapping away at my laptop, about to go to bed and I figured I'd drop by and say hi.

So, y'know... hi.

The tour continues to go well. In fact, it's going great. Brilliantly. The response has been incredible, with so much energy and enthusiasm at each event. Signing queues have been massive, which is slightly less cool, because I just don't have the time to chat to each person as much as I'd like to, or even sign all of their books in some cases. Next time I'm over I'm going to INSIST that more time is left for signing. Some of these Minions-with-funny-accents go through an awful lot to get to me- some have been driving for 7 hours, some have even FLOWN in... The least I can do is have a chat and sign whatever they have. Sometimes that's just not possible, but I try my best.

I've met so many people from this Blog and the Forums and the Facebook pages (and the old Bebo page! Which I must reactivate... maybe... The Bebo page was DAUNTING because of the amount of comments and emails I'd have to answer every time I logged in... Every time I opened the Bebo page I'd spend HOURS there... no such thing as a quick dip in and out...)

Where was I? Oh yes, meeting a load of people I've only seen online. That's pretty cool, to be honest. I had no idea, for example, that Nixion or Calamity were Australian (well, maybe I did have an idea once, but I'd totally forgotten it). It's always so weird when I meet people and realise I know them from somewhere online- it's like we're old friends, and yet we've never met...

Another nice thing about being on tour is the amount of hyperventilating teenage girls who arrive in front of me. I swear, if Teenage Me ever found out what Adult Me is confronted with every day on tour, he'd be so insanely jealous... You're all hysterically funny and quite, quite odd.

When I get home I'll post pictures of some of the cool stuff I've been given (really, you'll have to see them to understand the coolness of some of your fellow Minions), but suffice it to say that I'm really glad I only packed half a suitcase worth of stuff- because I'll be going home with a LOT more than I came with.


Right then, just a few things before I go... According to the Facebook page, some stores in the UK and Ireland have already released KOTW. Naughty,  naughty stores. On its OFFICIAL release date I'll put up a special Spoiler blog where you can discuss it here openly, but until then, please keep doing what you're doing and don't spoil it for the others. I'm very grateful to you all for the restraint you've shown so far.


Because of the fact that some schools are back early, some of the Irish times have been changed.


Thursday 30th AugustPublic Signing: Easons, Whitewater Shopping Centre, Newbridge, TIME CHANGE FROM 12 noon to 3PM start.
Friday 31st AugustPublic Signing: Dubray Books, Market Cross Shopping Centre, Kilkenny, TIME CHANGE FROM 2PM TO 4PM start.



And one last thing- the competition winners from, ahem, last year. Yes yes, it's taken me ages to send you your books, but now you're also going to get a signed KOTW too, so, like, yay...! But I need you to send your names and addresses to us again, because SOME of you, hilariously, decided not to include your real name the last time, and instead insisted that the books be sent to your online taken name... which would have confused the nice people who deliver the parcels. Also, I know that at least one of you have changed addresses since winning, so we're gonna need an update.

So, send your real name, and your real address (and also your online name so I'll know who you are) to this email:

kids.marketing@harpercollins.co.uk.

It's the only email address they could find that wasn't being used for anything else... Sorry...

NZ

New Zealand, eh? Lovely country, full of lunatics...

I arrived on Tuesday, checked into my hotel and met up with a friend who's living over here. By nine that night, every time my eyes closed I was in serious danger of falling asleep right there and then. Only the fact that my luggage had been misplaced somewhere between Dublin and Auckland kept me from turning in early. It's not exactly a nice feeling, wondering if you're ever going to see your luggage again. You start thinking about all the clothes you packed, about the toothbrush, about the phone charger you might never see again...

I went to bed, then was woken at 2 AM by reception- my luggage had arrived. They delivered it to my room and I wept manly tears of joy. Or, y'know, I shrugged and mumbled a thank you and went back to bed. Whichever.

It's now Friday night, and tomorrow is my last day in New Zealand. It's been astonishingly good so far. Every school I've been to has been great- really enthusiastic people, ready to have a laugh. Two schools even did a welcoming Haka-type thing, which was awesomely cool.

The public signings have been great too. This afternoon I did one in the Children's Bookshop in Christchurch, where I met a load of readers, including Jordan, a girl who had kept me updated about her status after the recent earthquakes. It's always nice to meet people I only know online, and she had many, MANY questions to ask.

Tomorrow is my last day in NZ, and so the first chunk of my tour will be over. I've really enjoyed my few days here- this was a great way to kick off the tour.

EDIT:

I've just read over what I've just written, and it's all so sickeningly POSITIVE and nice. Bah humbug! There needs to be some grouchy stuff in here in order to be genuine- so I'll just say that I STILL haven't been able to see Katie Taylor winning the gold in boxing, and I am NOT happy about that. I can't even find it on YouTube.

Bah YouTube! Bah!

Every single Irish Minion knows who Katie Taylor is, and they're as proud of her as I am. What a girl.

A Post Before I Go

I have a few random pictures cluttering up my desktop, so I shall intersperse them as I go...

I'm catching my plane tomorrow. An hour to London, then 13 hours to Singapore, then 7.5 hours to Sydney, then 3 hours to Auckland... I'll arrive in New Zealand a little before midday on Tuesday, mildly confused about whether or not I'm sleepy after spending a day in the air zipping across time zones. 
Oh boy oh boy.
I'm not packed, either. I know what I'm bringing- roughly- but I'll leave the packing until tomorrow. I'm bringing A Dance of Dragons to read, and I've already looked up what movies will be playing on the plane. Movies that I haven't seen but want to include Battleship, Dark Shadows, Lockout, Get the Gringo, The Five-Year Engagement, and The Woman in Black, and I'll also get a chance to watch The Avengers again. That's roughly 16 hours of movies... I think I should be okay...

Today, I am cleaning the house. Laura will be staying here when I'm gone so I need to have everything nice and tidy, or else she'll throw a mug at me. 
I fully intend to blog while I'm on tour. I know my publishers would like me to keep a Tour Blog, detailing how the events went and who I met and what the various cities were like- basically documenting the entire experience. Annnnnnnnd that's not gonna happen. When I get back to my hotel- usually at around 9 o'clock at night- I'm pretty much exhausted. But I'll do my best to keep my Minions appraised of developments.

I'll be gone for 17 days, during which time I'll be staying at 9 hotels and visiting 12 airports. 
The temperature in New Zealand is ranging from 1 degree (celsius) at night to 14 during the day. This, my Minions, is a temperature I can deal with.
The temperature in Australia is ranging from 7 to 23. 23 is a tad high. Please Australia, cool down a bit before I get there. Just a few degrees. Say, five. Thank you.
I've got my Sky box ready to record my shows when I'm away. Right now I'm recording Criminal Minds, Newsroom, The Mentalist, and Supernatural. I was delighted beyond measure to realise that I'll be able to watch the Ronda Rousey fight live in my hotel room on my only day off- Sunday the 19th. Thanks to the time difference, I'll just be sitting down to room service lunch when she fights...
And that's it. That's all. I have a house to clean and time is running out. I also need to write up instructions for Laura on how to use the TV (it's more complicated than it sounds) when I'm gone. All you Minions-with-funny-accents, prepare yourselves. I am coming. 

Spoiling...

Okay then...
For those of you who have read KOTW, first of all, I'm glad you seem to be liking it, but I'm going to have to ask you to be careful. And for those of you who haven't read it- which is the vast majority of you- I'm going to have to ask you to be EXTRA careful. There are spoilers all over the place, on forums and Facebook pages and Tumblr... 
The heartening thing is that these spoilers don't pop out of thin air. Everything is tagged with spoiler warnings, which I really appreciate. But I know you lot. I know how impatient you can be. I know that if you're on a forum and you come to a post that's hidden behind a spoiler warning, and all it takes is one little click... I know how tempting it is to just sneak a teeny tiny peek...
Which could ruin the entire book for you.
We have, what, 35 days until it's widely available? That's a lot of days for mistakes to be made, or for something to slip out...
So be careful. I was never a fan of releasing this book so far in advance of the Ireland/UK date but I was convinced it was necessary in order to facilitate the tour. If it doesn't work out, it won't be happening again. I don't know what that would mean for any future Down Under tours, but I'll deal with that if it crops up. 
So, I want to thank everyone for behaving themselves as far as spoilers go, and ask that they continue to be very, very careful about what they say. 
And also, some of those spoilers (of which I am allowed to read, because, y'know, I wrote the book) and your reactions to them have made me grin...

Tom Percival Back Cover Madness!

You lucky, lucky people...

I am, of course, referring to those Minions who talk with those funny accents. A full 36 days before the rest of us, Kingdom of the Wicked is now available in Australia and New Zealand.

The normal rules apply. No Spoilers. None. None whatsoever. There's not even going to be spoiler zone Blog post for you to discuss it in secret- not until it's available in Ireland and the UK. You're just going to have to keep it to yourself and off the internet for 36 days. That is your punishment for getting it early...

And you have it SO early that not even I have a copy. How is THAT fair?


In other news...

A new school-type event is now listed in the Sydney section of the tour schedule below. If you want to get involved... er... I dunno what you have to do... Get your school to register, or something?

Denver

By now most of you will have heard about what happened in Colorado during the Dark Knight Rises midnight screenings. The gunman does not deserve to have his name mentioned here. He does not deserve any degree of fame or notoriety. He is beyond pathetic. He is beneath contempt.

I'm not going to talk about the victims, the dead and the injured, because even as a writer I don't have the skills to put into words the senseless horror of what has happened. Neither am I going to talk about the friends and families who have lost loved ones. I try not to talk about things about which I know nothing- and I cannot imagine their pain or their grief.

Instead, I'm going to talk about Art, and life imitating Art, and Art imitating life.

This pathetic nobody of a person chose the Dark Knight Rises as the perfect place to make his bid for fame, and so people are going to start laying the blame at the feet of films. And those who aren't laying the blame on films are laying the blame on video games- because they like films, and they don't like video games. The pro-gun control people in the US are already blaming it on the availability of high-powered weaponry, and the anti-gun control people are, bizarrely, complaining that MORE people didn't have guns in that cinema. They appear to want a return to the days of the Wild West, where everyone was shooting at everyone else. Both sides will, invariably, start pointing their fingers at the movies, and at video games, for desensitising their children to violence and being the root of all evil in the world.

And this is not something I'm going to debate here. I've said it before on this Blog- video game violence densensitises children to video game violence. Real life violence is a TOTALLY different thing. It's real, for a start, which is something a lot of people tend to forget.

Let's think about another group of people who have been affected by this tragedy. It may seem shallow to start pitying the poor filmmakers, but as a writer I can at least begin to understand what they must be going through. They've spent the last few years of their lives making this movie. They've spent the last few months gearing up for its release. They've spent the last few weeks worrying and fretting and fidgeting. And they've spent the last few days in shock, after some pathetic loser hijacked a night that was supposed to be a celebration, and twisted it into something disgusting.

No matter what this loser's proposed motivation might turn out to be, blaming the films he watched or the games he played or the books he read is as short-sighted as it is irresponsible. The plain fact of the matter is that the blame lies with one person and one person alone- the man with the gun. The man who opened fire. The man who decided to kill.

Lunatics seize their inspiration from all sorts of places- the Beatles' Helter Skelter and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye stand out most prominently- but inspiration is not the same as motivation. Early reports suggest this loser may identify with the Joker. But does this mean Christopher Nolan or Heath Ledger share even one iota of blame? How can it? If the Joker wasn't an inspiration, then something else would have been. The inspiration doesn't matter. Watching The Dark Knight didn't make this loser kill. Only the motivation matters. Why did he kill? What went so wrong in his life that he did this? What went so wrong in his head that he pulled the trigger?

Whenever I hear about another mass shooting in America, or anywhere around the world, a part of my mind always slips away to wonder how I'd react if I had written something like that into my books. When I was writing Kingdom of the Wicked, I had a sequence in mind for the super-powered teenagers to rampage through their school, killing and destroying as they go. When I got to the sequence, though, I paused.

Do I really want to write about teenagers killing their schoolmates? After everything that's happened? And what if I do write it, and the book is released, and a few months later there's another school shooting in the States? It'd have nothing to do with me or my books, obviously, but I'd still have used a horrible scenario that is all too real in a book that is meant simply to entertain.

What if, in Death Bringer, Melancholia had visited a cinema? What if she'd started killing people at random? After Thursday night, how would YOU, the reader, have felt about that? You'd never be able to see those chapters in the same way again, would you? It'd be forever tainted by life imitating Art.

But does that mean it shouldn't be written about? Should a writer shy away from such things on the off-chance that something similar might happen in the real world? Is there any way to actually answer that question and still consider yourself a decent human being?

Speaking for myself, I wasn't comfortable putting that onto paper. If this had been some other book, a book about these spree-killings, then I would have written it and I'd have been proud that I did. But to use it as an action sequence, primarily to entertain? No. I couldn't do it.

Writers, all artists in fact, have a duty to the truth. Stories are lies- no matter what genre they plug into- but the writer must seek the truth in the lie. They must be honest. And in order to be honest, they must reflect the world around them. Simply by doing that, though, they run the risk of life veering too close to their Art, and they risk being tainted by association. But I genuinely believe, with the whole of my heart, that it's a risk they have to take.

My condolences to the friends and families of those who have been hurt or killed in this evil act.

Slight Changes

Hi all,

Just a quick note to point out two slight time changes to the UK dates-  at Southampton and Guildford- to make sure that readers have enough time to get to the events.

For the Irish dates, we're checking when most schools are back in Kilkenny and Newbridge. Both signings were originally scheduled to happen in the middle of the day- but if the schools are back in session by then, we might move those start times to 3 PM. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, and for all those people asking for a Belfast signing, you now have your wish...

The changes have been made to the post below.

Double Rainbow

Another public event in Perth has been added to the Australian
tour-

check three posts down for information. For those who have asked, the Brisbane event on the morning
of the 13th IS a public event. A few schools are coming along,
but it's still open to the public also- even though it's on at 11 AM
on a weekday...EDIT: Also, the Southampton and Dulwich events have been
switched for the UK tour. The change has been made to the below
post...

We're having a pretty awful summer here in Ireland, but
sometimes you can find little moments of prettiness in amongst
all the dreary drabness.Like this double rainbow outside my
house...

I liked that double rainbow. It was a nice double rainbow. But I
didn't like it nearly as much as this guy liked HIS double rainbow...

Ireland and UK

Right then, I have here the details of the Ireland/UK tour. My publishers do like to keep me busy, the little scamps, but this tour isn't quite so arduous as they've been in the past- probably because they know I'll have just come back from the ANZ tour, and will be feeling pretty sorry for myself...


Ireland

30 August: 

Easons, Newbridge, Co Kildare-   Public signing - 12 noon

Easons, O'Connell St, Dublin- Fan Event - 6 PM

31 August:

Dubray Books, Kilkenny - Public signing- 2 PM

1 September:

Waterstones, Drogheda - Public signing - 11 AM

Easons, Swords - Public signing - 3 PM

2 September:

Easons, Cork - Public signing - 12 noon

5 September:

Mountains to the Sea Festival, Dun Laoighaire


UK

7 September:

Village Bookshop Dulwich, London

8 September:

Waterstones, Bournemouth - Public signing - 11 AM

Waterstones, Southampton - Public signing - 3 PM

9 September:

Waterstones, Bluewater - Public signing - 12 noon

13 September:

Waterstones, Guildford - Public event - 6 PM

14 September:

Waterstones, Birmingham (New Street) - Public signing - 5 PM

15 September:

WHS, Stoke - Public signing - 11 AM

Waterstones, Liverpool One - Public signing - 3 PM


29 September: 

Bangor Literature Festival

14 October: 

Cheltenham Festival




And now I am going to watch the Silva/Sonnen fight from last night. I haven't even glanced at online stuff today for fear that someone will have mentioned who won. Oh I'm looking forward to this...

Winners and Release Dates

For those of you who don't know, we recently ran a writing competition on the Skulduggery website, where I supplied the first 50 words of a story and left it to others to come up with the next 450. The ten winners were supposed to be announced last week, but it took my publishers longer than expected to cope with the massive response... Ah, those silly publishers. When will they learn?

I was sent a little over 30 entries and it was not easy narrowing them down. As usual, the standard of writing was very high- and not just with the winners, either. A lot of the entries made me laugh, and that's always a good starting-off point, but the major point of interest for me was watching where you took the story. I gave the villain an outrageous name- Sadistica Tortura- and sat back and let the fun begin. There were some lovely ideas in there, some lovely moments and some fantastic lines. You should all be proud- especially those of you who managed to stick to the word count (ahem).


I managed to take a few days off last week, but seeing as how I have about five weeks before I head off on tour, I need to start working again. August is pretty much wiped off my calendar as far as writing goes, so I'm going to have to get an early start on Book Eight. Which is scary, because it only seems like a few weeks ago that I finished Book Seven. I'm not going to talk about Book Eight AT ALL until a few months from now, once you've absorbed KOTW into your bloodstream, but it feels kind of weird to be tying up all of these stories that I've been telling since 2007. Best not dwell, methinks...

Oh, and as for KOTW release dates, those lucky scamps in Australia/New Zealand will be getting the new book ever-so-slightly ahead of anyone else... My tour there starts on August 8th, and my publishers want the books on the shelves at LEAST one week before that- maybe even two. For the UK and Ireland, we're looking at a release date of August 30th, I think.

Of course, the Minions-who-speak-funny know by now how much I detest spoilers, and you've all been fantastic at not ruining the books for other people. I shall expect this to continue (shakes fist in a threatening manner...)

For all you Ameriminions, still no news on getting the newer books released over there, my apologies. I have some positive news for the Germinions, however, as my German publishers are planning to catch up to the English-language releases. More news on that when I have it.


Oh, and Irish readers will be able to take a break from the football final on Sunday night to tune into Celebrity Mastermind on TV3, where I shall be showing off my amazing brain power on national TV. Hells yeah.


And now, a picture.