Timothy Miller's Blog, page 7

Carlos Labbe

 

"He'd been mistaken, he said to himself, as he sat back down at his desk: he didn't want to write a detective novel; he wanted to write a mystery." --Carlos Labbé

A Drood

 

After publishing three books without an agent, I've been hitting the cyber-pavement searching for a good one. They don't want snail mail submissions any more, oh, no (my first agent must have been the last one on earth to prefer paper) and half of them have abandoned email queries for query forms--very impersonal and efficient. One recent agent query form asked me what my dream as an author was, which I thought was an interesting question, one I hadn't thought about before. But I dec...

The labyrinthine page

"You can always edit a bad page.
But you can't edit a blank page."

    

      I've been seeing this quote on social media a lot lately, and it's true as far as it goes. But there are hazards involved with filling up a page, and they often go unexamined. Because every word choice constrains the next choice. "A" rather than "an" means that you have eliminated all words with a vowel in the choice of the following word. The word "I've" in at the head of my first sentence locked in the tense for the fo...

Target audience

 

The agent's query submission form asked who was the target audience for my book, so I answered:Mystery readers who don't mind reading in a mirror, romance readers brought up on cheap gin, suspense readers who like getting sidetracked."I mean, if you're going to be rejected anyway, you should have a little fun. Besides, it's true

KRL review of the Pharaoh's Heart

"The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart is a paranormal romp with Holmes and Watson, and a time warp to the well-researched 1920s, from glittering haunts of the rich to the tombs of the Valley of the Kings."

Read the entire review at KRL News and Reviews.

Age Limit

The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart.

                                      Recommended for ages 6 to 600.

Raymond Chandler

[image error]A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong."--Raymond Chandler

A Minifesto

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Call it a minifesto.
"With the rise of artificial intelligence, we've had to imagine a world in which AI replaces the human artist entirely. It's a theoretical day that we hope never comes to pass. Timothy Miller, author of The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, argues that dangerous threats to art do exist, and they don't stem entirely from AI, but from the audience itself. Read on for more."
Read the entire piece at Criminal Element.

Q&A

 

How did you decide where your book was going to take place?

Luxor and London were pretty much de rigeur for a story about Sherlock Holmes and the pharaoh’s curse. Monte Carlo was just for fun, and the Reichenbach Falls seemed like a good place to kill off Holmes. Wait! Did I say that? Did I do that?

A little bit about Holmes, a little bit about Tut, a little bit about me. Catch the whole piece at Fresh Fiction.

Behind the book

 

Where I blame it all on Doyle:

"There wasn’t supposed to be a third book. I mean, a second Sherlock Holmes book made sense, because I had already written it, lo these many years ago, as a screenplay. So my second book actually inspired my first one. that was alright. That was cool."

Read it all at Crimespree Mag.