Peter Darbyshire's Blog, page 23

The girl is in the ice cream truck! The iiiiccccceeee ccccrrrrreeeaaaaammmm trrrrruuuucccckkkk!

Late in The Apocalypse Ark, there’s this real twist where….

Yeah, this is probably the point I should talk about spoilers.

I have a spoilers story I always like to tell people.

A couple of years back, I was watching a season of The Walking Dead on Netflix. I have two children, a full-time career in the media, and I try to write when I can, so I don’t tend to watch things when they first come out. I usually get around to it a year or three later. So I was catching up on the episodes of The Walking Dead that everyone else in the newsroom had already watched.

You can see where this is going.

I mentioned to the photo editor that I had just started Season 2, which focuses in large part on the survivor group’s attempts to find a girl who was separated from the others by walkers early in the season.

“Oh, that moment where she drives the ice cream truck into the house had me crying!” she said.

OK, that’s not really what she said. I’m not going to tell you what she said, because spoilers. Some of you may not have seen it yet, like I hadn’t when she told me what really happened with the missing girl.

A great deal of the season’s drama arises out of the characters’ search for the missing girl. Where is she? Will she ever be found? Did the walkers get her? Etc. The whole season, as I watched the drama build, I could only think: “She’s in the ice cream truck. Just listen for that unholy jingle and track her down.” Well, that’s not exactly what I was thinking, but you know what I mean. All the anticipation and excitement and anxiety and everything else of the season was lost for me because of that one slip by a colleague.

Of course, when I mentioned that to my other colleagues, they thought the situation was quite funny and now they openly discuss plot twists and turns around me whenever they can. It’s enough to make me watch House of Cards instead. There are no surprises there, right?

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying I have a new book out and please don’t give away the secrets. No spoilers! Unless the person you’re talking to wasn’t going to buy the book anyway. Then they deserve to have their day ruined.

“A vastly entertaining, fantastical, breakneck hodgepodge quest novel”

The same day The Apocalypse Ark received that wonderful Vancouver Sun review, it also got a fun review at Publishers Weekly. Hard to beat comments like this:

The Cross series is a spiritual relative to Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim and Lavie Tidhar’s Bookman series, meaning that anyone (and anything) in the literary universe is fair game. Mythological beasts, Lovecraftian allusions, pirates, and characters from Moby Dick and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea all fuse together to form a vastly entertaining, fantastical, breakneck hodgepodge quest novel that has the good sense never to take itself too seriously

“One of the strongest, and strangest, literary creations this country has ever seen”

I will just say that I am deeply pleased to read this review of my latest Cross novel, The Apocalypse Ark. It’s nice to have a reader that gets what you’re trying to do.

Roman (a pseudonym for Vancouver Province journalist Peter Darbyshire) writes with the unfettered delight of a gluttonous reader trapped in a library in his own mind, drawing promiscuously from myth, folk tale, religious texts and apocrypha, literature, music and philosophy — seemingly anything that catches his attention. A Cross novel, at a quick glance or description, seems like an absurdist piece of outsider art, shiny objects thrown together in a fit of barely checked mania.

Anyone who has read a Cross novel, however, knows the truth: despite their crazed, iconoclastic appearance, Roman’s novels are skilfully wrought, thematically deep, with a philosophical depth and a keen sense for both story and its implications. They’re smarter than they would need to be, were they mere action novels, with a sense of literary intersectionality and deep, canonical knowledge most closely akin to writers like Neil Gaiman, Bill Willingham and Mike Carey, graphic novelists all, and three of the finest storytellers at work.

Special thanks to the Storm Crow Alehouse in Vancouver for the photo shoot! I will be back for the Dungeon Burger!

I wish I could quit you, Harlequin

If you search for my new book, The Apocalypse Ark, on Amazon, Indigo, or any of the other online book emporiums, you’re likely to come up with two hits: my book and the Mack Bolan book of the same name.

The funny thing is, they’re related.

Let me explain.

Many years ago, before I was leading the jet-setting life of a published author and rubbing shoulders with Leonardo di Caprio’s body double’s body double, I used to work for Harlequin, the romance publisher. I was a proofreader in their Toronto office, where I worked the night shift after a rather painful divorce — because nothing says romance like a divorced man with no options working a cubicle job at midnight. (All jokes aside, it was a great job, with great people. Except for the salary. That was still a joke.)

What does this have to with the end of the world?

As it turns out, Harlequin is also the publisher of the Mack Bolan books. Who is Mack Bolan, you may ask? (I certainly did.). Mack Bolan is the Executioner, aka a one-man army fighting the enemies of America, whatever they may be today. Think The Punisher meets Netflix’s Daredevil, and you’ll be close enough.

There’s a whole series of Bolan books, but they all feature similar things: “hard men” wielding “sawed-off” weapons that “spurt hot lead” into the bodies of other “hard men.”

You get the idea.

I worked in the Harlequin offices for nearly a year, editing romances and the Mack Bolan books, which were essentially romances for men. After I left Harlequin I continued to freelance for them, while also publishing academic papers on romance novels. So what’s the connection between my new book, The Apocalypse Ark and the Mack Bolan novel of the same name?

None, really. Except for the fact that the Harlequin job was what got me into Toronto in the first place. Once I was in Toronto, I reconnected with old friends who got me into the writing scene there, where I met many new friends. Being part of that scene gave me the inspiration and belief in myself as a writer that helped me publish my first book, Please. It’s a wandering path from the Mack Bolan books to Please to The Apocalypse Ark, but it’s been an interesting journey.

So Mack Bolan’s Apocalypse Ark doesn’t have anything to do with my Apocalypse Ark, but it also has everything to do with my book. Because I likely wouldn’t have written any of my books if I hadn’t worked that Harlequin job all those years ago.

I guess the message of this post is true love never dies, no matter how many times you spurt hot lead into its hard body. Also, make sure you order the right copy of The Apocalypse Ark if you buy it online. Or just buy them both and make everyone happy. Because Harlequin is all about the happy endings.

Behold the chimera fish!

Is it any coincidence that horrors from the deep begin to surface just as I publish my new book, The Apocalypse Ark? I think not. Take back your horrors, ocean! (Also, make note of this devil fish for new book.)

See also the mysterious sounds of the sea!

Flashback Friday: In which I talk about the old book instead of the new one

I know I should be using this time to promote my new Cross novel, The Apocalypse Ark, but Facebook just reminded me about the talk I had with Sean Cranbury at The Interruption one year ago. In that podcast, we talked about the second Cross book, The Dead Hamlets. Go have a listen to it if you haven’t already — it’s a fun chat about pen names, literary fatigue and the nuances of genre. Best of all, it’s under 10 minutes long! Why, you could listen to the whole thing while you’re ordering your copy of The Apocalypse Ark online….

You can’t really enjoy porn if you’re at work

I recently wrote a piece on the most popular porn search terms in Canada for my day job at The Province. As it turns out, this is not the first time I’ve written about porn in my workplace. Or viewed it, for that matter.

My most infamous story of surfing porn at work comes from my days at eye weekly, a now-defunct alternative weekly paper in Toronto. I was employed by eye as a proofreader for a time, my first gig in the glamorous world of the media. Most of my duties consisted of fact-checking porn sites that our sex columnist mentioned in her columns. It seemed she was willing to experiment with everything except Google, so I had to ensure we were linking to the correct lusty corner of the porn net.

This one particular day, I was rather hung over and unshaven, sitting slumped in my chair and guzzling a coffee to keep awake in eye’s dark dungeon as I perused porn for my paycheque at the ungodly hour of sometime before noon. I heard some people enter the room behind me but I didn’t really pay any attention because the editorial department wasn’t really a public space. Then I heard someone saying “And this is where the magic happens” or something to that effect, before his voice trailed off.

I looked over my shoulder to see a man in a suit guiding a group of men and women in suits through our office. At the time, eye was owned by TorStar, publisher of the Toronto Star and also the owner of Harlequin Romances. For whatever reason, this TorStar exec had decided to lead a group of clients or other execs or something on a tour of our offices. And there I was, slumped in my chair, red-eyed, clinging to my coffee like it was the holy grail, while on the screen in front of me men with truly impressive erections tried to outperform each other in an outrageous gang bang. Did I mention it wasn’t even noon yet?

“How are you doing?” I said. Or something to that effect. Surprisingly, no one greeted me back. Instead, the exec quickly ushered them from the room, and I never saw another tour come through in my time as proofreader there.

The fact that eye no longer exists has nothing to do with my porn habits, I swear! I blame it on other people’s porn habits, as everyone got too busy searching for their own fetish of the day to read the news anymore. Which I can’t help but tie to the political rise of Donald Trump. So here we are, wanking ourselves to oblivion.

Anyway, I have a new book out: The Apocalypse Ark. Buy it now so I don’t have to keep surfing porn for a living. Or share The Province article if you prefer my porn to my fiction. Whichever.

21 leagues under the sea

The Apocalypse Ark has only been out a few days in Canada — I still don’t have copies of it myself! — but it managed to hit No. 21 on Amazon’s Historical Fantasy Kindle charts today. It also hit No. 8 on the Occult charts but I’m a little nervous about posting images of that for fear of breaking the seventh seal, etc.

Thanks to everyone who bought a copy of the book! I hope you like it!

This is how the world ends – not with a bang but with vomit

Today was a rough day spent cuddling a very sick little boy. As the doctor said, “Oh yeah, you smell like vomit.” It was all made better, however, thanks to Robert J. Wiersema’s wonderful discussion of my Cross series of books on the CBC’s All Points West show. My favourite line: “If you like your literature with a nitro feeling, you’ll love these.” What a great welcome to the world for my new book, The Apocalypse Ark. Now to do something about this vomit smell….

(Reposted from my Facebook feed because it’s hard to get anything done when you’re cuddling a little boy in one arm.)

Dear PLR: Thanks for helping me to create

I recently received a payment cheque from the Canada Council’s Public Lending Right program, which compensates Canadian authors for the free public access to their books in libraries across the country. I always love receiving this cheque, for a few reasons. One, I always forget it’s coming, so it’s an awesome surprise! Two, it comes after Christmas, when I need it the most. Three, it keeps me writing.

The third reason is perhaps the most important one. The stated goal of the PLR program is to pay authors for works they’ve already written and that other people get to read for free, courtesy of our great library system. But it’s more than just compensation: it’s also an investment. Those cheques that get sent out at the beginning of every year help writers across the country keep writing. The books we’re getting paid for? Those books are already done and published. The PLR money we get for them helps buy us time to write our next books. Every spring, I get a cheque in the mail that makes me think, “To the writing cave!”

So thanks, PLR and Canada Council! And thanks to all you readers who keep buying books and checking them out of libraries! Without you, I’d just be a crazy person locked in a room arguing with imaginary people.