Mark Edwards's Blog, page 11
May 23, 2015
The Truth is Out There – The Story Behind What You Wish For
What You Wish For is a book about a group of people who believe in aliens. But it’s not a book about aliens – or UFOs, or abductions, or little grey men – even though on the surface it’s a thriller featuring a search for a missing woman who is convinced that she can communicate with extra-terrestrials and is set in a world of UFO-fanatics.
As Stephen King says in On Writing, most good books have themes, but the story should always come first…and as you are writing, the theme will emerge. This is exactly what happened when I wrote What You Wish For.
I started writing this book waaaay back in 1997 and it was originally going to be called Staring Into Space. Back then, aliens were trendy. The X Files was the biggest programme on TV, that Levi’s ad featuring ‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo had recently been a massive hit, and the media was full of stories about alien autopsies and crop circles. Pre-millennial madness perhaps. One Sunday afternoon when I was walking on the East Hill in Hastings, where I lived, I bumped in to my best friend from primary school. I hadn’t seen him for years. We went for a drink and he told me, excitedly, that he had recently been to Roswell to see where the US Government kept the bodies of the aliens that had crash-landed in the New Mexico desert. His eyes burned with the conviction of a religious zealot.
This sparked the idea for a novel, and after reading up on what UFO-watchers believe, I started writing it. And as I worked on the novel, I realised the theme of the book I was writing: belief.
The Truth is Out There – The Story Behind What You Wish For
What You Wish For is a book about a group of people who believe in aliens. But it’s not a book about aliens – or UFOs, or abductions, or little grey men – even though on the surface it’s a thriller featuring a search for a missing woman who is convinced that she can communicate with extra-terrestrials and is set in a world of UFO-fanatics.
As Stephen King says in On Writing, most good books have themes, but the story should always come first…and as you are writing, the theme will emerge. This is exactly what happened when I wrote What You Wish For.
I started writing this book waaaay back in 1997 and it was originally going to be called Staring Into Space. Back then, aliens were trendy. The X Files was the biggest programme on TV, that Levi’s ad featuring ‘Spaceman’ by Babylon Zoo had recently been a massive hit, and the media was full of stories about alien autopsies and crop circles. Pre-millennial madness perhaps. One Sunday afternoon when I was walking on the East Hill in Hastings, where I lived, I bumped in to my best friend from primary school. I hadn’t seen him for years. We went for a drink and he told me, excitedly, that he had recently been to Roswell to see where the US Government kept the bodies of the aliens that had crash-landed in the New Mexico desert. His eyes burned with the conviction of a religious zealot.
This sparked the idea for a novel, and after reading up on what UFO-watchers believe, I started writing it. And as I worked on the novel, I realised the theme of the book I was writing: belief.
May 21, 2015
Jealousy and Eye Explosions: The Inspiration for Because She Loves Me
Because She Loves Me was inspired by a number of events that happened to me.
Firstly, like the protaganist Andrew, I suffered a detached retina a couple of years ago, and spent two weeks sleeping upright with a gas bubble in my eye, imbibing a cocktail of drugs and wondering if I would ever recover my sight. It was scary. Fortunately, thanks to the surgeons at my local hospital, I recovered. But the experience, including the horrible follow-up laser surgery, has made me slightly obsessed with my eyes.
Eyes feature heavily in Because She Loves Me – but to say more would be a spoiler…
Secondly, there has been my experience of jealousy. When I was at university I had a girlfriend who made my life hell because a green-eyed monster lived inside her. She accused me of fancying every woman I met; she got angry if an attractive woman appeared on TV; she demanded that I break off contact with my female friends. Going into a lecture, I squirmed and sweated if a good-looking girl sat next to me, in case my girlfriend found out. Being a nineteen-year-old idiot, I let her get away with it for quite a long time before the relationship burned itself out.
Years later, I lived with a woman who wasn’t jealous but who told me, after I broke my leg and was trapped in our upstairs flat for weeks, that this situation made her happy.
‘I like knowing exactly where you are all the time,’ she said. ‘And what you’re doing.’
And I have experienced jealousy myself. I know what it feels like when that darkness fills you up and devours good sense, filling you up with paranoid rage and fear. It’s the most irrational and nasty emotion and I’m happy to say it hasn’t afflicted me for a long time.
All of this combined to make me want to write a book about sexual jealousy and how destructive it can be. And, of course, that original idea grew into something much darker…
Jealousy and Eye Explosions: The Inspiration for Because She Loves Me
Because She Loves Me was inspired by a number of events that happened to me.
Firstly, like the protaganist Andrew, I suffered a detached retina a couple of years ago, and spent two weeks sleeping upright with a gas bubble in my eye, imbibing a cocktail of drugs and wondering if I would ever recover my sight. It was scary. Fortunately, thanks to the surgeons at my local hospital, I recovered. But the experience, including the horrible follow-up laser surgery, has made me slightly obsessed with my eyes.
Eyes feature heavily in Because She Loves Me – but to say more would be a spoiler…
Secondly, there has been my experience of jealousy. When I was at university I had a girlfriend who made my life hell because a green-eyed monster lived inside her. She accused me of fancying every woman I met; she got angry if an attractive woman appeared on TV; she demanded that I break off contact with my female friends. Going into a lecture, I squirmed and sweated if a good-looking girl sat next to me, in case my girlfriend found out. Being a nineteen-year-old idiot, I let her get away with it for quite a long time before the relationship burned itself out.
Years later, I lived with a woman who wasn’t jealous but who told me, after I broke my leg and was trapped in our upstairs flat for weeks, that this situation made her happy.
‘I like knowing exactly where you are all the time,’ she said. ‘And what you’re doing.’
And I have experienced jealousy myself. I know what it feels like when that darkness fills you up and devours good sense, filling you up with paranoid rage and fear. It’s the most irrational and nasty emotion and I’m happy to say it hasn’t afflicted me for a long time.
All of this combined to make me want to write a book about sexual jealousy and how destructive it can be. And, of course, that original idea grew into something much darker…
Neighbours from Hell: The Real-Life Story Behind The Magpies
In The Magpies, a young couple called Jamie and Kirsty move into their dream home together. The other people in the building seem nice – but then everything starts to go horribly, terrifyingly wrong…
The Magpies is not purely a work of the imagination. Back in the 1990s, I left university and moved into a flat in St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex on the south coast of England, with my then-girlfriend. As in the book, it was a ground floor flat in a large Victorian house, with high ceilings, large sash windows that rattled in the wind and bright, sunny rooms. This flat was where I wrote my early novels, spending a lot of my twenties locked away indoors pursuing my dream of being a published writer.
There was a middle-aged woman on the top floor – we didn’t see much of her – and a young guy above us who, at times, seemed to have a motorbike and a drum kit in his flat. But you expect noise when you live in a flat.
Beneath us, in the basement – or garden – flat were a married couple in their early thirties. I won’t use their real names, just in case they see this and track me down, but they are burned into my memory more than any other neighbours I’ve had.
She was an acquaintance of my girlfriend’s mum, and had a face, as Les Dawson would have said, like a bulldog chewing a wasp. I am pretty sure I never saw a smile crack her face. She worked as a nurse in a care home for the elderly, a detail I borrowed for Lucy in the novel.
He was a great soft-bellied hulk, with what used to be called a crew cut and eyes like a great white shark’s. He was a man of few words and had an air of simmering violence about him. He didn’t smile much either. He mostly lumbered around the garden, watering it at night during the hosepipe ban.
My girlfriend lived in the flat on her own for a while I was at university. On her first night in the flat she was playing music on a tiny cassette player while unpacking. No, she wasn’t playing it loudly. Shortly after she pressed play, the man from downstairs knocked on her door and asked, while staring at her chest, for her to turn the music down as his wife had a headache. Feeling intimidated by this huge man and not wanting to annoy her new neighbours, she obliged.
After I moved in, the trouble really started. Mostly, it was constant complaints about noise. They used to send us letters in which they described the noises that came from our flat. One memorable letter complained about the noise of ‘the toilet brush thrashing about the pan’. They wrote that they could hear me laughing (‘my boring guffaw’, they wrote). They made it very clear that they could hear everything we did – and I mean everything. I feel like I should point out that we were definitely not excessively noisy.
Then we started receiving hoax parcels. In those days, book clubs were popular, and we received a parcel of books from BCA, the biggest, containing such classics as Nancy Friday’s Women in Love, a pre-Fifty Shades of Grey work of true life erotica. We got BCA to send us the order form. The handwriting matched the writing on the complaint letters.
Cigarette butts were often shoved under our door. They constantly banged on the ceiling with a broom. Every time we put music on, they would start playing music much louder so we could hear it over ours. They were always lurking around, looking miserable and intimidating. Although they never threatened us, they made us feel on edge all the time, and we were blissfully relieved when we moved out after buying our own place.
Later, I started to imagine how far the harassment could have gone. Could your neighbours wreck your life if they set their minds to it? The seed of The Magpies was sewn. I wanted to write a scary novel that didn’t contain vampires or demons, but real monsters – the monsters who lurk in our society, causing stress and damage, and worse, to everyone around them.
And I tried to imagine what I would have done if my own nightmare neighbour situation had got a lot worse. How would I have fought back? Would I have fought, or run? I wanted to write a book about someone who is driven to the edge of despair, to act out of character, because of growing provocation. Many of the situations in the novel happened in my real life, but they are taken to an extreme in The Magpies.
I think everybody has had either a nightmare neighbour, or colleague, or some other acquaintance; the kind of person who you wish would cease to exist. Crammed together in cities and towns, in flats and small houses, we are forced to deal with other people. They say that ‘hell is other people’. In The Magpies, I have taken that saying to its extreme.
I hope readers enjoy it far more than I enjoyed living upstairs from the couple from hell.
Neighbours from Hell: The Real-Life Story Behind The Magpies
In The Magpies, a young couple called Jamie and Kirsty move into their dream home together. The other people in the building seem nice – but then everything starts to go horribly, terrifyingly wrong…
The Magpies is not purely a work of the imagination. Back in the 1990s, I left university and moved into a flat in St Leonards-on-Sea, in East Sussex on the south coast of England, with my then-girlfriend. As in the book, it was a ground floor flat in a large Victorian house, with high ceilings, large sash windows that rattled in the wind and bright, sunny rooms. This flat was where I wrote my early novels, spending a lot of my twenties locked away indoors pursuing my dream of being a published writer.
There was a middle-aged woman on the top floor – we didn’t see much of her – and a young guy above us who, at times, seemed to have a motorbike and a drum kit in his flat. But you expect noise when you live in a flat.
Beneath us, in the basement – or garden – flat were a married couple in their early thirties. I won’t use their real names, just in case they see this and track me down, but they are burned into my memory more than any other neighbours I’ve had.
She was an acquaintance of my girlfriend’s mum, and had a face, as Les Dawson would have said, like a bulldog chewing a wasp. I am pretty sure I never saw a smile crack her face. She worked as a nurse in a care home for the elderly, a detail I borrowed for Lucy in the novel.
He was a great soft-bellied hulk, with what used to be called a crew cut and eyes like a great white shark’s. He was a man of few words and had an air of simmering violence about him. He didn’t smile much either. He mostly lumbered around the garden, watering it at night during the hosepipe ban.
My girlfriend lived in the flat on her own for a while I was at university. On her first night in the flat she was playing music on a tiny cassette player while unpacking. No, she wasn’t playing it loudly. Shortly after she pressed play, the man from downstairs knocked on her door and asked, while staring at her chest, for her to turn the music down as his wife had a headache. Feeling intimidated by this huge man and not wanting to annoy her new neighbours, she obliged.
After I moved in, the trouble really started. Mostly, it was constant complaints about noise. They used to send us letters in which they described the noises that came from our flat. One memorable letter complained about the noise of ‘the toilet brush thrashing about the pan’. They wrote that they could hear me laughing (‘my boring guffaw’, they wrote). They made it very clear that they could hear everything we did – and I mean everything. I feel like I should point out that we were definitely not excessively noisy.
Then we started receiving hoax parcels. In those days, book clubs were popular, and we received a parcel of books from BCA, the biggest, containing such classics as Nancy Friday’s Women in Love, a pre-Fifty Shades of Grey work of true life erotica. We got BCA to send us the order form. The handwriting matched the writing on the complaint letters.
Cigarette butts were often shoved under our door. They constantly banged on the ceiling with a broom. Every time we put music on, they would start playing music much louder so we could hear it over ours. They were always lurking around, looking miserable and intimidating. Although they never threatened us, they made us feel on edge all the time, and we were blissfully relieved when we moved out after buying our own place.
Later, I started to imagine how far the harassment could have gone. Could your neighbours wreck your life if they set their minds to it? The seed of The Magpies was sewn. I wanted to write a scary novel that didn’t contain vampires or demons, but real monsters – the monsters who lurk in our society, causing stress and damage, and worse, to everyone around them.
And I tried to imagine what I would have done if my own nightmare neighbour situation had got a lot worse. How would I have fought back? Would I have fought, or run? I wanted to write a book about someone who is driven to the edge of despair, to act out of character, because of growing provocation. Many of the situations in the novel happened in my real life, but they are taken to an extreme in The Magpies.
I think everybody has had either a nightmare neighbour, or colleague, or some other acquaintance; the kind of person who you wish would cease to exist. Crammed together in cities and towns, in flats and small houses, we are forced to deal with other people. They say that ‘hell is other people’. In The Magpies, I have taken that saying to its extreme.
I hope readers enjoy it far more than I enjoyed living upstairs from the couple from hell.
February 24, 2015
Rejection, Rejection, Rejection…
Post from Louise:
I had lunch yesterday with my old (as in, ex, not age) literary agent, the wonderful Jo Frank. She will always be up there as one of my most favourite people in the world, not just because she is lovely, but because she was the first person to have absolute faith in my writing, and the one who made it all happen for me. We’ve not seen each other for a few years and were reminiscing about those heady exciting days.
At that time, in the late ‘90s, I’d had so many rejections from agents for my first novel To Be Someone that I was on the verge of jacking it all in. Then I had the closest call of all – I’d bravely sent the ms to the hottest agent in town who read the first 100 pages then rang me, raving about it and saying how he was going to auction it; which editors he was going to pitch it to, etc. etc. I was giddy with excitement and certain a publishing deal was finally on the cards for me….
….until he sent me a curt email a week later along the lines of ‘I’m sorry. This book wasn’t quite what I expected. I’m going to have to pass on it.’
To say that I was devastated is an understatement. That’s IT, I thought. I can’t take this rejection any more! I was all for burning the manuscript and taking up pottery instead when I decided I would give it one final go. The hot agent had done me one favour – in his PS, he said ‘You might try Jo Frank at AP Watt.’
So I did. And she rang me too, after she’d read the first 100 pages, raving about it. Instead of being excited though, my heart sank. ‘Ring me back if you still like it when you’ve finished it,’ I think I said, convinced that my ms would go down in history as having the Best First Hundred Pages ever and yet still manage to be entirely unpublishable. To my joy and astonishment, Jo did ring me back, a day or so later. She’d finished it – and she still loved it! She auctioned it, and won me a six -figure pre-emptive offer for two books from Transworld, and so began my long and chequered career as an author.
That story is relevant to the fact that I have a new solo novel out today, my first in ten years, and my first psychological thriller. I’ve had to overcome a lot of nerves about putting myself out there again without the comfort blanket of being 50% of the Voss Edwards partnership! My last solo attempt, ten years ago, was a women’s fiction novel called An Army of Lovers that had failed to find a publisher and lost me an agent to boot – Jo had by then, sadly, left AP Watt and moved back to Oxford so I had a new agent. I’d been very impressed by this new agent’s roster of world-famous authors, and very chuffed to be counted amongst their number, but I soon discovered the downside: she worked with me a lot on the novel, editorially, but when it came time to send it out to publishers, she did an abrupt about-face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I need to devote all my time to my star clients’ (or words to that effect).
Transworld had dropped me, and so had my agent. Back to square one. I managed to secure a meeting with another agent, and I will never forget her verdict on Army: ‘I’m sorry,’ (they do a lot of apologizing, agents, don’t they?) ‘I can’t take you on. This book just isn’t good enough.’
I remained agentless until 2011 when Sam Copeland took Mark and I on together for our thrillers. I had lost confidence in the idea of doing more solo novels, but our joint success at that point made me start to reconsider, and eventually The Venus Trap was born. I even took a bit of the story from Army and recycled it – the character’s teenage diaries, mostly.
I’d originally intended to self-publish The Venus Trap but my editor from Thomas & Mercer, publisher of our joint books, asked to see it. I sent it off to her, bracing myself for what I thought would be the inevitable rejection – but she loved it, and immediately offered me a deal for it. Since then, the response to it from everyone who’s commented on it has been great, and I’m hugely relieved.
It just goes to show – you have to be brave. Speculate to accumulate, and all that. I’m so glad I managed to overcome my fear of rejection and that the lessons learned from the early ‘misfortunes’ with To Be Someone and then Army had stayed with me. I’ll go as far as to say that I’m very proud of The Venus Trap, and the fact that its path to publication comes after so much rejection makes every positive comment I’ve had all the more precious. Talk about a ‘long and winding road’ – the one thing I’ve learned about publishing in the past fifteen years is that, like life, everything can change in a heartbeat.
Wonder what’s going to happen next?
October 1, 2014
From the Cradle Released Early in the UK – Free or 99p
Very Exciting News! Our fifth novel, FROM THE CRADLE, has been released one month early in the UK as part of Amazon’s new Kindle First promotion. If you’ve got Amazon Prime, it’s FREE. If you haven’t, it’s just 99p. You can get it here. We can’t wait for everyone to read it as we are really proud of this book. We think it’s our best yet.
From the Cradle is the first in what we hope will grow into a new series – our first police procedural, but with strong elements of psychological thriller – featuring Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon, who works for one of the Metropolitan Police’s MITs (Murder Investigations Team) in south-west London.
Here’s the blurb:
The first child was taken from her house.
The second from his mother’s car.
The third from her own bedroom…
When Helen and Sean Phillips go out for the evening, leaving their teenage daughter babysitting little Frankie, they have no idea that they are about to face every parent’s greatest fear.
Detective Inspector Patrick Lennon is hopeful that the three children who have been abducted in this patch of south-west London will be returned safe and well. But when a body is found in a local park, Lennon realizes that time is running out – and that nothing in this case is as it seems…
Blending police procedural and psychological thriller, FROM THE CRADLE will have every parent checking that their children are safe in their beds…then checking again.
Download it now on Amazon.co.uk.
Readers outside the UK will be able to get in from November 1st, when it’s also released in paperback. Remember, if you haven’t got a Kindle you can get the Kindle app for your smartphone, computer or tablet.
July 4, 2014
Because She Loves Me Out Now.
Mark writes: My third solo novel Because She Loves Me was published worldwide on September 2nd by Thomas & Mercer and is available to buy now from Amazon, as an ebook, paperback or audiobook.
After The Magpies was published, I realised I wanted to write something in a similar vein. As that novel was based on a real experience, I peered into my past to find something else to inspire me and hit upon a theme that I’d always wanted to explore in fiction: sexual jealousy.
When I was in my twenties, I lived with a woman who had a green-eyed monster inside her. Her jealousy made our life hell. Years later, I experienced jealousy myself and was shocked by the power of this most destructive emotion – and wondered just how destructive it could get… In The Magpies, the ‘monsters’ lived next door. In Because She Loves Me, the terror is even closer to home.
Because She Loves Me is not a sequel to The Magpies – but Lucy Newton from that book makes a cameo appearance and we find out what happened to her next. Anyway, here’s the full blurb:
A gripping tale of jealousy, obsession and murder, from the No.1 Bestselling author of The Magpies.
When Andrew Sumner meets beautiful, edgy Charlie he is certain his run of bad luck has finally come to an end. She is perfect. And she likes him as much as he likes her.
But as the two of them embark on an intense affair, Andrew wonders if his grasp on reality is slipping. Items go missing in his apartment. Somebody appears to be following him. And as misfortune and tragedy strike his friends and loved ones, Andrew is forced to confront the terrifying truth…
Is Charlie really the girl of his dreams – or the woman of his nightmares?
I can’t wait for this book to be published as I’m very proud of it. As with every new book, I also feel nervous. Will people like it? Can it come anywhere near to replicating the success of The Magpies? Not long till we find out…
Because She Loves Me is available to pre-order now.
Because She Loves Me is Coming Soon.
Mark writes: My third solo novel Because She Loves Me will be published worldwide on September 2nd by Thomas & Mercer. I’m excited to reveal the cover, which I absolutely love. The photograph was taken by Sarah Ann Loreth, whose pictures also appear on the front of Catch Your Death, The Magpies and Kissing Games.
After The Magpies was published, I realised I wanted to write something in a similar vein. As that novel was based on a real experience, I peered into my past to find something else to inspire me and hit upon a theme that I’d always wanted to explore in fiction: sexual jealousy.
When I was in my twenties, I lived with a woman who had a green-eyed monster inside her. Her jealousy made our life hell. Years later, I experienced jealousy myself and was shocked by the power of this most destructive emotion – and wondered just how destructive it could get… In The Magpies, the ‘monsters’ lived next door. In Because She Loves Me, the terror is even closer to home.
Because She Loves Me is not a sequel to The Magpies – but Lucy Newton from that book makes a cameo appearance and we find out what happened to her next. Anyway, here’s the full blurb:
A gripping tale of jealousy, obsession and murder, from the No.1 Bestselling author of The Magpies.
When Andrew Sumner meets beautiful, edgy Charlie he is certain his run of bad luck has finally come to an end. She is perfect. And she likes him as much as he likes her.
But as the two of them embark on an intense affair, Andrew wonders if his grasp on reality is slipping. Items go missing in his apartment. Somebody appears to be following him. And as misfortune and tragedy strike his friends and loved ones, Andrew is forced to confront the terrifying truth…
Is Charlie really the girl of his dreams – or the woman of his nightmares?
I can’t wait for this book to be published as I’m very proud of it. As with every new book, I also feel nervous. Will people like it? Can it come anywhere near to replicating the success of The Magpies? Not long till we find out…
Because She Loves Me is available to pre-order now.
