Mark Chisnell's Blog, page 4

The Hero's Journey

I’ve been a fan of the thriller in all its forms since my Dad took me to see Diamonds are Forever at the local Odeon cinema. I subsequently inhaled the collected works of Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, John le Carre and many others as I was growing up. And more often than not, I would see the movies as well as reading the book.




I suspect that this is the reason that I tend to lean on films just as heavily as books when it comes to inspiration for my writing – flick through the reviews on my Amazon pages and you’ll find ‘filmic’ and ‘visual’ more often than ‘literary’. I’m fine with that, and I wanted to make the link even more explicit in this blog by talking about a fantastic tool for screenwriting that I use when plotting my books.




If you haven’t come across it before, then the Hero's Journey is probably the single most useful aid a writer can have when it comes to plot. Whenever I’m stuck, unsure about what might happen, or where the story should go next, I flick through the stages of the Hero's Journey and then go for a walk or do some washing up (my wife is a big fan of writer’s block). I can pretty much guarantee that the plotting problem will have been solved by the time I’m done with the exercise or the chore.




The Hero's Journey stems from the work of the American mythologist,  Joseph Campbell  whose essential notion was that many of the world’s great stories and myths share important patterns and structures. He pared these down into what he called a ‘monomyth’ and in 1949 published the idea in a book called  The Hero with a Thousand Faces .




The elevator pitch for the Hero's Journey is that an ordinary person ventures from ordinary life into a more dangerous world, where many threats and obstacles are overcome before a decisive victory is won. The ordinary person returns home a hero, changed in ways that benefit the society she originally left.




The book was already an influential work when a gentleman by the name of George Lucas used it to inject plot and structure into a sci-fi movie called Star Wars – and from then on the Hero's Journey has never looked back as an inspiration for Hollywood screenwriters.




Its place in the pantheon was probably sealed by Christopher Vogler who, while working for Disney, wrote a seven page memo called ‘A Practical Guide to the Hero with a Thousand Faces’. It distilled Campbell’s work into a twelve-stage structure. The memo was such hot property that Vogler subsequently turned it into a book –  The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers  and more recently  a website .




If you want to see how deeply the Hero's Journey is embedded in our modern movie culture, then check out this fantastic video in which Vogler explains the ‘monomyth’ with the help of some of the many films that have been  inspired by it .




And next time you watch a film - or read a thriller, mystery or action adventure story (especially one of mine) - see how many elements of the Hero's Journey that you can spot. An easy one to start on is the Christopher Nolan reboot, Batman Begins... watch out for that Call to Adventure!






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The Heroes Journey

I’ve been a fan of the thriller in all its forms since my Dad took me to see Diamonds are Forever at the local Odeon cinema. I subsequently inhaled the collected works of Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, John le Carre and many others as I was growing up. And more often than not, I would see the movies as well as reading the book.




I suspect that this is the reason that I tend to lean on films just as heavily as books when it comes to inspiration for my writing – flick through the reviews on my Amazon pages and you’ll find ‘filmic’ and ‘visual’ more often than ‘literary’. I’m fine with that, and I wanted to make the link even more explicit in this blog by talking about a fantastic tool for screenwriting that I use when plotting my books.




If you haven’t come across it before, then the Heroes Journey is probably the single most useful aid a writer can have when it comes to plot. Whenever I’m stuck, unsure about what might happen, or where the story should go next, I flick through the stages of the Heroes Journey and then go for a walk or do some washing up (my wife is a big fan of writer’s block). I can pretty much guarantee that the plotting problem will have been solved by the time I’m done with the exercise or the chore.




The Heroes Journey stems from the work of the American mythologist,  Joseph Campbell  whose essential notion was that many of the world’s great stories and myths share important patterns and structures. He pared these down into what he called a ‘monomyth’ and in 1949 published the idea in a book called  The Hero with a Thousand Faces .




The elevator pitch for the Heroes Journey is that an ordinary person ventures from ordinary life into a more dangerous world, where many threats and obstacles are overcome before a decisive victory is won. The ordinary person returns home a hero, changed in ways that benefit the society she originally left.




The book was already an influential work when a gentleman by the name of George Lucas used it to inject plot and structure into a sci-fi movie called Star Wars – and from then on the Heroes Journey has never looked back as an inspiration for Hollywood screenwriters.




Its place in the pantheon was probably sealed by Christopher Vogler who, while working for Disney, wrote a seven page memo called ‘A Practical Guide to the Hero with a Thousand Faces’. It distilled Campbell’s work into a twelve-stage structure. The memo was such hot property that Vogler subsequently turned it into a book –  The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers  and more recently  a website .




If you want to see how deeply the Heroes Journey is embedded in our modern movie culture, then check out this fantastic video in which Vogler explains the ‘monomyth’ with the help of some of the many films that have been  inspired by it .




And next time you watch a film - or read a thriller, mystery or action adventure story (especially one of mine) - see how many elements of the Heroes Journey that you can spot. An easy one to start on is the Christopher Nolan reboot, Batman Begins... watch out for that Call to Adventure!






Would you like to sign up for new-book alerts?




http://www.markchisnell.com/email.htm

About Covers and a Small Success...

I’ve got an
unhealthy – or maybe it’s perfectly natural, given my career choices – fascination
with book cover design. The topic comes up here pretty regularly, usually when
I’ve just been working on one for the new book. 



And guess what... designer Stewart Williams has just finished the cover of The Sniper, the new Janac’s
Games book that will be out at the end of July.




What do you think?




It had to match the
existing covers for The Defector and The Wrecking Crew, so the biggest problem
was finding the right images to work with – and that proved tougher than I
would have thought. We got there in the end though, after hours on photo stock
libraries...




Meanwhile, I
thought I’d enter the cover of Powder Burn to Joel Friedlander’s May book cover design competition – at the very least I thought it would
interesting to get his feedback, as I’m a fan of his blog. 









If you want to check out the winners for April, and have a look at some cool and some not-so-cool covers, click right here. We'll see how Powder Burn does next month...





The importance of a
good cover cannot be underestimated. I was recently part of a promotion run
by Bookbub.com (it's well-worth signing-up to get their alerts), and it
boosted The Defector into the Top 100 on B&N.com. Most of those sales decisions
are being made based on the cover and blurb – so I’m sticking to the
same template for The Sniper. Now I just have to finish it!




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April Review Round-Up

I don’t think I
managed quite so much reading this month, what with Powder Burn coming out and starting work on the new Janac’s Games short story - called The Sniper. 




I’ve just seen that the new
B&N publishing system, called Nook Press, allows interaction with Beta
readers, so this book might go out on Nook first, and then Amazon. Meanwhile, I
did manage to read a couple of thrillers this month, both top notch books from
top notch writers...




The Black Echo by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #1)




I picked this one
up because it was a group read on Goodreads, and I’m very glad I did. The Harry
Bosch books have been a huge hit and it’s easy to see why from this opening
tale - Connelly nails his central character from the very beginning.




Harry Bosch is a
Vietnam vet, a tunnel fighter, one of the handful of Americans that struggled
to battle the North Vietnamese in the dimension that they totally dominated –
underground. Harry’s also a nascent media star for breaking a couple of big
cases and, thanks to consultancy work on translating those case histories into movies,
he’s the owner of a (small) house overlooking the Hollywood studios. It’s a
great backstory and Harry never fails to engage and hold the reader’s
attention.




The terrific
central characterisation of Harry is backed up by a fine portrayal of FBI Agent
Wish as Harry’s sidekick/lover/and sometime antagonist. This is combined with a
really solid plot -- I didn’t see the twist coming at all, although the hints
were there – the central bank ‘caper’ has just the right amount of twists and
complexity for a highly entertaining read.




If I had a
reservation about the book it would be some pretty clunky dialogue. It’s a
nit-picking point, but Connelly hasn’t (rather than ‘has not’) shortened any of
the words in the speech. It makes lots of the characters sound pompous and
formal. It might have been the way to do it in 1992 when the book was written,
but it’s a definite negative now. I also had trouble with some of the minor
characterisations, the IAD chief, Irving was a bit of a cliché for instance.




Overall, these are
minor quibbles, and I had no problem giving the book four stars.




Without Fail by Lee Child




I’m a huge fan of
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, and I think I might have mentioned previously
on this blog that they were the inspiration for some aspects of Powder Burn and
my new ‘Burn’ series. So I needed no encouragement to pick this one up when it
was also chosen as a Goodreads group read. And as usual, I wasn’t disappointed.




Jack Reacher
appeals to the angry and vengeful core in all of us – there are no judges or
juries in Reacher’s world, just violent retribution dispatched swiftly, without
compunction or mercy and, in this case, unusually cold-bloodedly.




The book was
written right after the 9/11 tragedy and I think its influence can be seen in
the way that in Without Fail it is acceptable for Reacher to assassinate the
bad guys. In many of the other Jack Reacher books that I’ve read, Reacher’s own
life is at stake from quite early in the story, and so the ruthless killing of
the bad guys is softened morally by his need to survive. This is not the case
in Without Fail where he could and should have left them to the Secret Service
or the FBI – both agencies are intrinsic to the story – but instead goes after
them with intent to kill.




Child does a good
job of making this aspect as believable as possible, and as the issue only
comes up at the very end, it doesn’t spoil what is otherwise a fine story. The
rest of the book has the usual impeccable mix of tight plotting, tighter
writing and great minor characters, and once again I had no problem awarding
four stars.

Powder Burn - Independently Publishing a Novel in 2013

It was back in September 2009 that I self- or independently-published my first novel, The Defector. It had been previously published by Random House in the UK and HarperCollins in Australia and New Zealand. I knew I had a clean manuscript, so it was just a matter of wrestling with the conversion from Word Perfect 5.1 to MS Word. When I’d figured that out, I read the Smashwords Style Guide to format the MS Word document. And then I loaded it onto the Smashwords website. I added a cover that had been designed by a friend and I was done. Ta-daa. Novel, meet world. World, meet novel. I sat back and waited to see what would happen.




Three and a half years later, publishing a novel independently is a rather different process. Some of the differences stem from the fact that the latest novels are new books that have never been published before. Others stem from the fact that the world has moved on. The process of publication for my latest book, Powder Burn went like this...




The book was read and analysed by my favourite structural editor a while back. I don’t know if that’s the correct name for it (or even if there is a correct name) but by structural editor I mean someone who goes through the book looking for weaknesses in the plot, lack of consistency in the characters, bad pacing – all that good story stuff. The structural editor does not care so much about grammar, never mind punctuation, their job is to analyse the structure of the story. I have to be really happy with the book before I get this edit done – I usually, foolishly, believe the book is finished - but they always spot something, often quite a big thing for the final rewrite.




I finished that rewrite over the New Year and as I think I mentioned previously, this was the last of eight drafts. In early January I was able to create some roughly formatted and unedited copies of the final draft. I asked for ‘Beta’ readers on my Facebook page, volunteers to read the book who would give me feedback. And I asked some trusted friends to do the same thing. In all, about twelve people read it over the next few weeks, and they all had at least one important contribution to the finished book.




While that process was going on, I searched for a cover designer. I’ve previously written about using 99designs.com for my covers, and although I’ve been happy with this I had been looking at other options and I really liked the work of Stewart Williams. I thought he was the right guy for the cover I had in mind. I’d noticed the new set of Thomas and Mercer (an Amazon imprint) covers for Ian Fleming’s 007 books, and really liked them. They use a white background and stand out against the almost uniformly dark covers that are currently fashionable. John Locke was doing something vaguely similar and I figured that these are two pretty savvy operators - perhaps white backgrounds and graphics was a bandwagon I should jump on.




Stewart liked those other covers too and was happy to work along those lines. We quickly struck a deal and he started work. It took three or four weeks to get the cover right, and during this time I was working on the changes to the manuscript suggested by my Beta readers. By the beginning of March, I had a cover and I had a story I was happy with – it was time for the manuscript to go to the copy editor. I use a guy in the States, Neal Hock and I had already scheduled the copy edit with him. Neal usually takes a week to ten days to complete the copy edit, and when the manuscript comes back I mostly just had to go through it clicking ‘Accept Changes’.




The final stage is the formatting and as I said, I used to do this myself. I’m still comfortable preparing the manuscript for Smashwords and Kindle Direct Publishing, but I decided to get some help with an ePub edition to load to the new Kobo direct publishing option, Writing Life. I used the same person that had previously done my CreateSpace PDFs, Heather at the CyberWitch Press – unfortunately, she’s closed to new clients, otherwise I’d recommend her, she’s wonderful.




Once I have the final files ready - Heather is working on them as this is published - it’s just a matter of loading them onto Smashwords, Kindle and Kobo and pressing go at the right time. For the Kindle that will be 3rd April. Of course, that’s when the real work begins. Back in 2009 I just sat and waited to see what happened next, this time I’ll be a little more proactive, but I’ll tell you about that next month.

The NFL - America’s Favourite Socialist Sport

It was a phrase
that I’d heard in television interviews a few times, but only recently did I
hear it for real - Obama’s turning this
country socialist. I’m a Brit and (on this occasion at least) I was far too
polite to argue with my American friend - hey, it’s not my country... But
afterwards, it struck me that what I should have said (don’t you always think of the right response too
late?) was that in one very high-profile arena, the USA has been running a
socialist system for years. And as far as I’m aware, President Obama has
nothing to do with the operation of the NFL, America’s favourite spectator
sport.




In Europe, the top professional
sport is football (or soccer) and it’s run on ruthless market principles.
Television revenue for the top leagues is divided according to performance.
And if a club has a bad enough season then relegation looms – the club drops
down to a lower league and the money from spectators, television and all the
other sports franchise income sources goes south with it.




The following
season the relegated club has to compete to try to return to the old league,
and do it with less of everything – money, good players and crowds. It’s a
punishing regime, and teams can get into a spiral of failure and drop like a stone
through successive leagues in successive seasons, some go bankrupt and
disappear altogether. Like any rigorous capitalist system failure is brutally
punished and success is hugely rewarded.  




In contrast, the
NFL rewards failure and punishes success in an effort to keep the teams evenly
balanced. All revenue is shared more or less equally whether you have a good,
bad or indifferent season.
And there is just the one league with a (more or less) fixed set of teams – no relegation.
Occasionally new franchises start and old ones fold or move, but most of the
time if a team does badly they stay right where they are in the NFL. There
is no punishment from the league itself for failure to perform...  in fact, quite the opposite.




During the NFL’s off-season,
the latest draft of players coming out of the college system are farmed out to
the clubs – and the worse performing teams get the first pick of players. If
they pick right, they get the best new players to kick-start the process of
improvement. The NFL is run on a system designed to maintain equality, and to
give every opportunity for improvement to those performing badly. Now, if that’s not
a system run on socialist principles then I don’t know what is...




Of course, the NFL
isn’t a country, it’s a sports league competing against other sports leagues - not to mention movies, computer games and even books - for the attention and cash of US
citizens. And the competition for that attention is run on a ruthlessly
capitalist system. Sports that don’t get enough attention suffer quickly and
cruelly. The NFL is the most successful sport in America, so it’s interesting
to note that in order to achieve success in a wider capitalist system, the NFL
has adopted socialist principles for its internal functioning. I can’t help
thinking that there might be other areas where this same approach could be
applied. Like education. Or medicine.  

A Thriller Reading Round-Up...

It’s been a busy
month. I’m in the final stages of production for my new thriller, Powder Burn , and I’ve been reading quite
a bit of non-fiction as research for a new Janac’s Games short story called The Sniper.
It’ll be the next book after Powder Burn,
and the first of several about Janac’s time in Vietnam. The idea is to track how
he made it through the war, and developed contacts in that part of the world to
build his drug empire. I thought I’d call them the Origins books to separate them from the main novels.




So, I’ve been
reading various accounts of the Vietnam War, and remembering the nature of that
horrific conflict. Long before there were suicide bombers in Iraq, there were
sappers in Vietnam. I grew up in a world saturated with Second World War
stories and movies, and I can still remember reading a newspaper headline
announcing that American casualties had reached 50,000 in Vietnam. I was very
young and I didn’t even know that there had been a war going on - how could
that be possible? Wars were something that happened in the distant past, not
now, and certainly not with America involved.




I remember it so
vividly for two reasons; firstly it was a massive wake-up call to a child - I was new to
this world and I needed to pay attention. I’ve been a huge follower of current
affairs ever since. And secondly, as I learned more and more about Vietnam I
began to slide from a belief in a black and white world of good and evil to one
filled with shades of grey. Michael Herr’s book Dispatches was central to that coming of age. I still live in that
world today, as anyone who has read the Janac’s
Games books will know. It feels appropriate to be returning to the Vietnam
War to tell more of his story.




All of which is a
long way of saying that I won’t be reviewing the non-fiction. I had a go at one
in the last blog round up, but I think I’d rather stick to reviewing what I
know about - thrillers. And last month I read a couple of highly contrasting,
but linked, books.




The Detachment by Barry Eisler




I first became
aware of Barry Eisler after the controversy surrounding his decision to turn
down a serious amount of money from a traditional publisher, in favour of
bringing the books out himself. Subsequently, he accepted a deal with one of
Amazon’s publishing imprints, and hasn’t looked back. Meanwhile, I became a fan
of his blog; his writing on book marketing, the publishing industry and
politics is always engaging, entertaining and usually right on the money.




I’m not sure why it
has taken me this long to try one of his thrillers – I think it was the lack of
availability as a reasonably priced e-book, something that Eisler is planning
to fix. But having finally got to it, I’m happy to report that Eisler deserved
every penny of whatever money Amazon threw at him – The Detachment is an
excellent book by a man as fascinated with the shades of grey as I am.




Eisler has been
writing about the assassin John Rain for a while, and this is the latest of
those books. I guess it’s not an ideal place to start as I came into it with
none of Rain’s backstory – but it didn’t matter. The book works perfectly well
as a stand-alone thriller, while the writer still encouraged me to go back and
read the earlier ones by making some adroit references to Rain’s previous
adventures.




Barry Eisler’s bio
says he worked for the CIA in a covert position, and it shows. Or, at least it
shows as far as I – a civilian – can tell. The book has an incredibly authentic
feel, that’s the first thing. The second is that it rips along at pace, with a
rock solid and all-to believable underlying conspiracy at the centre of the
plot. John Rain, the conflicted killer is a terrific central protagonist, and the
other characters that make up The Detachment are all well drawn and keep you
guessing. My pulse was racing in the final set-piece shoot up – only the
denouement of Argo has matched that recently. I hope we see more of Rain, and
the other characters in The Detachment, but I will most certainly be reading
more Eisler either way – ‘nuff said about this one. Five stars.




Lethal People – by John Locke




Ironically, John
Locke also came to my attention as a result of an ebook publishing controversy
– he was one of the first really successful independents. He wrote a book
called How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5Months! and I have a copy - I know, I know, sucker. I even read it, and I thought there was one interesting marketing
idea and I went so far as to try it. It didn’t work. It turns out the book was probably b******s.
Allegedly, Locke was successful because he had the cash from his other
businesses to pay for 300 book reviews on Amazon, enough to get him off the
launch pad.




I didn’t want to
like this book, and to start with I didn’t – particularly coming to it off the
back of the hyper-real Eisler book. The central character Donnie Creed is an
assassin just like John Rain, but that’s where the comparison ends - there is
nothing real about him. He has himself tortured to build up his resistance to
pain, sleeps in other people’s attics to build up his skills at undetected
intrusion, and otherwise lives in a prison cell so he’s used to it when he
inevitably goes to jail. Right. Of course he does.




And then, with the
help of a Goodreads friend, I got it. It’s not meant to be real or anything
like it - this is black comedy, satire. And as such, it’s not bad at all – so long
as you can get past the grim violence. The writing is uneven and could use a
decent editor and personally, I didn’t find it laugh out loud funny.
Nevertheless, Locke has created a very engaging character in Donnie Creed, and his
first person narrative voice does keep you turning the pages. I doubt I’ll buy
another one, as it’s not really my cup of tea, but I can see why Locke has sold
a lot of books. Three stars.

About... Mark Chisnell

I've been thinking that it was about time to update the 'Bio' section on my website, which was a bit rambling and off the point. So I did, and then I thought I should post it as a blog, just in case there's anyone out there who's wondering why I'm doing this...




I grew up in a small town on the east coast of England, a
town dominated by the rise of the oil industry and the decline of shipbuilding
and fishing. I messed around in boats and read everything written by Alistair
MacLean, Ian Fleming and many more like them – but the sea was a non-negotiable
part of everyone’s life in that little town, and a future as some sort of
marine engineer seemed inevitable.




And then I found a copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
in a hill cabin in England’s Lake District. A mix of a hang-over and too much
snow restricted any other activity – well, it was New Year – and so I read it
over a couple of days.



The cover said it would change the way I thought and felt about the world, and
the funny thing was... it did. Pirsig’s exploration of quality and values
inspired me to drop my plans for engineering, and take philosophy along with physics
at college. I also learned that books work - they’re important and they can change your life. I wanted to write
one. I wanted to write lots.




Those were the days before 19-year olds got seven figure
advances for Young Adult novels, and I (rather sweetly in retrospect) believed that
I needed to know about the world before I could write about it - at least that
was my excuse for buying a one-way ticket and, with US$400 in my pocket,
climbing on the plane to Los Angeles.




By the time I got home three years later, I’d had a couple
of travel stories published in the New Zealand Herald and the South China
Morning Post. And I’d hitch-hiked to Mt Everest base-camp in Tibet. In Adidas trainers.
It was either my greatest achievement, or the stupidest. A year later a
fully-equipped British summit attempt was airlifted out from the same spot - cue
icy chills down the spine when I read that news story.




I’d also got involved in the 1987 America’s Cup, a
professional sailboat race. Before I knew it, I was being asked to fly around
the world to glamorous places - Honolulu, San Francisco, Sardinia and the
Caribbean - and being paid to race sailboats. It was an impossibly long way
from the life I’d grown up to in that fishing and oil town – and far too good
to turn down. The writing would have to wait.




It didn’t have to wait long. I quickly started to write
about the sport I was so immersed in, publishing hundreds of thousands of words
in books and articles on sailing, and winning a couple of awards along the way.
And I started to think about a novel - I had an idea from all those philosophy
lectures I had endured, a game of the Prisoner's Dilemma played for life and
death. The Defector and then the rest of the Janac’s Games series grew out of that idea.




My goal for that first book and all my novels since was to
keep the reader turning the pages, but to leave them with something to think
about afterwards.




What will you do...?




The Defector was first published in the UK by Random House (as
The Delivery), and got rave reviews
in the trade literature. It was followed up by The Wrecking Crew, the second in what would become the Janac’s Games series. Initially, this
second book was rejected by London publishers and it seemed that my fiction career
was over – but I kept working at it, and a few years later HarperCollins in Australia
and New Zealand published them both to coincide with what would be the last big
contest in my sailing career, the 2003 America’s Cup in Auckland.




I realised that I had been given a second chance at my
life’s dream of writing novels, but that this time I must fully focus on it. It
was time to close the door on my sports career – I didn’t have the time or
energy for both. What followed was a transitional decade, but I was still lucky
enough to get involved in some very cool projects. I went to the Falkland Islands
and South Georgia on a beautiful sailing boat. I got to write for some of the
world’s leading magazines and newspapers, including Esquire and the Guardian,
and I worked in television for a while, commentating and script-writing.




There was also a revolution in publishing going on. The Kindle
and other eBook readers transformed the business opportunities for writers, and
I was quick to take advantage of them to get control of the way my novels were published.
The Janac’s Games books found success
in the eBook formats, and were followed up by The Fulcrum Files – historical fiction of which I’m very proud -
and then the first of the Burn
series, Powder Burn featuring Sam
Blackett, my favourite character to date. There will be more, lots more. Just
like I hoped all those years ago.

The Next Big Thing

A
February first – a blog hop. It’s called The Next Big Thing (as you probably
guessed) and if you haven’t come across one before (and I hadn’t) then the
idea is straightforward - and not dissimilar to a chain letter.




I was
tagged by the wonderful Nina Sankovitch, who’s a friend of one of my oldest
university buddies, but also - and more importantly in this context - the reader of
hundreds of books that she reviews on her website, Read All Day. Nina’s also
a writer and her 2010 book,  Tolstoy and The Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading was published by HarperCollins. It tells the story of her lifetime of reading, and of one magical year when she read a book a day to rediscover how to live after the death of her oldest sister. Read about Nina's next big thing right here. It’s a delight
to be tagged by Nina.




So much
for the preliminaries, onto The Next Big Thing, which in my case, is the
soon-to-be-released (April 3rd) novel, Powder Burn.




What is
the working title of your book?

Doh –
just gave that away, Powder Burn! It’s the first of a new series of Burn books featuring Sam Blackett, a
Vermont backcountry girl and wannabe investigative journalist.




Where
did the idea come from for the book?

I’d
always wanted to write a book with a kick-ass female hero, and when I saw Kill Bill I realised it was time to get
on with it. I started well, but then life intervened - that was about ten years
ago.




What
genre does your book fall under?

It’s a
suspense thriller.




Which
actors would you choose to play the hero in a movie rendition?

A kick
ass female hero? I guess Angelina Jolie virtually made that role her own for a
while, but right now I’d take Jennifer Lawrence.




What is
the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

If Dragon Tattoo’s Mikael Blomkvist and the Hunger Games’ Katniss
Everdeen could have a love-child, she’d probably be a lot like Sam Blackett.




Will
your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It will
be self-published. I’ve had some great agents in the past, but as something of
a control freak, I get along a lot better now that it’s all my fault when it
goes belly up. Or not.




How long
did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About
six months – and then another ten years for the next six drafts.




What
other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I guess
you can probably tell from the one line synopsis that I’m hoping fans of The
Hunger Games and the Millennium Trilogy will like the books – although those
books set a very high bar for comparisons.




Who or
What inspired you to write this book?

I took
four sources of inspiration for this book, the movie Kill Bill got me going, so that’s one. I love the way Lee Child’s
Jack Reacher moves around the USA and happens into an adventure wherever he
lands up. I see the Burn series with Sam
Blackett in the same light, she’s travelling, researching and looking for
stories, and some of them are going to land her in a world of trouble. Thirdly,
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (Dragon Tattoo etc) had a strength, independence
and crusade-for-truth aspect to the investigations of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist that I wanted to capture. And finally, I think the first book in Suzanne Collins trilogy, The
Hunger Games is possibly the best genre book I’ve ever read. The writing is so
smooth, the action, characterisation, plotting and theme are all just so perfectly
realised. I think it’s a model for how good genre books can be, and the one I
look up to every day I sit down at the computer.




What
else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

The movie
rights of an earlier draft of the novel were optioned by Working Title Films - Les
Misérables, Love Actually, Billy Elliot etc. – but now they’re
available again, if anyone’s interested... 




And now I
get the huge pleasure of passing the torch to four of my favourite writers.  Here they are (in alphabetical order) - go check 'em out!






Rachel Abbott has
spent the majority of her working life running an interactive media company,
designing and building software and websites, mainly for education. Her company
was sold in 2000, and although she continued working for another 5 years, she
also fulfilled a lifelong ambition of buying a property in Italy, and
then found the time to fulfil her second ambition of writing a novel.




The book proved very
successful, and by February 2012 it had reached #1 in the Amazon charts (all
genres). It remained there for four weeks. It also hit the top spot on the
Waterstones ebook charts, and remained there throughout August, September and
most of October 2012. Rachel now has a publishing deal in the US and
Canada, and the foreign rights in Only the Innocent have been sold in several
countries, including France, Germany, Brazil and Russia. An audio version of
the book is also in development.




Debbie Bennett  has worked in law enforcement for over 25 years, in a variety of different roles (on the front-line and back in the office), which may be why the darker side of life tends to emerge in her writing. In 2005, she was long-listed for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award, which gave her the push to independently-publish the psychological thriller Hamelin’s Child, closely followed by a young adult fantasy novel and a collection of previously-print-published short stories. 




The sequel to Hamelin's Child was published in January 2013. At present Debbie plays with police computers during the day. The rest of the time she’s working on a couple of other novels and several short stories. 



Ruth Harris is
a 1,000,000 copy New York Times and Amazon bestselling author and a Romantic
Times award winner. Ruth’s highly praised fiction has "been called
brilliant," "steamy," "stylishly written,"
"richly plotted," "first-class entertainment" and "a
sure thing" and been translated into 19 languages, sold in 30 countries,
and honoured by the Literary Guild and the Book Of The Month Club. In their
e-book editions, Ruth's novels have risen to #1 on the Movers And Shakers List
and been featured on Ereader News Today, Pixel of Ink and Kindle Nation Daily.




With her husband,
Michael, Ruth indulges her wild side and writes bestselling thrillers with
vivid characters, international backgrounds and compelling plots. Their
thrillers have made numerous appearances in the top 3 of Kindle’s Movers
& Shakers list. Publisher’s Weekly called Ruth's and Michael's
thrillers "Slick and sexy with all the sure elements of a big seller
written by pros who know how to tell a story.”




Scott Nicholson has written
15 thrillers, 60 short stories, four comics series, and six screenplays. He
lives in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where he tends an organic
garden, successfully eludes stalkers, and generally lives the dream. Entering
the digital era with a vengeance, Nicholson is
releasing original titles and collections while conspiring to release
interactive books in the near future, building audio files, video, and
collaborative fiction projects. 




Nicholson won the grand
prize in the international Writers of the Future contest in 1999. That same
year, he was first runner-up for the Darrell Award. He studied Creative Writing
at Appalachian State University and UNC-Chapel Hill. He has been an officer of
Mystery Writers of America and Horror Writers Association and is a member of
International Thriller Writers and inaugural member of the Killer Thriller
Band. 

A Couple More Book Reviews

It's winter, it's cold outside all the time, and dark for most of it - what better way to pass an evening than to do some reading? Here's a couple I got through in January...




Killing Plato by Jake Needham




I was introduced to Jake Needham through the
first of his Inspector Samuel Tay books, The Ambassador’s Wife, which I really
enjoyed. I thought I should give his Jack Shepherd series a try, and I wasn’t
disappointed. This is a character-focused rather than an action-packed
thriller, and Jake Needham does grumpy, out-of-sorts-with-the-world characters
really well, and comes up with some strong storylines to push them through.




Jack Shepherd is a former big-shot Washington
lawyer, now living in Thailand and teaching at a University. Unfortunately, the
strength of his US and White House connections see him targeted by the world’s
best-known and wealthiest fugitive, and the result sucks Shepherd into a grim
and tragic plot that threatens to lose him everything. It’s well-paced and
well-written, and as I’ve set a couple of my books in that part of the world, I
appreciated seeing someone else doing it. Recommended.




Dear Mom: A Sniper's Vietnam by Joseph T. Ward




I picked this book up to research the war in
Vietnam, as I have a story planned that features a US Marine Corps Sniper from
that tragic conflict. I'm not going to pull any punches on the writing - this
is not great literature, but that's not its purpose or point. I suspect that it
does exactly what it set out to do, which is show the reader the mechanics of a
very particular form of warfare - humans hunting humans with long-range
weapons. If you want to know how the US Marines went about training and using
snipers in Vietnam, then this is your book. If you want psychological insight
into the cost of engaging in hunting and killing your fellow man - even while
harbouring reservations about the politics of the war - then it's not your
book, Ward doesn't really go there. But perhaps that's why he was so successful
at this most rarefied of jobs.