Mason Cross's Blog, page 21

Library event

Just a quick reminder that I'm going to be at Cambuslang Library this Saturday at 2:30pm if you're in the vicinity. I'm going to be reading from The Samaritan (which means I need to find a good excerpt soonish) and generally talking about writing, books etc etc. My last event there (it seems a bit grandiose to call it an 'appearance') was a lot of fun and really well-attended, so hopefully this one will follow suit.


Couple of other things...


Myself and fellow Orion thriller dude Steve Cavanagh are taking turns reviewing Amazon's new Bosch series based on Michael Connelly's acclaimed novels - my blog on episode one is up now at the Murder Room.


Also at the Murder Room, it's my turn to blog on John D. MacDonald's classic Cape Fear , aka The Executioners. If you're only familiar with the film(s) you should definitely check it out.

Publication Day: America

The Killing Season is published in hardcover in America today by Pegasus.

It's already had some great advance reviews in Kirkus , Publishers Weekly , Booklist and Library Journal and on US mystery blogs like Over My Dead Body , and now I can't wait to hear from readers in the spiritual home of pulp fiction.

It's a really big deal for me to be published in the world's biggest thriller market, and it's yet another milestone I dreamed about hitting when I was spending my nights writing this thing.

If you like the book, I'd love to hear from you. Reviews and telling a friend are very welcome too. If your friend happens to be Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood, that's even more welcome.

You can get The Killing Season in various formats in the following stores in the US:

Hardcover
Amazon
Barnes & Noble Indiebound

eBookKindleNook
Apple Audio

Amazon Audible 
“British author Cross makes a spectacular U.S. debut with this harrowing thriller. The gripping, intense pace and the intriguing characters will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Hope for a sequel!” (Library Journal starred review)

“Mason Cross has created an enigmatic character in Carter Blake. The writing is taut, intelligent, oozes suspense. A highly impressive debut novel.” (Matt Hilton, author of the bestselling Joe Hunter thrillers)

“Keeps the pace breakneck, the suspense high, and the body-count higher.” (Booklist)

"The suspense builds all the way to the breathtaking ending. Readers will look forward to seeing more of Blake." (Publishers Weekly)

"Pulse-pounding. Mason Cross launches into The Killing Season with no-holds-barred, as he deftly combines an adrenaline rush plot with one of the best new series characters since Jack Reacher. Prepare to read all night." (Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author)

“Cross provides a gratifyingly high body count, ruthlessly efficient action sequences and all the other thrills you'd expect of the superior popcorn movie you can expect his first novel to spawn, right down to a nifty extra twist in the tail.” (Kirkus starred review)

"My kind of book." (Lee Child)

Hitting the pulps

I'm incredibly excited to have a story published in the new issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine . Before I ever attempted writing a novel, my big ambition was to be published in one of the classic mystery magazines. I submitted a lot of stories over the last fifteen years, and I finally managed to make it. Feels like I'm a proper pulp novelist now. You can check out the website to find out where to buy, or you could subscribe to the excellent Kindle version which delivers a packed issue of murder and mystery every month at a bargain price.  

The 500 words method

Although I still consider myself a newbie to the world of being a professional writer, I have a reasonable number of events, signings and talks under my belt already. I love doing events, because they're always unique, and you always get at least one or two questions that nobody has asked before.

I also hear some questions again and again, which I don't mind in the least because a) it's natural that there will be some aspects of being a writer that everyone is interested in, and b) answering the same question multiple times gives me a chance to really think about the answer.

One of the questions I'm consistently asked (whether at events or just when people find out I'm a writer in conversation) is, "How do you find the time to write a novel?"

I think there are two main reasons people always ask this: either they're awestruck about how anyone could sit down and write enough words to fill an entire book, or they're aspiring writers who would like to give it a go, but don't know how they can fit in the time to do all that writing. A mainstream commercial novel these days is usually somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. Whichever way you cut it, that's a lot of words. I can completely understand why the size of the task intimidates people, because it intimidated the hell out of me before I gave it a try.

All writers get asked the 'How do you find the time?' question. The glib answer is "One word at a time." The answer that's closer to the truth for me is, "Five hundred words at a time."

When I first thought seriously about writing a novel, I realised that I would have to structure my time so that I could write every day (or as near as I could manage). I read a lot of advice that suggested I'd need to aim for a thousand words a day. Hell, Stephen King does at least two thousand a day, seven days a week. That freaked me out. For me, sitting down at the desk after a long day in the real world, in the knowledge that I'd have to write such a big chunk of words, would be a one-way ticket to writer's block. To cap it all, I read one moronic article online that loftily proclaimed "If you don't have time to write a thousand words a day, you don't have time to be a writer."

I can now confidently assert that the above advice is bullshit.

My turning point was talking to a friend at work and bemoaning the fact that, with a full-time day job, a part-time night job and a young family, it would be tough to find the time to write a thousand words a day.  His advice was simple: "Don't. Write five hundred words a day."

I thought about it. Five hundred seemed a little more doable. But it couldn't really be that simple, could it?

I did some calculations. Five hundred a day, say six days a week, makes 3,000 words a week. That's over 12,000 words in a month, which would be close to the word count of the longest story I'd ever written. In six months, at that pace, I'd have around 80,000 words, which is a novel. I remembered John Grisham saying he wrote his first novel at the rate of one page a day until it was done. Suddenly, the impossible task seemed almost... possible.

So I tried it out. Every night, I sat down with the intention of writing five hundred words. Most nights, I didn't stick to that. Most nights, once I got started, I wrote more than five hundred words. Sometimes a lot more. Freed from the pressure of having to meet a high word count, I relaxed and got into the daily routine. The other thing it did was get me in the habit of being able to write anywhere. If I had a half hour in a coffee shop or a train journey, it was an opportunity to get my words for the day done. If I had a laptop, great. If not, I could write longhand and type it up later.



It doesn't take long to write five hundred words - when I put my mind to it, I can get five hundred words down in fifteen or twenty minutes. Even with some procrastination time and wasting a while on Facebook, Twitter or 'research' when I first sit down, I can get it all done in an hour, no problem. If you have time to walk the dog, go jogging, commit to a half-hour soap opera, you have time to write a book.

To this day, I still rely on that method. Even though I have deadlines now and I know I'll need to average quite a bit more than five hundred a day in order to hit them, I can always fool myself into getting started by promising myself I can stop at five hundred. Occasionally I do, but more often than not, I'll be walking away from the keyboard with another eight hundred, a thousand, even two thousand words in the bank.

If you're reading this and you've been trying to find the time to write a novel, stop thinking about that mountain of words you need to climb.

Just think about the next five hundred.

Killing Season... Bulgarian style

The Killing Season makes its first foreign-language appearance this Thursday in Bulgaria, locally titled Сезонът на убийствата, which (according to Google, at least), translates as Season Murders.

I also think my name looks much cooler in Bulgarian.

You can order the book from the website of Obsidian, who are my publisher over there. In the meantime, if any Bulgarians are reading this, Надявам се, че като него!

Lee Child read my book!

So, lots of cool stuff happening over the last week.  I picked up another really nice American review, this one from the Library Journal , who said: British author Cross makes a spectacular U.S. debut with this harrowing thriller. The gripping, intense pace and the intriguing characters will keep readers on the edge of their seats. Hope for a sequel! Speaking of libraries, I've been asked back to do another author event at Cambuslang Library on 21st February, which is great as I had so much fun doing the last one. Check out the events page for more details, and it's completely free, so just show up if you're in the area. I found out that Sainsburys is going to be stocking The Killing Season across their stores in the UK, which is fantastic as it will get a chance to reach tons of readers who might not have a bookshop near them.  And finally, I got some amazing news from my editor: Lee Child read the book, enjoyed it, and is giving me a cover quote. You can see it on the shot of the latest paperback design below.    
If you have trouble reading it in the picture, it says "My kind of book." This is a fantastic surprise - I'm a huge fan of Lee and Jack Reacher, and he's definitely been one of my big influences.

Can't wait to see it on the shelves... of Sainsburys and everywhere else.

Publishers Weekly review and some nice proofs

Great advance review of Killing Season in the States from Publisher's Weekly :

Cross’s engrossing debut, the first in a new crime series, introduces Carter Blake, a man without a home and with no personal ties, but with a knack for finding people who don’t want to be found. Blake agrees to help the FBI locate serial killer Caleb Wardell (dubbed the Chicago Sniper by the media), who escaped from a prisoner-transport van en route from Chicago to the federal correction complex at Terre Haute, Ind., where he was due to be executed in two weeks. Elaine Banner, an FBI special agent, starts feeling conflicted when Blake’s instincts prove to be more reliable than those of FBI man Steve Castle, who’s calling the shots on the investigation. The body count grows as Wardell goes on a rampage in several states. The suspense builds all the way to the breathtaking ending. Readers will look forward to seeing more of Blake.

It's interesting that  Booklist ,  Kirkus and now PW have all commented on the high bodycount with approval. I hadn't thought too much about it, but now I'm happy that The Samaritan also happens to be fairly death-heavy.

Only a few short weeks now until The Killing Season makes its American debut on February 15 - can't wait to see how it goes down with readers.





 Orion has produced an amazing limited-edition slipcase containing the advance proofs of The Samaritan along with the Killing Season paperback. I feel really fortunate to be getting such a big push from my publisher on these latest upcoming releases, although seeing my name alongside some of these luminaries is a little daunting.

I'm still writing book three, and at the moment, simultaneously going through page proofs on Samaritan, which is the last time I can make changes before it's published in May.

I can report that it's no less daunting waiting for the second novel to come out.

Waverton Good Read

First, a nice announcement: I'm delighted to be selected for the long list for the 2014/15 Waverton Good Read Award.

It's a prize for the best debut novel by a British author, and is judged by the people of Waverton, a village just outside Chester. Previous recipients of the award include Mark Haddon and Tom Rob Smith, and this year I'm up against 25 other new authors, whittled down from around 80 nominations.

You can find out more about Waverton Good Read at their website, and view the full list of nominations here.

I was also really pleased to be asked to come and speak at the announcement of the long list on Monday night.

After meeting some of the organisers for a very welcoming dinner, we headed over to the meeting and I spoke to about 60 of the participants in the Good Read about how I got started writing and my long journey to publication. As always, my favourite part was stopping talking, and letting people ask questions. Some really good ones, as you'd expect from a roomful of fiction experts. We talked about the differences between British and American thrillers, violence in crime fiction, how I find time to write (beats me, I just do) and many other subjects. Here's me doing the moody author pose:

    The morning after, Gwen from the WGRA committee was kind enough to take me on a whistlestop tour of Chester, which is a very cool medieval town that I'm keen to return to soon.       We saw the Cathedral, took a walk along the city walls (allegedly it's still legal to use a bow and arrow to shoot a Welshman within the walls after dark), and saw one of Chester's most distinctive medieval features: a system of galleries running down the main streets at the heart of town known as the Rows.  You can read more about the Rows here, if you're a history buff. Gwen pointed out that there was one row that was difficult to let to businesses because it was constantly dark. That combined with the fact everything is built on Roman-era human remains and there are rumours of hauntings, made for an evocative surrounding. Surely someone should write a spooky Chester-set mystery called The Dark Row. Maybe I'll give it a go someday.
And just to complete my literary excursion, when changing trains on my journey back home I saw this paperback on a charity stand, and was powerless to resist. I mean come on: It was the modern miracle... or a sinister force of destruction. I have a ton of things to read, but SKYSHIP is now way higher on the list than it ought to be.



Happy 2015!

Just a quick post to wish you all a very happy New Year.

2014 was an incredible year for me with the publication of The Killing Season, and I've been really fortunate to have had such great reviews and so much fantastic feedback from readers at the various festivals and appearances I've done so far.

I'm also really gratified to appear on some end of year best-of lists from some of the best book bloggers in the business, like Crime Thriller Girl and Reader Dad.

The next twelve months promises to be busy as I finish writing the third Carter Blake book and try to make it to as many festivals and events as possible. I'm getting off to an early start, speaking at the announcement of the Waverton Good Read long list on January 12. The Killing Season is set to be published in America in February and Germany in March, with the UK mass market paperback out in April.

And of course, there's the small matter of The Samaritan, which will be hitting shelves in May this year. Advance proofs arrived at my door on Christmas Eve, and I can't wait for people to read it.




See you in 2015, where in just a few short months we'll all be riding around on one of these babies...

And the title of book 3 is...

I'm delighted to report that Orion has signed me up for two more Carter Blake novels to follow on from The Killing Season and The Samaritan.

I thought it would be fun to take a leaf out of the James Bond book and announce the title of the third book in the series, so without further ado, the next Carter Blake book will be called...






I'm really excited about this book because it ties together a lot of the loose threads from The Killing Season and The Samaritan, as Blake's mysterious past finally comes back to bite him.

Incredibly, you can already pre-order it on Amazon. Winterlong is due out in 2016, now I just have to finish writing it...