F.G. Cottam's Blog
February 8, 2023
Next (possibly)
Live long enough, and even those with charmed lives will at some point be confronted by failure. Or at least obstacles that appear immovable. Which happened to me with my post-covid-lockdown novel. Not in the writing, that was a blessed relief and a welcome distraction after all the restrictions and grief we faced. But in the reception it got.
My agent loved it - thought it among the very best I've written - and there are 13 F.G. novels out there so that was high praise.
And she duly sent it out with high hopes. But it failed to attract a single offer from a publisher. Not a solitary one.
I never made this news public (who would?) but when it did get out, quite recently, it was suggested by more than one person that I could crowd-fund the book.
I thought crowd-funding was for high medical or vetinary bills or late-stage bucket list dreams. But it transpires people use it for creative projects too. And I would say a novel stretching to just under a hundred thousand words qualifies as one of those.
Anyway, I'm doing it. I'll make the digital version as cheaply priced as possible. If I raise the funds for a print version that too will be heavily discounted. And there'll be signed copies.
The novel is entitled The Fourth Haunting. It's a stand alone, but anyone familiar with my fiction will recognise some familiar characters and locations. And an obstinately persistent and secretive cult it's very bad news for anyone innocent to encounter. This is the relevant link, for anyone interested. http://gofund.me/e8044c4a
My agent loved it - thought it among the very best I've written - and there are 13 F.G. novels out there so that was high praise.
And she duly sent it out with high hopes. But it failed to attract a single offer from a publisher. Not a solitary one.
I never made this news public (who would?) but when it did get out, quite recently, it was suggested by more than one person that I could crowd-fund the book.
I thought crowd-funding was for high medical or vetinary bills or late-stage bucket list dreams. But it transpires people use it for creative projects too. And I would say a novel stretching to just under a hundred thousand words qualifies as one of those.
Anyway, I'm doing it. I'll make the digital version as cheaply priced as possible. If I raise the funds for a print version that too will be heavily discounted. And there'll be signed copies.
The novel is entitled The Fourth Haunting. It's a stand alone, but anyone familiar with my fiction will recognise some familiar characters and locations. And an obstinately persistent and secretive cult it's very bad news for anyone innocent to encounter. This is the relevant link, for anyone interested. http://gofund.me/e8044c4a
January 25, 2021
Publishing
Thought I'd post some musings on publishing, from a purely personal perspective. Over the past 20 years I've been the author of 17 published novels, 18 if you include the novelisation of a film. So I feel reasonably well qualified to do this.
I wrote four novels as Francis in the early noughties. They were historical fiction, set in or around WW2. So when I began the novel that would become The House of Lost Souls in 2005, I needed to differentiate between those and the paranormal thriller I was working on. Different subject matter needed a different name, so I decided to include ghostly goings on writing as F.G. Cottam.
THOLS did well. It was a Times Book Club choice, won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award and was translated into 18 languages. It was the first of my five novels published by Hodder & Stoughton. The others being Dark Echo, The Magdalena Curse, The Waiting Room and Brodmaw Bay.
Then I wrote The Colony, a sort of reaction to the tightly-knit, almost claustrophobic character of Bay, just to see if I was capable of handing something panoramic, with a large cast of disparate characters. The trouble being that when it was completed, no one wanted to publish it.
I self-published. And The Colony immediately became the best-selling book I had written. And the audiobook was recorded and became my strongest selling title, both in the UK and in the USA in that format. And a couple of years later, my agency PFD launched their own imprint and published a revised version of The Colony in paperback, and I suggested writing two more full-length books to complete a Colony trilogy.
Partly, but not wholly as a consequence of the pandemic, there is a huge amount of uncertainty right now in publishing about what fiction readers want. And I have never sold enough books to be immune to that uncertainty. I think that the book I completed last year is the best I have written for a decade, but that's no guarantee of anything.
I would say to any aspiring fiction writer that persistence is a vital attribute and that unless you are extremely lucky, disappointment is an unavoidable aspect of the craft. So, however, is self-belief (not to be confused with self-delusion). Either someone will make an offer for The Fourth Haunting, or someone won't. But either way, it will see the light of day. I write because doing so makes me feel more contented and fulfilled than I otherwise would. But I very definitely don't write for an audience of one.
I wrote four novels as Francis in the early noughties. They were historical fiction, set in or around WW2. So when I began the novel that would become The House of Lost Souls in 2005, I needed to differentiate between those and the paranormal thriller I was working on. Different subject matter needed a different name, so I decided to include ghostly goings on writing as F.G. Cottam.
THOLS did well. It was a Times Book Club choice, won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award and was translated into 18 languages. It was the first of my five novels published by Hodder & Stoughton. The others being Dark Echo, The Magdalena Curse, The Waiting Room and Brodmaw Bay.
Then I wrote The Colony, a sort of reaction to the tightly-knit, almost claustrophobic character of Bay, just to see if I was capable of handing something panoramic, with a large cast of disparate characters. The trouble being that when it was completed, no one wanted to publish it.
I self-published. And The Colony immediately became the best-selling book I had written. And the audiobook was recorded and became my strongest selling title, both in the UK and in the USA in that format. And a couple of years later, my agency PFD launched their own imprint and published a revised version of The Colony in paperback, and I suggested writing two more full-length books to complete a Colony trilogy.
Partly, but not wholly as a consequence of the pandemic, there is a huge amount of uncertainty right now in publishing about what fiction readers want. And I have never sold enough books to be immune to that uncertainty. I think that the book I completed last year is the best I have written for a decade, but that's no guarantee of anything.
I would say to any aspiring fiction writer that persistence is a vital attribute and that unless you are extremely lucky, disappointment is an unavoidable aspect of the craft. So, however, is self-belief (not to be confused with self-delusion). Either someone will make an offer for The Fourth Haunting, or someone won't. But either way, it will see the light of day. I write because doing so makes me feel more contented and fulfilled than I otherwise would. But I very definitely don't write for an audience of one.
January 15, 2021
Deja Vu
My last blog post was about The Fourth Haunting, the novel completed last autumn and currently in the hands of my agent.
Prior to writing that, I felt the urge to go back to New Hope Island, the principle location of my Colony trilogy, despite its cold remoteness and the grim phantoms from a bloody past that stubbornly haunt the place. The truth is, I like New Hope.
My question is, would anyone else? I stopped after 29, 000 words, thinking that a trilogy involving a fourth instalment has surely outstayed its welcome. So I stopped probably just under a third of the way through and didn't delete the file (I'm not that rash).
The premise is that the head of a Moscow based centre for psychic research thinks New Hope a promising location for a bit of experimentation. In this of course he's horribly wrong. I'd got to the point where he's beginning to realise that, but his backers are people who wouldn't take kindly to his getting cold feet.
Some of my trilogy characters feature. Patsy Lassiter, Phil Fortescue and Ruthie Gillespie all become embroiled. Is it worth pressing on? All comments welcome.
Prior to writing that, I felt the urge to go back to New Hope Island, the principle location of my Colony trilogy, despite its cold remoteness and the grim phantoms from a bloody past that stubbornly haunt the place. The truth is, I like New Hope.
My question is, would anyone else? I stopped after 29, 000 words, thinking that a trilogy involving a fourth instalment has surely outstayed its welcome. So I stopped probably just under a third of the way through and didn't delete the file (I'm not that rash).
The premise is that the head of a Moscow based centre for psychic research thinks New Hope a promising location for a bit of experimentation. In this of course he's horribly wrong. I'd got to the point where he's beginning to realise that, but his backers are people who wouldn't take kindly to his getting cold feet.
Some of my trilogy characters feature. Patsy Lassiter, Phil Fortescue and Ruthie Gillespie all become embroiled. Is it worth pressing on? All comments welcome.
October 18, 2020
The Fourth Haunting
That's the title of the novel I completed on October 10. I couldn't write at all in lockdown until August 14 when suddenly I couldn't stop. 91, 000 words, first-person single POV and two time-frames.
Tom Carter endured an experience at the age of 11 that determined his future life. In the present day he's Britain's most celebrated ghost-hunter. He is painfully divorced and the father of a beloved daughter who is a danger to herself. He pitches four allegedly haunted locations to a TV producer as the basis for a series and the producer green-lights the pilot, to be filmed at an abandoned orphanage at the foot of the Italian Dolomites. And away we go.
I think this is the best novel I have written since Dark Echo and the scariest since The House of Lost Souls. Done in under two months, there were times when it felt like it was writing itself. Though I have buffed it up since completion. Or polished it, for those of you unfamiliar with English phraseology. It's also written from a post-pandemic perspective, which seems a bit optimistic. Though I do hope all of you are getting through these uncertain times without them taking too much of a toll.
Tom Carter endured an experience at the age of 11 that determined his future life. In the present day he's Britain's most celebrated ghost-hunter. He is painfully divorced and the father of a beloved daughter who is a danger to herself. He pitches four allegedly haunted locations to a TV producer as the basis for a series and the producer green-lights the pilot, to be filmed at an abandoned orphanage at the foot of the Italian Dolomites. And away we go.
I think this is the best novel I have written since Dark Echo and the scariest since The House of Lost Souls. Done in under two months, there were times when it felt like it was writing itself. Though I have buffed it up since completion. Or polished it, for those of you unfamiliar with English phraseology. It's also written from a post-pandemic perspective, which seems a bit optimistic. Though I do hope all of you are getting through these uncertain times without them taking too much of a toll.
September 29, 2019
Island Life
Never say never have turned out to be wise words where my writing is concerned. I said (in a taped interview, so it's on record), that I would not revisit New Hope Island after completing my Colony trilogy with the closing novel Harvest of Scorn, which seemed when I finished it to wrap matters up fairly emphatically.
But about two months ago a premise occurred to me and it was this: the head of a Moscow-based centre for psychic research thinks New Hope Island the perfect location for some experimentation concerning the paranormal. He's very, very wrong. And he's beginning to suspect that he is. But the mission has financial backers too ruthless - and frankly too sinister - to dare to disappoint.
I'm now 30, 000 words in, so about a third of the way through a stand-alone that nevertheless features a few familiar characters. Like me, these people swore they'd never go back to that isolated lump of Hebridean granite. But one consistent feature of my fiction is that no one is really in control of their own fate. They're destined to revisit the island despite themselves.
I won't say anything further about the plot, other than one small detail that might be of interest to those of you familiar from past reading with little Rachel Ballantyne. It transpires that Seamus Ballantyne's daughter wasn't an only child. Rachel didn't only have a sister, she had a twin. Which might be sobering news for my studious Russian and his team of occult experts. As I write, they're three days away from setting off. I can only wish them luck, since they're really going to need it.
But about two months ago a premise occurred to me and it was this: the head of a Moscow-based centre for psychic research thinks New Hope Island the perfect location for some experimentation concerning the paranormal. He's very, very wrong. And he's beginning to suspect that he is. But the mission has financial backers too ruthless - and frankly too sinister - to dare to disappoint.
I'm now 30, 000 words in, so about a third of the way through a stand-alone that nevertheless features a few familiar characters. Like me, these people swore they'd never go back to that isolated lump of Hebridean granite. But one consistent feature of my fiction is that no one is really in control of their own fate. They're destined to revisit the island despite themselves.
I won't say anything further about the plot, other than one small detail that might be of interest to those of you familiar from past reading with little Rachel Ballantyne. It transpires that Seamus Ballantyne's daughter wasn't an only child. Rachel didn't only have a sister, she had a twin. Which might be sobering news for my studious Russian and his team of occult experts. As I write, they're three days away from setting off. I can only wish them luck, since they're really going to need it.
December 17, 2018
The Auguries
Since the February 28 publication date isn't that far away, here are some specifics about the next novel. Some of you might remember that the ritual that restored dead WW1 soldier Patrick Ross to (a sort of) life in my novel The Waiting Room was formulated originally by a 16th century German alchemist named Gunter Keller. The ritual is rediscovered early in the 20th century in that story, so Keller is very much a background figure.
In this one, in the here and now, history professor Juliet Harrington believes Keller to have been the principle architect of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom, a potent spell-book compiled by a cabal of the greatest occultists of his age.
The story is predicated on the notion that powerful magic exacts a powerful price - nature's way of objecting to reversals in the natural order of things. These calamities are preceded by strange events, the Auguries of the title. When a lunar eclipse no astronomer predicted is followed by an inexplicable tragedy involving great loss of life, Juliet suspects the Almanac has been rediscovered and is being used. Specifically, in London.
This is indeed the case, and the person who has rediscovered it is a precociously bright 14-year-old sufficiently gifted at languages and maths to understand its dense Latin text and arcane codification. Dawn Jackson is an angry, isolated, disassociated adolescent. In some ways the perfect candidate to find the Almanac, but in others the worst possible person to use it, because she is indifferent to the wider consequences.
As crisis escalates and spreads around the world, Juliet embarks on a quest to find the book and its user, convinced that Keller's secret agenda in compiling it was to accelerate the End Times.
My last novel, The Lucifer Chord, was in some ways deliberately understated. The paranormal element was ambiguous, the events largely open in retrospect to rational interpretation. This one is a story on a much bigger scale. And it has two time-frames - the present day and the period in which the Almanac was compiled, when we hear first hand from Keller and from the man who commissioned it, English Tudor Baron Edmund Fleury. Keller is vain, arrogant and merciless. Fleury is noble, loving, loyal and kind. So why on earth did he pay a king's ransom for the creation of something so potently deadly? That's a question the story fully addresses. I'm not daft enough to answer it here!
In this one, in the here and now, history professor Juliet Harrington believes Keller to have been the principle architect of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom, a potent spell-book compiled by a cabal of the greatest occultists of his age.
The story is predicated on the notion that powerful magic exacts a powerful price - nature's way of objecting to reversals in the natural order of things. These calamities are preceded by strange events, the Auguries of the title. When a lunar eclipse no astronomer predicted is followed by an inexplicable tragedy involving great loss of life, Juliet suspects the Almanac has been rediscovered and is being used. Specifically, in London.
This is indeed the case, and the person who has rediscovered it is a precociously bright 14-year-old sufficiently gifted at languages and maths to understand its dense Latin text and arcane codification. Dawn Jackson is an angry, isolated, disassociated adolescent. In some ways the perfect candidate to find the Almanac, but in others the worst possible person to use it, because she is indifferent to the wider consequences.
As crisis escalates and spreads around the world, Juliet embarks on a quest to find the book and its user, convinced that Keller's secret agenda in compiling it was to accelerate the End Times.
My last novel, The Lucifer Chord, was in some ways deliberately understated. The paranormal element was ambiguous, the events largely open in retrospect to rational interpretation. This one is a story on a much bigger scale. And it has two time-frames - the present day and the period in which the Almanac was compiled, when we hear first hand from Keller and from the man who commissioned it, English Tudor Baron Edmund Fleury. Keller is vain, arrogant and merciless. Fleury is noble, loving, loyal and kind. So why on earth did he pay a king's ransom for the creation of something so potently deadly? That's a question the story fully addresses. I'm not daft enough to answer it here!
November 13, 2018
Creatively Speaking
I've launched a creative writing consultancy. Part of the reason is seeing shelves-full of books on the theme of writing a bestseller by people who have never written a single word of published fiction. Most of the reason is to create another income strand doing something I honestly believe I'm qualified to do. Though my rates are very reasonable.
I've written 14 full-length paranormal thrillers including The Colony trilogy and Children of the Night Award winner The House of Lost Souls. As Francis Cottam I'm the author of four historical novels including WH Smith Literature Award short-listed debut, The Fire Fighter.
My fiction has ben translated into 17 languages and I've been published by (among others) Bloomsbury, Random House, Hodder and Stoughton, St. Martin's Press, Severn House and Vintage.
Areas I'll advise on include pacing, character-development, tone, atmosphere, genre-classification, coherence and marketability. Often something as simple as which tense the writer has chosen or whether it's a first or third-person narrative can be hugely influential in determining the character and appeal of a story.
I've done this before, but on an ad-hoc basis while this is more of a professional commitment. I've copy-edited The Auguries (my next novel - out in February of next year). I've written the dedication. Can't see myself starting anything else of my own prior to Christmas and this is a positive way to keep busy. Time will tell how it goes, but it's a plan for anyone seeking objective advice about an unpublished novel, just so long as it exists as a Word file.
I've written 14 full-length paranormal thrillers including The Colony trilogy and Children of the Night Award winner The House of Lost Souls. As Francis Cottam I'm the author of four historical novels including WH Smith Literature Award short-listed debut, The Fire Fighter.
My fiction has ben translated into 17 languages and I've been published by (among others) Bloomsbury, Random House, Hodder and Stoughton, St. Martin's Press, Severn House and Vintage.
Areas I'll advise on include pacing, character-development, tone, atmosphere, genre-classification, coherence and marketability. Often something as simple as which tense the writer has chosen or whether it's a first or third-person narrative can be hugely influential in determining the character and appeal of a story.
I've done this before, but on an ad-hoc basis while this is more of a professional commitment. I've copy-edited The Auguries (my next novel - out in February of next year). I've written the dedication. Can't see myself starting anything else of my own prior to Christmas and this is a positive way to keep busy. Time will tell how it goes, but it's a plan for anyone seeking objective advice about an unpublished novel, just so long as it exists as a Word file.
September 11, 2018
The Auguries
On July 18 I was invited by my publisher at Severn House to submit the synopsis for a new novel. They'd previously published The Memory of Trees and The Lucifer Chord so were familiar with my style and themes.
I don't really do synopses, because I make them up as I go along. Often I don't know what's going to happen in the next line, let alone the next chapter. So I sent her a premise, which she must have liked, because she commissioned the book on the strength of it.
I write quite fast. By August 29 I was ready to send her the completed novel, 72, 000 words divided into 47 chapters. She emailed me on Friday saying she was delighted with the finished result and giving me a publication date of February 28 2019.
The Auguries is full-blown apocalyptic and the darkest thing I've written. Ordinarily I wouldn't describe my books as in the horror genre, I'd say they're more thrillers with a paranormal element. But this one is as close to horror as I've ever got. My 16th century alchemist from the Waiting Room, Gunter Keller, appears in this in sections set in Europe in the 1520s. But most of the contemporary action takes place in London and apart from him, the cast of characters is completely new.
My character Ruthie Gillespie got the stand-alone novel I thought she deserved in The Lucifer Chord. I'll definitely feature her again in the future, she's resting rather than retired. But Juliet Harrington, the main female protagonist of The Auguries, has ample charms of her own, as I hope at least some of you will discover early next year.
I don't really do synopses, because I make them up as I go along. Often I don't know what's going to happen in the next line, let alone the next chapter. So I sent her a premise, which she must have liked, because she commissioned the book on the strength of it.
I write quite fast. By August 29 I was ready to send her the completed novel, 72, 000 words divided into 47 chapters. She emailed me on Friday saying she was delighted with the finished result and giving me a publication date of February 28 2019.
The Auguries is full-blown apocalyptic and the darkest thing I've written. Ordinarily I wouldn't describe my books as in the horror genre, I'd say they're more thrillers with a paranormal element. But this one is as close to horror as I've ever got. My 16th century alchemist from the Waiting Room, Gunter Keller, appears in this in sections set in Europe in the 1520s. But most of the contemporary action takes place in London and apart from him, the cast of characters is completely new.
My character Ruthie Gillespie got the stand-alone novel I thought she deserved in The Lucifer Chord. I'll definitely feature her again in the future, she's resting rather than retired. But Juliet Harrington, the main female protagonist of The Auguries, has ample charms of her own, as I hope at least some of you will discover early next year.
June 25, 2018
Motivation
In every novel I've written I've tried to keep the writing fresh by taking on a new fictive challenge. In The Lucifer Chord, this was making supergroup Ghost Legion and their frontman Martin Mear seem an authentic part of rock history. I want readers too young to recall the 1970s googling them, convinced that they must have existed in actuality.
This wasn't in the writing, a straightforward process. Inventing Ghost Legion's history and creative output and supposed cultural legacy was easy. Martin himself, though, was much trickier. He was enigmatic. He was profoundly - and paradoxically - private. He was a keeper of secrets. And he was someone different to everyone who knew him. A Russian doll of a man, in the words of the Legion's veteran manager Carter Melville. Layers uncovered until there's almost nothing left.
But that's one of the reasons my researcher heroine Ruthie Gillespie takes on the commission of sorting man from myth at the outset of the story. There's a long essay to write about Martin to accompany the definitive box set containing every recording he ever made. There's a generous fee involved. But in the opening chapter, Ruthie needs a distraction from her own emotional predicament. That, and the fact that she likes a challenge, are her real reasons for bidding for the job. She also has a talent for solving mysteries, which in this novel, is tested to its fullest extent.
'Cottam is adept at creating an atmosphere so disquieting that a sliver of ice lodges in your brain and remains until the final twist.' So said Kirkus Review, reviewing The Lucifer Chord. At the start of this piece, I said I try to do something different in every book, and that's true. But I always, always try to scare you. That never changes and I don't think it ever will.
This wasn't in the writing, a straightforward process. Inventing Ghost Legion's history and creative output and supposed cultural legacy was easy. Martin himself, though, was much trickier. He was enigmatic. He was profoundly - and paradoxically - private. He was a keeper of secrets. And he was someone different to everyone who knew him. A Russian doll of a man, in the words of the Legion's veteran manager Carter Melville. Layers uncovered until there's almost nothing left.
But that's one of the reasons my researcher heroine Ruthie Gillespie takes on the commission of sorting man from myth at the outset of the story. There's a long essay to write about Martin to accompany the definitive box set containing every recording he ever made. There's a generous fee involved. But in the opening chapter, Ruthie needs a distraction from her own emotional predicament. That, and the fact that she likes a challenge, are her real reasons for bidding for the job. She also has a talent for solving mysteries, which in this novel, is tested to its fullest extent.
'Cottam is adept at creating an atmosphere so disquieting that a sliver of ice lodges in your brain and remains until the final twist.' So said Kirkus Review, reviewing The Lucifer Chord. At the start of this piece, I said I try to do something different in every book, and that's true. But I always, always try to scare you. That never changes and I don't think it ever will.
May 31, 2018
Unfortunate.
So publication day arrives in the UK (today) and amazon.co.uk announce that The Lucifer Chord is currently out of stock. Not ideal, if I'm honest. In fact, this has put a total dampener on what should have been a celebratory day, given that I think this title is in the top five of the 13 paranormal thrillers I've written, if not in the top three. I'd like to be philosophical, but I'm not, since this was completely avoidable. Book #13. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for me, anyway. Sorry to be negative, but bitterly disappointed.
