The Terrible Twos

*This appeared earlier this week as a guest post on the megalith book review blog

Here we are again. It’s been a few years. Lots of things have happened in that time. Not least Brad Thor slayed me in a mighty smack-down last year where I think we managed to get about 300 people to vote for us. I was quite proud of that. I mean, Brad’s a giant in the best possible way, and his readers are rabidly loyal and a very decent bunch. That was a lot of fun. Of course, last time I was invited to chat it was about Silver, my first thriller, which was just coming out so I guess we’re looking at Jan 2010, the best part of three years ago. So, anyway, it’s nice to be here again.

There’s a note in the back of the hardcover that says GOLD coming Jan 2011…

That’s what this little visit’s all about. The dreaded sequel.

I remember when a friend read Silver he said ‘it’s great, but it’s not your best book, and if you never write Gold it’ll just be a so-so unfinished tale’. That email has stuck with me for the last 3 years. It’s been like the email of Damocles hanging over my head to be honest. I mean, look at where we are. September 2012. And there’s no Gold on the shelves. Silver’s being forgotten about by readers and with good reason. It’s been a long time.

Now, let’s make no bones about it, following up anything is difficult if you’re like me. You want to purge yourself of the characters, do new stuff, develop. But it’s not as simple as all that. Sometimes the real world gets in the way, Sometimes it’s pressure, sometimes it’s completely external that you have absolutely no control over.

So, the terrible twos…

Let’s look at the evidence: The UK digital edition of Silver was listed as the #26 bestselling digital book of 2011, it sold into hardcover into Germany, France, Poland, Turkey and Spain and did pretty well everywhere but Germany, but then I wasn’t particularly kind to Berlin in the book so perhaps I did that to myself. It’s by far my most successful original novel and is neck-and-neck in terms of sales with my most successful media novel, the Von Carsten Vampire Wars series for Games Workshop.

At the time I did a lot of blog tour stuff talking on indie sites about thinking of yourself as a brand, and thinking about your product and brand identity. So any right-thinking chap would obviously sit down and dive straight into Gold, right? What can I say? It’s amazing how many bad decisions one man can make. Especially after leaving the book on the mother of all cliff-hangers (I didn’t really, honestly… I finished the book the chapter before and the last part that got everyone so frustrated was actually just setting up the next book). It’s the smart thing, right? So what did I do? I wrote London Macabre, vast sprawling novel of fantastic Victoriana (most certainly not steampunk) and then sat down to start Gold having cleansed my palette. You see, I have got this kind of magpie brain that just gets attracted to shiny ideas and because I work everyday, and work at least 6-8 hrs every single day, I am writing a lot, meaning I can explore these shiny ideas… so when I was commissioned to write a short novel (40,000 words) called London Macabre I figured it’d be about 6-8 weeks work and a nice break from the intensity of Silver. It wasn’t. It took me almost an entire year working unpaid on a speculative project. It was the worst possible business decision I could have made, and I’ve really been paying for it for the last 2 years. Even so, I ploughed on and finished the most complex novel I’ve ever written—which we couldn’t sell. It’s just come out now, actually, in ebook as an exclusive for Barnes and Noble here and print via a small US publisher, Crossroad Press, who in general do a lot of reprints of successful books so it’s a bit of a step in another direction for them. But it meant there was no Gold. The book everyone was writing to me about.

I wasn’t worried. I had a story in mind that was really worthy of following up Silver. I was bursting to write it.

And I managed 50,000 words, or about a third of the novel, before I threw it out.
And I really do mean threw it out. It’s gone.

Now obviously everyone thinks I must be barking mad, but let me explain. It was a lot of work and there was a lot of good stuff in it. So why throw it out? Honestly, because it was exactly the same formula as Silver. It wasn’t deliberate. I don’t quite know why or how it happened but I was subconsciously following an identical beat-sheet in my head. Open with a spectacular and sinister disaster/threat, go to Nonesuch for debrief, scatter the group to follow clues… heck there was even a scene with Noah visiting Margot, just the same as Silver. None of this was deliberate, but I found myself reading back through it and just going cold. I mean, I really don’t want to be the kind of thriller writer who by book two has fallen into an identifiable pattern. So I tossed it all.

That put me more than 12 months behind schedule. More like 16 months.

At this point it was probably around Feb 2011, or a month after Gold was due to hit the US in hardcover. It’d come to the realisation there was no way back from that.

The Internet’s changed the way we can interact with and approach authors. I think at that point I was getting maybe 5 or 6 letters a day asking ‘Where’s Gold?’ The other mails asked ‘When’s the final Slainé novel coming out?’ and I didn’t have a good answer for either, because by then Gold was feeling like a dim and distant dream.

I worked really hard for about 4 more months, researching heavily, and finally decided on my new plot line – and it was a good one. A really good one and I was about to dive in when I got a phone call from DICE – a division of Electronic Arts – asking if I’d be interested in helping them out on something called ‘Project Venice’ which had failed to get through the gate. Meaning they’d spent millions on it and it hadn’t been approved to go into the final stages of development. They wanted a story, and because of the similarity between what I’d done in Silver and what they wanted to do with Venice (Battlefield 3) they thought I was the man to help pull it all together. I ended up in about 2 months of non-stop meetings discussing terrorism and what I would do if I were a terrorist, how I’d go about inspiring fear, and another month writing full time on it. I wound up scripting a lot of little details for the Dima character, who let’s face it, is extremely close in style to Konstatin Khavin, working out what exactly the terrorist threats should be, and crafting what I think are still the most powerful scenes in the finished Battlefield game – which take place in Paris around the Euronext Stock Exchange and the moral dilemma of chasing a terrorist on foreign soil while the Gendarmerie try to stop you. The core of this was all harking back to Bin Laden’s last video urging the young men to rise up against the nodes of economy because the United States economy was a Paper Tiger that could be brought down just like Russia’s.

There was an inevitable cross-pollination of ideas, after all I’d just spent 4 months researching counterfeit culture and how to bring about an economic collapse through terrorism. That was when we hit the first major problem with Gold – I couldn’t do anything with the plot I’d come up with because it walked a very similar line to BF3 and the nature of computers and the punitive contract I’d signed meant that basically every idea I’d had on the project DICE owned lock-stock and two smoking barrels. It would been easier if I’d stayed with the project to the end, but I didn’t. I wrote the storyline, came up with the actual structure around it, building two layers of story simultaneously with a 24-style NOW interspersing the unfolding backstory. Someone else was brought in to write the video cut-scenes and character dialogue. What this meant was that I could never really know what was being used and where the game had evolved beyond our meetings and my storyline. The last thing I wanted was to be sued for ripping off myself.

So Gold sat in a weird stasis for a period while I looked at October 2011 as liberation day – BF3 would come out and I’d know for sure what had and hadn’t been used. Only it didn’t work like that because suddenly I heard rumours of an Andy McNabb novel featuring Dima as the lead character and I was left thinking crap, does this mean stuff they didn’t use in the game could serve as the story for Dima? As I said, a lot of my input for Dima was stuff that could quite easily have been stuff for Koni. So I had to wait to read the novel to work out if there was anything else that had become off-limits. And then there were download extensions, and it felt like the whole thing was never going to end.

In the end, and for the second time, it was just easier to chuck everything out, because this crap could just go on and on forever and it was doing my sanity no good. By now though Silver had exploded in the UK, with over 40,000 ebooks sold in a couple of months, hitting #2 and staying top #10 for 3 months. Suddenly there was a very vocal audience for a book that just didn’t exist. And I didn’t have a new storyline worthy of the team.

It was, all in all, my worst nightmare. Screwed by my own success. Because people wouldn’t wait forever, and my friend’s prophetic ‘if you never write Gold’ was really starting to ring in my ears a little too loud and clear for comfort.

To make matters worse there were rumblings. Variance, who put the hardcover edition out in the US, hadn’t put out a new title in getting on for 12 months. Was I about to dedicate 9 months of my life to write a book where there’d be no publisher at the end to actually get it to readers? Were they still excited by the story? Were they even going to be around in 12 more months when it was done and dusted? Lots of questions to worry about that took me further and further out of the actual writing process. And in the middle of all this I’d been contracted to write a novel for Guild Wars 2, Sea of Sorrows, which had gone sour when my editor Will McDermott, was fired from Arena. The whole thing started to take a toll. The stress of making mortgage payments, the expectancy of readers, all of it, just served to really drag me down and it was Gold that was suffering. Big time.

So I had to get over it, pick myself up and start again. No choice. No time for feeling sorry for myself. But I didn’t dive straight into Gold. Instead I had an idea for something a little different – tangential. I needed to get the team moving again, having adventures. And I had some ideas that linked into the opening part of Silver where the team are described as treasure hunters working under cover in dangerous territories. We needed to see these things. I needed to write them. So I started plotting three short novels, Solomon’s Seal, WarGod and The Prophet. These are ‘Ogmios Origins’ novels, letting us meet the team doing what they do best.

This week sees the release of Solomon’s Seal (in the US here:here and the UK here: here) co-written with one of my best friends and long term writing partner’s Steve Lockley. It focusses very much on the events of Jenin, the refugee camp in Palestine where Orla, the female member of the team, was abused and tortured pre-Silver. It’s a fundamental part of the story that I really wanted to tell. With the discovery of the long lost Seal--real or not--Konstantin and Orla find themselves in Jerusalem and Palestine fighting for their lives in a desperate race to stop all hell breaking lose. They don't know who they can trust. They don't know which way to turn next. All they know is they have to find the Seal and divert the detonation of a dirty bomb at one of Jerusalem's most holy sights in the process. It’s a proper balls to the wall thriller. I’m really pleased with it. I think readers will be too, because it fills in a lot of blanks.

Then there’s WarGod coming next month, which was written with up-and-coming adventure writer Sean Ellis, which is about Julius Caesar’s legendary sword, Crocea Mors, and is very much Ronan Frost up front and centre, and the final one of the set, The Prophet, which is about the lost Templar “treasure” the head of Baphomet. That’s a Noah-Orla tag-team effort with Rick Chesler.

And then we get Gold. I’m reluctant to put a release date on it. It feels honestly like it’ll be summer next year.

The fact is it’s actually really hard to write a sequel to a successful book – harder by far than I expected, and made harder because it was successful, when you realise that what you’d been doing was in fact write the same book again. Hell, even the internalised pressure increases exponentially, I want to it to be the best it can be. I want it to be thrilling. And the thing is, real life has changed me in the years since writing Silver. We all change, obviously, but even the way I think has changed in part. I mean, I’m suddenly aware that there are new things to be frightened of, intimate things, so Gold isn’t going to be so much about the spectacle of fear like Silver was, it’s going to be much closer to home. One reason for this is actually something that happened to a family friend. He’s a journalist. Actually a respected journalist who works for newspapers like The Times in London. His sister works with my better half. 14 months ago Martin was found guilty of terrorism in Ethiopia and sentenced to 11 years in prison. It was a trumped up ‘crime’ and we’ve all been sitting and praying he’d come home while the politicians have been locked in silent diplomacy to bring him and his partner Johan back to Stockholm. It’s funny how even as an outsider this stuff changes you. It does. I’ve found myself thinking about Greta, Martin’s sister. About how it feels to be the one left behind, not knowing. This reality impacts on Gold in ways you wouldn’t expect, but in ways that will make it much more powerful, I think. More intimate and real.

So that’s it, the terrible twos, and why it was easier to give birth to triplets than write a sequel to a successful book.

Remind me never to do this again.