That One Minute – Teaser

The cover is released, I hope the rest of the book will soon follow

After Lord of Water, That One Minute will be my second title with US small press Dark Quest Books and I hope it’ll see the light of day in January or so??? Honestly, I don’t know yet when the book will come out. Let’s say, I would not be surprised if there was a delay.



Nevertheless, the cover is out and it was again done by Naoyuki Katoh and he never fails to surprise me. While the other covers he did for me so far (Dome Child, Hagen trilogy parts 1 and 2 (She Should Have Called Him Siegfried and To Mix and To Stir), Lord of Water) were all drawings, he integrated photos into the cover for That One Minute. It’s three photos in total from one river and two lakes in the greater Tokyo area.

One of the key scenes in the story are happenings at a small lake in a park where the water retreats, gates to “hell” (?) open up and where the story’s hero, Chris Burns, makes first acquaintance with certain ghostly gray hands.

There are two funny things about this cover. I described the scene to Katoh sensei and wanted to have an old fashioned pocket watch with roman letters above the actual scene from the book which shows one minute to twelve. I got my watch and if you look closely my name is inside the watch where otherwise the watch maker’s name would be. I didn’t ask for this, that was Katoh sensei’s idea.

Then I sent the cover to Dark Quest and got another funny surprise when Danielle from Dark Quest got the idea to use the watch as the “O” for That One Minute. I had thus two big happy moments with this cover – a nice start.

Now what’s it all about? I don’t know yet how Dark Quest will label the thing but I like to call it a “Fantasy Horror Comedy”.

Behold, we all exist twice. Once here and now, and once more in a parallel world that is one minute closer to heaven and hell than we are. We lead happy blissful lives here, not aware of the “demonics” and “angelics” playing chess with our souls next door.

Under circumstances I shall not describe in detail here, the complete loser Chris Burns gets transferred into the parallel world where he meets his know-it-all second self, his much nicer wife and where he gets the job to save their world and ours from dark demonic plans.

It’s a tongue in cheek experiment with a lot of POVs. More or less every major and even not so major character gets one or more POV scenes. It’s all 3rd person limited. I wanted to find out how many POVs you can have without confusing the reader. The trick with that is that you have to make clear very very quickly whose POV you’re in at the beginning of each POV change (usually a new scene and/or chapter). I hope I managed to make that clear and I hope nobody gets confused .

I like what Neil Gaiman said during the awards ceremony for the World Fantasy Award a few weeks ago in Brighton. In these days and times with so much stuff out there and “no rules” anymore – just write what you wanna write.

Well, I always write what I want to write, but from the experiment point of view this motto fits all the more to That One Minute than to some other stuff I have written. There is no deep philosophy or message behind That One Minute, it’s just a “movie” that I would like to see and I think that Mr. Undersecretary Adrian Stern from the “Ministry of Spirits” (the bad guy) is just sooooo cool