New books

I knew it was a while since I had posted; coming back here today I see it's six months. Oops. I have some lame excuses about moving house, settling in to a new country and so on, but who's buying it?

The truth is usually that I didn't have anything to say, and in that case, it's better to keep silent. But I have been writing, and working on various stages of different books, and so here's a quick post of what's happening, and what books I hope will appear in 2016.

Have a very good and peaceful holiday.

Mister Memory
My second novel for the excellent people at Mulholland, Mister Memory is scheduled for July 2016, and is the final realisation of an idea I've tried to work with for a very long time, over a decade in fact. Inspired by the real story of Solomon Shereshevsky, it's the story of a man with a perfect memory. Shereshevsky was a Russian living in the early 20th century, who lived a pretty sad life due to his inability to forget. Mister Memory recounts the tale of Marcel Despréz, working in the clubs of Pigalle, Paris at the end of the 19th. It's a tale of murder and of power, but above all of the fact that in order to function, we have to find the balance between memory and forgetting.

Saint Death
October will (I hope) see the arrival of my next book for Orion. I've just finished the first draft, and am trying not to tinker with it for a while. It's set (literally) on the border of Mexico and the United States. It's about death, love, money, power, guns, gambling and lies. It's about three friends who are part of the kind of community that suffers greatly from the narco wars.

Blood Red, Snow White

If you're reading this in the States, however, it's more likely that the next YA book released will be this true story about an English writer and his small but significant role in the Russian Revolution. You can read more about it here.

Snow

Finally, I'm now working on a short book/long essay about one of my favourite subjects, for Little Toller. This is a beautiful series (have a look here) and I'm really happy to be adding to it. It's possible to write about anything, anywhere - but it's fun when what you're writing about is all around you. As I write these words from my new writing room in our new house in the French Alps, with snow lying thickly on the ground, my work as a writer is made that little bit easier.

That's it for 2016, but looking further ahead, 2017 should hopefully see the following books.

Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black

After Dark Satanic Mills, my brother and I wanted to work on something else. This book is the result. It takes the Orpheus legend and recasts it during the Christmas of 1944 in London. Harry Black, conscientious objector, artist, is working as a fire warden as the doodlebugs and V2s pound the city towards oblivion. It's part novel, part graphic novel. There is exciting news about the artist for this one, but I'm not allowed to say who that might be, as yet.

Scarlett Hart: The Tentacles of Terror

Another collaboration, this time with my great friend Thomas Taylor. We've both posted bits and pieces about this long-running project for First Second Books, which has been beset by delays. We're both now happy to say it looks like it's back on track and I hope 2017 will see it emerge. Thomas is doing an amazing job with the art, he's a total natural for comics, and I can't wait to see the finished thing.

Where I Work

(This post first appeared on Mulholland's tumblr)

A few years ago I moved back to Cambridge: when I saw this shed in the garden of one of the houses I was viewing, I put an offer in on the spot. Like most writers, I’ve had to work in all sorts of inappropriate spaces, and, like most writers, always craved the perfect place to work.

My shed is near perfect. It’s a little on the small side, but that just means I have to tidy up from time to time, which is no bad thing.

Here’s what it looks like on the inside (just after a tidy up)

The stuff on the walls is never just random – they’re all things to do with books, most usually, they’re inspiration for books I’m writing or have just finished writing.

High up on the wall are a couple of guardians – ‘V’ from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, one of my favourite films, and Edgar the raven, both of whom make me smile every time I walk into my shed. That’s more important than in sounds, and links to the word that Edgar’s standing on. That one word – PLAY – is the single most important thing I’ve learned in the 15 years I’ve been a published author. I’ve thought a lot about writing in that time, I’ve had moments of block, I’ve had many fears and worries and concerns about how to best do the art. The importance of play, and I mean play in a focussed yet relaxed, serious and yet fun way, cannot be denied: it underlies the best work I do, I think.

Underneath that are a few spirals; I’ve just finished the second draft of a new YA novel called The Ghosts of Heaven – it’s a slightly complex quartet of novellas, each of which has the motif of the spiral underlying the text.

  

Beneath the spirals we come to a series of rough art by my friend Thomas Taylor. I’ve started to write graphic novels in the last year or so – and these are images from a forthcoming project: Scarlett Hart. It won’t be out for a while though. I finished a first draft in the autumn; a second draft is due and then Thomas has the gargantuan task of producing almost 200 pages of full colour art. That will take him a year or so to do. And then publication will be a year after that – comics take MUCH more work than many people give them credit for. Personally, I’ve found it a wonderful challenge to learn how to write for comics – to set up plot, character, backstory, atmosphere etc etc and yet to have so few words to do work with (95% of what you ‘write’ as the author of a graphic novel disappears into the images) is a huge task. Then, add to that, that you have to hit a page count more or less exactly (due to the cost of production of comics) and you have a major set of hills to climb. But I like a challenge.

 

On the left of the desk here are a few books I’ve been using to research my next novel for Mulholland – I’m deep in that process of hunting out things that I know will be useful, or hope will be, and connected to that, I guess, are the red notebooks at the back of the desk. I’m on book 10 at the moment, since 2000, and the previous 9 I keep close at hand as you never know when browsing through old ideas might finally make a connection to something that’s been lurking in your unconscious for a while. Connections are as much the stuff of a writer’s art as the imagination.

Next to the books are the edits for a short story I was recently asked to write – that will be what I work on later this week. I love writing short stories – they’re a chance to let your hair down, try something new, and experiment with style. Something which can feed back into longer work in the future, perhaps.

I tend to change the view on my screen saver, and find something central to what I am writing about at the time – this is a building that will appear in this second Mulholland title. I won’t say where it is but it’s more sinister than it might first appear. Me view is pretty limited  - a hint of my neighbours’ garden – but that’s a good thing – it’s interesting enough to stimulate day dreaming (a friend in my opinion, not an enemy), but not so interesting that you end up not doing what you should be doing.

Over to the right, although I’ve finished work on it long ago (the book is about to be published) is the cover of my first novel for Mulholland – A Love Like Blood. Covers are so important. I know that’s obvious but what might be less obvious is the nerves with which you open an email with the subject line “cover of your book”. Whenever we get to the moment of designing the book cover, I live in fear, and the hope that your publisher will come up with something you love. Fortunately, this time, I loved the cover from the first design. A little tweaking and it was done. If you get sent a dodgy first attempt, you know you might be in for months of wrangling. But if you have to, you have to, because covers are the first and primary thing that sells your book once it’s out in the world. Something that some authors might not like to admit, but which, having worked in sales, in publishing for many years, I know to be true. Above the book jacket is a photo of the Italian village where the book opens – a weird and wonderful hilltop place called Sextantio by the Romans.

And finally, here’s another important tool for me. Along with notebooks themselves, maps of one form or another have always been key to how I organise a book. So I use large sheets of paper, on which I write in pencil (because it changes all the time) and on these maps I sketch out a novel’s structure, themes character notes, and so on. Every book has a different kind of map, because every book needs to be written in a different way. Understanding that and not being scared of it is very important, and is again something I am still learning about. This map is the first go at one for the second book I’ll write for Mulholland. At the moment it doesn’t even have a working title, the characters don’t have names, the plot is still forming. It’s simultaneously one of the scariest and most exciting periods in a writer’s work cycle.