The Next Big Thing

1) What is the working title of your next book?

Broken Homes

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

From the real life scandal during the 1980s when Tesco heiress and uber-grifter Dame Shirley Porter deliberately housed poor families in asbestos ridden blocks of flats as part of her criminal plot to rig the local elections.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Well I call it a Crime/SFF hybrid but Urban Fantasy fits.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I have a whole Fantasy Casting page.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Architecture can be murder.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No the book will be distributed by bananas.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

It's not quite finished yet - nearly there.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I like to think that my books are incompatible incomprehensible incomplete incomparable!

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I can't stop writing them now. It's too late for me but it might not be too late for you. Save yourself! Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family...

 10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?

 Come the zombie apocalypse it will make a useful source of firelighting material. Unless you get the eBook version of course - in which case you're screwed.

Currently Reading: The Adventures of Amir Hamza

The Adventures of Amir Hamza

By Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Belgrami

Translated from the Urdu by Musharraf Ali Faroqi

This was a present from my good friend Samit Basu author of the brilliant Turbulance (which you should buy immediately and then read). It is the size of a couple of G.R.R, Martin books and so I suspect I'm going to be currently reading this, bit by bit, quite a way into the New Year. 

Fantasy Casting Update

Added some of the suggestions made in the last week here

Currently Reading: Ugly Ways

Ugly Ways
By Tina McElroy Ansa

(From Amazon) Three black sisters reunite in their Georgia hometown to embrace, scream, smoke, contemplate suicide, and swap clothes while preparing for their mother's funeral--in a rambling follow-up to Ansa's Baby of the Family (1989).

Esther Lovejoy has died at last, and her three daughters- -Betty, the ultra-reliable owner of a pair of beauty salons; Emily, the lonely, unstable researcher who longs for love; and Annie Ruth, the pretty youngest whose job as an L.A. TV anchorwoman is driving her nuts--rush home to begin rehashing their traumatic childhood memories in the hope of laying them to rest. Ruled with an iron hand by Esther, who insisted they call her "Mudear'' (baby talk for ``my dear''), the three Lovejoy girls learned the hard way to hold their heads high, work hard, and, whatever happened, never to trust a man--even while Mudear herself spent her days as a voluntary shut-in, watching TV, taking naps, and wearing negligees while her husband worked in the chalk mines to support her. 

Tormented by a mother whose belief that "she was above the laws of God and man,'' to say nothing of her habit of gardening only by moonlight, caused tongues to wag all over town, the Lovejoy girls nevertheless grew up to forge successful, independent lives while their father faded into the background, muttering about "womens taking over [his] house.'' As each daughter (and, occasionally, the shrill, judgemental ghost of Mudear herself) recollects those long- gone years, the source of Mudear's familial power is revealed, the daughters' lifelong resentments aired, and the father's suffering at last relieved, resulting in a happy funeral for one and all.

Have added a cover gallery here.

But but but...You're reading it wrong. Again!

....Or the strange case of Dr Walid's phenotype.

Last week I idly started a fantasy casting blog/twitter thingie which not only provided many happy hours of procrastination but also threw up loads of names that I’d never considered before. But the really interesting result was what happened when I asked for suggestions for the character of Dr Walid.

I got many suggestions for many fine actors, amongst them Ben Kingsley, and the one thing they all had in common was they were all ethnically Asian(1), Arabic or Middle Eastern. Hooray for diversity I hear you say and hurrah indeed were it not for the fact that Dr Walid is neither ethnically Asian, Arabic or Middle Eastern.

Here is the passage where Peter first meets our illustrious Cryptopathologist.

I was introduced to Abdul Haqq Walid, a spry, gingery man in his fifties who spoke with a soft Highland accent. (Rivers of London, p67)

Dr Walid is a white Scot from Oban, his family are observant members of the Church of Scotland, and he converted to Islam when studying medicine at Edinburgh. I often refer to him as ‘Gastroenterology’s answer to Cat Stevens,’ after Yusif Islam who likewise converted in the late 1970s and like Walid he took an Arabic name when he did so.

Readers read books much faster than writers write them and can miss details as they go. Obviously many readers read the name Abdul Haqq Walid and immediately superimposed Ben Kingsley on the character before they’d even finished the sentence. They did this because western culture has a hard time separating Islam, the religion, from a bundle of distinct ethnicities (Asian, Middle Eastern and Arab).

So now a quick digression followed by some waffle.

A Digression

My favourite TV drama example of this kind of stupidity comes in The State Within by Lizzie Mickery and Dan Percival during which the US Government decides to lock up or deport (I forget which) all British Muslims. Now leaving aside the constitutionality of such a move – how the fuck would they know of which British passport holders are Muslims? Religion is not specified on the passport and that information is not gathered for any British (or as far as I know US) form of identification.

There’s a scene where a British Muslim couple nervously approach a checkpoint, we know they are Muslim because they’re Asian and nervous, but how would the officer’s at the checkpoint know they were Muslims. By their ethnicity – they could have been Hindi’s, Jains, Christians, Sihks, Jews or, god forbid, atheists. By their names? Many Asian Muslims have Arabic names but many do not, many non-Muslims have Arabic names – my son for example – you run across many non-Muslims with Arabic names especially if they or their parents are from West Africa.

None of this is raised by any of the characters in the TV series because for the writers and production crew Islam was an ethnicity not a globe spanning religion. Once the US Government had made the decision to deport them they’d be easy to spot – no worries.

Some Waffle

I can't help wondering that I could have avoided the confusion if I had written the sentence as... I was introduced to a spry, gingery Scot called Abdul Haqq Walid. Would the whole gingery Scot stereotype have overcome the Muslim as ethnic group stereotype? I can't tell and that's the problem. 

You see I deliberately made Dr Walid a convert in part to work against that stereotype (in other part because he insisted on looking like Robin Cook in my imagination) so should I have hammered the point home a bit harder? Some argue that a writer has a responsibility to judge their audience reaction when tackling sensitive topics like religion and ethnicity but by what margin of overkill do you need to put into your writing to ensure everyone gets it? Is it even desirable that everyone gets it?

As my friend Andrew says - it'll just be a lovely surprise for everyone if they make a TV series.

(1) That’s South Asian in American English.

Fantasy Casting

UPDATE 03/11/2012
THIS GOT SO OUT OF HAND THAT I GAVE IT'S VERY OWN PAGE

Currently Reading: Red Country

 

They burned her home.
They stole her brother and sister.
But vengeance is following.

Shy South hoped to bury her bloody past and ride away smiling, but she'll have to sharpen up some bad old ways to get her family back, and she's not a woman to flinch from what needs doing. She sets off in pursuit with only a pair of oxen and her cowardly old step father Lamb for company. But it turns out Lamb's buried a bloody past of his own. And out in the lawless Far Country the past never stays buried.

Their journey will take them across the barren plains to a frontier town gripped by gold fever, through feud, duel and massacre, high into the unmapped mountains to a reckoning with the Ghosts. Even worse, it will force them into alliance with Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, and his feckless lawyer Temple, two men no one should ever have to trust.

The BBC 6 O'Clock News Regional Bias report: Month 2

Salford - City of Light!

Last month I reactivated my project to determine, entirely to my own satisfaction, whether the rest of the UK (but mostly the North and Scotland) were ignored by an excessively London-centric news media.

 Another month(1) has gone by and while I think it is far too early to make conclusions there is little sign of a London-centric bias so far. On the contrary Scotland, Wales and North-West have dominated. 

Starting with the raw figures in minutes of coverage per region/nation.

	September	October	Total
North West	42.66	18.76	61.42
Wales	14.55	24.46	39.01
London	18.31	18.99	37.30
Scotland	13.59	21.35	34.94
South-East	24.07	9.91	33.98
Yorkshire +	19.76	11.08	30.84
South-West	5.60	22.88	28.48
East	3.43	13.81	17.24
West Midlands	0.92	10.57	11.49
Northern Ireland	7.37	2.88	10.25
North East	6.55	-	6.55
East Midlands	1.97	1.72	3.69

London comes in 3rd behind the North-West and Wales, which has had a particularly news worthy month what with mad hit and run drivers etc. If we then adjust for population size we find London dropping down the chart to 7th place behind the South-West.

	September	October	Total
Wales	4.75	7.98	12.73
North West	6.05	2.66	8.71
Scotland	2.59	4.06	6.65
Yorkshire +	3.74	2.10	5.84
Northern Ireland	4.07	1.59	5.66
South-West	1.06	4.33	5.38
London	2.24	2.32	4.56
South-East	2.79	1.15	3.94
East	0.59	2.36	2.95
North East	2.52	-	2.52
West Midlands	0.16	1.89	2.05
East Midlands	0.43	0.38	0.81

 One thing is indisputable though there are regions of the UK that seem oddly neglected by the news media it just so happens it's neither Scotland, Wales, the North-West or Yorkshire.

Still, given the difference one good solid sex scandal or murder can make to a region, it's far too early to draw any conclusions from this data.

(1) I'm doing this, for my convenience, in 4 week blocks. At some point it will get horribly out of sync but I'll worry about that  when I get there.

At Last The Truth! They Wrote What?

Readers often ask me whether such and such a book was an influence or not. Occasionally people can be quite insistent that obviously such and such a book was obviously an influence and can provide close textual analysis to back up their claim.

For my last blog about the influences on Rivers of London I thought I'd talk about those books that would have been an influence if only I'd read them before I wrote it.

Neverwhere (and Anansi Boys and American Gods)

Neil Gaiman is one of the writers most frequently attributed to me as an influence. Alas I'd caught about ten minutes of the original TV series back in the 1980s but I've never read the book. Like alot of books on this list I read Anansi Boys a while after I'd started writing Rivers of London after someone pointed out, in those fatal words - that's a bit like what your book sounds like innit?

Kraken
I had thought China Mieville had struck out for the more lucrative shores of literary fiction and the good opinion of the broadsheets but he surprised me by producing his own London based mystery - the bastard.

61 Nails

I was about halfway through the first draft of ROL when Mike Shevden came strolling into the Covent Garden branch of Waterstones, where I worked, bold as brass and slapped an ARC of 61 Nails down in front of me. 'Get a load of my new book,' he said. 'It's an urban fantasy set in Covent Garden and draws heavily, and rather brilliantly if I say so myself, on the mythology of London especially stuff you've never heard of because your research mojo is just that pathetic - I pity the poor sod that tries to follow in my footsteps for he shall be subject to much ridicule.'(1)

The Sweet Scent of Blood

I mean you wait ages for an urban fantasy centred around Covent Garden and then two come along at the same time. Suzanne McLeod was another of those reminders that however original you think you are somebody else has already arrived and grabbed all falafel off the buffet table. Although in Suzanne's case she ran off with the kitchen sink as well.

Bryant and May

Fortunately the Bryant and May books didn't register with me until after I'd finished the manuscript otherwise it might have been all over for yours truly's literary career.

Christopher Fowler's Roofworld was an important influence on Rivers of London but while I'd gone onto read Rune, his next book, I'd sort of lost track of him. I remember shelving the Bryant and May books and thinking I should get round to reading them but there's so many books, so little time. We share a similar obsession with the nooks, crannies and secrets of London but luckily a different approach to writing about them. well different enough anyway.

Street Magic
Obviously at some point in time, presumably a couple of years prior to me working in a bookshop, a memo had gone out suggesting that what the world needed were fantasy police procedurals set in London. Caitlin Kittredge hearkened to this call and produced the Black London series in order to throw me deep into a depression. Fortunately, just as with Bryant and May and Felix Castor, London is a diverse enough city for me to get away with being Johnny come lately.

The Wine of Angels

I heard about Phil Rickman's rural fantasy/mysteries when his agent rejected me and cited him as the reason. They said that they already had their supernatural mystery writer, thank you very much, and wouldn't be needing another. I immediately rushed over to the relevant shelf in my crime section and plucked the lone Phil Rickman that had been languishing there and read it. Then I ordered his back catalogue - they sold quite nicely as well.

The Atrocity Archive

This really would have been a seriously major influence had only I had heard of it in time. Charles Stross' fantastic mixture of office comedy, spy thriller and Lovecraftian horror is how I like to spend my afternoons.

(1) He didn't really say any of this because he is, in fact, a very nice gent but that's how it sounded to me.

Coming Up!

UPDATED: 29/10/2012

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO LACK OF TICKET SALES

One of the great things about success is I now get to go to places I've never been before. 

Portsmouth Book Fest
Tuesday 30th October

Orbit Books and Gollancz present: Urban Fantasy and the City Setting

What? A fourway slugfest between Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Griffin and Benedict Jacka.

Where? The  Menuhin Theatre
3rd Floor
Portsmouth Central Library
Guildhall Square
Portsmouth
PO1 2DX
7.00pm. Tickets: £5

Why? Because London is only big enough for one urban fantasy series. Four writers enter only one leaves!

Currently Reading: Jack Glass

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Blurb: Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged.

Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, JACK GLASS is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain. JACK GLASS has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour.

Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challenges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.

I'm looking forward to this one.

Currently Reading: Sparks

Sparks by David Quantick

Blurb: When Paul Sparks is dumped by Alison, he decides to use a gateway into a million parallel universes to look for a new girlfriend - an Alison who won't dump him. It's a simple plan - he's a simple man - except for the forces of the Random, a man called Joseph Kaye, and a cockroach that doesn't exist. Sci-fi comedy. 

I know David Quantick primarily as the creator of the Blaggers Guide To... on the radio so when I heard he had a book I rushed out and downloaded it onto my kindle(1).

(1) Okay so I rushed out in a metaphorical sense.

The D-Word: delinking exercise.

A CCE can strike without warning!

Every morning I heave my tremendous bulk around the Heath for about an hour of brisk walking.

Up until recently I did this as part of my weight loss programme. The theory is sound, eat LESS calories, burn MORE calories LOSE more weight.

The trouble with this approach is that the moment you have a CCE (Catastrophic Cake Encounter) and gain weight you lose all incentive to continue to exercise. 'What's the point of dragging yourself round the circuit if you remain the same porky bastard as before?' 

The answer, according to the New Scientist, is that exercise is good for you regardless of whether you lose weight or not. In fact a fit fat person (not an oxymoron apparently) is better off than an unfit thin person - take that you skinny wretch!

But how can this be? I hear you cry. What follows is a summery of the summery of the research as outlined in New Scientist 25th August 2012 page 39.

The most robust evidence comes from the Exercise is Medicine Initiative pioneered by the American College of Sports Medicine. Their baseline for physical activity was 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (brisk walking etc) or 75 minutes of vigorous activity (running, swimming etc) a week. That's 2 and a half hours a WEEK!

The reasons, the detail is in the article, is because exercise; flushes all manner of shit out of your system reducing the risk of heart attacks by 30-50%. It alters the structure of fatty triglyceride particles (bad for you) making it easier for the body to break them down. Lowers the chance of developing type 2 diabetes by 58% (by helping the body deal with glucose in various ways) and helps burn off excess sugar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exercise is good for you - we get it - so what?

 You have to de-link exercise from weight loss. The exercise is doing you a ton of good regardless of whether you shed a single kilo or not. Thus diet failure (and all diets like all political careers end in failure) is not an excuse to stop exercising. So now when I'm struggling up Kite Hill I no longer tell myself that I'm doing it to lose weight I tell myself I'm doing it so I can outlive those thin bastards who sit in front of the TV all day.

Two and half hours a week - please, I spent more time on twitter over the last two days than that.

Now Available in Brazilian Portuguese

Which I'm reliably told is different from Portuguese Portuguese.

The series is being called Enigma's of London and the first book is Spirits of the Thames (I think).

Blurb: E se a magia fosse real? E mais: e se ela fosse controlada por um departamento da polícia e utilizada para proteger as pessoas de espíritos mal intencionados e entidades maléficas?

Após descobrir que a única testemunha de um crime é na verdade um fantasma, Peter Grant torna-se aprendiz do enigmático inspetor Thomas Nightingale e logo aprende a controlar magias e feitiços que o ajudarão a resolver uma série de crimes.

Através dos olhos cínicos e sarcásticos do detetive recém-assumido, somos introduzidos aos seres sobrenaturais que habitam as partes soturnas da cidade de Londres, assim como às regras do submundo de trolls que vivem embaixo de pontes, famílias de vampiros, ninfas dos rios e guardiões do Tâmisa.

Com uma história repleta de mistério e humor, Espírito do Tâmisa é uma fantasia urbana em que o leitor ficará preso até o último minuto.

Gostaram?

 

Strangely the Diana Gabaldon quote seems to have cross fertislised with the iO9 quote from the American edition - not that I'm complaining you understand.