BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

I can justify that headline. A man called Books reserves his, Books', books of books. There.

Meanwhile, adding to yesterdays frankly amazing news about Birdkill going on promo and being FREE yes FREE for the next four days (it was five days but you wasted a day dawdling), I can now reveal that A Decent Bomber is ALSO FREE for the next five days.

Get Birdkill FREE here.

Get A Decent Bomber FREE here.

And if that weren't already enough, Beirut - An Explosive Thriller is ALREADY permafree. So now you're looking at getting THREE of my novels for nothing.

AND now Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy is on promo for £0.99 with a deal through free/bargain books promo website manybooks.net!

I mean, gosh, it's like a bargain book basement around here!

Let your friends know. Hell, let your enemies know. Here be free books aplenty!

Psychological Thriller Birdkill Kindle Ebook Free Shock Horror

So my newest novel is free on Amazon in all flavours for the next 48 hours or so. Enough time to nip off over there and download it: enough time to tell friends.

Get Birdkill FREE from Amazon.com

Get Birdkill FREE from Amazon.co.uk

The book could do with some more reviews so if you do download it (and I heartily recommend you do) or recommend it to friends (and I heartily commend that course of action, too), then do feel free to leave a review. That review, BTW, shouldn't by any means be sugar coated or anything: your honest, full and frank opinion is fine by me.

Enjoy!

Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second panel session wot I am doing at the wonderful Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is titled Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer.

Moderated with insight, wit and dexerity by savage old Irishman James Mullan, I'll be joined by Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek. The session takes place on Saturday 12 March, from 11.30-12.30 at the Al Ras 1 room at the InterContinental Festival City.

Our brief is to talk about how we create really bad baddies. And how we bring them to justice. I'm not entirely sure about the justice bit, but we'll try and muddle along.

Chris writes books about very nasty people. More about him here. His eight books based around psychologist turned detective Robert Hunter have propelled him to top the UK best-seller lists and have chilled hundreds of thousands of readers to the bone.

Sebastian is one of Germany's top crime writers, all seven of his novels have been German best-sellers and he is now crafting a fierce reputation in English markets as well - his novel about a ten year-old serial killer, The Child, was adapted for cinema and also released in the UK last year. More about him here.

And then there's me...

Uncle Pat And Decent Bombing

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The phone rang. For some reason its peal stilled him. He lifted the handset slowly. The sacred heart lamp was guttering. He’d have to get a new one next time he went down the road.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line had a hint of American. ‘This is Patrick O’Carolan?’

  ‘It is, sure.’

  ‘Hello, Mr O’Carolan. Your code word is Dan Breen. Could you confirm you understand me?’

  There was something else under the American note in the voice, a hint of something deep and dark. Pat’s tongue felt double the size, his voice thick. ‘Yes.’ Damn his hesitancy, it sounded like he had a stutter. He mustered his wits; his eyes squeezed shut to block out the nightmares of the past. ‘Yes, I confirm.’ As he spoke, his mind shrieked: No, tell them no. Tell them you don’t know what the fuck they’re on about and to leave me and my niece alone.

It all started with Sarah's uncle Pat. He's a mild-mannered, gentle man who keeps a small herd of milk cows on a wee farm up on the margins of the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary. He likes tea. As a younger man, he was a bit of a Republican. The Irish kind, not the looney gun-totin' American type. Being a bit 'green' as a lad hardly marks you out in South Tipperary, you understand.

I've long teased Sarah with dark mutterings about how uncle Pat's sitting on an IRA arms cache. It's amusingly incongruous if you know Pat.

And then one day it hit me. Hang on. What if he WAS? And what if bad people came calling? Really bad people. And what if he had a past? And what if...?

I started to throw the idea around and pick it up by its ears to see if it squealed. I did a little research and yes, it could work. I worried a bit about what I was setting out to do to Pat, the placid, kind man with a Pioneer badge who'd done nothing to deserve being turned into a gun-toting leviathan. And then I got over it and started writing. That's the trouble with this writing thing, it tears away your morality and leaves you stealing people, plucking this trait from here, that sentence from there.

Don't ever chat to a writer. Seriously. You just can't trust 'em. You never know where your unplucked nasal hair, kipper tie and Bootle accent is going to turn up next...

Book Research Madness

It's funny, but it's not until you set out to write a book you realise how little stuff you know. I've said it before but can't help repeating it - I don't know how writers did this before Google. Really.

Yet again, how researching A Decent Bomber didn't get me nicked, I don't know. Surely someone, somewhere is looking out for people from the Middle East displaying an interest in supplies of ammonium nitrate and detonators? Maybe they are, and a whole team of over-excited NSA types has just been stood down. 'Calm down, lads, it's just another bloody author'...

I now know how you make a one ton bomb. It's a bit like being able to touch your nose with your tongue. There's not much call for the skill...

Meeting former IRA man Brendan Curran was a big deal for me, not least because it made me realise the book I had written didn't achieve the aim I set out for it. I'll confess I was nervous about the meeting, which started with me spotting a 50mm brass shell on the sideboard and him asking me the immortal question, 'So. What are you about, then?'

Ulp.

My serious and dedicated research in Belfast consisted mainly of getting hammered with the in-laws and staying in the lavish Merchant Hotel. If you're ever in Belfast, go for a few late night drinks at The Spaniard - the nearest thing to a Hamra bar I've ever encountered outside Hamra itself.

It's a bit like researching Shemlan by eating lazy afternoon mezze with friends - oh, this author's life! It was nice that an anti-internment march the next day plunged Belfast right back into 1990s timewarp, with armoured squad cars and water cannon on the street.

You have to find out all sorts of things. Cow diseases, train timetables, bullet impact velocities and the like. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to actually kill a cow if you're not using an RPG. The organisational chart of Tipperary police was one delightful evening's work. Ferry timetables, capacities and freight sailings get jumbled up with the colour of this police station wall or the reception layout of that hotel. Visiting locations (suspicious drive-by's of Banbridge nick) and checking facts, distances and even number plate series conventions all come into it.

And all because there's an Internet and somewhere in it is Nigel who knows the air speed of an African swallow. Unladen.

A Decent Bomber is available on pre-order from Amazon, iBooks and all good ebook outlets. It's also available in paperback from Amazon, Createspace or on order from your local bookstore.

Publishing A Decent Bomber

Perpetua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For what it's worth, I've been embroiled in a last minute flurry of edits and changes, a lot of book formatting and layout and quite a bit of uploading.

It's all quite exciting. For a start, I find layout therapeutic, a load of rote tasks performed with the assistance of a glass or two of Bombay's finest and some quinine-laced fizzy stuff. Page down, change headline to 22 point Perpetua, body font Palatino Linotype first para no indent, second para 0.5cm indent.

I've been messing around a lot with font sizes, templates and margins and think I've got quite a good combination going now, so I'm trying to reformat all of my print books to meet the new grid. Slightly more space and a slightly larger font/leading. After much soul searching, Garamond is going and Palatino is this year's body text bikini model.

Like people give a hoot? Yes, I think easy on the eye is good if it's unobtrusive and the reader finds it more comfortable. Do I care too much about type? Oh, yah. Seriously. Perpetua, and I'm sure you'll think I'm odd saying this, is my typographical Musar; the Orrefors of the world of letters. I have long admired the odd life and achievements of eccentric stone cutter (and enthusiastic rutter) Eric Gill - the William Morris contemporary who gave us the London Underground's typographical identity, which persists today, as well as WH Smith's logo - and Perpetua was, to my mind, his finest lifetime achievement. Seriously.

Sorry. Sidetracked again.

Check spellings, get annoyed at Microsoft's daft blue-lining of things that are patently right. Catch SNAFU, wince, change.

Then the MS, updated to reflect my Createspace edits. Lose all the italics in the book, damn, spend an hour replacing them using the Createspace file as a reference. Fine. Review some of those itals and lose a couple. Find an awful literal sitting there in the text snarling at you like a drugged-up bullfrog. Excise the bastard like one of George Bush's colonic polyps. You'd have thought I was experienced enough not to have to deal with these things. Oh no.

The manuscript is now complete and uploaded to Createspace, Amazon KDP and Smashwords and so A Decent Bomber is available for pre-order from Amazon as a Kindle book, from iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other brilliant, decent even, ebook platforms. It publishes 'officially' on November 5th, but every pre-order means another heave up the rankings on that day, so I'll be irritating everyone I know between now and then to pre-place their orders. The Createspace book, the paperback, will go 'live' sometime in the next week.

I won't, once again, be doing a conventional print run. It's simply not worth it. Olives took five years to make back its Dhs15,000 investment and I still don't have a final report from the distributors, despite the book having sold out before last year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

But I'm happy. Truly happy. Two years in the writing, albeit with very many breaks and stops, A Decent Bomber is now a novel I can say has merit and personality enough to be a readable thing.

Which is nice...

Stalled. A Writer's Nightmare.

I've stalled on the new book. I've written not one word since before the Summer hols. I made some notes and stuff in Belfast and Newry, I sat down for a long chat with a 'Shinner' MP and former IRA man while I was in 'Noori', that fine town in 'Norn Iron', an engagement organised by my lovely Sister in Law and fascinating in so many ways. But I haven't actually been, you know, writing.

'So you served 15 years of a 27 year sentence in Long Kesh. The Maze.'
'That's right.'
'The H Blocks.'
'No, before them. It was Nissen huts, then, segregated on sectarian lines. We used to pass notes across each others' huts. So even the Unionists would pass our notes, and we would pass theirs.'
'Did you get time off for good behaviour?'
'I doubt it. We burned the prison down.'

It's not 'writer's block', that's something different altogether. It's a bit like work on Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy, which was stalled by my decision to publish Olives and Beirut myself. While all that went on, poor old Shemlan took a back seat, unfinished at around the halfway mark. But I went on going to Beirut and visiting the village, the Mountain and other locations in the book. I just didn't write anything.

When I finally sat down to finish Shemlan, jacked into volume 11 death metal and Estonian plain chant, it flew like a jet-propelled Teflon coated flying thing in a vacuum. Hang on, how do things fly in a vacuum if there's no pressure of air or gravity or other opposing force? Help!

So I'm not really angsting about the lack of progress. Things happen in their time and this one obviously needs to 'bed down' a bit before I go on. I trust my instincts well enough by now not to try and keep pushing if my head won't be pushed. The novel's at a crossroads and I need to go back over it, test it against the stuff in my head and correct it before starting construction work again.

I'll know when I'm ready. Life's busy, there's so much going on, distractions are flying like Teflon coated flying things gravitating towards a large body.

In the meantime, any time I get a few moments to sit down to write, I'm ending up scribbling blog posts instead. The paucity of such posts testifies to the lack of time in general.

Where does it all go?