It's been quiet on The Dead Tracks for quite a while now, but about a week ago, I heard from my copy-editor at Penguin, who has been busy going over the manuscript with laser-guided eyes, picking out my bad grammar and even badder plot inconsistencies. Writing books really is quite an odd process at times. You spend so many months with a story, working on it, shaping it, editing it, rewriting it, editing it again (and then – in my case – completely losing all confidence in it), but then once it has finally been given the thumbs-up by your editor, it just vanishes, at least for a time. Between The Dead Tracks getting sign-off from my editor, to the time the copy-editor got the manuscript across to me today, it has been, give or take, five months since I even as much as looked at the book. That, I'm sure, will be both a blessing and a curse when I finally start looking over it again: on the one hand, I'll be able to approach it with fresh eyes, having forgotten some of it, or mis-remembered other bits; on the other, I worry that time away from the manuscript will make me realise I hate it.

The intervening five months hasn't been entirely wasted though. I've got a synopsis locked down for Book 3, I've even started Book 3, and I've done an immense (immense for me anyway) amount of reading. This past week Family Weaver and I have been holed up in a very nice holiday cottage in South Devon (it only rained twice: once, while I was unpacking the car; and the second time, when I was packing it again), which only added to the opportunity. In just under nine days, I finished Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow, Stephen Leather's Nightfall, Mo Hayder's The Devil of Nanking, Simon Beckett's The Chemistry of Death and Garth Ennis' The Boys Volume 2. (Not strictly a book, but as it involves reading words, I'm including it.) The best? Probably The Devil of Nanking, but only by a sliver. I enjoyed The Chemistry of Death more in a lot of ways: it was brilliantly written and consistently gripping, but whilst I'm loath to become one of those annoying people who trumpet joyfully that they guessed who the villain was a long time before the end, I have to say I, er, guessed who the villain was. Did it make a huge difference to my enjoyment of the book? Absolutely not. The thing that tempered my enjoyment more was the villain's reasons for doing what he did, which never seemed completely convincing, at least to me. Ultimately, though, it was still a high class thriller, expertly handled.

The Devil of Nanking (née Tokyo, and another book I'm very, very late in arriving at) was equally well constructed, but considerably more upsetting. I talked a little in the last blog about The Treatment, and its gut-wrenching subject matter, and Devil definitely comes from the same kind of area, this time using the very real Rape of Nanking to propel its plot. It really is an exceptional piece of writing: creepy, gory, tense, bizarre and, ultimately, devastating in its delivery of the events, it's a book that sits there with you for days afterwards because you know, at least in part, it all happened.

For now, I expect my reading to slow up a bit. The Dead Tracks copy-edits await, and I really should be powering on with Book 3. My biggest worry is dropping behind schedule on a novel, and having to rush it, so I always try to make a good, early start on things, allowing myself editing time at the end to knock out the weak bits. On the flipside, staring down the barrel of a third book has brought with it the exact same doubts as the first two: is the story any good? Have I got it in me to write another book? What if it's rubbish? What if it's average? What if it's only good? I don't know if I worry more or less than other writers, but I worry enough. And if that means I can turn out something even half as good as The Devil of Nanking or The Chemistry of Death then I know it's probably a handy mindset to be in…

Happy reading!

Tim

I've been thinking a lot about violence in books over the past month, and 
in particular the violence in Chasing the Dead. What sparked me off was a talk to a reading group I did at the end of June, in which one of the people gracious enough to listen to me for an hour asked, "Is your book gory?" I got the sense that if I'd said "Ooooh, yes – very!", she would have run for the hills, but – equally – I didn't want to lie to her. After all, anyone out there who has read Chasing the Dead will know that it has its fair share of violence, particularly later on in the story, and to suggest otherwise would be massaging the truth. So, in the end, I told her it was no more or less violent than the books of Stuart MacBride, Mo Hayder or Karin Slaughter.

It's an interesting question, though, and one that's given me a lot to mull over. Until people started writing about Chasing the Dead on the internet, in newspapers and via my email inbox, I honestly never had it pegged as a violent novel. That may seem amazing to some people. But, apart from one (admittedly pretty brutal) 20-page section, there's a couple of quick flashes, a lot of perceived threat and not a lot else. Or am I just remembering it wrong? I've grown to know the novel so well, there is, I suppose, the danger I've become desensitised to it. And yet, every act of violence in Chasing the Dead is a reaction to circumstances, and to fear: the fear of someone hurting you first; the fear of someone dismantling what you've built; the fear of dying before your time is up. And the other thing: perhaps with the exception of one character, no one in that book enjoys being violent. In fact, it's usually a last, and desperate, act.

It's a very personal subject, this, because it depends entirely on what your horror is. What horrifies you? How much is too much? For some people, it may be a man having nails hammered through his fingers, but for me that doesn't come close. Straight off the bat, I can list the two books I struggled to finish, not because they weren't great books – they were – but because the subject matter was so horrific: Stuart MacBride's Cold Granite, and Mo Hayder's The Treatment. The common theme: paedophilia. Cold Granite in particular was so unrelenting in its descriptions of the children's bodies, of the disgusting places they were left, and of the subsequent autopsies, that – once I'd finished it – I had to watch the Disney Channel for a day just to get back onto an even keel. (I'm not joking either. Imagination Movers is highly recommended.) Even before I became a father, the idea of writing about paedophilia – about young children as victims – never appealed; but once you have kids yourself, I think the world takes on a different hue and it becomes even harder. These days I get emotional watching sick kids on Extreme Makeover Home Edition, so I know for a fact I'd never be able to face down a 500-page novel. The idea is just too horrific. The violence in 
it would be too gut-wrenching. The experience would be far too upsetting. And yet, for other people, violence against kids, a loss of innocence, of a young life, may come a distant second to nails being hammered through fingers. That's the way we're built. And that's why, basically, it was near-impossible to answer that lady's question. She could have found Tea Time for the Traditionally Built a little dark – or she might have counted the rat scene in American Psycho amongst her top ten literary moments. Everyone reacts differently to violence and tone, which is why it's hard to judge.

What I can say with absolute certainty is that Fast Food Nation (yes, yes, I know I'm late to the party on this one), is truly the scariest book I've ever read. I'm halfway through now, and I'm never going to eat again...

Happy reading!

Tim

I always hoped I might blog more often than once a month - certainly that was my intention - but the demands of a full-time job, the equal demands of writing thrillers and, latterly, the distractions of the World Cup have seen to that. In truth, with my writer's hat on, most of the past month has been about trying to pull together a detailed synopsis for Book #3, something I never did for Chasing The Dead (which is probably why it took ten years to write!), but did do second time round for The Dead Tracks. I found it made an enormous difference to the writing process: I wrote faster, felt more assured in my plotting and characters, and never hit the constant dead ends I did in the first book. Because of that, I'm keen to get as much of a plan down on paper as I can for the third book, even if I ultimately end up – as I did with The Dead Tracks – not always sticking rigidly to it. (Part of the fun with writing the second book was exploring whole new areas on the fly, whilst having the assurance of the synopsis there in the background.)

One of the odd things about planning Book #3 is that technically Penguin haven't asked me to write a Book #3. As it stands, I have a two-book deal with them, and I delivered the second one a month ago, so I'm now in something of a no man's land; effectively between contracts, although that assumes Penguin even want to offer me the chance to write more books. (Believe me, I'm not taking anything for granted. My editor would probably welcome the opportunity not to have to answer countless Weaver emails!) It is a strange feeling, though, and one that reminds me of where I was before Chasing The Dead was picked up. Over the past two years, I've regularly been knee-deep in planning, researching, writing, editing and more editing, as I flitted between Chasing The Dead and The Dead Tracks. But now The Dead Tracks has been through agent and editor, the only thing that remains to be done are the copy edits, which is where an eagle-eyed, super-brained Penguin sub goes through the manuscript correcting my terrible grammar and zeroing in on plot inconsistencies. Beyond that, I'm not sure. This is all new to me. So, I'll just keep everything crossed.

An obvious benefit of being caught in this strange hinterland, is that I've continued to catch up on my reading. Admittedly, the book pile by my bed doesn't seem to have got that much smaller (and being the world's slowest reader probably hasn't helped) but I've made some impact on it. I finally finished The Raw Shark Texts (which I very much enjoyed, even if its supreme oddness eventually started to grind a bit) and I also polished off The Hundredth Man by Jack Kerley. I can't say Kerley's writing style was quite to my tastes, but the book was the dictionary definition of a page-turner and I recommend it to anyone with aspirations to write fast-paced, commercial fiction. Now I'm midway through mammoth graphic novel, The Walking Dead, which is basically an amalgamation of every zombie film ever made (as well as the opening of The Day of the Triffids), but bravely places characters right at the forefront of its story, sacrificing action and pace in the process. Despite its over-familiarity and lack of surprises, I like it, and I can see why it's currently being turned into a TV series.

Talking of TV, I've been catching up on some of that too. After the finales of 24 and Lost, it was on to Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Is anyone else out there watching it? I have to say, it's probably the most ludicrous show on TV, full of silly dialogue and ripe acting, but I'll guiltily confess I can't stop watching it. Mrs W just shakes her head when she looks over and sees a man being scythed in two, but it's so preposterous and over-the-top, that it's kind of charming in its complete ridiculousness. To achieve some sort of equilibrium, I've also been watching Breaking Bad, which is – unlike Spartacus – utterly brilliant. I don't have any guilt recommending that.

Happy reading!

Tim

P.S. Thank you to everyone who continues to get into contact, in whatever form. It's lovely to hear from you, and I'll always make an effort to reply. 

The past fortnight has been spent working on the latest edit of THE DEAD TRACKS, and it's been a frustrating and ever-so-slightly fearful time. Each successive edit of a book should, in theory at least, become easier, as the really hard work – the big, complicated structural changes – is done when the book first comes back from the editor, rather than at this stage, four or five months down the line. Instead, this past week, I became very worried about one particular sub-plot, and from there ended up retracing my steps back through the manuscript in order to address it. This was never the case with CHASING THE DEAD. In that book, everything was pretty much locked down by the third or fourth edit, and all I was doing was addressing tiny, tiny things like spelling or dialogue, or the rhythm of the narrative. In THE DEAD TRACKS, I've been making important changes to a fifth edit. 

This isn't an ideal situation. The book is supposed to head into the machine at Penguin this week, where a copy editor will go over it with a fine tooth-comb, and of course it'll be the first time that this new, adjusted sub-plot has been in there. Ideally, my editor would have had the time to cast her eyes over it properly, as a whole novel, rather than in the bits and pieces I emailed her this week. But, ultimately, there wasn't much I could do. Time wasn't on our side, I really felt strongly that it needed changing, and better now than in nine months time when it's already sitting on shop shelves. 
Apart from that minor emergency, though, I have to say I'm pretty happy with how the book has gone. It feels like enough of a departure from CHASING THE DEAD to avoid accusations of repetition – it's certainly more ambitious – but people who read and enjoyed David Raker Part 1 will, I hope, immediately feel at home in the world of David Raker Part 2. 

So, what's next? Well, next is some down time, where I hope to read a little (that means polishing off The Raw Shark Texts, which I still - rather embarrassingly - haven't finished), watch some TV (including the finale of Lost) and enjoy the warmer weather. And once I start getting itchy feet after about two and a half minutes, I'll probably start thinking about Book #3. I've got most of a basic and (I think) pretty interesting plot figured out in my head, some of which I've already got down on paper, and some of which has yet to form, either on paper or in my brain. But I enjoy the early stages of a book, despite not always having it 100% figured out from the off. I like returning to a blank canvas after a year (and usually a bit more) of working on the previous book, and I like heading into the next stage of Raker's life and seeing what new and horrible things await him...

Happy reading!

Tim

Firstly, apologies for how long it's taken me to update the blog. I promised myself that I wouldn't be one of those people that was always complaining about never being able to find the time, but that's exactly what I'm about to do. I do have good excuses, though. Honest. Firstly, I was working every hour God sent (and a few that He didn't) trying to finish a mammoth first edit on Book #2 – and all before the 24th March. Why the 24th? Because that was the day Family Weaver and I flew out to South Africa for a two-and-a-half week holiday, and I was determined not to leave a chunk of the rewrite for my return. I've found there's nothing worse than really getting on a roll with an edit (especially one where you're losing 20,000+ words – which is what's happened with the, er, slightly over-written Book #2), abandoning it for a while and then having to pick it up again while you're still mourning the loss of good weather and extreme amounts of holiday eating. Anyway, the good news is that I did manage to finish it before I went – just – and get it off to my lovely editor at Penguin... which means – a day after landing back in the UK – I find myself in the strange position of having a few spare evenings on my hands before the book is returned to me for the next round of edits. It's a nice feeling.

One of the great things about non-writing time (and this is especially true when I'm on holiday), is that I finally get the chance to catch up on my reading. I'm not sure if it's a weird quirk unique to me, or whether a lot of writers feel the same way, but I find it very, very hard to read other people's work while I'm in the process of writing or editing my own. In fact, since things really took off with CHASING THE DEAD, I've read a pitifully small amount of books compared to my pre-published days. Principally, I think it's down to the fact that my tiny brain can't handle the process of dipping in and out of someone else's world while being fully immersed in mine. I find it a jolting, concentration-effecting experience. But mostly it's to do with fear: I'm scared someone else will have come up with the same idea as me – and will have done it better, first. So far, in the reading I've done in my down time, that's never been the case, but the worry is always there in the background, vaguely threatening to ruin my best laid plans. 

While I was away, I had the good fortune of taking John Connolly's The Lovers away with me, which I very much enjoyed (although I'm not sure it's up there with his best – for me, Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The Unquiet are him at his most terrifyingly brilliant), Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box (terrific premise but, for my tastes, a bit on the slow side) and The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall which I'm halfway through and – so far, at least – am finding to be brilliantly bizarre, hugely inventive and really fun. I only wish I could read faster. I'm one of those really s-l-o-w readers that takes in every word, never, ever skim-reads and really slams the book shut hard after the last page is done, as if to prove to everyone I took in, chewed over and analysed every letter. 

I found The Lovers an especially interesting read, not only because I'm a big fan of John Connolly, but because I wondered how people new to the Charlie Parker series would find it. For me, it relied more heavily than any book I can remember on the reader having an intimate knowledge of events and characters from the previous seven novels (as well as Parker short story The Reflecting Eye and even non-Parker outing Bad Men). Did new readers feel excluded when he frequently referenced events and villains (and even brought back characters) from Every Dead Thing, Dark Hollow, The Killing Kind and The Unquiet? Were they hopelessly confused? Or did it, in fact, make them want to seek out the other books in the series so they could fill in the blanks? I would love to hear Connolly's take on it. Like him, I'm keen not to let major storylines be played out in isolation. In Book #2, David Raker should reference what happened in CHASING THE DEAD (without delivering massive, book-ruining spoilers) and major, life-changing events (as well as the relationships he has built up) should segue into the new book – but, at the same time, I feel it should also operate as a standalone with absolutely no barrier to entry. Getting the balance right is just one of the many balls you end up juggling in the editing stage.

Oh, and one last thing. I'm getting a bit sick of calling Book #2, well, Book #2. So it's time we gave it an official name. The title of the second David Raker book will be THE DEAD TRACKS. And it's out 3 February 2011. More details to follow soon, I promise, but better pencil it into your diary ;-)

Happy reading!

Tim

Hello! I hope this first ever (proper) blog post finds you all really well. I think it would be rude not to start off by saying a massive thank you to everyone who has taken the time out to get into contact with me, either through this blog, the contact form on the site or via my Facebook page, or even indirectly by reviewing the book on sites like Amazon. I always imagined the most exciting part of being published would be seeing your book on shop shelves (and after ten years of trying to get there, I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t VERY EXCITING INDEED!), but I have to admit it’s immensely satisfying to hear that most people, at least up until this point, are having a great time with the book.

In my experience so far, I have to say the weirdest part of writing novels is the constant switching between CHASING THE DEAD and its sequel. At the moment, I'm deep into the edits for Book #2, but CHASING has only just come out, meaning I'm doing a lot of writing – interviews, journalism, blogging (!) – about a book that I basically haven't even as much as looked at since the final version disappeared into the publishing machine last August. It's not like you can forget about a book you spent 10 years with, of course, but when you move onto a new story, with new characters and a new dynamic – like I have with Book #2 – it does feel strange stepping back into the shoes of an older version of David Raker, at a very different stage of his life. It was especially odd during the actual writing of Book #2 (which took place between December 2008 and June 2009) as I was also, at the same time, working with Penguin's copy-editors on ironing out mistakes and inconsistencies in CHASING's last few typeset versions.

What can I tell you about Book #2? Well, Raker's back and this time he's taking on the case of a missing seventeen-year-old girl. In my head I see it as the flipside to CHASING: if that story is him as The Hunted, this – in many ways – is him as The Hunter… except, of course, it's not quite as simple as that and, just as in CHASING, things can get turned on their head pretty fast! I'm really pleased with the story, the structure and the new characters, although it still requires plenty of editing. The two wonderful ladies in my book writing life – editor and agent – have been through it with a fine toothcomb – and their notes have, as with the first book, certainly given me plenty to think about over the coming weeks and months. 

Have a great week!

Tim