Ninety-six days

I had intended to blog on Monday to mark the point when it was exactly 100 days until The Killing Season is published on April 24th. Lots of things got in the way this week, so instead I'm going to mark the all-important 96 day point.

There are lots of things to keep me busy over that time. I'm currently doing the rewrite on the second Carter Blake book. Once I've finished that and sent it back to my editor, I think I'll blog about the experience of writing a sequel, and the unique challenges of writing That Difficult Second Novel.

The website is up and running now, and although it's fairly sparse at the moment it means I have somewhere to add news and events in the run-up to the end of April. Talking (typing?) of which, I've already been asked to come to a couple of crime and literary festivals, which will be fantastic. I'll post the details here and on the events page when everything's finalised, but for now I can say I'll definitely be in Bristol for CrimeFest in May. Looking forward to catching up with some of the readers and authors I've already met and saying hello to some new ones.

My editor got in touch yesterday to say that, several months after Orion put in the request, we've been granted permission to use a couple of Paul Simon lyrics in the book. I'd resigned myself to doing without and had stripped them out of the final version, but I'm happy to be able to include them after all. I've always liked song lyrics in crime fiction, I think that (used sparingly), they can really add something to a book. On more than one occasion, I've bought an album because I liked the way an artist's words were sampled in a novel. Which I think is a pretty sensible argument for allowing portions of songs to be used by authors free under fair use, but I guess this is where I differ with the record industry.

The final exciting thing on the horizon is unrelated to the book. After well over ten years of intermittently submitting short stories and having them politely rejected, I've sold my first story to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. It's not a Carter Blake story, and in fact it's a story I only submitted on a whim, really not thinking it would get anywhere. Not for the first time I've realised that I have no idea what's going to work and what isn't. Just goes to show it's always worth throwing your hat in the ring, and that it pays to be persistent.

Long before I ever tried to write a full-length novel, my ambition was to sell a story to one of the big mystery magazines. EQMM has published so many legends from Agatha Christie to Stanley Ellin to Stephen King to Michael Connelly, and it's daunting (in a good way) to think I'll be joining that list.

When I know which issue it's going to be published in, I'll post the details here. It's beyond cool to be selected for a magazine with such a storied history, and I can't wait to see the story beneath one of those fantastic old-school pulp covers. Maybe even one a little like this classic:

Grizzly murders and the perils of quoting The Boss

I've just finished going over the final page proofs of the book, which means (to my extreme nervousness) that it's now pretty much set in stone.

One of the few advantages of not having a publishing deal before now is that I was able to write The Killing Season entirely to my own timescale. That meant I could really take my time over it and make as many changes and tweaks as I liked en route to what I amusingly believed was a final version.

Lousy coffee purchased as table rental, pencil sharpened, ready to go...

I probably went through five or six drafts before it got to the point where I was happy to send it off to Thomas, my then agent. Since then it's been through another couple of rewrites with Thomas, and a further version with Jemima, my editor at Orion. It's been read by a copyeditor and a proofreader. A bunch of my friends have read it, as well as my new agent, Luigi. All of these people have fed back on it and helped to point out the little mistakes (as well as the not-so-little ones). All in all, you'd expect that it would be polished within an inch of its life by now, but reading the page proofs over this week, I still managed to find 37 new things I decided needed changing.

This ranged from minor continuity mistakes (such as referring to a 'cold October noon' which falls at the beginning of November) to minor formatting glitches to one embarrassing spelling mistake - on page 152 I found myself writing about a 'grizzly' manner of death. Since there were definitely no bears involved, I was glad to have caught this one.

One of the final changes was to remove a number of song lyrics. Another advantage of blasting out a publisher-less novel is the fact that you operate in a bubble of blissful ignorance of things like copyright law, and specifically how it gets complicated around song lyrics. Naively, I'd assumed you could quite reasonably include a line or two from a pop song in your book and it would be covered under fair use.

Not so. Quotations from song lyrics don't work quite the same way as literary quotations. For a start, nothing from the modern era (actually since 1923 or so, which is pretty much everything, pop-music-wise) is in the public domain. There is no fair use limit, so any part of the song other than the title is copyright. And the rights may be held by more than one party (songwriter, dead songwriter's estate, publisher etc). There's an informative article on the whole thing here, summed up by the author's advice: Don't ever quote lines from pop songs.

Orion flagged this up to me at the contract stage, and kindly offered to chase down the rights-holders to see how much it would cost to use the five or six song quotes I'd blithely tossed into The Killing Season. None of them were cheap.

So part of the process this week has been to surgically remove these expensive little samples and instead try to allude to the songs without directly quoting. There was one Bruce Springsteen lyric, however, that I couldn't bear to lose. It's from the song 'Nebraska' - I quote it in the epigraph and I like how it sets the tone for the book, so I decided that one was worth keeping. It worked out something like £36 a word for a two-line quote. Given the low-fi nature of that particular album, I've probably covered the production costs all by myself.

So the typos are fixed and the song lyrics have mostly been excised and I've made a few other little nips and tucks and now that's it. The next time I see The Killing Season, it'll be in a bookshop, which is exciting and terrifying and unbelievable all at once.

Thankfully, I won't have much spare time to worry about it. I need to get my basic website looking a little less basic over Christmas, and there's also the small matter of the revisions to Carter Blake book 2: The Samaritan, which my editor has now sent me. I'm told it's already in pretty reasonable shape for a Difficult Second Novel, but this time I'm under no illusions about how many more changes there will be between now and publication day.

And no, I haven't used any Springsteen lyrics in this one.