Friday 11 August 2017

Win a signed book by me and a doodle by Ava

Competition time again.

This time, you can be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of the third Carter Blake book The Time to Kill (aka Winterlong). You'll also get some nice chocolate and an inspirational doodle that my more-famous-than-I'll-ever-be daughter Ava has kindly contributed.


To enter, all you have to do is make sure you're signed up to my Readers Club by midnight UK time on Friday 25th August. The lucky winner will be randomly picked from the whole list (so if you're already a member, you're automatically entered) and contacted by email.

Go here to sign up!

I'll happily dedicate the book if you desire, and post it with the other goodies to wherever you are. It's open to anyone, anywhere in the world. Good luck!


Friday 4 August 2017

Top five writing tips

I'm appearing at the excellent Bute Noir lit fest this weekend - come and say hello if you're on the island!

In the meantime, here's a summer repeats. A while ago the excellent tartan noir author Michael J. Malone asked me to contribute my top 5 tips on being a writer to his blog. Head over there to check out some of the other great advice, and see below for what I said:



1. There’s no secret formula

The best preparation for being a writer is to read a lot and write a lot. Everyone says this, but that’s because it’s true. Like all writers, I started out as a reader. I always enjoyed creative writing at school, but reading widely helps you to work out what sort of stories you want to tell.  The other biggie is to take it seriously. If you want to write for a living, you have to treat it like a real job and show up for work, even on the days you don’t particularly feel like it.

2. You need a system, but everyone has a different one

I used to work in fits and burst, writing loads one day and then not doing anything for weeks at a time while I pondered all of the wonderful books I wasn’t writing. I had been told that a serious writer needs to write 1,000 or 2,000 words a day, and that seemed like an impossible task to fit in amongst all of the other responsibilities and distractions of everyday life.

My breakthrough came when one of my friends suggested just writing 500 words a day. That let me focus on a manageable goal, but at the same time, the words started to build up fast: 500 words a day, six days a week is 3,000 words. In four weeks you have 12,000 words. In six months, you have a first draft of a novel.

Everyone’s different when it comes to laying the groundwork. You don’t necessarily need to painstakingly craft your 3 act structure or write detailed biographies of every major and minor character. Stephen King doesn’t plot at all. James Ellroy constructs elaborate 300-page plot outlines.

They both write great books. Me? I try to plot in advance as far as possible, knowing that I’ll improvise a lot on the journey.

3. You need to put yourself out there

If you want to maximise your chances of somebody publishing your work, you need to let people know about it. Submit stories to magazines and competitions. Blog and tweet. Go to literary festivals and chat to authors and publishers in the bar. Do everything you can, because you never know what’s going to help.

The breakthrough for me was one of the things that took the least effort: I posted a few of my short stories on the HarperCollins Authonomy website (now sadly departed), and against the odds, it resulted in a contact from the agent who now represents me.

Even now I’m published, I think it’s important to make sure I’m as visible as possible, which means doing festivals, library events, guest blogs, interviews and basically never saying no to anything that gives me an opportunity to reach new readers.

4. You can learn from every writer

I’ve been inspired and motivated by so many writers. Not just crime writers, either: SF, historical, graphic novels, literary, horror, non-fiction. Listen to established writers and work out how their suggestions chime with your own methods and experience.

And you don’t just learn from the nuggets of actual writing advice like…

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” (Elmore Leonard)

Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” (Neil Gaiman)

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” (Stephen King)

…but you learn just as much by reading authors in the genre you aspire to work in and beyond. If you read enough, you’ll start to notice things you can learn from, like a clever plot twist, or the way dialogue can do the heavy-lifting on character development, or a really amazing opening line.

And you can also learn from not-so-good books, from the flat-out terrible, to the ones that almost work but don’t quite. You start to see the pitfalls to avoid. And even if you think a book just plain sucks, you can still learn from it by working out what made it suck, and then not doing that.

One of the best pieces of advice I got came from comic book writer Mark Millar. At one of his events he spoke about knowing a lot of people who said they were writing a novel or a screenplay, but what they were actually doing was sitting around in coffee shops with a laptop talking about writing a novel or a screenplay. It reminded me of the sign Harry Bosch keeps on his desk: Get off your ass and knock on doors. The writer’s memo should be the opposite: Sit your ass down and write some words, something like that.

5. It’s the best job in the world

The most pleasant surprise is that my dream job really doesn’t disappoint. You have to love writing, of course, because there’s a lot of that to do. But all of the other stuff is so much fun too: events, signings, working with publishers on making the book better than you thought it could be, seeing early proofs of the cover, walking into an bookshop or library and seeing a real-live book with actual words you made up inside it.

I’ve done a lot of different jobs: some which I’ve enjoyed, some I’ve hated. All in all, I would have to say being a writer is substantially more fun than real life.



Tuesday 1 August 2017

Not the Booker Prize 2017



Don't Look For Me is on the (extremely long) longlist for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize 2017. If you'd like to make me very happy by casting a vote for me, here's how:


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All you have to do is cast your vote in the comments below the article.

You need to choose two books from the longlist, from two different publishers, and accompany those choices with a short review of at least one of your chosen books. It would also be very helpful if you could include the word “vote”.

Here is a template for submitting your vote for the Not the Booker shortlist. Using this template will ensure your vote is properly structured and won't be discarded!



[yourusername] - Vote # 1 - [Book title only]*
[yourusername] - Vote # 2 - [Book title only]*


[A review of one of the two books. We're looking for something like 100 words, give or take, but we're very generous regarding the word count. Only one review is required, but we'd love to hear your thoughts on the second book too.]

[Anything else you want to tell us, including a review of your second book. We'll read it all, I promise.]

The review should be something above 100 words long, although as our happy and glorious terms and conditions state, we don’t promise a perfect count. Please just make it look like you care.
It’s that easy. So let’s get voting. You’ve got just over a week. The deadline is 23.59 BST on Monday 7 August 2017.


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Always nice to be on a list, and I believe this is my first mention in the Guardian, which is nice.

If you're looking for another choice for your second vote, June Taylor's Losing Juliet, Jay Stringer's How to Kill Friends and Implicate People and Derek Farrell's Death of a Devil are also very good shouts, but there's loads of good stuff on this list, which is kind of the point, I suppose.