You are cordially invited to the official launch of...
The Killing Season
by Mason Cross
7pm, Wednesday April 23, 2014
Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow
Thursday, 6 March 2014
Monday, 24 February 2014
Everybody's a critic...
...now including me.
The folks at Orion have asked me to review the excellent new HBO show True Detective with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson for the blog at The Murder Room.
I'll be sharing review duties with Becky Masterman, author of Rage Against the Dying. We'll take it in turns to cover each new episode after it airs in the UK.
You can find out what I thought about episode one by going straight to my review at The Murder Room. I'm really pleased to have an excuse to watch every episode a couple of times as the story unfolds over the next eight weeks.
I'm trying to avoid spoilers as far as possible, but I have heard some murmurs that have intrigued me enough about the killer's motivations to pick up Robert W. Chalmers The King in Yellow...
Saturday, 15 February 2014
The next one
If you're new to the publishing industry, as I am, you might be surprised at how far in advance things start to happen. Example: although it's still more than two months until The Killing Season hits the shelves, I've spent most of my time recently on the sequel, which won't be out for another year. I've just submitted the second version of this one to my editor.
Book 2 is provisionally called The Samaritan, and it follows Blake as he travels to Los Angeles to track down a prolific serial killer who may just be a long-forgotten figure from Blake's past. I'm looking forward to the feedback on this version, and I think it's a much stronger book after I've incorporated the thoughts of my editor and my agent, as well as some things I've decided to do differently on the second pass.
Although this one is going to be the second Carter Blake novel, calling it a sequel, as I did a minute ago, isn't quite correct: it's the second book in a series, and I think that's an important distinction.
The way I've approached the daunting task of writing That Difficult Second Novel, is in part to try to avoid writing a sequel to The Killing Season. It has the same protagonist, there are some ongoing plot threads that are picked up, and obviously it's in the same genre, but I've tried to approach The Samaritan as though it's the first Carter Blake book - i.e. one that someone who hasn't read the first book in the series can pick up and enjoy as though it were a standalone thriller.
This goes back to my thought process when I came up with Blake. I've always liked thriller protagonists who are not limited to any one location, from Travis McGee to Jack Reacher. Blake's background and profession means he can go anywhere he likes, take on any job he chooses. He's not tied down by authority or personal commitments. That means that every time I start a new book, I get to use a new location and create a whole new villain and a new supporting cast. It opens up a whole lot of possibilities for where the series can go.
The movie sequels I really love - films like Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - are all examples of the creators deciding to do something distinctive from the original. None of them are simple retreads of the original, even though they feature the same key characters and similar themes. I've tried to do something similar here: Blake is pretty much the same as he was in The Killing Season, but he's in a new city, working with new allies, facing a new antagonist. If I've got the balance right, the people who liked The Killing Season should like The Samaritan just as much, without it being a carbon copy.
I had a lot of fun writing this new book. It was a totally different experience to that of writing my first novel. The biggest difference was knowing that I definitely had a publisher this time. That was a slightly strange experience, because while I felt more secure about a lot of things, at the same time I felt more pressure to get it right. Secondly, I had to turn it around in a much shorter timeframe. I had all the time in the world to finish my first novel; procrastinating and tweaking and researching to my heart's content, but the writing of the new one was much more like a job. An awesome dream job, I hasten to add, but writing to order as opposed to as a hobby was definitely a different experience.
If all goes to plan, we'll be including the first couple of chapters of the second book at the back of the first one to encourage my readers to come back for more.
I've been talking to people about lots of exciting developments and upcoming events, none of which I can talk about just yet, but I'm hoping to be announcing some things soon. In the meantime, if you check out the nifty new Events page, you'll see that I'm going to be at CrimeFest in Bristol in May. It will be my first time at one of the biggest crime events in the UK calendar, and I'm looking forward to a few days of hanging out with some cool people, authors and readers and industry people alike.
Okay. Time to start plotting the third one...
Book 2 is provisionally called The Samaritan, and it follows Blake as he travels to Los Angeles to track down a prolific serial killer who may just be a long-forgotten figure from Blake's past. I'm looking forward to the feedback on this version, and I think it's a much stronger book after I've incorporated the thoughts of my editor and my agent, as well as some things I've decided to do differently on the second pass.
Although this one is going to be the second Carter Blake novel, calling it a sequel, as I did a minute ago, isn't quite correct: it's the second book in a series, and I think that's an important distinction.
The way I've approached the daunting task of writing That Difficult Second Novel, is in part to try to avoid writing a sequel to The Killing Season. It has the same protagonist, there are some ongoing plot threads that are picked up, and obviously it's in the same genre, but I've tried to approach The Samaritan as though it's the first Carter Blake book - i.e. one that someone who hasn't read the first book in the series can pick up and enjoy as though it were a standalone thriller.
This goes back to my thought process when I came up with Blake. I've always liked thriller protagonists who are not limited to any one location, from Travis McGee to Jack Reacher. Blake's background and profession means he can go anywhere he likes, take on any job he chooses. He's not tied down by authority or personal commitments. That means that every time I start a new book, I get to use a new location and create a whole new villain and a new supporting cast. It opens up a whole lot of possibilities for where the series can go.
The movie sequels I really love - films like Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - are all examples of the creators deciding to do something distinctive from the original. None of them are simple retreads of the original, even though they feature the same key characters and similar themes. I've tried to do something similar here: Blake is pretty much the same as he was in The Killing Season, but he's in a new city, working with new allies, facing a new antagonist. If I've got the balance right, the people who liked The Killing Season should like The Samaritan just as much, without it being a carbon copy.
I had a lot of fun writing this new book. It was a totally different experience to that of writing my first novel. The biggest difference was knowing that I definitely had a publisher this time. That was a slightly strange experience, because while I felt more secure about a lot of things, at the same time I felt more pressure to get it right. Secondly, I had to turn it around in a much shorter timeframe. I had all the time in the world to finish my first novel; procrastinating and tweaking and researching to my heart's content, but the writing of the new one was much more like a job. An awesome dream job, I hasten to add, but writing to order as opposed to as a hobby was definitely a different experience.
If all goes to plan, we'll be including the first couple of chapters of the second book at the back of the first one to encourage my readers to come back for more.
I've been talking to people about lots of exciting developments and upcoming events, none of which I can talk about just yet, but I'm hoping to be announcing some things soon. In the meantime, if you check out the nifty new Events page, you'll see that I'm going to be at CrimeFest in Bristol in May. It will be my first time at one of the biggest crime events in the UK calendar, and I'm looking forward to a few days of hanging out with some cool people, authors and readers and industry people alike.
Okay. Time to start plotting the third one...
Wednesday, 29 January 2014
Win an advance copy of The Killing Season
Orion has just launched a book giveaway on Goodreads.com to win one of ten advance review copies of The Killing Season.
These copies have been produced specifically for pre-release publicity, and feature a very cool embossed and die-cut alternate cover:
To be in with a chance of winning one of these limited edition goodies, all you have to do is go to this link to visit the promotion page on Goodreads and then click on 'Enter to win'. Entries close on March 1st so be sure to sign up before then.
While you're there, you can also have a look at my author page, and if you're feeling particularly generous, you can also click 'Want to read' to place The Killing Season on your to-read shelf.
Go on, you know you want to...
These copies have been produced specifically for pre-release publicity, and feature a very cool embossed and die-cut alternate cover:
To be in with a chance of winning one of these limited edition goodies, all you have to do is go to this link to visit the promotion page on Goodreads and then click on 'Enter to win'. Entries close on March 1st so be sure to sign up before then.
While you're there, you can also have a look at my author page, and if you're feeling particularly generous, you can also click 'Want to read' to place The Killing Season on your to-read shelf.
Go on, you know you want to...
Friday, 17 January 2014
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:
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:
Thursday, 26 December 2013
Season greetings, and a new website
I've been noodling away at my author website in spare moments over the Christmas break (you know, in between eating too much, drinking too much and watching Doctor Who). I'd held off doing much beyond a holding page until now for a couple of reasons: firstly, I had to write the second Carter Blake book, and secondly I didn't have a good web design tool, and the free ones I tried kind of sucked.
With its usual impeccable timing, it just so happens that Google managed to launch a beta version of Google Web Designer about a week before I thought to myself: 'Hey, I wonder if Google offers free web design software?' The answer is yes, and if you're willing to put up with a bit of head-scratching, trial and error and occasional screams of frustration (it is a beta, after all), it's actually pretty good. It's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than shelling out for a Dreamweaver license, and I didn't find it as restrictive as Wordpress.
I've had a look at a few other author websites and included the basics, but this is very much a work in progress. As we get closer to publication, I'll be updating the content with new articles, upcoming events and news, and no doubt I'll be doing a bit of tweaking on the design as well. You can have a look at www.carterblake.net, and any feedback is gratefully received. It seems to display okay on Internet Explorer and Chrome, but any Firefox aficionados with a bit of time to spend looking around are more than welcome.
Short update this time; there's some cold beer and leftover roast beef sandwiches I have to get to post-haste.
Merry Christmas everyone, I hope Santa brought you some good reading material.
With its usual impeccable timing, it just so happens that Google managed to launch a beta version of Google Web Designer about a week before I thought to myself: 'Hey, I wonder if Google offers free web design software?' The answer is yes, and if you're willing to put up with a bit of head-scratching, trial and error and occasional screams of frustration (it is a beta, after all), it's actually pretty good. It's certainly a hell of a lot cheaper than shelling out for a Dreamweaver license, and I didn't find it as restrictive as Wordpress.
I've had a look at a few other author websites and included the basics, but this is very much a work in progress. As we get closer to publication, I'll be updating the content with new articles, upcoming events and news, and no doubt I'll be doing a bit of tweaking on the design as well. You can have a look at www.carterblake.net, and any feedback is gratefully received. It seems to display okay on Internet Explorer and Chrome, but any Firefox aficionados with a bit of time to spend looking around are more than welcome.
Short update this time; there's some cold beer and leftover roast beef sandwiches I have to get to post-haste.
Merry Christmas everyone, I hope Santa brought you some good reading material.
Saturday, 14 December 2013
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.
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.
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.
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