Review frenzy!

Blimey, less than a month to go before publication.

My brain is a little frazzled, I’ll admit – hard at work on Total War: Rome 2 by day, and hard at work on Reviver Book 2 by night, I’m rediscovering the ups and downs of serious caffeine abuse.

Last night I shoved a quiche in a food cupboard rather than in the fridge, shoved a remote control in the fridge rather than, well, NOT in the fridge, and neglected to put a nappy on our toddler son when I put him to bed, leading to a damp and unhappy morning for the wee lad.

Also this morning I came a cropper heading to work on my bike (pedal variety). Beyond cuts and bruises, the only thing broken was pride, as I was pretty much stationary at the time. I waved away the concerns of passers-by, wearing a fixed grimace, but I probably would have told them I was fine even if blood had been spraying inconveniently far, such was the shame...

But enough complaining. Time to look at something else that’s been happening: reviews!

It’s mainly just blogs so far of course, but there are some genuinely nice reviews out there. I’ve taken the liberty of extracting the best lines. Of course.

 

First up, some nice quotes from authors. Actual professional ones!

‘A brilliant, original and very scary concept - which Seth Patrick carries off with chilling aplomb.’ Peter James

‘A highly original story skillfully told, a thriller that twists and turns all the way to the end.’ Simon Kernick

‘A great concept-based thriller. Chilling and emotional in all the right places.’  Mark Charan Newton

‘Highly recommended.’ Neal Asher (review here)

And the rest:

 

Here's a novel that manages to deftly extend hard-boiled forensic mystery into the next life. The plot and the implications of the novel are both going to keep readers up well into the night.

http://agonycolumn.com/agony/news/2013/03-04-13-news.htm

 

'Reviver' is a gripping thriller, but what really makes it fun is the addition of elements of horror and crime fiction into the mix.

http://acuparia.blogspot.ie/2013/05/reviver.html

 

Seth Patrick has created an entire forensic discipline, all backed up with authentic (at least, to this non-scientist) and utterly believable detail.  I was completely absorbed by the weird take on the world he has created between the covers of this book.  Heartily recommended.

http://promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/reviver-by-seth-patrick.html

 

Supernatural thrillers don’t get much better than British author Patrick’s assured debut.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-250-02170-0

 

It's intense, a little creepy and a hell of a lot of fun.

http://www.mithrilwisdom.com/2013/05/reviver-by-seth-patrick-book-review.html

 

[An odd fish, this one, in that it doesn’t come across as entirely positive yet contains some superb quotes, but it's here in the name of balance (and, er, superb quotes)]
‘gripping conspiracy thriller’
‘the reading experience is resolutely thrilling’
‘an excellent sense of immediacy and quantities of unbridled excitement’

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/03/reviews-reviver-seth-Patrick

And finally...

This is going to be big. Massive big. You can just sense it.
http://onechaptermore.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/seth-patrick-reviver.html


Right, that's it for now. I've just remembered that sleep is, quite probably, important.

Published!

... albeit in a language I don't speak.

Yes, the Spanish version of Reviver was published, available through Circulo de Lectores, meaning that my first published book was effectively written by someone else. Remembering the level of difference in translation attempts in any language classes I had at school, I suspect the degree to which a good translation matters is hugely underestimated. I hope a decent translation gets the credit it deserves...

They've called the book Ultimo Aliento.  When I first saw the title, for a terrible moment I thought it meant 'The Last Alien'.  But no!  Thankfully.  It's actually 'Last Breath', which is fine by me.

Find it in their catalogue on page 34 here:  http://catalogo.circulo.es/ 

(Bit of Trivia: the catalogue entry was written by someone who'd only read the original version of the manuscript, before the rewrites, and it mentions a character (Beth) who used to be key to the story but was almost entirely cut from the finished book. She still gets a little cameo, does Beth.  Aw, bless.)

Of course, when their new catalogue goes up in a few weeks, that'll very much NOT be my book on page 34, but http://www.circulo.es/Libros/2013/022013/27045.aspx may last longer.


Anyway, the translated opening line is:

A veces, Jonah Miller odiaba hablar con los muertos.

Google Translate has that as 'Sometimes hated Jonah Miller talk to the dead.' 

Almost, Google.  Almost.

87 days

87 days to go before release. Reviews are popping up here and there, and my naturally sociophobic (not –pathic. Definitely not. Too lazy.) nature is being strongly challenged by the need for PR events.

Saying that, at my first ever such, an evening to celebrate Horror authors at Tor UK, I did stay until the death and drink, um, thoroughly.  There were people more drunk than me, but I’m doubtful as to how much solace you can ever take from that.

I'll have to make sure I don’t talk while photos get taken if I can help it, and improve those expressions I somehow contrive to pull. Blue Steel is not a good look.

To my surprise, I even found myself enjoying chatting to the good folk there, but I’m finding everyone else knows a hell of a lot about books. Eight years of day-job, young family, and that writing-a-novel stuff left me with very little spare time and groaning shelves laden with still-unread novels.

I’ll catch up.  A little.

There’s another event this coming Thursday, Fantasy in the Court. Lots more authors, but mainly outdoors. Brrr. I’ll dress warm, and avoid pouting while cameras are aimed at me.


Anyway, to round off, here's the little bit on horror the people at Tor UK asked me to do for that Horror evening.


Ah, horror.

One thing people underestimate about horror is its breadth. From the deep unease of M. R. James to the Grand Guignol of Clive Barker, horror can be brutal or genteel, Satanic or technological; anywhere from a whisper to a scream. All tastes are catered for. You don’t think you like horror? You just haven’t found the right mix.

Horror is at the heart of being human. When people gathered around a fire forty thousand years ago, I can guarantee their storytellers didn’t explore the fine points of language, or the angst of middle age. They spoke of the creatures that came from the dark; they spoke of pain and fear. But here’s something else I guarantee: they did it with humour, with thrills, with shocks. With a pinch of romance and a dash of the supernatural.

Even now, our existence is only a wrong-turn away from genuine horrors that, fascinated as we are, we can’t bear to discuss. Horror is our way of peering close at the rotting corpse we’ll all become, and then closing the book, finding ourselves a little more grateful than before.

In the end, though, the appeal of good horror is a simple one: it guarantees an eventful read. And at its best, it provides moments that will forever lurk in your thoughts. The strange thing is how much fun it can be to write horror. A dark kind of fun: a sense of mischief and a hope that, just maybe, you can capture such a moment.

A moment that seizes your heart and makes you know – just for a time – that something is very, very wrong.
 

Sheer terror

I remember when I was nine years old and I sang a solo at our school’s Christmas Carol service. (I was the Angel Gabriel. Typecasting, pah.) The choir sang a verse, then little me in the centre of the stage on my ownsome piped in with my part. Rinse and repeat x4.  Each time the choir mercilessly advanced through their lines, it felt like the whole world was condensing time into one particularly nasty moment just for me.

I was recalling this early experience (of what, I guess, is stage fright) just last night, in the moments leading up to me having to talk about my book to a large roomful of people.  I was hit by that same sense of time squeezing itself down to a pinhead of fear; a fear that, although a little pathetic, is also pretty universal.

My publisher Macmillan had invited a group of professional authors (and also me!) to a get-together to meet the Macmillan team while "tasting" (ie, drinking large amounts of) wine, but the price was having to give a little speech in advance. Way down the running order, I followed Paul Cornell, and the moment he finished talking and sat down, eyes turned to me and I stood.

There’s a bit in Reviver that’s exactly like this, only with more blood.

I’d given a fair bit of thought to what I would say, and only at one point did I forget what came next. Sadly I also forgot what I’d just said, which made my legs genuinely turn to jelly. That brief wobble was resolved by mentioning the film deal, which got me a round of applause. I’ll try to mention it more often.

Funny really, before it’s your turn you’re too preoccupied to hear much of what those before you say, then after your turn you’re too relieved to hear much of the rest.  Relieved that you’ve not fainted or cried, or as a friend pointed out, shat yourself. Setting low standards for success, perhaps, but baby steps…

[Speaking of low standards, here’s a tip: if an off-joke with the word ‘hole’ in it suddenly occurs to you during a speech, don’t say it.  To wit: “I only know two things about wine: the hole it comes out of and the hole it goes into.” The top of the bottle and the mouth, people. Those ones.]

Singing as a nine year old Gabriel, my voice held up, nothing catastrophic occurred, and the terror I felt during the last verse was nowhere near as bad as during the first. I’m assured the same will happen now, and I’ll be an old hand in no time.

Or at least when book two launches.

Older

This poor neglected blog may get a little more attention, thanks to something that will put the fear of God into my editor:

My writing shed now has Internet. 

Thanks to the miracle of a massive piece of thick wire going shed-to-garden-to-living-room-to-router which I've promised my wife will soon blend perfectly into the background (LOL!), this shed is online.

Previously my procrastination options came down to Freecell, or arsing about with Sonar X1, but now...  they are unlimited!

I'm celebrating this luxury, plus the fact that it's my birthday, by sitting out here freezing and getting just a little drunk.  I have beer (Tanglefoot and Hobgoblin), Guinness, and JD&Coke at the ready, chilling in the foot of snow outside the door.

This is the point in a blog's life where at most two people read it, and I feel entirely justified in drunkenly slapping bollocks down that is of no interest even to them.  So I'll crack open another beer and do that thing everyone does on their birthday:

A review of How Things Are Going.  The plus-and-minus summary of the year.  Apologies in advance!


Plus:  I got the big rewrite of Reviver done.  All the problems I secretly knew about got hit and sorted.  Everything finally worked!

Minus:  I ended up fucking exhausted.  I have two kids and a full time job.  I got very familiar with the wee small hours and five hours sleep.  Every little bug that my kids got, I succumbed to.  This year, viruses were like bad guys in a Bruce Lee movie, queuing up to punch my face.  With phlegm.


Plus:  The book was finished!

Minus:  The book wasn't finished. A few more changes, then a few more, then the copy edit, then proofing... It means that just when you think you're done you have to go over everything a few more times.  I realised that a writer ends up reading their book more times that anyone else ever will, by a factor of twenty.  (This is why making it genuinely entertaining is so important.  It protects the writer from insanity, which in turn explains why reading the output of mad writers is rarely any fun.  You know those writers who have no sense of humour remaining, the ones who look like they're chewing glass?  It's their own fault!)


Plus:  Movie deal! Holy Jesus! Out of nowhere, a great production company optioned the book! When I was sixteen, if you'd asked me what things I wanted to achieve that I didn't really think would ever happen?  Get a job writing computer games!  Check!  Publish a novel!  Check!  Movie deal?  No way!*

Minus:  I found out I was allergic to chocolate. Decades of sporadic mouth ulcer catastrophes, and I finally realised it was down to chocolate. 'That's actually really common,' someone told me after I'd worked it out. Nobody says these things before you work it out. Although maybe that dream about Satan was real after all.  ('You get the movie, all I want is to take away your ability to eat chocolate!'  'Uh, what about my soul?  My soul's tasty!'  'The chocolate thing or no deal.')


Plus:  I started to write the next book, and discovered I was actually really enjoying it.

Minus:  There is no minus to this one.  I'd been terrified, I'd been putting it off, and then found it was great fun. Hang on, isn't that what I should be doing right now?  Maybe just one more beer!


*OK, so there were more things on the list. Some involved girls.

Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe

Reviver owes its existence to Edgar Allan Poe, born 19th January 1809.

I was browsing the web at work (it was lunchtime!  probably!) and someone pointed out there were entries in Wikipedia for specific dates, and you could find out if you shared your birthday with anyone interesting.

Mine came up with Dolly Parton and Edgar Allan Poe.

I'd been browsing because I was hunting for a story idea.  I'd joined a creative writing course run by Peter James, back at the tail end of 2004.  This was just before Peter's first Roy Grace crime novel had been released, and he was still best known as a horror writer.  At the end of the first class, he set homework for the following week: write the first 250 words of a scary novel, introducing your protagonist and a murder weapon.

I had a week to do it, but after four days I was still blank.

Once I'd found the birthday connection, I read Poe's Wikipedia page.  As I did, two of his stories, which I'd read years before, collided in my brain.

The first was The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.  Here we have Monsieur Valdemar, on the point of death;  a friend, with an interest in mesmerism, asks permission to mesmerise Valdemar to see what happens.  (Clue: not happy stuff.)  When it was published, some actually took it to be a true account.  That gives me goosebumps.

The second was The Murders in the Rue Morgue, widely considered to be the first modern detective story.  (It was also riffed on in one of the most memorable X Files episodes, Squeeze.)

These two stories fused, and what flashed into my head was the image of Valdemar being given a post-mortem interview by Poe's detective, Dupin.

That evening, I started to write.  It was the first page of what would become Reviver, and it has hardly changed since.

Now I'm not sure if Poe ever had a happy day in his life, and, well, he's long dead*, but I'll raise my glass to the man all the same... Happy Birthday Edgar!

(*There's a slim chance that someone who looks a lot like Peter Cushing has Poe stashed in his basement churning out new stories.)

Noob

My first blog post!  Even though I’ve been employed in computing my whole life, I’ve avoided Facebook, Twitter and blogging until now.  I count that as a success, but it means I’m a social media noob, so bear with me.

My first novel, Reviver, won’t be released until June 2013.  It feels both very near and extremely distant.  It feels near because by then I’ll have finished the second book in the trilogy, and the deadline is never far from my mind.  It feels distant because I’ll be able to walk into any bookshop and pick up a copy, and that seems CRAZY.

You see, even though I’ve been writing since I could lift a pen, I’m a writer noob, too.

Most of my life, I’ve been convinced I didn’t have what it took to be an author.  I’ve dabbled in television, radio, movie scripts, anything to avoid prose.  It took a while before I had the confidence to really try. 

It seems such a nebulous thing, writing.  You make things up and put words on the page.  Right up until the point someone else sees it, you daren’t hope that it’s any good, and you can’t bear the thought that it’s not.

Then one day an agent loved what I’d written.  Soon after, a publisher did too.  Years of hard work, distilled into a novel that people can read for themselves in June.

But as a writer noob, it still feels impossible that this will really happen.

It’ll be interesting to see how my brain deals with it when it finally does.  If you see me standing in Waterstone’s next summer, staring at the shelves and looking bewildered, you’ll know the noob thing hasn’t quite gone yet…