Another Week, Another Distraction, Bernard Cornwell's Winter King, and Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak

Three weeks ago I went to London for the weekend. At the end of the trip, with two hours until I had to take the tube to Heathrow Airport, I finally achieved my goal of visiting a bookstore.
I bustled from Victoria Station, past the back wall of Buckingham Palace and through the beautiful, green dampness of St James's park, to the grand shops and mansions of Piccadilly.
Drizzle fell constantly. I didn't care, I was going to a bookshop.
In the end, though, I didn't go to a bookshop, I went to two bookshops. The first was Hatchards, in Piccadilly. It's the oldest bookshop in the UK, on five floors, and it looks like this.

 I bought a copy of Idylls of the King Publisher: Penguin Classics, and a history of the Kings of England (exciting stuff). More importantly I roamed around their five floors, got recommendations from their lovely staff, and browsed through all kinds of fascinating little nooks and crannies.
And then, from there, I went up the road to Waterstones Piccadilly, ANOTHER five floor book store. What an embarrassment of riches! it used to be a department store called Simpsons, and it's huge.
Here I bought this:

Because I thought it would be interesting to see a historical representation of the King Arthur years.
It turned out it was more than fascinating. basically, in British history, there's a 500 hundred year gap, after the Romans left, and before the Normans came, when we know NOTHING that went on. While the Romans were around they wrote letters about people, and drew maps, and recorded battles, and accounts. Then they went, and everybody pulled their palaces down to make pig sties, and let grass grow on their roads, and stopped recording anything.
It's like there's an invisibility cloak over the whole time. A cloak that Cornwell attempts to push aside. He makes a real historical time fascinating, and quite dreadful, and the characters amazing.
Recommended.

The Other Queen, Philippa Gregory, Levels 4

So the bad news is that Levels 4 'The Walled Lake' is growing slowly. The good news is that my distractions are fun....

The Walled Lake is a new kind of book for me. It has four main characters, for a start, and a dozen extras. Levels 1-3 were like threads that I woven together into a line from beginning to end. Levels 4 is more like a fabric, or a lace, with different stories criss-crossing each other, and some of them not reaching an end. It surprises me all the time, and so a big part of the slowness is caused by continually going back to the beginning to lay the foundations for exciting events I've just thought of...

Two of the characters are Maddie, the heroine of the first three books, and Oh Sanden, who you will know if you read 'Reason to be Shy.' Their relationship is complicated, and so it was a happy accident that I read 'The Other Queen' while I was working.

This tells the story of three women, Elizabeth the first of England, Mary Queen of Scots - her cousin and prisoner, and Bess of Hardwick, who is forced to use up all her resources and give over her house as Mary's prison. The women are forceful, and dramatic and they clash openly and surreptitiously.
Though you know how the story will end, because it's all true, it's completely captivating because of the strength of the characters, which is kind of a lesson for me.

Recommended.

FREE BOOK

Song to Wake to is now FREE on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Song-Paranormal-Romance-Levels-ebook/dp/B005RFA1RU/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1368310480&sr=1-1&keywords=song+to+wake+to

That's all for now...

Where do those funny little things in your imagination come from? And Vampires.

So, this has taken a while. I'm usually up on titles well before a book finishes. Most of the stories floating around in my head, or on scraps of napkins from coffee shops on South Street, have titles. In fact I probably have more titles than stories. I think of them, and send them to myself as text messages, or scribble them on receipts.

If I had all the time in the world, a book shaped-flood would pour from my balcony, scattered with titles like 'The Cloud Ceiling,' 'The Course,' 'No Love Song Finer,' 'Jordan's Golden Shoulder,' 'Bath Night,' 'The Wonder of it All,' 'The Lost Ocean.'

But I don't have all the time in the world. Fortunately I have saved a little time by realising that a title I scrawled on a receipt from the internet cafe at Istanbul Airport, was perfect.
Once upon a time I lived in Bucharest, Romania (there's a lot of stories there, too. I know the real stuff about vampires...).

Anyway Bucharest is full of fascinating corners, where confusing fragments of the past sneak through the grey concrete of communist times. There are streets named for Greeks who ruled the city as the ambassadors of the Turks. There are cemeteries filled with men who fought the Russians when they came. There is a park, near a road called Basarabia Boulevard, named after the home of the people who once lived there. Besarabians, from a place now called Moldova, then also part of the Ottoman Empire.

Here's one of my favourite Bucharest Places:


What is the point in all these connections?

Of the titles I suggested for my stories, in my little survey in the post below this,  I liked the made-up words 'Giantorium' and the long ones 'The Girl who gave up her Name.'

You didn't. You preferred the places, 'Traitor's Gate' and the others. The one problem with those is there wasn't a connection between them all, not like the 'song' theme of the first stories. Two of them, 'The Locked Chapel' and 'Traitor's Gate' had the theme of openings/access. But I needed a third. Which is where the park in Bucharest came in.

All parks in Bucharest have lakes, but this one was different. It had been encroached on by the walls of the stadium next door. They pinched it between their high, grey surfaces, and gave me the idea for a book title that I never had a story for until about six months ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, Levels 4, Idylls of Merlin, book 1:

THE WALLED LAKE

The Half-Blood Prince, City of Heavenly Fire, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Once and Future King, and A River Runs through it

What's the link between these five books?

It's that I really like the titles. And why is this? To me great titles have to do three things. They have to have at least a little poetry, maybe from rhyme, rhythm, assonance, whatever.  Good titles have to hint at what's in the book (more important for kids' books than adult ones). Finally they have to be catchy, or memorable.

In addition, if the book is in a series, they have to link backwards and forwards through the series. Cassandra Claire, for example, achieves this with her 'City of...' titles.

There is of course a second link between all these books. I really like 'em. A River Runs Through it matches the poetry of the title in the rest of the story, and it's carried over into the movie. Take a look here:


The 4th Levels book will also be the first in a new trilogy. I've decided to move on from the song theme of the first books, and have come up with the following ideas for titles. It's soooo hard to decide.

What do you think?

A.
1 Wait
2 Want
3 Waste

B
1 The girl who forgot her own face.
2 The boy who lost his past
3 The girl who gave up her name

C
1 Traitors Gate
2 School of War
3 The locked chapel

D
1 Giantarium
2 Otherself
3 Enchantless

E
1 Broken Knights
2 Knight Fall
3 Dead of Knight

F
1 Damsel
2 Lady
3 Sorceress

G
1 Wizard
2 Knight
3 King

If you've got an opinion, please leave a comment. i want to stop referring to this as L4...!

Bigger than Jacob Black, Cooler than Jace, Smarter than ET and Jacob Cullen. What is it?

As readers we love cool, imaginary non-human species. ET, Jacob Black, Simon from the Mortal Instruments. I've got news, though. I've written a book about the coolest non-human species, and it ISN'T IMAGINARY. Here it is.

It's unfortunately called the sperm whale, which is a stupid name, because we used to think its head was filled with sperm. Go figure. It gets worse. We hunted these amazing creatures in their thousands to get the 'sperm' out of its head, so we could burn it, or grease watches with it.

Ridiculous. So I prefer to use the French name 'cachalot.' It sounds like Catch A Lot, which is what it does. It's the biggest predator EVER, bigger than dinosaurs, and what does it live on? Giant squid. It hunts them two kilometres deep, in complete darkness and pressures that would squash you flat.

It's as weird and distant as if it was hunting aliens off the plains and valleys of the moon. Most of what we know about giant squid is from the scars we've seen on cachalots, and the remains found in their stomachs.

The more I knew about cachalots, the more I knew they would make an awesome story. I worked out a way to have them interact with teenagers, and pressed 'cook.'

The NEW news is that it's free on Amazon Sunday and Monday the 3rd and 4th of March. Check it out, the story's quirky, the kid is cool, and you'll learn tons of amazing stuff. If you know a teenager who likes animals, or is a bit geeky, or maybe just curious, point them at it. They'll like it

Bizarrely, we know more about vampires and werewolves than we do about cachalots. We don't know what the stuff in their heads is for, we don't know why they have the biggest brains on earth, and we don't know why they make the LOUDEST noise of any animal ever. Louder than a jumbo jet.

The cool thing for a writer, about all these 'don't knows' is making up reasons. I made up tons of cachalot backstory, and some of it might, one day, turn out to be close to the truth. Check it out.

Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey and THE INDIE AUTHOR save the bookstore.

Everybody buys their books at Amazon. Borders has gone. Everybody else has gone. Barnes and Noble is fading away.

Are we looking at a world where there's no such thing - beyond college campuses, airports, and places like the wonderful STRAND BOOKSTORE - as a bookshop? I hope not. But at the same time, I owe such a lot to Amazon. They allowed me to publish my stories, find readers, and make more money doing it than if I'd ever gone through a traditional publisher.

As marvellous as it is, though, Amazon is missing something. There will never be a movie scene, like this, shot in an Amazon warehouse.



This is one half of my marvellous, bookstore-saving hypothesis. The other is me.

Or rather, those like me. The Indy Author, publishing on Amazon. A phenomenon that can take pride in being scorned less and less (we're not very full of ourselves). I don't know what the latest stats are, but we sell more and more books every year, and there are more of us, and whatever we do sell, we keep far more of the income than our traditionally published colleagues.

The one thing that we don't have is books on shelves. We don't have book signings, or chances to meet readers (and many of us have tens of thousands) in the flesh. But bookstores can give us that, and in exchange, I think some Indie Authors might be very nice to the traditional bookstores that also sell eBooks. Especially, of course, if the bookstores were run by Hugh Grant, or Kate Winslet.



If they can offer Indie Authors shelf space, or meet-the-reader evenings, book signings, or physical publicity, who knows what Indie authors might give up in exchange. It's the hint of a beginning of an idea. What do you think?