Following a meeting with my PhD supervisor yesterday, it would seem that my novel, DISORDER, is on the right track. There is more work to be done (isn't there always?), but not quite as much as my worst-case-scenario thoughts might have suggested. It's all good.
So, now follows a period of thinking time before I tackle it again. This will be facilitated by the kind folk who will be sending me their thoughts when they get a chance to look at the early draft. A few have even gotten back to me already. Many thanks, you absolute stars.
And so, mostly because I can't just sit on my arse ALL day and think about one book, I have other things to get done. Most of them involve sitting on my arse and typing. Thankfully, I'm back at the gym following an injury that became an excuse to be lazy long after it was healed, so I'll spend some time on my feet (and my back) as well.
Again, paranoid that if I release too much info on any of this stuff it'll curse it all, I'll be a little vague for this next paragraph or two.
I still need to seek out and woo agents of various stripes. My screen and stage writing badly needs representation. I have two television scripts, a movie script and I'm working on a play, but I have no idea what to do with this stuff. And while I would like to have a literary agent again, I can get by without one for now, so I haven't put much energy into securing a new one yet. So, maybe this would be a good time to look at agencies that could accommodate all three of my writing streams. Certainly, there's been little response to my half-assed "can anybody recommend an agent?" approach that I sometimes indulge in on Twitter or Facebook.
And while I know that the agent thing is important, I try not to allow myself too much time off from writing. That is the number one concern for a writer, surely? It might also be the reason why I've got stuff on my computer that I keep forgetting to send out to be read/considered/rejected. On the bright side, it also means that I'll be able to release a fourth novel through Blasted Heath this year. Not another Cormac Kelly just yet (but that's coming, trust me). I have a new character to put out there first. Detective Shannon McNulty's first adventure will be available in the near future. No actual date yet, but I'm hoping it'll hit virtual bookshelves by the summer.
So, that's an update that ran longer than I intended. It was my intention to simply list the books that were very important in the writing of DISORDER but I got a little chatty. Here's the list anyway:
Fiction
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett
The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins
The Hunter, Richard Stark
Cotton Comes to Harlem, Chester Himes
The Prone Gunman, Jean-Patrick Manchette
Interface, Joe Gores
The Man With the Gloved Hand, Joe McKimmey
Stumped, Rob Kitchin
Non-fiction
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith
Writing Mysteries, ed. Sue Grafton
Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon
The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield
There may be one or two books that I've forgotten about that contributed directly to the writing of DISORDER, but if they come to mind later I'll slip them into the list. I read quite a bit of academic non-fiction as well, but that was for the critical component of my PhD, and so it's not really relevant to this particular post. I'll maybe put a full bibliography on the blog when I've completed the whole thing in another year and a half, but the above will do nicely for now.
