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Call me chicken, but I’ve decided to return to the structure of my first three books for the fifth one.
The Devil Will Come, is the working title for a thriller about the nature of true evil. It derives from a passage in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus: The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Along the Appian Way in Rome a new 1st century catacomb is unearthed and all the human skeletons have a remarkable and disturbing feature: they all have tails. Vatican archaeologist, Sister Elisabetta, a young Franciscan nun, finds herself in a deadly race to solve the secret of the catacomb before a horrible act occurs which will send the world into an Armageddon.
Like my first three books, this one will shuttle between three time periods: the present, 1st century Rome and Elizabethan England.
The Devil Will Come is only at outline and research stages and will probably take me the better part of 2010 to write once I’m ready to tackle it. But I’m crazy about Roman archaeology and Elizabethan religious intrigue so I’m really looking forward to taking it on. And it gives me an excuse to read some very cool stuff when I’m goofing off from writing. And by the way, I have to spend a week or two in Rome doing research. Damn!
If I pull it off, keep an eye out for the book in late 2011 or early 2012.
Is there anyone who isn’t fascinated by the subject of the afterlife and near death experiences? I sure as hell am!
Near Death is the working title of my fourth book, a thriller about the biological underpinnings of near death experiences. As I’m writing this blog it’s nearly half done. It’s going well but I’m not ready to run a victory lap yet. There’s a lot of hard slogging ahead and I admit that I’ve got a few large plot points to resolve before the whole story hangs together. I’ve got two places I rely on to work out the twists and turns of a complicated story: the town conservation land in Massachusetts where I walk my dog and my bathtub. Before this book is done I’m going to be doing a lot of walking and soaking.
As a relatively new novelist, I’m gaining a degree of confidence with each book and I’m looking to explore the boundaries of my abilities. Near Death is a departure from the first three books in a couple of significant ways and I’m hoping it works out.
First of all, the book has a more conventional structure than the others: all of it takes place in the present without my typical time shifts. And second, the book features an antagonist, a British neuroscientist, Alex Weller, who is as strong and in many ways, as appealing a character as the hero, FBI special agent Cyrus O’Malley. Perfectly good heroes and perfectly dastardly antagonists don’t particularly interest me. No one is all good or all bad, at least in real life. In Alex Weller, I wanted to push the envelope and create a character who does horrible things in the pursuit of lofty motivations. I want to see if I can make readers hate the guy but love him at the same time. We’ll see…
Look for the book in early 2011.
It’s a bit unconventional but my friends at Random House have decided to bring out two of my books in 2010. I sincerely hope you don’t get sick of me…
The Tenth Chamber draws on my first academic love: archaeology. I got my undergraduate degree in archaeology and it was always going to be a toss-up of whether I was going to go into that profession or medicine. For better or worse, medicine won by a hair.
The period in prehistory that always gets my juices especially flowing is the Paleolithic, the long stretch of stone-age that includes the lavishly painted caves of France and Spain like Lascaux and Altamira. One of the best ways to come up with story ideas is to start the process off with: What if…
So, what if a medieval manuscript was discovered in an obscure French monastery written by a monk who claimed to be 220 years old. The secret to his longevity seems to lie within a prehistoric painted cave, presently unknown to archaeologists. But the manuscript contains a rudimentary map and the rare documents restorer, Hugo Pineau and his university mate, archaeologist Luc Simard, discover Ruac Cave, the most amazing painted cave ever found.
Again, I had a tremendous amount of fun with time shifts. The book jumps back and forth between the present, medieval France and the Paleolithic, 30,000 years ago where the stone-age Da Vinci of his day makes a series of fantastic inventions that will ripple through time.
Then, the members of Luc’s archaeological excavation start dying one by one. Someone wants to make sure the secrets of Ruac Cave never see the light of day.
With Book of Souls, I knew I had a reservoir of fans of Library of the Dead who wanted to keep going. Since it’s a stand-alone novel, The Tenth Chamber makes me feel like I’m starting all over again which is exhilarating but also nerve-wracking. I’m going to be sitting on the edge of my chair until I see what readers think.
I have a confession to make. When I sold LIBRARY OF THE DEAD, I committed to a sequel without having a clue how to pull it off. I wrote the first book as a stand-alone with a big ending. A sequel was the farthest thing from my mind.
But necessity is the mother of invention – I really believe in this old saw! So, over the course of about a month I came up with an idea, but to make it work, I needed to make a few changes to the first book. Fortunately, it hadn’t been published yet and I was able to sneak the revisions into the galleys.
BOOK OF SOULS picks up the action a year and a half later. Will Piper, the hero of LIBRARY OF THE DEAD is retired from the FBI, keeping the secret of the great Library of Vectis and warily adjusting to life as a married man and father. Then, a single long-missing volume from the Library, dated to 1527, surfaces at an auction house in London and Will is drawn back into the dangerous, clandestine world of Area 51. As his old nemesis, Malcolm Frazier, tries to shut him down and prevent the world from learning the fantastic truth about the Library, Will learns that this one book has shaped the religious philosophy of John Calvin, the prophesies of Nostradamus and even the world view of the young William Shakespeare.
I was able to happily immerse myself in the 16th century for significant chunks of the book and I hope you enjoy the ride. One ought never say never, but I think this is it for Will Piper. He’s a great guy, I’m fond of him, but I need to leave him alone to contemplate the meaning of February 9, 2027.
The folks at Random House have given me this terrific platform to blog for five days on any topic I like. So, being the narcissistic fellow I am (I’m not, really), I thought I’d write about myself! Well, not myself, as much as the weirdly wonderful transition from wannabe writer to published author. It’s a transition I highly recommend and I encourage everyone who’s got the burning desire to keep at it until you cross the line.
My second thriller, BOOK OF SOULS, is now out and I’m excited about that, but given the lag in publishing and the fact I’ve been beavering away, my head is filled with book 4 and book 5 activities. I like to keep two projects on the fire to keep things fresh so I’m currently writing Number 4 and researching Number 5. Since I’ve got five blogs, I thought I’d devote each to one of the books to give you a sense of the beginning stages and the evolution of a new author’s career. (It’s awfully fun having a new career at age 56!)
So, I crossed over the line with LIBRARY OF THE DEAD, which came out in 2009. It’s a complicated thriller about fate and predestination involving a string of killings in New York City where each victim receives a postcard preannouncing their date of death. The past two years have been a bit of a blur as the book was translated into 29 languages, has been an international bestseller and has sold about 700,000 copies!
All that sounds good, but here’s the rub: In the beginning, I couldn’t get a literary agent to represent it to save my life. I sent out 66 query letters to agents in the US and the UK and 65 told me to pound sand. Then, one brand new junior agent in California, in his first month on the job, said what the heck and requested the manuscript. He thought it had potential but wanted a major re-write. He figured it would take me months but I was on an adrenaline high and turned it around in three weeks. He liked it, liked my work ethic, agreed to represent it, and within a month the sales started pouring in.
So for all you folks who want to cross the publishing line, keep writing, keep getting better and remember my statistic: 1 in 66.
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