What

I don't do bloggs, partly because I don't read them, partly because it seems an act of colossal vanity to think that people will regularly log in to see what I had for breakfast or listen to me rant about politics or the price of fish. That said, this seems as good a place as any to think aloud about the things I'm up to as far as the books are concerned and, generally, what's going on...

ACT OF WILL sells apace, and I'm currently working on the final edits for the sequel which will be out next winter. Have also been exploring a couple of other projects including the development of WHAT TIME DEVOURS into a film script and a new series focusing on a crime scene photographer: both more and less conventional mystery than my thrillers, more in that the hero unravels cases from under the auspices of the police, though he's not an officer himself, and less because tonally it's much closer to ACT OF WILL. I'm going for something a little on the lines of Janet Evanovitch's PLUM novels, but with a male lead and a different angle on the action. We'll see how it goes. began research by doing a ride-along with the local CSS which was fascinating and unsettling. As I remarked to someone on Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter now) I hadn't expected to be following a blood trail by flashlight from the place of a shooting at 4 in the morning... Booksigning tomorrow then off to DC for the Shakespeare Association of America where I'll probably do some stock signings if I ever make it out of the conference hotel.

Just back from New York and a wonderful Winter's Tale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack and Ethan Hawke, among other notable. The Sicilia stuff was glorious. Off to my first signing for Act of Will which has been out two weeks though a clerical error delayed it reaching Barnes and Noble till now. This is my first fantasy novel and tonally very different from my thrillers, but the reviews thus far have been strong and I think readers will have fun with it: humor-laced adventure seems pretty timely right now. We could all use a little escapism... Looking forward to hearing reader feedback at the usual place (author@ajhartley.net). I have also added some extras about the history of the original manuscript from which the novel is taken on the Act of Will page, and I've added a couple more chapters to the one I already had posted so that readers can see if it's something they'd like to pick up.

As to what happens next.... Not sure. Publishing is being hit hard by the so-called "economic downturn" and a lot of writers, myself included, are feeling the pinch. New projects suddenly look uncertain, and directions similarly unclear. We'll see. Till then, here's hoping WILL makes a splash...

Er... Happy New Year. What can I tell you?: it's been a busy start to the year. What Time Devours seems to be doing well and--more importantly--has been well received, at least in the reviews I've seen and the mail I've been getting. It seems to be generating interest abroad too, and we have already done a deal for the Dutch translation. Given the state of the economy (and that of the reeling publishing industry) I'm just glad people are buying books at all. The Tears of the Jaguar is now under consideration and I'll post something as soon as we have a definite publisher/release date lined up. In the meantime, I'll be working on the final revisions for the sequel to Act of Will which comes out next month and which got a very nice "starred" review in Publishers Weekly. There has been some interest in that book from Hollywood, but it's too early to say where that is going. I know the movie industry of old and won't be holding my breath. I'll be adding more on Act of Will and its tangled past soon. Work on that manuscript has been a long and complicated process which started almost twenty years ago...

Two weeks till the release of What Time Devours and reviews are starting to crop up online. Have finished the new novel, whose working title is The Tears of the Jaguar and got an enthusiastic thumbs-up from my agent so I'll be looking to sell that in the new year. Hopefully by then What Time Devours will be popping up on the best sellers lists. There's been lots of scary/depressing news about the state of the publishing business in the last couple of weeks so I'm trying not to get too excited...

As some readers will know, the book is dedicated in part to Ira Yarmolenko, a former student of mine who was murdered back in May 2008. Last week two men were arrested and charged with her murder. I don't know what to say about that, except that this is the beginning of some kind of closure for her family.

Yes, yes, I know, my uselessness at updating this continues apace. As usual, of course, I have the excuse of having been actually writing, among other things including a brace of writer's conferences, most recent in Myrtle Beach SC where I got to raise a few glasses with Jim Born and Michael Connelly among many pleasant and gifted folk. Of course, the big thing is that I'm almost done with draft one of the new book which doesn't have a title as yet but is set in Mexico and the UK. The end is not quite in sight, nor is it, as they say, the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning, so there's that...

In just over two months What Time Devours will be out and a couple of months after that Act of Will will be out too. I'm adding cover art to the main page shortly.

OK, so even by my pathetic standards it's been a LONG time since I updated this. There are, however, reasons, and silence does not equal inactivity. Quite the contrary. Apart from various academic projects, including my up-coming book on the performance history of Julius Caesar and several papers for conferences and the like, I have been writing and editing furiously. I have turned in the final copy edited manuscripts of both Act of Will (due out from Tor Jan/Feb 09) and What Time Devours (due out from Berkley Jan 09), and made significant headway on the next thriller, much of which has grown out of a trip to certain Mayan remains in the Yucatan in April. More on that as the project progresses.

But what has really taken me out of updating the site was the murder of one of my students: Ira Yarmolenko, a charming and gifted child--she had just turned 20--who I directed in Doctor Faustus last year. She was a remarkable person, full of joy and hope and energy. I don't know what to say about this. As someone who writes about murder for entertainment purposes I found myself completely at a loss to process the real thing. I have wanted to write about this many times, but each attempt seemed to trivialize the event, the enormity of the thing. It doesn't help that the case is still wide open two months later, though I know the police are working hard to bring some kind of closure, preferably in the form of an arrest. A strange and terrible business, and my heart goes out to her family and to all those who knew her better than I did.

What Time Devours will be dedicated, in part, to her memory. When the book comes out, I will create a subsection of the page for that book (working in conjunction with her family) which will direct readers to charities and scholarships that are being set up in her name.

The SC book festival was a blast. Got to spend some time with some fun folk: readers, writers, booksellers, organizers. Good time. And my new sat nav system got me there no problem (and to the zoo on the way back) so I'll now be able to write about such things and know what I'm talking about.

More up-coming signings listed on the news/events page, including one in Dallas (where I'll be for the Shakespeare Association conference, the other half of my double life).

Man, I'm bad at this. I occasionally follow a link to an author's site and it really is embarrassing to see how everyone else is constantly updating the bloggs with pithy little entries about life, the universe and everything. Still, I do wonder how they ever get any other writing done. I can at least say that in the last two months I've got some stuff done. Here's the short version.

What Time Devours, as you may have seen in Publishers Weekly, was sold to Berkley last month. I'm excited about their plans to try and get it even more attention than the last two. We're doing final editorial revisions now. The book probably won't be out till early 09, alas, but I'm not sure about that yet. As soon as I have details, cover art etc. I'll post it.

Right now I'm engaged in an academic project: a book on the performance history of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The other big news is that I'll have a new fantasy series coming out from Tor, with the first--Act of Will--due out about the same time. This is a very different kind of book: a somewhat comic fantasy adventure told from the perspective of a young actor. The details of how this comes to have my name on it are complicated and will have to wait till I have more time. It's all very strange...

Another long period of silence. Apologies. A busy time of year in school with final papers, exams and performance projects all coming down to the wire. But as a novelist I have been far from idle. I have completed the new book, a Thomas Knight story involving a lost Shakespeare play called Love's Labour's Won (yes, it really existed). It is set in Chicago, England and northern France, and is called What Time Devours. I will say more about it later. For now, I'll just say that I'm excited about it and that it's with my editor...

In other news, I just signed a contract for French rights to The Mask of Atreus, which is nice and brings the total number of languages for that book to almost 20.

It's been a while since I added to this, but not for lack of news. I'll do it in bits...

FIFTH DAY seems to have done well. It's still very much around, and a lot of stores are now carrying MASK again, whose sales also spiked after FIFTH came out. I've had lots of good feedback and had a chance to talk about it at SIBA in Atlanta a few weeks ago, where I signed 200 copies after the fun/scary Moveable Feast.

First, the next Thomas Knight adventure/mystery/thriller (whatever it is I write) is almost done as a first draft. I'm into the patching and tweaking and polishing stages which will probably last another month or so, but the shape of the thing is there. For now I'll just say that it involves Shakespeare and champagne...

Second, I signed a two book deal with Tor for my fantasy adventures ACT OF WILL and WILL POWER, which should be out early 2009 and 2010 respectively. These are a little different from my other books in that they are set in a mythical vaguely late medieval world, but there's still plenty of mystery and adventure. They are first person stories told by a morally dubious apprentice actor called Will Hawthorne who--in the first book--finds himself in serious trouble with the local authorities and casts himself on the mercies of a band of principled adventurers... I love writing this stuff because I get to be a little more playful than usual.

My big news is that FIFTH made the New York Times bestseller list (#28). Very good news.

Just back from Thrillerfest in NYC and a round of meetings with agents and everyone at Berkley: a fun and productive time. At the conference I got to meet (and thank) all the folk who had so graciously done blurbs for my books: Doug Preston, Steve Berry, James Rollins and a handful of others. James Rollins was especially nice and encouraging. I also got books signed by Lee Child, David Morrell and David Hewson (a fellow Brit who writes beautiful and superlatively researched thrillers set in Rome). As I heard someone say, the bigger the writer, the nicer they seemed to be in person!

FIFTH seems to be doing well and entered the USA Today bestseller list at 121, which is wonderful (that list is the top 150 books in all genres and forms, hard and paperback). I hope it hangs in there for another week or two.

I signed stock all over New York which was pretty surreal. It's odd to feel like a (admittedly minor) celebrity in a city which is so cosmopolitan and overwhelming!

There was a very nice piece in the Charlotte Observer on Sunday, and the on-line version contains a link to the book's prologue (in case you've somehow wound up here without reading it!). Read it here.

Fifth Day is now well and truly OUT! It continues to be strange to me to see the book in central store displays and, perhaps odder still, in grocery stores and pharmacies. I still haven't stumbled on someone reading it (or Mask, for that matter), something I think will push the strangeness still further.

I'm told the new book is selling well at Barnes and Noble, but we don't have numbers for other stores yet and probably won't for some time. It's being carried in my local Walmart, though I don't know if that represents a large scale effort by that chain, or if mine is one of only a few (which I believe is how it was with MASK, though my local didn't sell that one). Perhaps readers can e-mail me when they see it in stores!

I've started doing both official signings and drop-bys, and am heading to new York later this week for Thrillerfest which should be exciting and instructive. I'm used to academic conferences rather than those for writers and I expect the atmosphere will be very different. If anyone who reads this plans to be there, be sure to track me down and say hi. Panel and signing details on the News and Events page.

I recently returned from the Shakespeare trip I led to the UK in which a dozen undergrads spent 3 weeks hopping from theatre to site to museum in London and Stratford. It was an immensely rewarding experience but was also exhausting and I'm really only just over it enough to get back to writing. I had to get the final versions of two articles in shape before I could turn to my new fiction project, but this week I finally got to grips with it and made some real headway.

Obviously it's all very early so I can't say much, but the core story will involve a lost Shakespeare play, and much of it will be set in the UK. It centers on Thomas Knight. I'll say more when I get some more of it written.

So here we go again. The book is not supposed to be out till early next week, but it's been showing up on shelves erratically all week. The waiting and watching and stressing starts all over... More later.

Got a very exciting review for the new book from Publishers Weekly, and it inspired me to redesign the site to accommodate both novels. I also now have a place for that very cool James Rollins quote.

Have been busily setting up signings which I'll enter as the dates are finalized, hopefully next week.

Well, it's been a long semester. My show (Doctor Faustus) opened and closed after a grueling four month rehearsal period which took all my attention. It was worth the work, but it WAS work. In the meantime, MASK continued to sell and I did a deal for an Indonesian edition. The Hebrew version recently came out in Israel. I must put all their different covers up on the site sometime soon.

I've been working on a movie script called Winging It to be repped by Gersh this summer, doing final tweaks to FIFTH and trying to think about the next novel while writing a couple of Shakespeare articles and a book proposal on Julius Caesar in performance. A busy year.

I've started lining up signings for FIFTH beginning early July, some in Charlotte, some in New York where I'll be for Thrillerfest. Plenty more, I hope, TBA, particularly at independent stores who I think we should all support.

Am taking a student group to England later this month to do Shakespeare stuff, esp. theatre, and we'll be seeing, among other things, Ian McKellan as King Lear... :)

On The Fifth Day is now available for pre-order through Amazon, Books-a-million and other on-line stores! I've put a link on the main page. The book will be released at the beginning of July.

Just agreed to a deal with Nemira for publication of FIFTH in Romania. They are also the publishers of MASK for that territory.

Happy New Year! I've been pretty lax up-dating this of late as the tail end of the semester got the better of me, but I hope to have more time this year in between various writing assignments and directing Dr. Faustus on the UNCC mainstage.

The new book, officially titled ON THE FIFTH DAY has been approved by my editor and sent on for final copy editing. I also have a sneak peak at the cover art. Imagine it with a cut away center (like MASK), embossing and gold foil wherever there's yellow and you'll get a sense of the thing:

The article on using Shakespeare for plotting that I co-wrote with Mary Bly, AKA Eloisa James came out in The Writer magazine in December, and I have chapter in a book on getting published that will be out later this year. More on that later.

Things have been nuts: lots of things going on which meant I had to pull out of Bouchercon, among other things. I'm still awaiting final notes on the new book but I did get some very good news re. MASK sales in the U.S. which are far higher than anyone anticipated: over 100,000 sold in the first six months!

The new book has been very favorably received by my agents and passed along for consideration by foreign markets as the final edit is approved by Berkley. I'll update as those come in. So far the only foreign rights sold for the new book are to a Dutch publisher who bought them for both books together. We see...

The Italian edition is out and there was a big feature in Il Mattino, the largest southern Italian daily, for those of you who read Italian.

I'll be doing a panel at Bouchercon in Madison at the end of September. Details on the news and Events page, along with an up-coming signing in Charlotte.

Well, the big news is that I've completed the first draft of ON THE FIFTH DAY and am circulating it among a few trusted readers. It's been tough, but I feel good about it, and great about finishing it. I think it's richer, more complex and more heavily plotted than MASK and that the pacing is better, all things I worked on consciously. But who knows? I'm way too close to it right now to be objective. I'll gather my reader reports and revisit before sending it off to my editor...

Just noticed that I didn't put the date of my Bookmark signing up in my last posting! It's this Friday (23rd) 12-1.30 in Founders hall, Charlotte.

Looking forward to the US' must-win game against Ghana tomorrow after a strong showing against Italy, and hoping that the injury to Owen will let us see Walcott for England in the Ecuador game. Hopefully they'll manage to show up for the entire 90 minutes this time.

I seem to move from computer to T.V. coverage of the World Cup pretty much constantly now... It will be a kind of blessing when we get beyond the group stage and the sheer number of games diminishes. Then I'll get more done, see my family etc... England's second game (against Trinidad-Tobago) looms and I'm hoping for a more consistent performance than against Paraguay, where they faded badly after the first twenty minutes. Saturday's challenge to the US team is rather more imposing, and I'm afraid they won't be able to rebound from the harrowing loss to the Czech Republic. It's too bad, because I hate it that most of the (Non Hispanic) population of this country will take the US's failure to get out of the group stage as another reason not to watch... I miss soccer and its culture, clearly.

In MASK news, we just did a deal for the Dutch rights, which was an unexpected turn of events, doubly so because it was a two book deal, so the novel I'm currently working on is guaranteed at least one over seas edition. I'm a little surprised that it will be Holland (esp. since they picked up on MASK so late), but it's all good!

I've added another local signing in Founders Hall (the Bank of America building) Charlotte, at the Book Mark 12-1.30 p.m. Should be fun.

Well, I'm back. It was a long and sometimes exhausting trip through Italy and Germany, much of the ridiculously cluttered itinerary dictated by research for the next book. But now I'm back and working every available minute on the story. I'm hesitant to say too much about where I've been because I don't want to give too much away about the book, but most of the core research centered around Naples and the Classical sites close by: Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum. And I did indeed get to the strange and unnerving place of bones which I mentioned in my last post. It may take a while (i.e. when the book comes out next year) but I think I'll post pictures from there and the other sites here as a kind of on-line visual companion to the novel.

The German leg of the trip was mainly to visit friends and family in the Berlin and Frankfurt areas. This was my second time in Germany and it makes me want to set part of a book there, preferably with a plot that has nothing to do with World War Two. Berlin was especially interesting in terms of its late twentieth history, the rise and fall of the GDR etc. I came back itching to read (or reread) Le Carré, and watch those old Michael Cane/Harry Palmer cold war spy thrillers (Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin etc.).

For better or (and?) worse, we got home just as the World Cup is about to kick off. I now have to work my writing schedule around the games. At least this time I won't have to get up in the middle of the night to watch, as I did when the tournament was in Japan/South Korea. I also won't be repeating my gloriously insane flight out there to see England lose to Brazil in the quarter finals. I was in Japan less time than I was on the plane. Returning via Chicago I thought I would die of exhaustion.

MASK made the top ten paperback list for Independent book sellers in April and seems to be continuing to do well, though I won't have real numbers for months. Right now I'm concentrating on the next one, which is actually very liberating. I don't hate the marketing side of publishing (yet), but I'll always prefer sitting by myself tapping out my stories...

This will be my last posting for a few weeks as I'm off doing research till the end of the month. Nothing much new to report: Mask slipped out of the big lists with the release of the May books, but it still seems to be selling well and is still around in grocery stores and pharmacies. It seems to be gaining ground in independent book stores, which is really great, since that speaks to some word-of-mouth interest. Still, it's all guess work at this stage and will likely remain so for several months.

I'm finding (as you can tell) that it's tough not to obsess about these things. I find myself continually checking my Amazon sales ranking and trying to figure out what on earth those numbers mean... I'm rather looking forward to being in Europe where I won't be tempted to be anxiously browsing the web for new reviews...

I have some pretty exciting trips planned for the next couple of weeks, but I'm going to keep at least some of that to myself because I don't want to give away too much about the next book. I will say that I'll be spending some of my time underground in a place walled with human skulls and thigh bones... Sound intriguing/unsettling? Yeah, me too. I just hope I can get in.

What else? The Australian edition is out, and the Greek edition seems to be doing good business. I was hoping the Italian one would be out by the time I got there so I could use it as a calling card to get into some places that aren't open to the public (the above mentioned places of bones, included). I'll have to rely on charm... :)

Am going to stop writing now. I think I broke my finger playing football yesterday, and that's American football, not soccer: I'd never played before and wound up with two touchdown catches and an interception, so I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself despite the fact that I can barely walk today and I should be getting my hand X-rayed. Ah, the things we do to feel young and alive...

MASK is back up (to #102) on the USA Today list, so that's all 3 weeks since release. Pretty cool. I'm told we won't really know sales numbers till the end of the summer because of the way books get returned (i.e. trashed) by retailers if it isn't flying off the shelves, so things are likely to be up in the air for a long time. What I do know is that there has been another printing (7500 copies) to maintain stock levels at warehouses. This doesn't tell me anything direct about sales, I'm told, but it's a good sign...

Did my first radio interview today, with KDAL in Duluth, MN. It was fun. For me, at least. I hope they thought so.

Added a contest to the main page as a way of dealing constructively with an error concerning the layout of Atlanta and environs that a reader pointed out to me. It's frustrating to think that despite the near decade I lived there I still got something wrong (I won't say what as there's a contest...). The irony is that if I had been researching a city I didn't know to use in the book and was working from a map, say, I wouldn't have made the error. The mistake came because I was relying on my own memory and tricked me, as memories often do... I'll say more about this after someone wins the contest.

MASK is continuing to hold the #6 slot on the B&N massmarket bestseller list, which is very good news. It slipped a few places in the USA Today list last week, but apparently that's to be expected. There are whisperings of a second print run, though since the first was over 200,000 copies, I'll believe that when it happens.

Got my first negative review on Amazon from someone claiming the book is predictable trash. This despite his confession that he skipped large sections... Most enlightening.

Ah well. I knew it was only a matter of time before I get what I thought were unfair criticisms, and I knew that I would obsess about them unreasonably. It's in my nature. I do the same thing with student evaluations: if I get one bad one in a stack of good ones, it's the bad one I remember.

I wonder if the desire to be liked (something most popular novelists flirt with) is crippling for an author, that the fear of upsetting people could become a stone around your neck? I knew that the politics of this book would upset some people, though that group is likely to be fairly small, and in the end I don't much care what they think. The next one might be trickier in that respect. The world--or at least our piece of it--seems so polarized right now that anything which reinforces a sense of 'us' and 'them' seems unhelpfully divisive. But at some point it starts to seem that getting everyone on board means that the idea you are trying to float probably isn't worth much. I guess I'll have to deal with the idea that some people are going to hate what I write, either because they find the ideas/politics objectionable or because they don't think it's very good. The latter will continue to bother me, I suspect. The former, I'll live with.

Just so I never forget it really happened... Here's the Barnes and Noble Mass Market best sellers list for this week.

Just back from Philly and trying to find out what's going on with the book. Last week MASK entered the USA Today bestseller list at #85, which is pretty extraordinary when you consider that that list covers paperback, hardcover, fiction and nonfiction all in the same list. It's also #6 on Barnes and Noble's Mass market bestseller list behind Janet Evanovitch and 4 Dan Brown novels! I don't think it can get much higher than that... I'm told that mass market paperback originals almost never make the NY Times list, but of course, I haven't given up on that yet. Now we'll see if it goes up or down as the new numbers come out.

For all the strangeness of my sudden preoccupation with these numbers and the baroque ways in which the various lists are compiled (which rarely have much to do with actual units sold, so they can be wildly different in what they say), I think the most bizarre thing of the last few days was seeing MASK in airport bookstores!

I did a joint signing with fellow Shakespearean and romance writer Eloisa James. She was really terrific, and in talking about the industry to her fans, I learned a good deal about how this crazy business works.

Booked my Italy/Germany trip. Now I have to figure out exactly where I need to be and what I have to find out for the next book. The whole thing is sketched out, but apart from a hundred pages or so, it's light on specifics and I've got to get it written by September. Who knew that my long term hobby/escape would turn out to be work? Still, a nice problem to have.

One day before release... Spent yesterday putting up flyers for the local signings and e-mailing local media. But the whirlwind is largely psychological and I'm resigned to the fact that I really have no control over what will happen next.

The big news is that I've sealed a deal for the next book with Berkley! They've been most generous, particularly as the agreement was made on the strength of a synopsis and some sample pages, and are looking for a release date of July 07. I just have to write the book now... But that's the fun part. The title is up in the air with working versions of The Jesus Fish and On the Fifth Day the recent front runners, though I doubt we'll go with either. Like MASK it will be thriller, this time beginning with the death of a Jesuit priest on a remote island in the Philippines and his brother Thomas's subsequent attempt to unravel the circumstances. Along the way he'll be drawn into the contentious realm of science and theology in his pursuit of what exactly his brother was pursuing when he died. It goes without saying that a lot of powerful people would prefer that Thomas never figure out what really happened or what his brother had come to believe.

Parts of the book will take place in Italy and Japan, places which have been close to my heart for a long time. Parts of the early summer are now being ear-marked for research trips since I haven't been to some of the Italian sites I want to use in many years. That--and the writing itself--is the fun part. I'd take that over marketing a book I've already written any day...

The book will be out in a little over two weeks. I've scheduled some local signings (see Events) and am nervously watching for reviews. Those I've seen thus far have been very encouraging (see reviews) but there's always a chance that a book by a new author, especially a paperback, will disappear before anyone gets chance to read it. The print run is great. Now people have to get the word out... Alas, it's the big boys who get all the publicity because they have the most money tied to their work. For absolute beginners such as me, there's not much to spend and Oprah is beating down my door...

The irony, of course, is that in real terms I'm not an absolute beginner. I've been writing for twenty years after all, even though this is the first novel to be read by more than my immediate family and friends! For the last couple of decades I've wanted to tell people I was a writer and never felt that I could because to do so might suggest a degree of professionalism that wasn't true. "I write," I'd say--which is somehow a different and less grandiose claim--and would be immediately asked "anything I might know?" Then I would look shame-faced and mutter "not unless you've been going through my garbage" or something equally self-deprecating.

But as of April 4th, that changes. I'll be able to say I'm a writer. I think. Does it matter that I have a regular job as well? Do I have to make all my money as a writer to be able to say "I'm a writer"? I don't know. More things to worry about...