Archive for July, 2008

Read Saved and help protect Kent

It’s more than a year now since Saved, my real-life account of the successful battle to prevent a huge housing complex swallowing the little Kent village of Wye, appeared. You can still buy the book in the village at Wye News and campaign headquarters, the New Flying Horse. But there’s a fresh outlet too.

I have donated most of the remaining copies of the book to the doughty campaigners facing a similarly greedy and unnecessary development nightmare in nearby Sellindge. So please visit their site and support their campaign, with a book if you like (all proceeds now go to their campaign and another local charity). 

For those of you too far away to get a book - or if you’d simply like to know what all the fuss is about - I’m happy to put the entire book of Saved online below. You can email it to others as a pdf and, if you join up to Scribd for free using the icon below, download your own copy too. To see a larger version which you can adjust to your own preferred size just click on the Scribd icon.

Holiday and novels

I get a lot of requests for information on some of the real life locations in my books. This why you will find maps in most editions now, and annotated Google maps for the titles on this site. But it never really occurred to me that people would want to organise some kind of formal tour of Rome to see what the places Costa and co visit look like.

I was, of course, wrong. There’s a lovely new web site which will let those of you interested in locations featured in novels swap info and pictures. My work is there along with that of Denise Mina, Lee Child, Jim Kelly, Elizabeth George and a bunch of others. It’s a great idea and the more people join in the better it will get. Congratulations to Jane Long who began Novels and Holidays, and I’m flattered to find out it was a Costa book and a holiday in Rome that begat the idea. Please take a look and help Jane build this into a great site combining travel and fiction.

A busy month away from the computer

The last four weeks have seen me cover something like 12,000 miles from Corte Madera in California to Phoenix, Arizona, Boston, New York for Thrillerfest, and finally Harrogate for the wonderful crime festival there last weekend.

I don’t honestly know where to begin to thank all the many people I’ve met along the way, authors, readers, would-be writers and just plain civilians out there. To the grand folk of the Book Passage Mystery Writers’ Conference I can only say: thanks for four days of unrelenting enjoyment, good company and great discussions about this great craft. Barbara Peters’ Poisoned Pen in Phoenix was as excellent a place to visit as ever.

Thrillerfest proved itself to be an absolutely essential event in the writing calendar for anyone published in the US or looking to be. At one point I counted myself in a room that contained Clive Cussler, Kathy Reichs, Steve Berry, Douglas Preston, David Morrell, Lee Child, a bunch of other big name authors, the cream of New York’s publishing and agent industry and little old me. Though the highlight still remains Lee introducing the line of ITW debut authors to a packed breakfast. Watching them look a little glazed and scared on the podium reminded me of how lonely it felt when my first book was published - lucky things!

The Harrogate Crime Writing Festival was better than ever under the amiable and deceptively organised stewardship of Simon Kernick. Well done, mate - I’ve never seen so many smiling places around the place. My personal highlight was conning Kathryn Fox into performing a sixty second autopsy on a plush toy Gromit in front of two hundred people. Thanks Kathryn! You are, officially, now a star.

And now I’d better start writing again… before South Africa at the end of August. Next year these three wonderful events take place on three consecutive weekends in July. No prizes for guessing where I will be.

Tools for writing

I’m talking at CraftFest today, the teaching arm of that great annual convention Thrillerfest, and promised students I’d put up a list of the software mentioned in the talk here for their benefit. You’ll find the list below. For the record my current portfolio of writing tools is Scrivener for the main work, Word for submission, Together for data storage and iPhoto for keeping photo records. All or most of these programs have demo versions. I suggest you find what works best for you, then stick with it and get on with the real job of producing a novel.

Programs for storing and cataloguing information

Mac
Together My current personal favourite - can store anything very easily.
Journler An interesting alternative, though not so great if you use multiple computers.
Devonthink Heavyweight data storage for lots and lots of stuff - quite hard to learn for me.

Windows
OneNote Part of Microsoft Office
WebResearch

Photo storage. For keeping pictures organised

Mac
iPhoto

Windows
Picasa

Journal software

Mac
MacJournal

Windows
WinJournal

Word processors aimed at authors

Mac
Scrivener
Storyist
Storymill

Windows
Liquid Story Binder
Power Writer
PageFour
Writers Project Organizer
Book Writer (www.yadudigital.com)