Author: aoyebanj

I am a huge fan of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, both the book and BBC/PBS TV series.  With a cold Scottish rain rattling against the windows, I recently spent an entire Sunday afternoon re-bingeing the TV show from start to finish.  I have no regrets!

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the basic conceit of Magpie Murders is a mystery within a mystery.  Alan Conway, a successful crime writer, dies in suspicious circumstances, circumstances that only make sense if one is aware of how his latest novel, Magpie Murders, concludes.  The problem is, no one knows how Magpie Murders ends because the last chapter is missing from the manuscript he handed in to his publishers.  His frustrated editor, intent on locating some usable version of the final chapter, finds herself inadvertently investigating a murder.

There are a few things I always take away from watching the TV show.  First, Lesley Manville is a simply brilliant actress; second, that I will never, ever behave like Alan Conway, a vile man who treats everybody, including the readers he is so lucky to have, with contempt; and, third, if it were me rather than Alan Conway who was the subject of Horowitz’s murder mystery, he’d have to come up with a completely different ending.

Without giving too much away, the reason I say this last thing is that the titles of Alan Conway’s books are an integral part of the plot.  “Not The Magpie Murders.  Magpie Murders.  That’s the bloody title!” as he tetchily informs his publisher.  But for the titles to fit into the plot like this, Alan Conway had to have control over them, something that yours truly absolutely does not.

As regular readers of this blog will know, no one trusts me with titles.  Neither of my two published novels, Braking Day and A Quiet Teacher, were called those things when I wrote them, not even close.  So chastened was I by this experience that I refused to reveal the title of my next novel, E________, because I was certain that it, too, would be changed.  (I keep saying I hope to be able to share news about E________ soon, and I really, really will.  Soon.)

With my fourth novel, though, the sequel to A Quiet Teacher, I was sure I had cracked it.  From the estimable Brady’s tongue-in-cheek 2 Quiet 2 Teacher, we (by which I mean I) settled on Critical Death Theory.  Brady liked it, Editor Rachel liked it, we were good to go.  I revealed it to the world.

And then I handed in the manuscript.

“Yes, well, the team is leaning against Critical Death Theory,” which is publisher-speak for, “You must be out of your mind.”  Needless to say, I didn’t put up much of a fight.  After a bit of toing and froing about what would best fit with an educator who solves mysteries, we came up with Two Times Murder.

So, there you have it.  Two Times Murder, the sequel to A Quiet Teacher.  Coming soon.  More details to follow!

Back from a fun weekend in Aberdeen attending the Granite Noir crime festival.  First though, a word about trains: they are awesome.  Scots complain a lot about the trains but, coming here after twenty-three years in the States, I have nothing but praise for them.  Sure, they sometimes run late or get canceled, but they mostly don’t.  They mostly run on time (to the minute) and, importantly, take you where you want to go when you want to get there.  If Amtrak got only half the support British railroads (railways!) get, travel in America would be revolutionized.

I mention the trains because that’s how I got to Aberdeen in the first place.  It took less than three hours. The route runs along the east coast of Scotland, around the firths of Forth and Tay, and then into northeastern Scotland with the icy blue of the North Sea for company.  It’s the most spectacular train journey I’ve ever taken and, if you ever get the chance to do so, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Just make sure to sit on the right/eastern side of the train!

Aberdeen’s nickname is the Granite City (hence Granite Noir) because granite is the local building material, and it shows.  All the older buildings are constructed with it, and many of the modern ones at least pay homage to the concept.  I was expecting a grimly gray metropolis, but Aberdeen is nothing like that.  The sun was shining and everything looked bright and crisp, even the seagulls that cruised low over the streets looking for scraps.  I look forward to visiting again.

As for the festival, it was an absolute blast and, as usual, I couldn’t stop myself from buying books.  All the hard work I put into reducing my TBR pile undone at a stroke.  I shared a panel with Briar Ripley Page (The False Sister) and Maud Woolf (Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock).  Both were delightful company, although I thought it was a little ironic that I, who consider myself a SF author with a sideline in crime, was the only one on the panel who’d written a straight up murder mystery.  Briar’s The False Sister, is a horror story set in the past and Maud’s Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock is very much a sci-fi.  Maud, indeed, was way more interested in Braking Day than A Quiet Teacher!

It never ceases to amaze me how receptive book festival audiences are to new(ish) authors.  I’m still at the stage where I dread sitting down to do a book signing because I don’t think anyone will come.  Once again, though, I was proved wrong.  It was a joy to meet new readers and talk books and book writing with them.  Also, I remain forever grateful that they are tolerant of my appalling handwriting!

I am looking forward to attending more festivals.  Critical Death Theory is now at the publisher’s, being gone over by Editor Rachel.  Fingers crossed she doesn’t hate it! Assuming no major rewrites, we look to be on track for a November 2024 release so, the next time I am on a stage, I should hopefully have a new book to talk about.

Critical Death Theory is finished!

This is publishing, so when I say “finished,” I mean finished for now.  The manuscript is out with my agent and others to take a look at before I submit it to the publisher.  I’m crossing my fingers that no one comes back and says, “This is awful.  You’ll have to start again.”  I don’t think they will (???) but the thought of it is bringing me out in cold sweats.  I’m hoping for some useful comments and tweaks to strengthen the final(ish) product before sending it out to Editor Rachel and her red pen.  More tweaking now means less red later.  That, at least, is the hope!

The fact that this project is running more or less on time is due entirely to the fact that the writers’ retreat at Moniack Mhor was a cracking success.  I really got a lot done there, despite napping at least twice a day, and the company of the other writers was incredible.  Which was just as well because we were basically snowed in for most of the week.  It wasn’t impossible to get out, but tough enough that no one was minded to make the effort.  We settled instead for a lot of writing during the day followed by red wine and convivial conversation in the evenings.  Plus The Traitors, the BBC reality game show that had a solid following among my companions.  I’d never seen it before.  Now I’m hooked!

As is usual on the last evening, there was a mostly traditional haggis supper (prepared in theory by yours truly and others but actually by others.  I simply chopped vegetables, washed dishes and took the credit).  I say “mostly” because the piper was snowbound and couldn’t make it over to pipe in the haggis.  You Tube and a cellphone filled in instead.  After which most of us read a little of what we’d been working on, which is always a treat.  It is a humbling experience to be surrounded by so much talent.  Over the course of a week you start to think you’ve got at least a sense of someone, then they read out their work and it’s like, wow! There is so much more going on there.

Someone told me that the piece I read out from Critical Death Theory reminded them a little bit of Slow Horses, the Apple TV series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels.  If so, then I’m in great company.  I’ll take it!

With Critical Death Theory finished (for now), I have rewarded myself by taking the time to re-read every single one of Martha Wells’s incredible Murderbot series and doing nothing writing related at all.  Now, though, my mind is turning to what’s next.

And what’s that, you might very well ask.

I haven’t quite decided.

Critical Death Theory, second draft: 51.8% complete

Looking forward to next week, when I will be returning to Moniack Mhor for a writing retreat. Moniack Mhor bills itself as Scotland’s creative writing center, and some of you may recall that I went there last year and had a really productive time of it. Back then, I was busy finishing the second draft of E_________ and Critical Death Theory was little more than a scattered collection of thoughts. Now, E________ is sitting with the publishers (I hope to have news to share on that front soon) and I am hoping to finish off the second draft of CDT and maybe even start playing around with my next project. Something SF, almost certainly, but nothing is written in stone (or anything else for that matter).

Unlike last year, I do have a bit of a deadline issue in that the completed CDT manuscript is due at the publisher’s next month. I really do have to finish the second draft up there or that timetable will slip. I am full of confidence, however! Even with the vast amount of napping the highland air seems to induce in me, I’ve made sufficient progress already that I will be shocked, shocked, if I fail to get it over the line. Also, and keep this to yourselves, publishers’ deadlines are distinctly more flexible than the legal profession’s, so I’m not going to put too much pressure on myself if I miss it by a few days. And who could blame me? Winter in the highlands; howling winds kept at bay by thick walls, roaring fires, and good company. There’s more to life than meeting deadlines.

Except, of course, that I’m a lawyer, so I don’t believe what I just said at all.

Total bummer.

Critical Death Theory, Second Draft: 6.7% complete.

Best wishes of the season to one and all! No white Christmas here, alas. I’m sitting at my usual coffee shop, staring out through the rain at Edinburgh Castle. Plenty of precipitation: none of it of the white, fluffy variety. It’s at times like this that I miss Pittsburgh – and Chicago. Although, I don’t think they’re doing any better than Scotland this year, I have many happy memories of walking dogs through Christmas snow in both cities. These are memories, of course, in which the bone numbing cold has been edited out!

I have been comparatively inactive on the writing front since finishing the first draft of Critical Death Theory. I’ve been writing an essay for MIT Press and was thinking of turning my mind to a new project when I got struck down by the man cold. When it comes to colds, I am not one of those people who can “power through.” I find them completely debilitating and spend at least a couple of days lying around feeling sorry for myself. Even after the worst is over, I lack the energy to write anything, which is my excuse for taking three times as long as I should have done to finish the essay, for making zero progress on the new project, and for the complete absence of a blog entry until now. You can interrogate me as much as you like: that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Now that I am (more or less) recovered, I have started on the second draft of Critical Death Theory. Starting on a second draft is, for me, an exercise in barely managed terror. I know I’ve written a first draft but I have no idea if it’s any good. All I did was write down what came into my head as I followed the rough guide of an outline. Whether it makes an actual, half-coherent story is quite another matter. And what if it turns out that I’ve forgotten how to write? What if the whole thing is a dumpster fire from beginning to end? How can I possibly fix that??? It’s thoughts like these that crowd into my head as I open my laptop for the first day of revision.

Fortunately, although Critical Death Theory still requires work (it took me two hours to revise the first page), the bones of it look pretty decent. My writing is as good or bad as it ever was, so there is still a fighting chance of turning out something that the mystery lovers among you will enjoy reading. And now that the terror of Day One is over, it’s time to settle down and enjoy the process. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.

The best Christmas present I could ever hope to have.

Critical Death Theory, first draft: complete.

The problem with going to book festivals is that you buy books.  Books that then get added to your TBR pile and sit there mutely demanding to be read.  The Cymera festival was no exception.  Worse yet, I attended a panel with three authors entirely unknown to me.  They were so funny and engaging, I had to buy their books.  Had to!

Anyway, having taken a final (for now) liberty with my TBR pile, here is my take on the last of them: Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a work of fiction that has a bibliography at the back but, then again, Emily Tesh is a schoolteacher in her other life, so perhaps it makes sense.  And when one considers that the bibliography refers the reader to treatises on North Korea, fascism, and the Spartans, it makes more sense still.  Because, right there, you have the baseline themes that make Some Desperate Glory (itself a quote from the (anti) war poet, Wilfred Owen) such a stunning book.

Tesh’s hero, Kyr, is a teenage girl who lives aboard Gaea Station, a small out-of-the-way place that houses the last human resistance to the majoda, a confederation of alien races that, after a long and bloody conflict, brought humanity to its knees by destroying Earth.  Although there are human survivors scattered throughout the universe, they live under the aegis of their conquerors.  Only on Gaea are there humans still willing to take the fight to the enemy.

Outnumbered as they are, the humans on Gaea, Kyr included, are prepared from birth for the waging of war.  Everything, their education, their organization into small, tight-knit cadres, even their free time, is geared toward creating the perfect soldier.  Otherwise, Gaea will be overrun and humanity lost forever.  Why a hollowed-out asteroid of 2,000 people would present any kind of military challenge to a civilization that cracked open Planet Earth like an egg is not a conundrum that occurs to her, such are the narrow confines of the world Kyr lives in.

It is only upon graduation, when Kyr is assigned to a role that makes a mockery of her training scores, that she begins to question the rightness of the world she lives in.  Coupled with her brother’s departure on a one-way mission that makes no military sense, she is moved to disobey orders and leave Gaea Station, determined to strike a blow for humanity that will really count for something.  Unfortunately for Kyr, the wider universe turns out to be nothing like she’d been led to believe, propelling her on a path far different than the one she’d imagined.

Some Desperate Glory is one of those books that leave you thinking about it long after you have returned it to the bookshelf.  It is layered and deeply intelligent and, while written from an unashamedly progressive viewpoint, manages to tell its story without jumping up and down on a soapbox or descending into tokenism.  What is humanity’s role in the wider universe?  Should humanity come first?  Does it deserve to come first?  Does the question of humanity’s future really matter — even if you, yourself, are human?  There is much to consider here as the book presents Kyr with a series of momentous choices.  I’m not at all sure that Kyr’s choices would be the reader’s choices.  And it is that, above all, that makes this excellent book such a haunting one.

Critical Death Theory, first draft: 65,200 words

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). At bottom, NaNoWriMo is a challenge/incentive to get people to buckle down and write that novel: 50,000 words in 30 days. It is not easy but, as I write this, thousands and thousands of people all over the world are attempting to do just that, and good luck to them!

Now, that said, as longtime readers of this blog will know, NaNoWriMo is something I prefer to admire from afar. I reckon it would take about four hours of my day every day to hit the NaNoWriMo target. That is too much for my personal wellbeing. I have a day job and a family I would like to still have in December. I have been known, however, to crash NaNoWriMo group events in libraries and the like. It’s kinda fun to write surrounded by a bunch of like-minded (albeit tougher) people trying their very best to get a decent novel onto the page. Plus, there is free tea and coffee.

The thing I find slightly jarring about NaNoWriMo, though, is not the difficulty of the target but the assumption (refuted, admittedly, in the fine print) that 50,000 words is a novel. That might have been true when NaNoWriMo started but it is certainly not true today – unless you’re writing for middle grade or younger. There is an excellent Writer’s Digest article by Chuck Sambuchino on the subject of how long novels should be. For adults, Chuck’s range runs from 70,000 to 110,000 words depending on genre. This partly explains why my first attempt at a novel, a middle grade sci-fi adventure, did not get picked up. It ran to almost 120,000 words which, for reasons I can’t fully explain, seemed to me to be the right length for a book. Any book.

It is also possible [sound of gritting teeth] that my first attempt was not very good. Maybe with a bit of editing . . .???

By the time I got around to writing my fourth manuscript, the one that turned into Braking Day, I was a bit more savvy about word count. Science fiction requires a lot of what is called world building, because the environment the characters inhabit needs to be explained to the reader. If a character gets off a plane in Paris, France, most readers will have a decent idea of what just happened. But what if you step through a Lenz portal to Aldebaran Station? What the heck is going on? The reader needs to know! This need to explain the characters’ world in greater detail means you need more words to get your plot to the same place as a romance, say, or a thriller. As a result, SF (and fantasy) novels tend to run long, so, by the rule of Chuck, 100-110,000 words is OK. Knowing this, the draft of Braking Day that went out on submission to agents came in at 109,000 words.

Which was great. The manuscript got picked up (so few words for such a giant, life-changing event!) and the first thing my agent and then my editor asked for was . . . more words. By the time Braking Day reached the shelves it was 130,000 words long. In the terminology of the industry, I had written an “epic.” Adam Oyebanji, epic author. I can live with that!

A Quiet Teacher, my next novel, was not science fiction. It’s a mystery, and very firmly set in the “real” world. Mysteries, particularly fair-play ones like A Quiet Teacher, come in at the opposite end of the scale, mostly for the simple reason that there are only so many clues you can plant in a story before the mystery ceases to be one. Chuck’s view is that 70,000 to 90,000 is about right.

The problem, though, was that my original draft of AQT was barely 65,000 words. Then I decided it wasn’t really a problem. First, that was the “natural” length of the story I had written and, second, rounded to the nearest 10,000 words (there’s no law against this as far as I’m aware) it’s as close to 70,000 as makes no difference. So, I sent it out and my agent and editor asked for – you guessed it – more words. The final, published version comes in at 68,000. Not 70,000, to be sure, but near enough.

Why am I boring you with all this? Well, as of yesterday, the first draft of Critical Death Theory passed the 65,000-word mark. I have written enough to make it into a novel! I always worry, as the word count creeps up from zero, that I don’t have enough for a full-length book. Sixty-five thousand is, in my head, a minimum safe distance from the starting point. I can stop worrying about whether I can write a whole book and concentrate on whether said book is any good.

Which is a problem for the second draft.

Critical Death Theory, first draft: 52,300 words

Ridiculously excited to know that Braking Day is now out in Japan, courtesy of the good folks at Hayakawa Publishing (株式会社早川書房).  Hayakawa Publishing is the largest science fiction publisher in Japan; almost all winners of the Seiun Award for Best Foreign Novel are published by the company. I still remember when my agent, the estimable Brady, let me know that Hayakawa had agreed to take Braking Day on. If, like me you are a person of a certain age with a certain taste of music, you will understand that it took me days to get Alphaville’s Big in Japan out of my head!

As is the case with most publishers, Hayakawa were kind enough to send me courtesy copies of the Japanese version. Ten, in this case. My son was addicted to Manga when he was younger, so I was prepared for the fact that it has to be read “backwards.” The Japanese read top to bottom and from right to left. What I was not prepared for though, was the size. The book is beautifully built, with a transparent vinyl cover to protect the contents, but it is tiny. A true pocketbook.

I do not, unfortunately, read Japanese, but for a page or two it is fun to pretend. Here is page 326 of the Japanese version:

which overlaps with page 143 of the English version:

Of course, once the pretense is over, reality returns. I still can’t read (or speak) Japanese and I have nine beautifully made books that deserve to be read. I am on the hunt for suitably good homes for them. Some of you will no doubt recall that the publisher sent me ten copies, not nine. But I’m definitely keeping one for myself!

Critical Death Theory, first draft: 43,100 words

The problem with going to book festivals is that you buy books.  Books that then get added to your TBR pile and sit there mutely demanding to be read.  The Cymera festival was no exception.  Worse yet, I attended a panel with three authors entirely unknown to me.  They were so funny and engaging, I had to buy their books.  Had to!

Anyway, having taken further liberties with my TBR pile, here is my take on the second of them: Ten Low, by Stark Holborn.

One of the great joys about reading science fiction is that it gives you a lot to unpack.  You have the surface level story, of course, but bubbling away underneath is a ferment of ideas and what-ifs that seep into the reader’s subconscious without them necessarily knowing.  Holborn’s Ten Low is a great example of that.

On the surface, Ten Low is a gritty, sci-fi Western, heavily reminiscent of Firefly.  Watch the pilot episode of that much-mourned TV show and it is easy to visualize Holborn’s adventure playing out against a near-identical backdrop of dust, horses, and advanced hardware in the bitter aftermath of a failed war of independence.

A combat medic who fought on the losing side, Ten Low finds herself washed up on the desert moon of Factus, a backwater world where the central authority is weak and people’s lives are dominated by armed gangs, an organ-stealing cult known as the Seekers, and a mysterious half-sensed presence that may, or may not, be real.  She spends her time here trying to use her considerable medical skills for good: a course of action that brings her to a crashed spaceship and a badly wounded child.  The child, it turns out, is a ruthless, genetically engineered soldier responsible for the death of many of Ten Low’s former comrades.  Despite this, and somewhat against her better judgment, she nurses the child back to health, fully aware that said child might kill her for her troubles.

That, though, is the easy part.  Hostile as her patient is, the two are forced into an uneasy alliance as it becomes clear that the crash was no accident.  Forces from both on and off world would like to see the both of them dead.  Woman and not-quite-child flee across Factus, enemies known and unknown in hot pursuit.  This is breathless, action-thriller stuff, well executed and fun to read.  If some of the incidents feel ginned-up just to keep things moving, it is a small thing and easy to forgive when everything else is so good.

So much for the surface.  Beneath the action-thriller stuff lies a nest of intriguing concepts that I don’t have room to lay out and which, I suspect, will be different for every reader: SF at its best!  For me, though, three things really hit home.

First, point of view is everything.  Two people sitting on opposite sides of a table will see the same pepper pot.  But to one, the pepper is on the left, to the other, the right.  The very human inability/refusal to see the other side is very much in play here.  Ten Low and the child see the war and its aftermath from the perspective of their own side.  Each makes sense.  Neither is inherently right or wrong.  Holborn has the wonderful knack of twisting the reader’s sensibilities as she jumps effortlessly from one side of the table to the other.

Second, a focus on where the pepper pot sits on the table can blind everyone to the fact that the table itself is rotten.  Now the war is over, both Ten Low and the child have been cast aside, their “usefulness” at an end.  Large organizations, be they governments or corporations, only care when it helps them achieve their aims.  Once that time is past, the people who relied upon and trusted them find themselves either abandoned or crushed underfoot.  Something for the reader to think about long after the pages are closed and Ten Low takes its place of honor on the bookshelf.

Third, there are a whole slew of ideas here that have not yet been fully developed.  Holborn’s world is far bigger than what we see in Ten Low.  Ten Low is a fine, stand-alone book but it leaves the reader wanting – and expecting – so much more from the sequel.  A lot of writers, when writing a series, write one story and chop it off arbitrarily at page whatever, leaving the reader feeling they’ve been conned.  A long story is not a series, it’s a long story.  The writer should finish it in one go.  Holborn does not make this mistake.  Ten Low is a story with an ending – and a good one at that.  It’s simply that there are more books here to be written.  Holborn’s is a world of depth and nuance with room to go deeper into the rabbit hole.  I, for one, will be delighted to follow along.

Once I’ve made a dent in my TBR pile, of course.

Critical Death Theory, first draft: 43,100 words.

So.  The Bloody Scotland Crime Festival.  Bloody brilliant.  As I always seem to do at book festivals, I had an absolute blast.  Stirling, Scotland, where the festival was held, is only 30 or so miles up the road from Edinburgh, so it was a much less epic journey than Shetland Noir.  I hopped on the train and, a few minutes later it felt like, there I was.

The good citizens of Stirling will probably not thank me for this but their downtown comes across as a mini-Edinburgh: all medieval stone and steep hills.  It is exceedingly picturesque.  The city makes a real effort around the event: there were posters everywhere, and the first thing the wait staff at Rishi’s Indian Restaurant asked when I dropped in to be fed was, “Are you here for the festival?”

This is Scotland, so there was an alcohol-fueled reception under the 15^th century arches of the Church of the Holy Rude.  King James VI of Scotland (later First of England), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was crowned there in 1567.  I half-expected a party in a church to feel faintly blasphemous but it felt like nothing of the sort.  The ancient nave was filled with crime fiction buffs determined to meet each other and have a good time, together with a large number of volunteers ensuring that a good time was actually had.  The fact that it was absolutely chucking it down with rain did nothing to stop the attendees from marching (or weaving) up to Stirling Castle for a flaming torchlight procession to the city’s Albert Halls for a prize-giving ceremony. For obvious reasons, no umbrellas were allowed!

Unfortunately for yours truly, I had to skip the ceremony in order to prepare for my spotlight presentation the following morning.  It is a paradox of public speaking that the shorter the talk the longer the preparation.  Aimless rambling takes no preparation at all.  I, on the other hand, had three minutes to introduce myself, my book, and do a reading.  I was up half the night.

Fortunately, the final product was well received.  A Quiet Teacher sold out at the bookshop, I got to spend time with the great James Naughtie and Charles Cunningham, and people came up to me all the rest of the day to tell me how much they’d enjoyed the presentation.  It’s a somewhat surreal sensation to hear someone you’ve only just met quote your own words back to you.  Forget about walls, it’s the people who have ears.