How is it almost 2020 already? And how is “2020” a real thing? Seriously, that’s a date from an 80s sci-fi movie, not a real, actual year that we’re going to live in. Oh, well; here comes the future, ready or not. Around this time of year I like to take a minute to look back over the past year’s work and then turn my attention to the road ahead.
I said last year that 2019 was going to be a year of experiments; I wanted (needed) to try some new things as an author, and I figured some people would be on board with it, some wouldn’t, some things would work out perfectly, some wouldn’t. It should be no surprise that this incredibly non-committal prediction came true.
Looking Back
Back in April, 47North published my first non-Faustverse novel, Ghosts of Gotham. This book was – is – personal to me. I mean, they all are (if art isn’t personally important to its creator, it’s probably not art and probably not good), but Ghosts is a love letter to someone very special in my life. I was pleased to see it got such a great response, and I’ll talk more about the future of that series in a bit, when we get to the “next year” part of this recap.
Then in August, Thomas & Mercer Publishing released The Loot, the first book in the Charlie McCabe series, and my first attempt at a non-fantasy crime novel. Writing it was a great experience and one that (I think) helped me to broaden my horizons as an author. Finally, October brought Right to the Kill, and the return of Harmony Black. In keeping with the theme of the year, I took some chances with this one instead of playing it safe (like switching from a first-person to a third-person perspective). I was beyond happy to hear so much positive feedback on this: writing is a process of constant failing, learning, failing again, and learning more. In this case, I think it was worth rolling the dice.
So that was my 2019: two totally new projects, and one sequel with a remix touch. I did not go with the safe and tested. Did it work out? I think so. Financially, I probably could have written three Faust sequels one after another and made a little more money, but none of this year’s releases were flops. Artistically? Hell yeah. Ghosts of Gotham was meaningful. The Loot put me in touch with the traditions of the crime writers who inspired me as a child. And Right to the Kill reinvigorated my own excitement for a series and characters who had been allowed to sleep for too long. So where do we go from here?
Looking Ahead
One week from today, Daniel Faust is back to help you through your New Year’s Eve hangover. Or just to share his. The Locust Job is the next installment in the series and…stuff is Happening. I think that in any long-running series, some books are going to be seen as more pivotal than others, and this is going to be one of the big ones. Without giving any spoilers away, I’m aiming to put a big smile on your face and make you curse my name, simultaneously. When you get there, let me know if I managed to pull that off.
While I inevitably juggle multiple projects at any given time, my current “on deck” manuscript is the follow-up book. I can’t even tell you the title, because it’s a major spoiler for something huge that happens in The Locust Job, but I can tell you that I’m going to do everything I can to have it out by the end of 2020. I felt bad about making fans wait while I experimented in 2019, and I’m aiming to make it up to you with a double dose.
The next Harmony Black adventure, Black Tie Required, is with my editor as we speak. While the last book was intended to serve as a new entry-point to the series, this one builds on the stories before it and brings some old familiar faces (and foes) back into the fray. When a string of abductions and assassinations target former employees of Talon Worldwide – including engineers who worked on a top secret dimension-gate project – Harmony and Jessie have to uncover the culprit and recover the stolen tech before it falls into enemy hands.
This story will definitively answer one of the longest-standing mysteries in all of my books. I speak, of course, of the mystery of what happened to Daniel Faust’s car.
Meanwhile, The Insider, the second Charlie McCabe novel, is nearly finished. We’ve completed developmental editing (which is where you sit down and hammer at the story itself, trying to punch it up and make it a stronger piece) and now we’re into the copy-editing phase (where you drill down into actual grammar, sentence structure, and proofreading for errors). Charlie’s sophomore outing involves a twisty little mystery, as she and her team are assigned to protect a critical witness in a police-corruption trial. An attempt on their client’s life results in a single bullet being fired…but two different guns are abandoned at the scene. Things get complicated fast, and what looked like a clear-cut situation is nothing of the kind.
Will there be more after this? I hope so! Thomas & Mercer originally contracted me for two books, and if book two is a strong seller, hopefully they’ll sign me on for more installments after this.
One project from 2019 doesn’t have a release window yet. This year I completed The Hungry Dreaming, a stand-alone novel set in the world of Ghosts of Gotham. It’s an odd beast, a sprawling story with a plot that runs through three ages of New York City, from the Revolutionary War, to the mid-1800s, to the modern day. And it’s big; nearly 200,000 words (where most of my novels run 90,000 words, for comparison). It’s about ancient Greek myth and modern surveillance culture, and what a commitment to truth means in an age when disinformation spreads like wildfire at the click of a button.
Anyway, I’m shopping it around, trying to find a good publisher-home for it. We’ll see how that goes. Writing is a business for gamblers, and the only sure thing is that when one project is done, you’ve got to start plugging away at the next one. And on that note, I’m in the very early stages of a direct follow-up to Ghosts of Gotham. It’s going to happen. Not soon, because I need to take a lot of time and reflection and get this exactly right, but it’s going to happen.
(Rumors that my outlining process involves sitting in a dark room, drinking gin from a water-spotted glass and listening to 1920s jazz on Radio Dismuke are grossly overblown. That’s only 20-30% of my process.)
It’ll get written. But it can’t just be a sequel; it has to be better than the original. So figuring out how to make that happen is my big goal for 2020 (and my gradually mounting pile of notes suggests this may actually end up as two books, one direct follow-up and another stand-alone set in the same world). It’s funny; I’m really displaced from time, in a sense. Most of what you’ll see from me this year is already written, done or in final edits right now. Most of what I’ll be working on now will go unseen until 2021 or beyond. And so I move like a ghost, trailed by manuscripts that show not where I am, but where I was a year ago.
And with that, I return to the story-hunt. Stay warm and stay safe. Be good to each other, okay? We are all we have.
Love always,
Craig