Author Archives: Peter Darbyshire
We’re Not Dead Yet! – The interview
My interview with the fabulous We Aren’t Dead Yet team is now live! I had a great time discussing my book The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, the confused state of spirituality in our troubled times, and how best to charm a Beholder and ride it into battle in D&D.
Related:
Grey work – The October 2024 Bibliofiles edition
Killer angels, 1950s Hollywood intrigue, the power of deep work, haunted pirate ships and more. Check out my recommended reads from the past month!
Fiction
The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Two women vie for the same starring role and the same lovers in a 1950s swords and sandal Hollywood production. The Seventh Veil is a complex dark romance that turns its camera lens on issues of race, gender and socioeconomic status, all while building to an inevitable clash. Rich with intrigue and historical detail, it’s one of Moreno-Garcia’s best books yet.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199927990-the-seventh-veil-of-salome
Genre Fiction
Grey by Ian Rogers
The last human soul has been stolen, which means the end of humanity is near. The angels seem powerless to do anything about it. So who do you turn to when the angels aren’t up to the job? Grey, a dangerous soul caught in Limbo somewhere between Heaven and Hell. Think John Wick pulled into a battle between God and the Devil, and you’ll have an idea where this novella will take you.
Link: https://www.ian-rogers.com/grey/
. . .
Hunt for the Grey Lady by Chris Willrich
I’m always delighted to see a new Chris Willrich tale, and “To Hunt the Grey Lady” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies is no exception. An enchanting story of a pirate captain’s attempt to capture the elusive ship Grey Lady, it features magic sea battles, enigmatic krakens, a sentient ship or two, some very complicated relationships and utterly fantastic prose. I read this one in pretty much one sitting but it’s so rich and layered that I can’t wait to read it again.
Link: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/to-hunt-the-grey-lady/
. . .
Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachel K. Jones
Only 600 words or so, but what a payoff.
Link: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/five-views-of-the-planet-tartarus/
. . .
Nine Tenths of the Law by KJ Parker
KJ Parker is one of my favourite living fantasy writers because his tales are so unlike any other fantasy stories out there. They often feature unlikely protagonists — clerks, engineers, battlefield salvage experts and the like — and are less traditional three-act structure and more elaborate twists and double-crosses, followed by more twists. “Nine Tenths of the Law” is no different and stars a lawyer possessed by a demon who helps possess others so they can carry out various crimes. What happens when one of his clients double-crosses him? Ah, well, that’s why you’ll want to read the story.
Link: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/nine-tenths-of-the-law/
. . .
Unfinished Basement by A.R. Capetta
In a housing market where every place is haunted by ghosts, what happens when a couple move into a home that has ghosts but is somehow worse? A delightfully weird and unsettling story by A. R. Capetta.
Link: https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/p/unfinished-basement
Non-fiction
Deep Work by Cal Newport
We live in a world of constant interruption and distraction — emails, status notifications, TikTok trends, news alerts, you name it. Is it any wonder then that we’re all perpetually stressed and feeling as if we can never catch up on all our work? So what’s the antidote? Newport argues it’s deep work – finding ways to turn off all those distractions and focus deeply on one thing at a time. It’s the only way to do something meaningful, Newport suggests, and our only true path to fulfillment in a world that fragments our attention so ruthlessly that we often lose our very sense of self.
Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work
. . .
The Jack David Master Class: What it Takes to Survive Fifty Years as an Independent Bookseller
Canadian publishing: A house of cards where banks call in loans at the worst times, distributors collapse, printers print books on promises to pay — and a single title can mean the difference between bankruptcy or living to publish for another season.
Link: https://shush.substack.com/p/the-jack-david-master-class
. . .
Live Like an Artist – The Why by Shawna Lemay
“In the end though, it always come back to the why. If you can make delight the why of your art making process, if you can delight in the work of it, this helps make everything make sense. If you can remember that you get to do this, in whatever slivers of time you’ve made work for yourself, that helps. If you can remember that this is what makes a good life, a rich life, this helps. If you can go on being curious and delighting in these things you make, and create a few sparks and delight others, that’s a bit of gravy, isn’t it?”
Link: http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/thewhy
. . .
Against Rereading by Oscar Schwartz
As a lifelong rereader, I am offended by the very existence of this essay. So much so that I read it twice.
Link: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/09/04/against-rereading
Under the Cover: Behind the scenes of the Cross books
All Lit Up has published my “behind the scenes” account of creating my Cross series of supernatural thrillers. Learn about the ancient poem that was the inspiration for Cross and the first book, The Mona Lisa Sacrifice; why the second book, The Dead Hamlets, had to be a ghost story set in the theatre world; and why the third book, The Apocalypse Ark, is literary chaos.
Related
Publication day for The Mona Lisa Sacrifice!
It’s publication day for The Mona Lisa Sacrifice. I am absolutely thrilled to see the first book of my Cross series of supernatural thrillers back in print with a special new edition from Poplar Press, an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn.
The early reviews have been positive, and it’s been gratifying to see all the love and interest in the book on social media. I’ve particularly enjoyed the podcast conversations I’ve had around the book — it’s always lovely to be able to talk about books and the writing process. Here are a couple that have gone live so far:
If you’ve read The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review on your platform of choice and/or spread the word about it on social media. Positive word of mouth is how most people discover new reads now, and it’s incredibly important to writers such as myself. The more people that learn about a book, the more potential readers it has. That means a greater chance of future books by the same author!
If you haven’t read The Mona Lisa Sacrifice yet, here’s a brief summary:
For thousands of years, Cross has wandered the earth, a mortal soul trapped in the undying body left behind by Christ. He’s been a thief, a con man, a soldier and a drunkard. He’s fought as a slave in the Colosseum and as a knight at King Arthur’s side. But now he must play the part of reluctant hero, as an angel comes to him for help finding the Mona Lisa—the real Mona Lisa that inspired the painting. Cross’s quest takes him into a secret world within our own, populated by characters just as strange and wondrous as he is: gorgons and dead gods hidden away in museums; faeries that live in countryside pubs, trapping and enslaving unwary travellers; and super-rich collectors who trade magical artifacts among themselves. He’s haunted by memories of Penelope, the only woman he truly loved, and he wants to avenge her death at the hands of his ancient enemy, Judas, a forgotten god from an ancient time. The angel promises to deliver Judas to Cross, but nothing is ever what it seems when Judas is involved, and when a group of renegade angels looking for a new holy war show up, things truly go to hell.
Anyway, I hope you like(d) the book. As always, thanks for reading!
Peter
From inspiration to The Dead Hamlets
I had a wonderful time talking to Ruff Radio about my book The Dead Hamlets and all things theatre — Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, performance vs. text, representation, the creative process, Ur-Hamlets and more. I actually worked in theatre a little in the past, and The Dead Hamlets is very much a love letter to those days. Many thanks to Christine Horne of Shakespeare in the Ruff for her thoughtful questions and theatre insights! I’d appreciate it if you give the interview a listen.
Here’s a bit of background to The Dead Hamlets if you’re not familiar with the book:
Something is rotten in the court of the faerie queen. A deadly spirit is killing off the faerie, and it has mysterious ties to Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet.” The only one who can stop it is the immortal Cross, a charming rogue who also happens to be a drunk, a thief, and an angel killer. He is no friend of the faerie since they stole his daughter and made her one of their own. When it appears she may be the next victim of the haunting, though, he must race against time to save her. He encounters an eccentric and deadly cast of characters along the way: the real Witches of Macbeth, the undead playwright/demon hunter Christopher Marlowe, an eerie Alice from the Alice in Wonderland books, a deranged and magical scholar – and a very supernatural William Shakespeare. When Cross discovers a startling secret about the origins of “Hamlet” itself, he finds himself trapped in a ghost story even he may not be able to escape alive!
Vancouver Sun highly recommends The Mona Lisa Sacrifice
The reviews for the new editions of my Cross books are starting to appear, which is lovely. I’m so grateful to see these books out in the world, particularly with such beautiful new covers. And I’m very grateful to read the Vancouver Sun review of The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, which calls the book “a pleasurable, fast-moving romp through history and myth, conspiracy, and confusion.” I very much like the part where Tom Sandborn, the reviewer, says the book “is likely to find a large and enthusiastic audience.”
If you like The Mona Lisa Sacrifice or any of my other books, please consider leaving a review of them on your favourite platform. It’s the sort of thing that can really help boost a book’s profile and bring it to the attention of other readers. And more readers means publishers are likely to pick up an author’s next book, so that means more books as well. It’s pretty much a win for everyone! Unless, of course, you hate the book….
Link: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/book-review-bc-peter-darbyshire-dan-brown-territory
Links to order The Mona Lisa Sacrifice
Ottawa has its share of characters….
I did a Six Questions interview with rob mclennan for Chaudiere Books about how Ottawa influenced my writing career. I only lived in Ottawa for a couple of years, but it’s still one of my favourite places in the world, and I think it’s still affecting my literary life in quiet ways.
I think the real thing that Ottawa has to offer is its culture. There’s just so much happening in Ottawa given it’s the nation’s capital and all. Every second person you encounter is a creator of some sort of another, and there are so many cultural industries where you can have a meaningful career. Ottawa is a place filled with people who recognize that culture is just as important to our society as health care or universities or spirituality or you name it. There’s probably an argument to be made that culture intersects with all of these things….
I should point out the interview took place before all the recent excitement in Ottawa, which introduced a whole new set of characters to the city….
Stop drinking? There’s an app for that!
Back at the beginning of 2019, I decided to take a break from drinking alcohol. I didn’t have a bad New Year’s Eve that ended with me waking up in a foreign country or a disastrous Christmas where I found myself naked and covered in ornaments or anything like that. No, I just wanted to get healthier.
I’d found for the past few years that drinking was just taking too much of a toll on my mind and body as I grew older. The odd hangover when I drank too much had turned into headaches whenever I drank anything at all. I developed strange heart palpitations that my doctor said were probably caused by alcohol. I was getting bloated and uncomfortably heavy. I was frustrated with my constant mood swings. I wasted way too much time on drunken midnight descents into 1990s concerts on YouTube.
As the father of a couple of young boys, I worried about the toll of all this and something happening to me that deprived them of a functional father, or a father at all. Leave aside for the moment they were often the reason I drank….
So I decided to try to stop drinking again, at least until I could shed some weight and get healthier. I’d tried a few times in the past and been reasonably successful — I’d gone a few months here, six months there, etc. But there was always some social event or another where I felt it was time to take a drink, and then the cycle started up again.
This time I decided to try out a new app I’d read about on reddit’s Stop Drinking subreddit: NoMo. I downloaded it in early January and started using it, and I 100% credit my year of sobriety to the app.
It has a number of features that are useful. One I quite like is you can track how much money you are saving. Simply check your bank statements to see how much you spent on booze the year before, enter that number into the app, and it’ll tell you how much money you’ve saved each day by not drinking. I’ve saved the price of a holiday trip to another country in one year — that’s right, I was drinking away a vacation each year.
You can also connect with other people for support and that sort of thing, if that’s what works for you. I’m more independent myself, but do whatever works for you.
The feature that works best for me is the app keeps track of your sobriety streak — how many days you’ve gone without a drink. That alone is the thing that has stopped me from drinking many times over the past year. There’s always been some occasion or another where I’ve been at a party or event where there’s a table of open booze bottles, and the thing that’s stopped me from drinking is that streak. I’ve actually pulled out my phone, checked my app and thought, “Nah, I don’t want to break my streak of 157 days of no drinking just to have a beer or shot of rum.”
The effectiveness of this really struck home with me when I was on holiday in Iceland with some friends a few months back. We were staying in a hotel that had an executive lounge that offered free booze every night — good, expensive booze! What better excuse to have a drink — I’m on holiday in Iceland, and they’re giving away excellent drinks for free. I can just take a short break from sobriety and have some fun! I didn’t, though. I didn’t want to break that streak on the app. And I honestly didn’t want to have a drink, either. I liked the way I felt sober and I continue to like the way I feel sober. So I passed and went to bed early and got up early the next day and wandered Reykjavik and went for hikes and had a lovely, inspiring time that I still remember.
I’m not one to be an evangelist about sobriety or anything else. But I’ve been open about my reasons for not drinking and I’ve been pleased with the changes over the last year — I lost 35 pounds, I’m more fit, I’m happier and more level, and I feel I’m much better equipped to deal with stress. Many people have asked me about my experiences and what’s been working for me. It’s clear a number of my friends and acquaintances have their own struggles with alcohol and are thinking about taking a break. So I thought I’d mention the app and my own experiences here for those who are interested.
After all, it’s the start of a new year. What better time to transform yourself into that person you want to be?
Stay strong and have compassion for others but most of all yourself.
Peter
20 wishes for 2020
It’s the end of another year, and I hope you achieved all your goals and had some surprising accomplishments that you never could have predicted at the end of last year. I hope you have gratitude for all the good things that happened or came your way. If it was a hard year for you, I hope you take comfort in simply surviving and acknowledge your strength and resilience. Sometimes it takes all we have within us to survive.
I have 20 wishes for you in 2020. Add or delete as you will to make your own personalized list.
- May you find/continue the love that you deserve — even if it is simply love for yourself. That is often the hardest love of all to discover.
- May you do that thing you’ve always dreamed of doing. Time will not wait for you, so why wait for time?
- May you discover something that changes your world and helps you find a better, more positive place in the universe. Therapy, spirituality, kink, travel, creativity, photography, meditation, parenting, whatever it is, I hope your journey takes you to new and better places within yourself this coming year.
- May you create. Create art, create life, create political change, create a new startup. Make something new that didn’t exist before, that only you could create.
- May you be compassionate with others. We are all struggling with things no one but us can see. Remember that when thinking about others, be they family, friends, co-workers or strangers.
- May you be compassionate toward yourself. We are our own harshest critics and never stop judging ourselves. We never forgive ourselves for things we have done that no one else even remembers, let alone cares about. Recognize you are human and every moment has been a learning experience to get you where you are now. Forgive yourself. Heal yourself. Love yourself.
- May you love others. Life is too short to get lost in judgement, anxiety, competition, envy, jealousy, all those things we feel toward others when our own life fails to meet our expectations. Love each and every one of us for the random, impossible miracles we are in this universe.
- May you read a good book. May you read many good books. A life without reading is like a life without colour. You can live such a life, but do you even know what you are missing?
- May you say yes to everything that comes your way. It is easy to say no, but what change happens when you don’t try something new? Say yes for a year and see how it transforms you.
- May you say no to everything that comes your way. It is easy to say yes to everything, but you can become lost in other people’s issues. What space can you make for yourself and your dreams by saying no? Say no for a year and see how it transforms you.
- May you let go of things that no longer serve you — those household items in storage, friendships that have become toxic or at least not inspiring or uplifting, relationships where you no longer recognize each other or help each other to become better people, jobs that have become work instead of a calling. Those things served a purpose in your life and brought you to where you are. But sometimes things can drag you down if you don’t let go of them. If something no longer serves you in any meaningful way, perhaps it is time to let go of it without having to let go of the love you once had for it.
- May you think about death. We are all dying every day and we try not to think about it. We should not be concerned about death. It is the most natural thing of all, more natural than life even. Contemplate death, for thinking about death will surely change the way you think about life.
- May you think about life and what sort of life you truly want to live before death. You only have one life (in this body and mind, anyway). Live it like you want to live it because one day there will be no later for you.
- May you care for yourself. Watch Netflix. Read. Sleep. Go to the movies. Go to the spa. Ask to spend more time with friends. Meditate. Exercise. Buy things for yourself you wouldn’t normally buy. We spend so much time in life looking after others that we often forget to look after ourselves. Look after yourself.
- May you change something about yourself. Life is transformation and change, from the moment we are born to our dying breath. If you are not changing, you are not really living. Embrace change. Embrace life.
- May you see the magic in life. We live on a rock spinning through the cold nothingness of space, just near enough and far away enough from a dying star that we may exist, but that star is itself just a speck of light in a vast universe that we know next to nothing about. Every second of life for all of us has been and always will be a miracle with no clear origin, an act of magic that seems to have been generated by the uncaring and unknowable universe itself. To see that shouldn’t invoke nihilism or existentialism but instead should inspire joy and wonder. Against all odds, and for no reason at all, we are here. For a brief split second in time, we exist when there was nothing before. What else is that but magic?
- May your every action be meaningful this year. We spend so much time doing nothing but wasting time — reading celebrity gossip, following the arguments of strangers on Twitter, watching viral videos about someone else’s misfortune. Imagine what your life would be if instead you spent that time in meaningful pursuits — learning new information or teaching yourself a new skill or improving your fitness or creating a new artistic project. Where would you be in a year’s time if you did this for yourself?
- May you discover wonder again. As we grow older, we often become cynical, judgemental and skeptical. Try to remember what it was like to view the world as a child and bring back that sense of wonder again. The world is a rich, complex and wondrous place. View it as such and discover the wonder in yourself again.
- May you learn to be comfortable with yourself. We see ourselves through the lens of others and find value in our lives by imagining how others perceive us. What if you were stranded for the rest of your life on an island with no other people? What if you were the last person left alive on the earth? What if there was no one else but you? How would you live a meaningful life then? Imagine a life that would make you happy in those circumstances and then live it in our actual, present world.
- May you find the courage to do the things you once found impossible, because everything is possible at the start of a new year.
An update on my Cross series of books
By now some of you will be aware of the controversy surrounding ChiZine Publications, the publishers of my Cross series of supernatural thrillers under the pen name Peter Roman. In light of all the information that has come out, I requested the rights back to my Cross series through Cooke McDermid and CZP agreed, so the rights have now reverted back to me. It’s a difficult situation for many reasons, not the least of which is I had a new Cross book ready to go in the series. I love Cross’s world and I do want to keep writing those stories, but I’ll have to figure out a new way to do that now.
My heart goes out to all the other writers and the readers affected by this situation. CZP published and employed many amazing, incredibly talented creators, so it’s a really heartbreaking time. I sincerely hope everyone lands in a good place for them and are able to keep following their passions. I urge you all to check out their works now if you haven’t already done so. (You should be able to do so by searching ChiZine on Google or your relevant social media networks.
Thanks to everyone who has supported me and read the Cross books to date. At the end of the day, you are why I write and will continue to do so.
Much love.
Peter
peter darbyshire 