Category Archives: Journal
Here’s my schedule for Ad-Astra
I’m off to Ad-Astra in Toronto this weekend. Here’s my schedule:
ChiZine Authors Reading
Saturday, April 30, 4 p.m. Oakridge Room
I’ll be reading from my new book, The Apocalypse Ark, alongside Adrian Van Young, Gemma Files, and Robert Wiersema — some of my favourite writers! Come out and witness us read from all the forbidden books and crack open the seven seals.
How to Go Beyond Getting Started and Get Something Finished
Sunday, May 1, 11 a.m., Markham B
I’m really hoping to learn something here! With Amanda Sun, Erik Buchanan, Gregory A. Wilson and Stephanie Bedwell-Grime.
Reviews: How to Write Them and How to Read Them
Sunday, May 1, 2 p.m., Markham B
I suspect my talk will go something like “Review my book pllllleeeeeeeaaaaassssseeeeee.” Or maybe I’ll just talk about it from the perspective of a newspaper editor. Come and be surprised!
At Ad-Astra this year
I’ll be appearing at Ad-Astra in Toronto April 30-May 1. It looks like I’ll be doing a reading and a couple of panels. I’ll post more details when everything is finalized.
Come see me if you’re around!
Hey neighbour, can I borrow a cup of kickass fantasy?
I’ve long been a fan of Sebastien de Castell and his Greatcoats series, which started with Traitor’s Blade, so I got a kick out of sharing some Amazon bestseller space with him. He’ll never let me live it down that he beat The Apocalypse Ark, though….
If you want to learn more about Sebastien and his kickass fantasy series, check out the interview and podcast I did with him at The Province, where he talks about moving from the barista lifestyle to the rich and glamorous life of a plumber after signing an eight-book publishing deal (it’s all explained in the interview).
Deadpool and me
Hanging out with Deadpool at the Storm Crow Alehouse in Vancouver. What could go wrong?
The girl is in the ice cream truck! The iiiiccccceeee ccccrrrrreeeaaaaammmm trrrrruuuucccckkkk!
Late in The Apocalypse Ark, there’s this real twist where….
Yeah, this is probably the point I should talk about spoilers.
I have a spoilers story I always like to tell people.
A couple of years back, I was watching a season of The Walking Dead on Netflix. I have two children, a full-time career in the media, and I try to write when I can, so I don’t tend to watch things when they first come out. I usually get around to it a year or three later. So I was catching up on the episodes of The Walking Dead that everyone else in the newsroom had already watched.
You can see where this is going.
I mentioned to the photo editor that I had just started Season 2, which focuses in large part on the survivor group’s attempts to find a girl who was separated from the others by walkers early in the season.
“Oh, that moment where she drives the ice cream truck into the house had me crying!” she said.
OK, that’s not really what she said. I’m not going to tell you what she said, because spoilers. Some of you may not have seen it yet, like I hadn’t when she told me what really happened with the missing girl.
A great deal of the season’s drama arises out of the characters’ search for the missing girl. Where is she? Will she ever be found? Did the walkers get her? Etc. The whole season, as I watched the drama build, I could only think: “She’s in the ice cream truck. Just listen for that unholy jingle and track her down.” Well, that’s not exactly what I was thinking, but you know what I mean. All the anticipation and excitement and anxiety and everything else of the season was lost for me because of that one slip by a colleague.
Of course, when I mentioned that to my other colleagues, they thought the situation was quite funny and now they openly discuss plot twists and turns around me whenever they can. It’s enough to make me watch House of Cards instead. There are no surprises there, right?
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying I have a new book out and please don’t give away the secrets. No spoilers! Unless the person you’re talking to wasn’t going to buy the book anyway. Then they deserve to have their day ruined.
“A vastly entertaining, fantastical, breakneck hodgepodge quest novel”
The same day The Apocalypse Ark received that wonderful Vancouver Sun review, it also got a fun review at Publishers Weekly. Hard to beat comments like this:
The Cross series is a spiritual relative to Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim and Lavie Tidhar’s Bookman series, meaning that anyone (and anything) in the literary universe is fair game. Mythological beasts, Lovecraftian allusions, pirates, and characters from Moby Dick and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea all fuse together to form a vastly entertaining, fantastical, breakneck hodgepodge quest novel that has the good sense never to take itself too seriously
“One of the strongest, and strangest, literary creations this country has ever seen”
I will just say that I am deeply pleased to read this review of my latest Cross novel, The Apocalypse Ark. It’s nice to have a reader that gets what you’re trying to do.
Roman (a pseudonym for Vancouver Province journalist Peter Darbyshire) writes with the unfettered delight of a gluttonous reader trapped in a library in his own mind, drawing promiscuously from myth, folk tale, religious texts and apocrypha, literature, music and philosophy — seemingly anything that catches his attention. A Cross novel, at a quick glance or description, seems like an absurdist piece of outsider art, shiny objects thrown together in a fit of barely checked mania.
Anyone who has read a Cross novel, however, knows the truth: despite their crazed, iconoclastic appearance, Roman’s novels are skilfully wrought, thematically deep, with a philosophical depth and a keen sense for both story and its implications. They’re smarter than they would need to be, were they mere action novels, with a sense of literary intersectionality and deep, canonical knowledge most closely akin to writers like Neil Gaiman, Bill Willingham and Mike Carey, graphic novelists all, and three of the finest storytellers at work.
Special thanks to the Storm Crow Alehouse in Vancouver for the photo shoot! I will be back for the Dungeon Burger!
I wish I could quit you, Harlequin
If you search for my new book, The Apocalypse Ark, on Amazon, Indigo, or any of the other online book emporiums, you’re likely to come up with two hits: my book and the Mack Bolan book of the same name.
The funny thing is, they’re related.
Let me explain.
Many years ago, before I was leading the jet-setting life of a published author and rubbing shoulders with Leonardo di Caprio’s body double’s body double, I used to work for Harlequin, the romance publisher. I was a proofreader in their Toronto office, where I worked the night shift after a rather painful divorce — because nothing says romance like a divorced man with no options working a cubicle job at midnight. (All jokes aside, it was a great job, with great people. Except for the salary. That was still a joke.)
What does this have to with the end of the world?
As it turns out, Harlequin is also the publisher of the Mack Bolan books. Who is Mack Bolan, you may ask? (I certainly did.). Mack Bolan is the Executioner, aka a one-man army fighting the enemies of America, whatever they may be today. Think The Punisher meets Netflix’s Daredevil, and you’ll be close enough.
There’s a whole series of Bolan books, but they all feature similar things: “hard men” wielding “sawed-off” weapons that “spurt hot lead” into the bodies of other “hard men.”
You get the idea.
I worked in the Harlequin offices for nearly a year, editing romances and the Mack Bolan books, which were essentially romances for men. After I left Harlequin I continued to freelance for them, while also publishing academic papers on romance novels. So what’s the connection between my new book, The Apocalypse Ark and the Mack Bolan novel of the same name?
None, really. Except for the fact that the Harlequin job was what got me into Toronto in the first place. Once I was in Toronto, I reconnected with old friends who got me into the writing scene there, where I met many new friends. Being part of that scene gave me the inspiration and belief in myself as a writer that helped me publish my first book, Please. It’s a wandering path from the Mack Bolan books to Please to The Apocalypse Ark, but it’s been an interesting journey.
So Mack Bolan’s Apocalypse Ark doesn’t have anything to do with my Apocalypse Ark, but it also has everything to do with my book. Because I likely wouldn’t have written any of my books if I hadn’t worked that Harlequin job all those years ago.
I guess the message of this post is true love never dies, no matter how many times you spurt hot lead into its hard body. Also, make sure you order the right copy of The Apocalypse Ark if you buy it online. Or just buy them both and make everyone happy. Because Harlequin is all about the happy endings.
Behold the chimera fish!
Is it any coincidence that horrors from the deep begin to surface just as I publish my new book, The Apocalypse Ark? I think not. Take back your horrors, ocean! (Also, make note of this devil fish for new book.)
See also the mysterious sounds of the sea!
peter darbyshire 