Category Archives: Writing
That immortality game
In a lovely moment of product placement, my new book, The Dead Hamlets, and The Lazarus Game by Stephen J. Valentine are listed side by side over at SF Signal’s February releases roundup. Anyone who’s familiar with Cross will get why this is charming.
Also, great representation by ChiZine!
The Dead Hamlets are alive!
It’s alive! My new Cross novel, The Dead Hamlets, is shipping. ChiZine wasn’t just pranking me when they said they’d publish it!
I’ll have more details about launches, blog tours, reviews and so forth soon. But right now I’m just going to crack these open and breathe deep of that new book smell.
And then get back to working on the third Cross book.
Roll a d20 for appearances
If you follow this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of the Storm Crow Tavern in Vancouver. Where else can you eat an Elvish Burger while rolling a d20 for random shots — Critical Hit! — while playing one of their many board games — who’s in for a quick game of Arkham Horror in front of the giant Cthulhu head?
On very special nights, such as when the Known Planets align with the Unknown Ones, or certain Thursdays, you can also hear writers such as myself read from their works.
I held the Vancouver launch for The Mona Lisa Sacrifice at the Storm Crow Tavern, and it was a great success, aside from that Curse of Typo Terror cast by the wait staff. Now I’ll be returning to the Storm Crow to read from The Dead Hamlets, the sequel to The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 16.
My reading will be part of the Storm Crow Tavern Reading Series – Season Two. Other readers will include James McCann, Kristi Charish, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Claude Lalumiere and Heather Haley. I’m thrilled to be part of such a great lineup.
I already have a special surprise in mind for the reading. But you’ll have to be there to experience it. Book your time away from work and your family now!
It’s alive!
My publisher teases me by posting a photo of my new novel, The Dead Hamlets, partying somewhere in Toronto with new friends, in no hurry to find its way home to me. Wicked, wicked publisher.
Licence Expired
Here’s a piece of interesting news: my publisher ChiZine is publishing an unauthorized James Bond anthology. Ian Fleming’s work has hit the public domain in Canada (there’s a whole other post about copyright in regard to that), and ChiZine is looking for works of a certain flavour. Full press release follows. Read the rest of this entry
And so it begins
The first reviews of my second Cross novel, The Dead Hamlets, have been spotted in the wild. That came as a surprise to me, as the book’s pub date is now mid-February — and I don’t even have a final copy of the book myself yet! I hope the advance reviewers have the most up-to-date version….
I was impressed by a Goodreads review by Pop Bog, which called The Dead Hamlets “A Rewarding, Witty, Hot Mess of Angel-Pummeling, Action and Noir Detective Fiction.” (Warning: minor spoilers.) The reviewer really embraced what I was trying to do and had a great sense of how my work relates to the rest of the genre. That was a relief, as you always wonder if readers are going to get what you’re going for. Also, I had to laugh when the word “unhinged” came up — I think that’s the third time now that I’ve been called unhinged for these books. I should put that on the jacket of the next book.
Please let me know if you see any other reviews of The Dead Hamlets. I do like to read them, as it’s always interesting to know what people think of the Cross books. And you never know: sometimes if you ask for something in a review it may just come true in a future book.
OK, I really should get back to finishing that third book in the Cross series now.
Change the category to non-fiction
Years back, I wrote a little book called The Warhol Gang. The narrator of the book goes to accident scenes and pretends to be a cop/paramedic/firefighter/etc. I got the idea after I read a news story about a guy going to accident scenes in Alberta pretending to be a first responder. Today, I read a story about a guy in Alberta pretending to be a cop, pulling people over, etc. Is it something in the oil in Alberta?
Boxing Day blowout at ChiZine!
Hey, ChiZine Publications’ Boxing Day blowout sale is still on! You can get all their ebooks for 60% off — that means you can buy my first Peter Roman book, The Mona Lisa Sacrifice, for $4. I mean, I know you already have a copy, but now you can get one for all your friends. That’ll make up for forgetting to send them a Christmas card. Plus, $4 is cheaper than most Christmas cards these days, so it’s win-win for you!
Big thanks to the Big Beat!
This is a nice way to end the year: The Mona Lisa Sacrifice makes a top 10 list of recent books at the Ottawa Citizen. I know Peter Simpson, the arts editor who put together the list, and he’s not an easy man to please! Plus, he obviously has great tastes.
And this just in time for the January launch of The Dead Hamlets, the sequel to The Mona Lisa Sacrifice!
Coming soon to a movie theatre near you: Big Screen Sermons!
A few years back I published a little book called The Warhol Gang. It follows the misadventures of a man who works in neuromarketing, getting his brain scanned in response to imaginary products, until he begins to lose his mind. He starts going out to accidents at night to get a dose of reality, where he falls in with a group of anti-mall activists. Things get crazy from there.
Almost everything I wrote about in The Warhol Gang existed at the time, just not in any meaningful scale. I wasn’t writing realism so much as I was trying to write the headlines of tomorrow — somewhere in between realism and sci-fi. As it turns out, I got a lot of it right — although that doesn’t exactly make me happy. Neuromarketing is a growing field, we’re increasingly live streaming terrorist attacks and political protests, we’re obsessed with the viral video — and we have sermons in movie theatres. One of the scenes in The Warhol Gang features our hapless narrator stumbling into a cinema in the middle of a religious service broadcast live on the screen. It’s the closest he can get to a real spiritual experience in his world, and he tries to get closer to the screen for a moment of communion. When I wrote the scene, I wondered if I was pushing things a bit too far. But I wondered that about almost everything in the book.
Today I checked out my news feeds and came across an article about people attending church sermons in much larger numbers than I projected in my novel.
peter darbyshire 