I am so chuffed with how my latest novel, A Treachery of Friends, is going, I can’t tell you. The reviews are averaging 4.5 stars, which helped move it into the top 100 crime fiction novels on Amazon. Yay!
The fact people seem to be loving it has made a fantastic start to my year. A big thank you to everyone who has reviewed the book, THANK YOU!
Reviews are really important to authors
You may not be aware, but reviews are really important to authors not just to hear what their readers think, but to introduce them to new readers too. If you feel the urge to make my day (go on, you know you do!), I’d love you to post a review. It only has to be a line or two, and not a literary tome, and it would mean a lot.
You can review it here, if you fancy (I thought I’d make things easy for you!):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=B0CL6S6GGY
Other news, is that two of my books, Scare Me to Death and Tell Me a Lie, the first two in the Dan Forrester series, have been used to train AI. Which is flattering on the one hand – just 183,000 authors globally have been used – but also infuriating considering they didn’t ask our permission and totally infringed copyright.
It looks like being the biggest fight in publishing and tech. Class Action Complaints are under way in New York at present, which writers are following closely. In the meantime, I wonder how many words and phrases from Dan Forrester and Lucy Davies’ mouths will be permeating other people’s work! Interesting times.
These two books have been used to train AI, without my permission
I’m writing this as I look out of my office window across the Box Valley, frozen white mid-January. It’s the perfect season for writing, tucked up cosily inside and allowing my imagination to lead me to bask in the sun, if I wish, or a tropical rainstorm elsewhere.
Looking out of my office window in the UK
The trouble is, my next book is set in Wales, so I’m describing rain and snow rather than tropical rainstorms! I set my first book Blood Junction in the baking Australian outback to cheer me up one winter, and it worked. I loved “going to work” beneath the hot Aussie sun and cooling off with an imaginary cold beer at the end of a wet and windy English day.
Where my imagination took me while writing “Blood Junction”
It took me a while to realise that when I’m deep in the creative mode, my own physical comfort or discomfort affects my characters and scenes. For example, my character will suddenly get ravenously hungry and start casting around for something to eat, and it’s invariably because I’ve just missed a meal and am ravenously hungry myself!
The same goes for music. I have to be careful what I play – I always have music on the go when I’m writing – because if I have a scene say, where the characters are getting romantic and I play something fast and angry, they will turn on each other for no good reason and start arguing. If I have a car chase, on the other hand, and the music turns light and soft, the cars slow down to a crawl and the drivers start to think about having a nap.
Flying over Wales, inspiration for my next novel
Over the Christmas period, I devoured a mountain of books. My top three are as follows:
I devoured In the Blink of an Eye in just two sittings. It’s a fast, easy and exciting read, and wonderfully original using an AIDE (Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity) as the main detective’s sidekick. It has to be a contender for crime debut of the year for its originality and sharp writing. A top-notch detective story with a unique twist.
Istanbul Passage was chosen by my local book club, and I absolutely loved it. Atmospheric and fast-moving, it has been described as “a thinking man’s thriller” no doubt for its beautiful writing and political intrigue. For me, however, it was a cracking spy story I found hard to put down. Who doesn’t love a great spy story?!
Lastly, Agent Seventeen was another spy story, but so far removed from Istanbul Passage as to be almost in another genre. It’s a high-octane, modern-day spy story that I found funny as well as surprisingly emotionally fulfilling. Slick and clever, I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, but I was hooked from the first page.
I hope you’re wintering well, wherever you are – or summering well, if you’re down under – and that you’ve had some great reading too!
Warm wishes
CJ
© CJ Carver 2024