11 Years Ago Today... Remembering Shadbolt's

They tore down Shadbolt's. 

There are times in your life when the passage of time, it smack you inna head. All things are fleeting, sunrise, sunset, cat's in the cradle, down to a sunless sea, etc. And so, with this in mind, I salute Shadbolt International, manufacturer and purveyor of finest quality veneered doors. Why, you may ask, am I doing this? Because in 2007 this small piece of the North London landscape closed down and moved to Braintree, along with a little bit of my personal history.

For anyone who traveled along the North Circular Road on the way toward Walthamstow Stadium back then, the Shadbolt factory had been a landmark for years, and each week the good folks working there displayed a sample veneer from their most commodious range, as you can see from the picture below.

Each Friday, when my friends and I got together for a regular evening's gaming, we would begin with a small ritual. One of our number would pass Shadbolt's on his way to my flat. On arrival, with great gravitas, he would announce the name of the Veneer Of The Week. 

Some times it was East Indian Satinwood. Australian Silky Oak. Wenge. Even the rare Macassar Ebony. That ever-changing panel outside their factory was part of our shared experience, just as it was for the millions of people passing up and down the A406. Even years later, when we'd all moved away, if one of us passed Shadbolt's on the way somewhere, we were duty-bound to inform the others. Text messages would arrive and simply say "Veneer of the Week is Sen", and we'd nod and smile knowingly, connected by our appreciation of high quality wood surfacing.

But the factory is gone now, and that roadside panel exists only in virtual form, displayed here against the information superhighway instead of a London A-road. This week it was Straight Grain Smoked Pear, in case you were wondering.

So Shadbolt's lives on, in our memories. The Guardian covered it here. Veneer Of The Week has its own Facebook page. And if you want a sense of what this shared moment of North London industrial surreality was like, then this video will take you there.

Viper-Versary

A reader over on the Trek BBS site drew my attention to the fact that January 25th 2018 was the 10th anniversary of the release of my first full-length Star Trek novel - Day of the Vipers – so I thought I’d mark the occasion with a brief post.

When then-Pocket Books editor Marco Palmieri came to me with the idea of writing a novel that was a prequel to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and a taut political thriller, I said no. Twice. 

Up until then, I’d made my bones in long-form fiction writing action stories with stuff-blowing-up and the idea of crafting a work that would be carried by hushed conversations, conspiracies and like sent me backing away to my safe place. 

But Marco – an insightful chap and a great collaborator – insisted I mull it over. And I came around to it, I saw it as a way to test myself as a writer by doing something outside my comfort zone.

Day of the Vipers was the first in a series of novels that covered the turmoil during the Cardassian occupation of the planet Bajor, as hinted at in the early episodes of DS9; book one was written by me to help round out a trilogy with books two and three - Night of the Wolves and Dawn of the Eagles - written by S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison.

Before the Dominion War and the decimation of Cardassia... Before the coming of the Emissary and the discovery of the wormhole... Before space station Terok Nor became Deep Space Nine... There was the Occupation; the military takeover of an alien planet and the violent insurgency that fought against it. The Star Trek: Terok Nor trilogy chronicles this perilous period in the history of the planet Bajor.

All three books got a fantastic cover treatment by the amazing John Picacio, and I still have a big print of the Vipers art in my office...

The series was well received by fans, and set me off writing Trek novels – my latest, Fear Itself, which ties in to the new Star Trek Discovery series, will be out later this year. Vipers went on to win in the ‘Best Speculative Fiction Original’ category for the 2009 Scribe Awards for tie-ins, an endorsement that I was proud to have – and a sign that I’d made the right choice in taking on the gig.

You can hear me talking about the novel (and some of my other Trek fiction) in this interview I did for Trek FM’s Literary Treks podcast Matthew Rushing and Christopher Jones.

If you’d like to read them, dead-tree editions of the Terok Nor series are harder to come by these days, but eBooks are available from Amazon UK, Amazon US or via Simon & Schuster’s website.

Something Borrowed (2018 Edition)

I love libraries; I mean, it's a place full of books you can read for free. Just that sentence alone makes me smile. Libraries have always been a fixture of my life since I was a little kid, and now I'm older and actually writing books that get put in them, I feel even more indebted to them. Books are something everyone should have access to, and and I'll fly that flag every day.

Of course, libraries also help out jobbing authors in more ways than just getting their books in front of people. There's this thing called the Public Lending Right; the gift that keeps on giving to writers, editors, illustrators and other folks involved in making books happen.

Here's my annual public service announcement on the subject:

If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/etc, a resident of the UK or Ireland and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the library - on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service - this is it.
 
The PLR is a system where authors who've written books that are in public libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows their works. It's a way to repay writers who won't be earning a royalty from a sale in a bookstore. 

The hardworking folks at the PLR office pay a nominal fee based on how borrowed you were - and in the interests of fairness, you can't earn more than around £6000, so the big names don't get to hog all the money.

The PLR and our libraries are under threat from government, so if you are a writer or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can.

Meanwhile, I would like to thank everyone who supported their local libraries and borrowed my books. Here's my Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2017 (with 2016's position in brackets)

1 (5) Nomad (paperback, hardcover and audiobook editions)
2 (-) Exile
3 (-) Fear to Tread
4 (3) Peacemaker
5 (1) Deadline
6 (4) The Poisoned Chalice
7 (-) The Latter Fire
8 (-) Black Light
9 (-) Icarus Effect
10 (6) Cast No Shadow

It was great to see my Marc Dane novels placing highly (3 editions of Nomad at the front, with Exile close behind for over 14,000 combined reader loans!) My Horus Heresy story Fear to Tread and Doctor Who tale Peacemaker both slipped one slot to 3rd and 4th places, and after 2 years at the top, my 24 novel Deadline got bounced out down to 5th place. My Star Trek books got some love, dominating the bottom end of the Top Ten, and there was an unexpected reappearance of my Deus Ex tie-ins too. I was also very pleased to see that although they were at the bottom of the list, 17 years on from when I wrote them my Sundowners YA steampunk westerns are still being read!

 

GHOST cover reveal!

This has been drifting around out there for a little while now, by I wanted to make it official; check out the cover art for the third book in my Marc Dane thriller series, Ghost...

 

A terrible threat from the depths of the dark net.
A devastating betrayal at the heart of a covert strike force.
A deadly pursuit across a digital battlefield.
A ruthless terrorist fueled by revenge. 

As devastating attacks unfold across the globe, Marc Dane must call on all his skills and ingenuity to track down the mysterious figure behind it all - a faceless criminal known only as "Madrigal".

Ghost will be on sale in hardcover, export trade paperback and eBook editions in May, and you can pre-order copies now at Amazon or wherever you buy your fiction. 

As ever, keep an eye on this blog and my twitter feed for more information, giveaways and the like - or sign up to the reader's club for email newsletters!

2K17 Movies

And the last of my annual listicles is a look over all the movies I watched in 2017. Numbers were down a little on the 2016 score, but I was pleased to get out to the cinema a little more than I had in previous years -and I had a long flight to California in August, so that always ends up like a little film festival for me to while away the hours on the plane. I saw a lot of great stuff I really enjoyed - Thor: Ragnarok and The Fate of the Furious were especially tons of fun - and Blade Runner 2049 was the movie I had been waiting decades to see. 

But I have to admit, I feel like I'm getting a little punchy from all the sequels and franchise films out there. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Wars and the Marvel universe - but I kept grasping for smaller films like Kill Command or Level Up, where I didn't know what to expect. I also feel like there's a lot of movies I saw this year that I need to see again to crystalize my opinions of them. Top pick of the year? Blade Runner, natch.

Here's my full list of flicks viewed:
Zootropolis; The Double; Kill Command; Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; 2 Guns; A Better Tomorrow 2012; Ghost in the Shell [2017]; Fast & Furious; X-Men: Apocalypse; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2; Elstree 1976; Suicide Squad; The Raid 2; Jack Reacher: Never Go Back; The Call Up; Survivor [2016]; New Police Story; Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux; Inferno; Baby Driver; Spider-Man Homecoming; The Fate of the Furious; Assassin's Creed; John Wick Chapter 2; xXx: Return of Xander Cage; Logan; The LEGO Batman Movie; Free Fire; Police Story: Lockdown; The Rebound; Passengers; The Last Stand; Marauders; Blade Runner: The Final Cut; Blade Runner 2049; Thor: Ragnarok; Level Up; Underworld: Blood Wars; Kill Me Three Times; What We Do In The Shadows; Star Wars: The Last Jedi; Good Kill

2K17 Games

Number three in my annual year-end blog list assembles my gaming playlist for 2017. This year I decided to add analogue games to the list (as in board games, card games and the like), because why the hell not? 

Most of my gaming was on the PlayStation 4, and again it was my favoured genre of FPS titles that dominated. A big part of 2017 for me was getting to work on one of my favourite game franchises - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon - creating the Fallen Ghosts DLC for the Ghost Recon Wildlands release, and I spent a lot of time rampaging through a virtual Bolivia. Later in the year, I rinsed out the whole of Just Cause 3 for stuff-blowing-up, a great title I got as a freebie with my PSPlus subscription. I also went back to The Division, another Ubisoft/Clancy game, playing that in team-game mode for hours on end - but that's a 2016 title and I'm only listing new plays here. My top pick for the year goes of Subsurface Circular, a short but perfectly formed sci-fi detective conversation game.

Here's my full list:
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare; Star Trek Panic; Tokaido; The Crew (PS4 version); Ghost Recon Wildlands: Narco Road; The Crew: Calling All Units; Type:Rider; Ghost Recon Wildlands: Fallen Ghosts; Life Is Strange; Sniper Ghost Warrior 3; Destiny 2; Just Cause 3; Spartacus; Fortnite Battle Royale; Ogre; Star Wars Battlefront II; Ghost Recon Wildlands: Ghost War; Hitman: Sniper; Subsurface Circular; Rocket League (PS4 version); Gaming Quiz; The Chase Family Board Game; Sniper Ghost Warrior 3: The Escape of Lydia

2K17 Books

The second of my annual year-end blogs rounds up what I was reading in 2017. I was in danger of clocking in with a lot fewer titles than 2016's total, due to me having little opportunity for just losing myself in a book. Usually I get time to make that up on holiday, but my trip to Iceland last year was mostly on-the-hoof and not enough by-the-pool... Still, I decided to have a "fiction-cation" over the Christmas/New Year gap and packed in a bunch of novels and audiobooks to bring up the numbers at the last second. 

This is the first year my science fiction and crime/thriller reads have almost been level, partly because all of a sudden people have started sending me advanced reader copies of things. I've clearly got myself on to a freebie list, which I am totally happy about. My top picks were Matthew Richardson's debut My Name Is Nobody, Ian McDonald's Luna: New Moon, Harry Sidebottom's The Last Hour and the gorgeously retrotastic Art of Atari.

Here's the full list:
Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide (Pablo Hidalgo); Ghost Flight (Bear Grylls); My Name Is Nobody (Matthew Richardson); Art of Atari (Tim Lapetino); Countdown to Zero Day (Kim Zetter); Luna: New Moon (Ian McDonald); Dark Waters (Richard Dansky); This Gaming Life (Jim Rossignol); Crisis (Frank Gardner); You Only Live Once (Haris Orkin); Freefall (Adam Hamdy); The Ghost in the Shell: Five New Short Stories (Various); Hot Wheels: 40 Years (Angelo Van Bogart); Desperate Hours (David Mack); The Final Hour (Tom Wood); The Last Hour (Harry Sidebottom); Blackbird (James Hamilton-Paterson); Brethren (Phil Kelly); The Calculus of Battle (David Guymer); Perpetual (Dan Abnett); The Embrace of Pain (Ian St. Martin); The Midnight Front (Mack); Slow Horses (Mick Herron); Fire With Fire (Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg); The Art of Provocation (Josh Reynolds); The Soul, Severed (Chris Wraight); Valerius (Gav Thorpe); One Rough Man (Brad Taylor)

Seventeen (Again?)

It Me

Before I sat down to write my usual year-ender blog, I re-read last year's edition and I was struck by how things have moved on - and stayed the same. Here's a direct quote: "Last year was really a rollercoaster for me. Externally, pressures about the world at large, political fears reawakening and a general sense of what-the-hell-is-happening put a drag on everything else..." 

I can pretty much cut-and-paste this comment about 2016 straight into my 2017 blog with a perfect fit. It has been, with no sense of exaggeration, a rather mad year. I've tried hard to concentrate on the good and not get caught up in the crazy, looking at the important personal stuff rather than raging at things I can't change...

And on that, things have been going well for me. Building on the success for my first original thriller Nomad, the second book in the series - Exile - came out in the summer in hardcover, with a paperback release at the end of December. Exile looks set to do as well as Nomad did, if not better, so once more I want to thank everybody who supported my work by buying a copy. 

I've finished work on book three - Ghost - for release in May, and if all goes well, my ex-MI6 agent hero Marc Dane will return for a fourth adventure in 2019. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself; like I said last year, I'm taking this one step at a time. At a Q&A this year, someone asked me if I was angling to cash out in some big Hollywood movie deal, and I said not bloody likely; I'm hoping to keep telling Dane's stories for a long while yet.

Coincidentally, the title "Ghost" kept coming up in 2017. As well as the new Marc Dane book, I worked on a novelization of the live action adaptation of the anime/manga Ghost in the Shell, which was an...interesting...experience. I'll say this: I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do with the GitS novel, and I only took on the project because I am a big fan of Masamune Shirow's original comics, so I'm disappointed that we ended up having to go a bit vanilla with it. The final version of the book, which I couldn't finish up because of other commitments, was taken on by Abbie Bernstein to handle the last pass and edits and she did a great job under testing circumstances.

The other big "Ghost" project of mine was Fallen Ghosts - a downloadable content, story and mission expansion for the Tom Clancy franchise videogame Ghost Recon Wildlands. This was hard work and often challenging, but looking back now it is done and dusted, I'm pleased with how things came together and I liked working with the team at Ubisoft Montpellier - a self-professed gang of 'punks' who welcomed me into a team characterised by honesty and passion. Most rewarding of all, Fallen Ghosts was a big hit with the Wildlands player community, and as a long-time Ghost Recon fan (all the way back to the 2001 PC original!) that meant a lot to me. Fallen Ghosts wasn't the only videogame project I worked on in 2017, but the other two have still not been officially announced, so I won't be talking about them until later this year...

My other writing projects for 2017 were tie-ins; in the world of Warhammer 40,000, my two Sisters of Battle novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil were finally gathered under one cover, along with an adaptation of the audio drama Red & Black, in Sisters of Battle: The Omnibus, and to add a little something extra to the collection I wrote a brand new original short story called "Heart & Soul". I'd hoped at one point to write a third Sisters novel, but that's not on the cards at the moment, so for now this is my "definitive" Adepta Sororitas collection. My other 40K outing was Corsair: The Face of the Void, an audio drama project that spun out of me wanted to write something a bit different in the Grimdark Future of the 41st Millennium; this is essentially the pilot episode for an ongoing series of audios set aboard the rogue trader starship Corsair, featuring renegade captain Athene Santiago and her misfit crew. I'm hoping listeners will take to it enough to warrant future stories...

And speaking of starships, there was one other tie-in that I signed on to write back in December of 2015 which took a year to get done and announced - Fear Itself, an original novel based on the Star Trek Discovery series. It was tough keeping this one under wraps while the show debuted and everyone was talking about it, having to bite my tongue when the books were being promoted at the big Star Trek cons in the USA because I couldn't say anything about my particular part of the project! I had to work for months on this under near-total secrecy, paralleling the production of the TV episodes as I put together the storyline for the book. Fear Itself will be out in the summer, and I'll be talking about it in more detail in the months ahead.

The rest of 2017 I filled up with some fun travel and cool events, including the ReFramed games festival in Brighton, the Trek-On convention in the summer, the Black Library Weekender and a bunch of library Q&A's with m'colleague Ben Aaronovitch. I was nominated for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Prize, visited the Red Bull Soapbox Rally and Drone Racing League world championship finals, not to mention spending a week in Santa Monica with the ace folks from League of Legends creators Riot Games and a packed trip to Iceland that was cool in both senses of the word.

On the edge of the Faxi waterfall in Iceland

Here's to more of that for 2018, and less of the other stuff!