The Official S. J. Bolton Blog

What's in a name? Well, quite a lot, if I dare take issue with the great one for a moment. Blood and tears have been produced in the quest for a title for Book Four. (Regular visitors may remember James Patterson stole my last one.) At the eleventh hour I thought I had it. From nowhere came the idea: SNAP! Perfect, it seemed, for a story that revolves around a) a copycat serial killer and b) an ordinary person becoming unhinged, whose sanity eventually goes … you see, it's not just me, you think it's good too.

It wasn't to be. Because even She-Who-Is-About-To-Embark-Upon-The-Greatest-Adventure-Known-to-Womankind has to bow before the might of the sales team. So, it's official. Book Four will be called:

NOW YOU SEE ME.

Not my first choice, or even my second, but I have to admit it's kind of creepy. And it does look good even on the very rough mock up my website designer produced. Okay, it's growing on me.

Generally speaking, things have perked up since I last blogged.  Not only has book f - oops, NOW YOU SEE ME been signed off by editors on both sides of the Atlantic, but also my ideas for Book Five have been accepted. This means that Evi Oliver (from BLOOD HARVEST) Lacey Flint and Mark Joesbury (both from NOW YOU SEE ME) will be returning. Blimey, it could be the start of a series.

Also, BLOOD HARVEST has made it through to the final shortlist of four in the CWA Gold Dagger award.  The other three are Blacklands (Belinda Bauer), The Way Home (George Pelecanos) and Shadowplay (Karen Campbell) The first two are excellent (damn it) and whilst I haven't read Shadowplay yet, I'm sure it's equally as good. I do keep having to tell myself the honour is in being on the shortlist. And the fun is in getting a new dress for the occasion. The eventual winner will be announced on ITV3 in early October.

In honour of its place in the final, Blood Harvest has been given a makeover.  Behold, stylish and rather scary new cover.

Another bit of good news is that the wonderful Buckman women have found me a Japanese publisher.  Tokyo Sogenshah, who also publish Ian Fleming, Minette Walters, Dean Koontz and Sarah Waters have bought Sacrifice, Awakening and Blood Harvest and will be publishing Sacrifice in the next eighteen months.

And finally, my pride and joy didn't need an operation to fix his broken elbow, his cast has been removed, he's been signed off fit to travel and we fly off to Italy  on Saturday.

As, I think, someone else will be doing too. If you're reading this, Powerful One, have a fabulous day, look as beautiful as only you can, and come back in top form for the autumn grind.  I can't do it without you.  Lots of love to you both from all of us here. xxx

All is not well Chez Bolton. In the first week of the school holidays, small (and far too adventurous) child fell off the monkey bars and shattered his elbow. As I write, we're waiting to hear whether the joint will mend itself or require surgery sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Summer plans are now in complete disarray, with hopes of enjoying our first long haul holiday since arrival of said child in more pieces than his elbow. We won't now be spending next week on a yacht in the British Virgin Islands, instead increasingly bored child and I will be stuck here in semi-rural Bucks, trying not to drive each other nuts. Nor will we be meeting up with friends in Devon for a week pretending to be swallows and amazons, because semi-disabled children and water sports just don't mix.

Oh, I had such high hopes for this summer!

Safe to say Mr B is not at his most sanguine. Neither am I. Holiday plans aside, I had two major deadlines to meet before we flew off to Tortola but the various summer camps and activities I'd planned to entertain child while I was working have also been cancelled. Looks like the final edit of Book Four and the detailed synopsis of Book Five are going to be fleshed out between the hours of ten and midnight.

Still haven't come up with a title, by the way. And lets face it, Book Four on the cover is hardly going to fly off the shelves!

Still, every cloud as they say.  We were cheered up considerably a few days ago by a phone call from She Who Is About To Glide Gracefully Down The Aisle. The Crime Writers Association have just announced the shortlists for the 2010 Daggers (also known as The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards) and Blood Harvest is one of eight books up for the very prestigious Gold Dagger. On 9^th August the list of eight will be whittled down to four finalists, with the eventual winner being announced at a televised ceremony in Grosvenor House in early October.

The annual daggers are a crime writing institution in the UK and the first tranche were announced a couple of days ago at the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. I'd have struggled to judge the Dagger in the Library this year, as three writers I particularly admire were all on the shortlist: Simon Beckett, Mo Hayder and Ariana Franklin. (Of course, they're all with Transworld - all the best thriller writers are!) Ariana won it, with Simon being highly commended. Mo can hardly sulk though. Her latest, Gone (my favourite Hayder book so far) has been shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, also to be announced in October.

I love my readers. Well, not the mean ones who post snide reviews on Amazon, obviously, but the ones who enjoy the books and are kind enough to let me know. Funny thing this, I've read voraciously for years, hero-worship more than one household name writer, but I've never once got in touch with any of them to tell them how much I've enjoyed a book, or to thank them for their work.

Which makes me now a bit ashamed of myself, as though for the same number of years I've been going to parties and to friends' houses for dinner without ever bothering with a thank you note. Because lots of people write to thank me and I can't tell you how lovely it is to get these cheery little notes in my inbox.

I can't say they make it all worthwhile, because it would be more than worthwhile anyway, but they certainly are the icing on the cake.

My favourite reader of the moment, though, is without doubt Carolyn from Texas who, whilst enjoying Awakening, felt the ending didn't quite hit the note she was looking for. So, and I'm sure only an American reader would think of doing this, she tore out the last ten pages, re-wrote it and sent it back to me.

And you know what - her version wasn't bad.

Spoiler alert - don't read on if you haven't yet (and might one day) finished Awakening.

Carolyn felt the ending didn't quite hit the romantic note she'd been hoping for. Not enough for this reader that heroine Clara has battled venomous snakes, resurrected corpses and saved the man she loves from a flesh dissolving end. She needed plucky Clara to be rewarded with a snog.

So in the new version she is. And for all those of you who found the ending of Awakening just that little lacking in warmth, here is Carolyn's re-write of pg 390.

Somehow, we'd moved closer. I could smell the wool of Matt's jacket, warm in the sunshine, his skin, his hair.

'What about your girlfriend, Matt?' I asked.

'Erstwhile girlfriend,' he replied, covering my lips with his. It was a slow, deeply satisfying kiss. Too soon, he pulled back and looked at me. With the barest touch, he laid his fingertips alongside the scar on my face.

'Are you OK?,' he asked.

Actually, Carolyn isn't alone. A lot of readers expressed their disappointment that the romances in both Awakening and Blood Harvest weren't tied up a little more neatly.  With Blood Harvest, in particular, I had an alternative ending in mind, much warmer and sexier, and had even written three quarters of it in my head. But when it came to it, in both books, the events leading up to the final pages were just too grim to tie either story up with a twee happy ending.

The other problem with having your characters ride off into the sunset, is that it's then so much harder to bring them back for subsequent books. If characters achieve a happy ending, I like to leave them there. On the other hand, if the events are resolved but not the relationships, there is scope to revisit.

I've just taken Evi Oliver out of her box, dusted her off and am trying her out for a leading role in book five. I wasn't too keen on Evi, all the time I was writing Blood Harvest. I found her a bit unwieldy, less interesting that my previous two lead females. In all fairness to her, though, she's bringing book five to life. Will she have her happy ending in Book Five? I suspect not, anymore than Lacey (whom you have yet to meet) will.

Book four is still with She Who Is About To Become A Vision In White and we've just heard that James Patterson has stolen my preferred title for it: Tick Tock. Honestly, that man! So, the race is on to find a new title for a book that is a modern take on the Jack the Ripper case before the cover design has to be agreed. Usually, that's sometime in … June! Ooops, my schedule is slipping.

By the way, if anyone fancies rewriting the endings of any of my books, feel free! I'll post the best ones here on the website.

Mr B was a bit disgruntled on Saturday. He'd had to fork out a tenner, so that he and small child could sit at the back of a hot sticky room and listen to me talk for an hour. (Even our eight year old complained he gets enough of that for free at home.) We were in Thame Town Hall, I on the thriller panel, they in the audience, as part of the inaugural Thame Arts and Literature Festival.

He's not fulsome in his praise, Mr B. This was the first such event he's been to and when I asked him afterwards how he thought it went, he said: 'You probably shouldn't have slagged off Stieg Larsson. He sells a lot more than you do.'

Well, I can't argue with that. But if I have to put up with people posting comments on Amazon about my "average and often clumsy novels", I don't see why I can't occasionally question another writer's phenomenal success.

And before you start muttering about sour grapes can I preface what I'm about to say by making clear that I'm a huge Dan Brown fan, consider JK Rowling to be a near genius, believe Lee Child to be almost as sexy in real life as his fictional counterpart, Jack Reacher, and if Stephen King were ever to ask, which I seriously doubt he would, the answer is a definite: yes, I will run away with you. I do not envy other writers' their massive success; as long as I believe it to be deserved.

Stieg Larsson though?

I've only read Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I'm told the trilogy gets better as it goes along but, I'm sorry, that's like saying a book starts off weak but picks up a third of the way through. In this incredibly competitive marketplace, such a book has no business on the shelves.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo needed the attention of a thumping good editor, in my view. One like my own, for example, because there's no way a book with something like fifty pages of financial information would ever get past her red pen. Especially as it's not, ultimately, remotely necessary to the plot.

Holding, as you can see, strong views on the subject of Mr L, I'd been looking forward to meeting my fellow panelist in Thame, Barry Forshaw, author of the first biography of Stieg, called "The Man Who Left Too Soon."  Barry is a journalist, book critic and crime editor. He's also written several non-fiction books about the crime genre and has a close to encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. If anybody would be able to tell me what the fuss was about, it was Barry. Because as far as I could see, the only thing the book has in its favour is the, admittedly fabulous, main character, Lisbeth Salander.

She's completely wonderful, I agree, and I so wish I'd invented her, but surely even a truly superb main character isn't enough, in itself, to turn an otherwise weak book into a great one?

Barry's take on the Larsson phenomenon? His success was down to two factors. The wonderful Lisbeth. And Larsson's premature death.

So there you go. That's what I have to do to hit the big time. Invent an absolutely corker of a main character. And die.

Now I'll probably spend the rest of this exceptionally beautiful late June day imagining how such a death might occur. And if you want to take issue with my Larsson comments, please, feel free. I would genuinely love to know what makes this book deserve the success it has had. Convince me and not only will I read it again, I'll even buy it again.

I'm often asked if I get writers' block. Never, has been my rather smug answer to date. Somehow the sentences, some good, some needing work, just kept pouring out. I wasn't sure I even believed in writers' block. Wasn't it just another way of saying, "can't actually be bothered"?

Well, it's payback time, because I find myself suffering a serious case of bloggers' block. I knew it would end in tears, back in January, when I allowed myself to be talked into this blog. I'm a writer, I complained to anyone who would listen. My life is exceptionally dull. I write, I wander aimlessly around the house, then I write some more. The highlight of my day is school pickup when I get to interact with real people* for about ten minutes.

Plus this is that very difficult time of year when I'm "between" books. Number four has been sent, in second-draft form, to She Who Must Be Obeyed and I have a few weeks respite to plan number five. Sheer torture. Staring at a blank screen and knowing that before the end of next February it has to contain 130,000 words.

You see, as well as bloggers' block, I've had a critical attack of planners' block. I have a basic idea for a story that I know could be brilliant. I just can't for the life of me see how to turn that idea into a fully formed plot. The planning is hard. Even harder than the editing and that usually sends me running for the gin bottle by three o'clock every afternoon. During planning season, a whole day can go by and I've produced a paragraph of text and had one idea that might comprise half a scene.  It feels very unproductive and, compared to the writing process when I might have 3000 words to show for a day's work, extremely frustrating. And there's always that nagging fear at the back of my head: what if I can't do it again?

I was talking about this on Wednesday night to the very clever and articulate Tom Cain, author of The Accident Man series, in front of an audience of several dozen people at Feltham Library. Tom doesn't plan, he says. He likes to be surprised by his stories and his characters. Good for you, buddy. If I didn't plan, the only surprise I'd get is if words actually got written.

So apologies to all the regular visitors (I know you exist, even if you never talk back to me) if I maintain radio silence for a while. I haven't gone anywhere. I'm not doing anything exciting. I'm just staring at my screen, waiting to be inspired.

Oh, and Tom made me laugh. He says all books are masquerading as something else. Mine, he thinks, are ghost stories masquerading as forensic thrillers. His, on the other hand, are romances, pretending to be action thrillers.  You have to read a Tom Cain book to appreciate just how funny that is.

* I use that term quite loosely, but after several hours with just my own company, I'm easily satisfied.