Christoffer Petersen

Authentic Arctic Thrillers

Christoffer Petersen

Uummannaq

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November in Uummannaq, Greenland

So this is Uummannaq, the town where Jane and I lived for four years. In my books I often mention the colours of the buildings in Greenland, and you can see them clearly here. Houses can be all colours, but blue is for the utilities with one of the power company’s buildings in the far left of the picture, on the road. Yellow is for hospitals and medical centres (although the main hospital in Nuuk is red, I think – I was pretty drugged-up while I was there!)

Jane worked in Uummannaq Hospital, and if you’ve read any of my books, well, plenty goes on there, from gun battles on the road in front of it (The Ice Star) and nefarious goings on inside it (Inside the Bear’s Cage).

But you’re not thinking of that, and you’re perhaps only barely aware of the hospital.

I’m guessing you’re looking at the mountain. 😉

Uummannaq mountain is 1,170 metres high (3,839 ft). It’s one of the most striking mountains in Greenland, perhaps the world, and I was thrilled skinny to call it home.

At least for a little while.

Chris

The Short Story Challenge

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Shortly after Christmas last year, still dealing with the fact that we cancelled Jane’s family Christmas due to COVID-19, I discovered that the writer Dean Wesley Smith was running a sale on his courses to help writers during the pandemic, among them was The Great Challenge.

The challenge was to write a short story every week for a year.

52 stories.

Now, I write a lot – not as much as some, but tonnes compared to the majority of traditionally published authors. But the thought of taking on the challenge appealed to me, especially after a weird year.

At this point, I might add that I found 2020 to be a fascinating year – difficult, yes, but fascinating – largely because I read David Quammen’s excellent nonfiction book Spillover in November and December 2019, and then suddenly, damn me if it didn’t come true! I honestly think that book helped me get through the year, just like watching the film Contagion did – an earlier favourite of mine, pre-pandemic and also frighteningly prescient. I should add that I’m not blind to the horror of COVID-19, but reading that book allowed me to take a step to one side and to think of the virus as a living thing, and the challenges of stopping it.

But I digress.

I was looking for a different kind of challenge, and I found one.

I started in the first week of January this year, and have hit the short story a week every week alongside my other projects. Sometimes I wished I didn’t have to write another short story but I did, every week.

Some of the stories have been Christoffer Petersen stories, others by other pen names such as Bran Nicholls. In addition to the fun of writing stories, I’ve had a blast making the covers for them too.

This week will be number 46.

A new story, a new cover, and a new pen name – this one’s secret, the second of my secret pen names. 😉

I’m getting there.

Chris

Yeah, I couldn’t wait until Sunday

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I planned to wait until this Sunday, but decided to tease the release today. And I say tease as there’s not much I want to say at the moment, and certainly no spoilers. But, for the sake of saying something, I should add that I’m working on an Advent story to be released each Advent Sunday this Christmas.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a Christmas story. I’ve currently got two Advent Calendar stories with a chapter for each day of the 24 days of the Greenlandic and Scandinavian Christmas period.

The existing series is called Dark Advent, and it starts with The Calendar Man.

The Calendar Man and Invisible Touch are the calendar novels, while Twelfth Night and North Star Bay are add-ons, continuing a thread started in each of the calendar stories.

So, as you can see, I try and release something each Christmas.

This Christmas is different, as I bumped up the release date for the Greenland Missing Persons #12 The Blister at the End of the World. It’s coming out this Christmas, but it’s not a Christmas story.

Yule at Aurora Station, however, is totally a Christmas story.

And now, to the teasing…

Just like I did with The Calendar Man, this story is set a little into the future where we find a popular character “all grown up”.

Yep, Luui is in this one!

Without giving too much of the story away, let me give you an idea of the way it will work.

I’m going to release each part of the story on each Advent Sunday in 2021 as per the following dates:

  • Sunday November 28, 1st Advent, part 1/4 of Yule at Aurora Station – FREE
  • Sunday December 5, 2nd Advent, part 2/4 of Yule at Aurora Station – $0.99
  • Sunday December 12, 3rd Advent, part 3/4 of Yule at Aurora Station – $0.99
  • Sunday December 19, 4th Advent, part 4/4 of Yule at Aurora Station – $0.99

I’m going to release them on my payhip store and then as a collected work for $2.99 on Amazon after Christmas Day.

Part 1 will be FREE, so you can try it and see if it’s something for you, and then if it is, you can choose to buy each part as it is released on the following three Advent Sundays this Christmas, or wait for the collected work. Once all the parts are collected as one, they will be about the length of one of my novellas, and priced accordingly.

I’ll tease a bit more about the plot later, but hey, it’s a Luui story, there will be spirits, probably monsters, and there will be mayhem. But she’s in her twenties, so it’s Luui but older, more mellow, believe it or not.

If that’s enough to give you a Petra frown, then you’re not alone. 🙂

More later!

Chris

Board Game Backdrop

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View from our window, November 10, Qaanaaq, Greenland

Jane and I played a lot of Settlers of Catan in Greenland. We often played with a Danish family when we lived in Uummannaq, and then in Qaanaaq we challenged each other, turning 3-4 player games into a 2 player where we both played two teams, but with a twist. When one of Jane’s teams was about to win – she was always about to win – we wrote her colours down on two scraps of paper. So, for example, blue on one piece and red on the other. I folded the paper with a piece hidden in each hand. If red had technically won the game Jane had to tap my hand with the piece of paper with red written on it. If she tapped blue then it was too bad, we played on, only red was not allowed to make any further moves or feed resources to blue.

Ingenious or simply mad?

Doesn’t matter.

If Jane didn’t tap the “right” hand I usually won.

But then, failing that, we just looked out the window for a bit.

This photo is taken from our lounge/kitchen in Qaanaaq. Our little wooden house was brand new, but designed for the Scandinavian summer house market. Also, the builders didn’t wait until the permafrost was at it’s lowest levels. So, when the ground froze and lifted each winter we couldn’t shut any doors. 🙂

Arctic Hares often ran past the window, sometimes running up to a hunter’s front door, bewildered by the lights, until it was lights out, and the hare was hung by its feet in the porch to be eaten later that winter.

You could call it Arctic take-out, delivered to the door.

Oh, and you can see Baffin Bay and Herbert Island on the far right.

Chris

When you strike gold

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Denmark has, in my opinion, one of the best library systems in the world. I’m not sure “systems” is the right word, but everything is connected. All the libraries are connected. I can order something from the database, and it might be plucked from the Royal Danish Air Force library and sent to my local library to be picked up. I’ve ordered articles from old newspapers and a librarian scans it and sends me the PDF. I can watch 100 films or documentaries every month, and borrow the DVDs of those films not available for streaming. CDs, board games, computer games – anything you want, and more, when you’re not careful. Like the time I thought it would be interesting to read Sir Richard Burton’s notes from 1001 Arabian Nights. Well, they arrived, all 13 volumes, but they were so old I had to read them at the library.

I must admit, I bit off more than I could chew there. But nevertheless, it is a rare occasion indeed when the Danish library cannot deliver.

Sometimes it feels like magic, as a certain character of mine might say.

However, another character of mine is rather less loquacious. And whereas I know where he got his name from, I did not know the name Maratse also belonged to the man believed to be the very last shaman in Greenland.

I only discovered this recently, but now, thanks to the library, I have Kirsten Bang’s book in my hand.

There’s not much to say at the moment, other than how cool I think it is that with all the shamanism (fictional and heavily dramatised) in my books, I love the fact that there’s a link, if only in name, to my main character.

So I’m going to put aside A Very Stable Genius which I’m currently reading, and crack open a very old book about a very old man, and see if I can’t lose myself in East Greenland for a while.

More on that later.

Chris

Nothing is impossible

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The publishing world has changed drastically since the advent of eBooks. There are thousands of articles and blog posts about the changes, and I’m not going to recap any of them here. But what I will say, as an independent author, is the smartest thing I ever did when flirting with the traditional publishing world was to keep my English rights for the books they were interested in.

I’d like to take credit for that smart move, but I must confess that at the time, I was ready to go all in, and sign over everything, because I believed I had finally made it. An editor from a big French publisher reached out after finding me on Amazon. They were interested in my books, but they would only deal with an agent. I found a reputable agency in Copenhagen, and I’m guessing having a publisher in my back pocket might have worked in my favour, and I was invited to meet them in the big city. I took my bag of books – I think I had five at the time – and I went off to make my fortune.

Sitting on the train, I felt like I was in a Disney movie, with my bag of books clutched to my chest. It was fun. I was excited about the prospects of becoming a ‘real author’. There was a tiny part of my brain that urged caution, and reminded me of everything I had achieved already as an indie author, but I ignored it. I was ready.

To cut a long story short, after the initial meeting and a tiny bit of haggling about commission rates, I accepted and the agency said they would send the contract to be signed.

The Chestnut Man got in the way.

Yep, that Chestnut Man.

Basically, the agency was swamped, understandably so, with putting the finishing touches on that book, and my contract took a little while to arrive. In the meantime, that voice urging caution got louder and louder, and when the contract did come, I renegotiated and pulled my English rights, leaving the agency to represent my foreign and film rights only. My English rights were my only source of income, so I kind of needed them. Prior to pulling those rights back the agency suggested I return to teaching.

This was in 2018.

I quit my teaching job in December 2017, wrote Seven Graves, One Winter in January/February 2018, published it on Valentine’s Day, got spotted in March, signed in June.

However, the French realised they already had a “Greenland Crime” book in their catalogue, and they pulled out. But during that time Françoise contacted me. She was a translator and had heard about the French interest in Seven Graves, One Winter, and was keen to translate it. But of course that particular deal fell apart. And with no other French interest, so did the opportunity for translation.

Fast forward to February 2021.

I was getting more and more disillusioned with traditional publishing, and considered quitting my agency contract to be truly independent once more. I reached out to Françoise. Was she still interested? And would she like to translate Petra’s Greenland Missing Persons series? They were not on the agency’s books, and therefore not bound to any contract or commission.

I think you can see where this is going, but I’m really excited to say she was interested, and today I published the fifth French translation in the Greenland Missing Persons: Le Piège de l’Hiver. Françoise is currently working on the sixth book in the series. You can find the others here. You’ll also see a Polish edition – more about that later. 🙂

When dealing with the traditional world of publishing, you’re often told about the things that are impossible to do as an independent author. Getting indie books translated was one of those things. Well, when you find the right person, and you both agree on the terms, then nothing is impossible.

One of my favourite books is Michael Asher’s Impossible Journey. It’s a fabulous true-life account of a husband and wife crossing the Sahara with camels. Michael Asher is one of my heroes and I was fortunate to meet him and his wife, photographer Mariantonietta Peru, at a lecture in Glasgow. In the book, Asher visits a French explorer to pick his brains about desert travel. What Théodore Monod said has stuck with me ever since I first read it: … nothing is impossible. Only, some things are difficult.

That quote and that attitude has been my mantra for as long as I can remember. It’s gotten me this far, at least. However, I’d like to add something to that quote and change it slightly to:

Nothing is impossible. Only, some things are difficult, but with the right help, many things can be easier.

I got the right help with my French translations.

Thanks, Françoise!

Chris