Following The Ice Star down under, I find myself regularly asking Google what time it is in Australia “right now”. And right now, The Ice Star is moving up the charts for International Mystery and Crime on Amazon.
So, as a crazy thank you to the sudden boost in readers taking a chance on my book, I dug around for an Aussie song from my childhood… I was 10 at the time. Right now, well, I’m a little older.
Thanks again to Aussie readers! Have a great day/evening.
Sometimes called “fall winds” (wikipedia) catabatic winds are common in Greenland. Fittingly, this fall, I will be releasing my first Arctic Short with the title Katabatic.
In Police Constable David Maratse’s first solo outing, set some time prior to the events in The Ice Star, I will be exploring the tragic themes of shame and suicide through a journalist’s narrative documenting the pursuit of a hunter who murdered his brother in a drunken brawl.
Is that Noir enough for you? Then be sure to check it out, and maybe even pre-order it.
The official release date is October 23rd, 2017. Until then, Katabatic is available for pre-order on Amazon kindles and tablets, and other devices with the Amazon app.
A lot of books get an awful lot of abuse, but the best-loved and most abused, in my opinion, are the ones squeezed onto hastily-erected shelves in frostbitten huts plunged into darkness for three to four months each year. The Ice Star has yet to join the hallowed spines of polar greats, but it is on its way to the Arctic, in the library of an Aurora Expeditions adventure cruise ship – they just posted about it on their Facebook page.
I have discovered interesting books in remote cabins in the far north of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. Tracing a finger down the cracked and splintered spine of a much-read, and much-abused book evokes a sense of adventure for it takes an adventurous spirit to reach such cabins in the wilds.
In the same way that frost can often eat into a book in a remote cabin, books can eat into the miles taken to reach such places. When the stove is burning, your wool socks are thawing on the line looped between the rafters, and you’re kicking back in a bruised-wood chair, a sleeping bag wrapped around your knees, a cup of cocoa in one hand and a book in the other, well … you get the picture. There’s nothing better after a long trek, paddle, climb, or ski than following the path of another adventurer through the pages of a book.
I plan on sending more books into the wilds, perhaps you’ll find one someday.
Photo of Shackleton’s bookshelf from The Smithsonian.
Fenna scrabbled to her feet and kicked the Gunnery Sergeant in the groin. He moaned, she kicked him again in the head, and then, a third time, planting the sole of her size five desert boots in the centre of his chest. She ignored the Gunnery Sergeant and collected her equipment, slipping her arms through the straps of the empty hydration pack, closing her notepad and stuffing it into the cargo pocket of her trousers, before pushing the rubber caps over the ends of the scope and slinging the rifle over her shoulder. The evening chill descended quickly, cooling the sweat on her back. She tugged a buff from her trouser pocket and slipped it over her neck. She took one last look at the Gunnery Sergeant and took a breath. It was time to move.
This is it then, book two in The Greenland Trilogy is less than a month from release, doing well in the pre-sales, and serving up a smorgasbord of nerves – for the author, anyway.
In book two, Fenna is plagued by demons from the past, but, at the same time, she must confront new adversaries like the USMC Gunnery Sergeant, above.
There is plenty of intrigue to offset the action in book two, but, I will admit, it gets a little rough at times, and, in Greenland, anything goes.
Curious? Then, you might be interested to pick up a cheap pre-order of In the Shadow of the Mountain, available from Amazon for kindle books and apps. The paperback will be available to buy on the date of publication: August 1st.
Today is a good day. There have been many good days on this indie author’s journey, but today is especially good as I have now – according to my budget – moved out of the red and into the black! I have now earned back the money I have paid for covers and promotion, and am now a colossal £7 or $10 richer! Of course, after Danish tax, that means about £3.50 or $5 richer, enough for a coffee without cream. But the journey to this point has been wild. And it’s the journey that counts!
So what’s next?
Well, it’s not like I don’t have any plans, but for this moment anyway, it’s time to kick back and enjoy the coffee – without cream – and dream of distant peaks, and icy summits, for the climb is what it is all about, summitting is just the moment when every step on the journey comes together.
I have a lot of steps left as an indie author, it’s time to gear-up!
Curious about that “next step”? I’ll be sure to post more information soon, but until then, you might be interested to pick up a cheap pre-order of book two in the Greenland Trilogy. In the Shadow of the Mountain is available from Amazon for kindle books and apps.
I was a teacher in Greenland. There were lots of highlights. Second to the amazing, and, at times, exasperating kids, was the role of external invigilator for the spoken English exams. Greenland must be one of the few places where the invigilator is flown by helicopter to schools in the remote settlements. Greenland is vast – something you understand when trying to get your head around distances – but from the air… well, Greenland can be a humbling experience. As it should be – something every invigilator should be exposed to before an exam. “You live here?” is a common thought to have when approaching the gravel landing square, marked with a rusty oil drum in each corner. Exams are one thing, but almost everything can have the flavour of a test in Greenland, and the results are not measured in grades, and they can rarely be captured in words.
You may have heard that the Inuit have a lot of words for snow. Honestly, I don’t know how many, and it is difficult to know when pop culture ends and the practicality of describing snow and ice begins. Until, that is, you’re standing on thin ice, with a kilometre or more of black sea beneath you. Then, as you begin to imagine sinking down in the black depths, I guarantee you will begin to imagine all kinds of words for ice, as if your life depends upon it, which it does, actually.
Once, when accompanying a hunter to check his long fishing line, my Western feet broke through the ice.
Despite weighing a good twenty kilos more than the hunter I was with, it wasn’t my weight that was a problem, it was my attitude, my angle of attack. Admittedly, the ice was only a centimetre or so thick – we had left the dogs behind. Apparently their attitude was similar to mine, although they were safe. No, the problem was that I didn’t glide or shush across the ice with flat feet, I walked, putting weight on my toes and breaking the ice. The hunter noticed, gave me a few words of advice, and shushed on ahead of me. I followed, pushing the sledge, skirting the bad ice, the really thin stuff, and taking a torturous route back to the village.
Rarely have I been more scared.
Rarely have I felt more alive.
If you spend time in Greenland, if you spend time on the ice, you’ll experience that feeling – that moment when you struggle to understand how you can have a cheesy grin on your face, while fighting the urge to pee, wondering if your heart is going to explode out of your chest, amazed that is hasn’t already.
Greenland, like Alaska, does that to you. Something I hope to have captured in my first Greenland thriller, and now as I edit the second.
If you’d like to know more you could try out The Ice Star – available in paperback and on Kindle or for Kindle apps from Amazon, or pre-order book two: In the Shadow of the Mountain, here:
It’s been quiet around here for a little while now, and with good reason. After many years of rented accommodation, Jane and I finally bought a house. We’re moved in, but we’re still moving in, if you know what I mean. This whole settling process is going to take time, and yet, for once, time is what we have, heaps of it. So the cellar can wait, we can navigate around the kitchen, the floors have been sanded and soaped, and the writing room – the writing nook – does not need to be ready today, tomorrow, or even three months from now, just so long as it exists, that’s enough.
During the course of my studies, I researched writing, lived on anecdotes and sage advice from authors. I rejected the concept of choosing a specific time of day and place to write, choosing instead to follow the idea of getting words on the page, whenever and wherever you can. It worked for me, and it still does, which begs the question: why do I even need a writing nook?
I can’t answer that.
But I think it has something to do with knowing that there is a space that I can retreat to, if need be. I have written a lot of words in libraries, hiding in plain sight in the afternoons, at kitchen tables, early in the morning when everyone else is sleeping, and in the armchair, late at night, when the house is still and the dust settling. I don’t need the writing space, but for the first time ever I have one.
It is a space, hardly a nook, but thoughts of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, invade it as I follow Fenna through part 2 of book 2: In the Shadow of the Mountain. It’s going well, she is surprising – ad-libbing and deviating from the storybeats. After the events in the first half of the book, I need to give her some leeway, and I figure that, by now, she knows what she is doing. I just need to relax, and let her get on with the story, telling it her way, with a few descriptions and comments from me once in a while.
As for now. It’s back to my nook.
