Nick Harkaway's Blog

My new book, Tigerman, is coming out on May 22nd in the UK, June 2nd in Australia and July 29th in the US.

(Sorry, Americans: I do try, every time, to get them all sync'd, but the publishing industry doesn't take to it.)

I'm doing a bunch of publicity stuff around it and of course I'll be at some festivals this year - Hay and Edinburgh to name the two big'uns - and I'll be at the Literary Death Match in July...

I've written some stuff about Tigerman on the blog (here and here) and I've just done the Writers' Blog Tour as well.

More news on the main site and on Twitter and so on - but I thought I'd flag all this up here on Goodreads as well.

Cheers,

NH

There are some audio clips (well, audio with a small video component) on YouTube for those who have read the book. They're Frankie's letters, read aloud. Fun.

The first one is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofji_z...

I have been nominated!



So please do go and vote - ideally for me :)

ALSO: I have a Q&A thing happening here at Goodreads. If you post a question in the group, I'll video an answer. Assuming that your question will not actually cause me to catch fire and explode on camera or get arrested.

Cheers,

NH

Two bits of new audio for The Blind Giant - one at the TBG tumblr here and one at AudioBoo here. Both are short readings from the book.

I'm experimenting, because I haven't done a lot of internet audio, so let me know what you think. :)

NH

So now I can say it: the geniuses at Knopf - and they really are - have encrypted a message on the cover of Angelmaker. Almost no one knows what it says (I, obviously, do :)

So... more details here.

Insane. Just insane. Everything happening at once, phonecalls, interviews on the net, a piece in the paper and another in a magazine...

Wow. I'm exhausted, and delighted. And not the least of my delight is the insanely amazing trailer Heinemann have had made for Angelmaker.

And there's so much else to be happy about - the buzz on Twitter, the general wow-factor of the covers in the UK and the US (coming in March)...

I ought to say more but I'm just too rushed and I have to go and take care of my kid. But this is a huge day for me, and it's been amazing.

NH

Democracy

A form of rulership buttressed by the twin pillars of popularity and pedantry. Rulers are put in place when they win a popularity contest, during which they will say and do things they have no intention of repeating subsequently. [...]

More here.

"Don’t try to adopt a style which doesn’t feel like yourself; your mask will slip as you work. Write, and find the voice, and then when you’ve found it, print it out and stick it up over your computer and look at it any time you’re in doubt. Let one good paragraph tell you how your writing should sound."

More here.

"…characterisation, plotting, self-editing and stamina are all vital and more challenging in the long run, but the making-stuff-up skill is more mysterious and less examined, because writers tend to think it’s a single action…"

More here.

So, Angelmaker is coming...

It's insanely exciting. I haven't quite got to grips with how exciting it is because I'm busy writing The Blind Giant (which I keep mistyping as The Bling Giant), the non-fiction book I signed up to do for the John Murray imprint. Which is also exciting, and in a way even scarier because I am not a non-fiction author in my mind, even thought I'm about to be one in reality, and because it involves writing about stuff I cannot just make up on the spot.

Back to Angelmaker:

the title of the book was originally (and throughout the entire first couple of drafts) Crazy Joe. I thought that would be okay, but it wasn't. Apart from anything else, there is apparently only one Crazy Joe, and that's Crazy Joe Gallo, and this book is not about him. Worse, I'm told it's a boring title. And beyond that, while the book was initially about the icon, Crazy Joe - the archetypal gangster who dies in a hail of bullets in The Gone-Away World and who is sort of the distillation of every bad man in every black and white detective movie from the 30s and 40s - that connection faded. I never really intended for him to have crossed universes, but I was inspired by and holding on to that first statement of Crazy Joe... and then I wasn't. Joe became his own person.

So this title is the one we settled on. It's a good title, with a sense of Ian Fleming about it, which is kinda cool and appropriate to the material. It's also a title which has been used by a couple of other people for completely different stories, but no one seems to be worried about that, so I'm not either.

Aaaaand... stopping there for the moment. More to follow... :)