FAQ, Part One
Or What Happens On Book Tour Doesn’t Have To Stay On Book Tour
As always, thank you for opening this and giving it a glance. I know you get a lot of newsletters. I do, too. It can be a bit much sometimes, but they give me something to read while I drink my coffee in the morning. World news isn’t always the best thing to wake up to. I like to enjoy a quiet moment before panic sets in.
Anyway, I’m back home after touring to promote Red Rabbit. (Have you heard of this book?) If you’ve been to one of my events (or if you read my previous newsletter), you might remember the Q&A part of the evening is always my favorite. I’m pretty much done talking about this book 24/7 now and I thought I’d share some of the questions I got in case you wanted to ask me something, but couldn’t make it out to see me.
Maybe you noticed the title of this one: FAQ, Part One. This time around, I thought I’d address some of the general questions I got. Then I thought I’d follow this up with more writerly questions I get about craft and process, the things other writers (published or not), and booksellers, and librarians ask me about. Inside baseball stuff. So stay tuned for the next installment.
Q: Will there be another Murder Squad book?
This is the question I get asked the most, by a long shot. Like, two to one. And the answer is… I don’t know.
I did begin work on the sixth (and what I thought would be the last) Murder Squad book. But I have changed publishers. I am writing horror stories now, and fantasy stories, and I’m even planning a science fiction book. Generally speaking, publishers don’t want to finish series that are carried over from other publishers. They have to put a lot into promoting a book, and if it’s the last book in a series it’s just going to promote their competition’s backlist. It’s just bad business. I bear no ill will toward either of my book publishers. They’ve been very good to me.
So… Yes, technically there is a sixth Murder Squad book. It’s called Hammersmith, and it jumps ahead to a decade after the events of Lost and Gone Forever. In it, Inspector Day is retired, and Inspector Hammersmith (yes, you read that right, he got a promotion) goes to him for help with a case. It’s their final adventure and I’m determined to get it out there at some point.
I have no idea when it will be published, but I imagine it will be published someday. Maybe when I get back the rights to the first five books, or maybe when I die and there’s a buck to be made by somebody.
Let’s see which comes first.
Back to Red Rabbit, and my work in general…
Q: Where did you get the idea for this book?
The same place I get all my ideas. Every Saturday night I take a handful of dried corn to the basement, where there’s a tiny naked man who lives behind our water heater. He has big ears and big teeth, and he wears the skin of a stray cat around his waist. I offer him the corn and I wait quietly while he eats it, careful not to look directly at him. When he’s finished with the corn, he gives me a strip of birch bark on which he’s written a story idea. Then he leaps at me and fights me, trying to get it back. If I can fend him off long enough to get upstairs with the piece of bark, the idea is mine to keep. One day I won’t run fast enough, or I’ll lose the fight against him, and I’ll have to take his place in the basement, generating ideas for the next person who moves in here.
Q: Okay, where did you really get the idea?
Fine. My son hates Westerns, but I love them (the good ones, at least, the ones that explore universal themes within genre tropes), so I decided to try writing one he might like.
Q: Does he like it?
Sigh. He hasn’t read it.
Q: The stuff you write is pretty dark. Is your wife afraid of you?
Yes.
Q: Have you ever had a weird dream and written about it?
Yup. Several times. (Believe it or not, this is an actual question somebody asked me at a bookstore event.) In the aforementioned Red Rabbit (I have mentioned Red Rabbit, right?) one of the characters is reading a book called The Call of the Nightfall King. There are even excerpts included from it, as if it’s a real book. I dreamed it up one night as I was working on Red Rabbit, and I decided to use it. The excerpts from it were originally much longer, but my editor wisely suggested I trim them. I might write the whole book some day.
Q: Who is your favorite author?
My all-time favorite writer is Graham Greene. I love everything he wrote, but if you haven’t read him I’d suggest maybe starting with Our Man in Havana or The Quiet American. But they’re all great! Or watch one of the movies he wrote. The Third Man is among my favorite films, and it’s something I rewatch frequently. Fallen Idol is great, too, if you can find it.
Q: Did you buy any books while on book tour?
(Okay, nobody actually asked me this, but I do always get asked what I’m currently reading and I never know how to answer, since I’m usually reading six things at once, and many of those things are research for whatever it is that I’m writing, which is not the thing you came to hear me talk about, and I don’t read that much in my category (categories?) anyway, so what I’m actually reading is probably not going to be of much interest to you, and I can never seem to come up with a really great book that I might conceivably be reading and that will be appealing to you, who are presumably into the sorts of thing I write (thank you), so this “question” is at least tangentially related to something I get asked a lot.)
I try to buy something at each shop I go to. (That’s an incentive for bookstores to host me, right?) It’s often tough to do, since a lot of the time a bookstore is already closed for the evening by the time I get there. I leave room for books in my roller-bag just in case.
This time around I bought How To Protect Bookstores And Why by Danny Caine, co-owner of the wonderful Raven Bookstore, which hosted one of my events, The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris, which I’ve read before and is also research material for the book I’m currently writing, and Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig, which I will talk about in my next newsletter. All good books, and all highly recommended by me!
I also bought a mass-market paperback copy of Stephen King’s Bag of Bones at an airport somewhere because I had finished reading my “traveling book” on the flight in. I am very hard on traveling books (they get stuffed in my carry-on and dog-eared, and otherwise treated in ways I would never treat other books), and I generally don’t keep them. Those other three books are in my office right now, but Mr King’s book is hanging out in the Little Free Library at my curb. If you swing by today, it can be yours!
Q: Will there be a sequel to Red Rabbit?
Yes. It’s called Rose of Jericho, and it ought to come out next year. I don’t have cover art to show yet, but as soon as I do…
Q: Are you working on anything else?
Of course! My wife attended one of my book events and was asked if I’m difficult to live with. She said I’m mostly okay, except when I haven’t written anything all day. So, yeah, I’m hard at work on the book to come after Rose of Jericho. It’s set in the same world as Red Rabbit, too, but it’s not directly a sequel. I’ve also written a fantasy novella that I should be able to talk about pretty soon.
While I was doing publicity stuff it was hard to work on a novel, so I wrote a slew of short stories. (I’m even poking away at a short story today!) I’ll let you know when and where (and if) you can read any of those. Maybe I’ll even toss one into a newsletter.
Like I say, I’ll probably do another FAQ-type newsletter soon, so if you have questions, please feel free to get in touch. The contact field on my website connects directly to my email, and while I’m pretty slow to respond I do read everything that comes to my inbox.
Feel free to pass this thing along to anyone you think might be interested. I don’t do much with social media anymore (I was honestly never great at the socials, and now it’s fragmented to a point at which I can’t figure out where to post), and I’m experimenting with this as my primary means of communicating with readers.
I did a fun interview with Kansas Public Radio in which I answered some of these very questions, and many others besides. Fun fact: I got lost on my way to the interview and I wandered around the wrong neighborhood for about an hour. When I finally showed up—very late, very sweaty, and very grumpy—the folks there could not have been kinder or more welcoming to me. It was a great experience that might otherwise have been terrible, and I’m grateful to them.
As always, if you couldn’t make it to one of my events, but are looking for a signed copy of any of my books, please contact Round Table Bookstore and they’ll hook you up.
Oh! I almost forgot! It’s spooky season. Have this. I don’t want it.
Your friend,
Alex
Really enjoyed Red Rabbit and happy to know there's a sequel coming.
Also, I do hope we get Hammersmith at some point.