It's been a long time coming, but my thriller Switch finally debuted in the UK and Germany this week and the reader reviews have been great. After such a long journey to publication, I can't describe how good it feels to receive such positive feedback. Here are a few snippets:
"Terrific, you’ve got to read this one. The emotions, both good and evil, that run through the book set it above most ... and the perverted mind manipulating the action is brilliantly drawn. Great stuff." —…
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Added by Grant McKenzie on July 20, 2009 at 4:25am —
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I've posted more about landing book signings on my main blog, "
Another Writer's Life."
Added by Austin S. Camacho on July 20, 2009 at 3:49am —
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It isn't only McDonald's that offers to supersize its food. In the most violent town in the West Bank, the local specialty is a hot cheese and syrup dessert called qanafi. Last month a Nablus baker made a qanafi that weighed 1,300 kg (1.3 tonnes). After the townspeople recovered from the sugar rush, a real estate developer put together a team this weekend to make a 1,700 kg qanafi that was 74 yards long.
The intention is to repair the image of a city damaged by nine years as the most…
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Added by Matt Rees on July 20, 2009 at 1:44am —
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Searching for a new script to get Hamas and Fatah to cooperate.
By Matt Beynon Rees -
GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Soap operas usually block out scenes with two cameras, one for each of the glaring opponents. The editor switches between each actor as they snarl and sneer. As for the plot, you can tune in every few months and…
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Added by Matt Rees on July 19, 2009 at 4:45pm —
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I've been flying below the radar for a while. I've had my head down working and the result is a new book.
DISGRUNTLED will be my next thriller and it will be hitting bookshelves next April.
Also, I've resurrected one of my old titles,
DRAGGED INTO DARKNESS, which has been out of print since 2004. It was my first short story collection and it contains some of my favorite short stories. The book has been hard to find even secondhand, although someone is…
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Added by Simon Wood on July 19, 2009 at 10:49am —
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Today was the day of the annual library sale, where the public and school libraries of three counties put all their over-stock books together and sell them at great prices. I'm talking $5 for 3 hardcovers, and $2 for 3 paperbacks (mass market and trade size).
For a stingy yet voracious reader like myself, I always go ape-shit crazy at this sale, and I bought a huge load of books for about $25 in just about every genre and subject. The trick is that you have to get to the back room of…
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Added by D.R. MacMaster on July 19, 2009 at 4:03am —
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I'm pleased to say that The Suffocating Sea, the third in the Inspector Horton Marine Mystery series of crime novels set in the Solent area of the UK, is to be published in Large Print in September.
I've also been told that it's coming out as an unabridged audio book but am waiting confirmation of the date. When I know it I'll post something here and on my web site at http://www.rowmark.co.uk/
I was chuffed when…
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Added by Pauline Rowson on July 19, 2009 at 3:38am —
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Earlier this week I noted that
I dislike writers describing a character as looking like a particular movie star. I cited a few examples from Elmore Leonard (which touched some nerves among fans of the Great Detroit Coolster) and one from Dan Brown. Now I bring you a real corker from The New Yorker.
The magazine's latest issue (at least the latest one to get through the Israeli postal…
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Added by Matt Rees on July 18, 2009 at 8:52pm —
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That's right. Those who bought those books now don't have them, as they have been deleted from their Kindles, their accounts credited for the price they paid.
So Amazon, via the Kindle, can take away books you have paid for, meaning when you buy a Kindle edition book, you don't really own it. Yet another reason not to buy a Kindle.…
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Added by John Dishon on July 18, 2009 at 8:06am —
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(Also posted on
One Bite at a Time.)
Interesting article in Slate magazine this week by Jack Shafer, about e-book pricing. The entire article is worth reading, but something he brings up in the first paragraph interests me more than the rest.
According to Shafer, publishers routinely sell books to retail booksellers for half the cover price. This…
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Added by Dana King on July 18, 2009 at 1:56am —
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They've taken over my brain again. Characters who I thought were going to be fun and entertaining as they romped through a murder have turned serious, and I can't stop them.
The problem is that I spoke about this book with an agent, and she liked the concept. Believe it or not, this agent actually asked what I was working on, not what I had finished. When I gave her two sketchy plots, she asked for samples of those. That sounded great at the time, an incentive to write the two ideas…
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Added by Peg Herring on July 17, 2009 at 10:04pm —
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So with the weekend upon us, another opportunity to get a chapter or two written...
Added by Douglas on July 17, 2009 at 10:00pm —
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We are four international crime fiction writers who have come together to blog as International Crime Writers’ Reality Check. Barbara Nadel has a series set in Istanbul, Colin Cotterill’s has a series set in Laos, Matt Beynon Rees has a set a series in the West Bank/Gaza, and Christopher G. Moore has set his series in Thailand.
We will be blogging about our lives, research, observations and writing from our region of the world. Reality check is our way of seeking out the facts and…
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Added by ChristopherGMoore on July 17, 2009 at 7:14pm —
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For the most part, I love the editing process. You submit your book with the initial panic that it’s crap and your publisher will hate it, but then you get the thumbs up. Phew! And then comes the detailed editorial report, which not only points out all the good things in the book, but also how to improve it. And like every writer, I’m all for making each book the best it can be.
But one of the things I HATE about editing is the scenes and lines that end up on the cutting room floor,…
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Added by Phillipa Martin (PD Martin) on July 17, 2009 at 1:00pm —
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Agree about the profs wanting to impress, especially each other, but you have to see past all that crap. Under all the post-structuralist jargon some of them know what they're talking about. Separating all the nonsense from the valuable advice is exactly what you've got to do. There is a lot to be learned about what way you're going to tell your story, and why.
I'm new here. I've written one crime novel, Lost Bodies. You can read an extract on Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals, if you…
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Added by david manderson on July 17, 2009 at 7:39am —
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For my first blog post in Crimespace, some BSP:
I have two new stories out, neither of which is a Diana Andrews story. She is my series character, a suburban prostitute in northern New Jersey.
The first story, "Bismarck Rules," focuses on Diana's sidekick in my unpublished novels, another hooker named Mary Alice Mercier aka Crystal. It's now oneline in the "Oregon Literary Review."
http://orelitrev.startlogic.com/v4n2/OLR-rickert.htm#Bismarck
I guess…
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Added by Albert Tucher on July 17, 2009 at 12:43am —
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There's only you and me, and we just disagree. (Okay, now sing that one in your head for the rest of the day!)
Just finished a book where the guy the protagonist was trying to clear of murder charges turned out to really have done the crime, with no mitigating circumstances. He was a stone killer who used everyone, including the protag, and deserved no sympathy at all. In addition, the nasty psychopath who we all wanted to have done the crime did a "good deed" murder as a favor at…
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Added by Peg Herring on July 16, 2009 at 10:53pm —
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The new blog I've started with fellow crime writers Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill and Barbara Nadel has a new post from me today. It's about why I came to write so-called genre fiction. It starts like this:
Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism that makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis. Three years…
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Added by Matt Rees on July 16, 2009 at 9:10pm —
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Julie McGuire gazed intently from her table in the filled-to-capacity dining room of the Wyndham Hotel. The Love To Murder Mystery Conference had saved the best for last. New York Times bestselling author, Tyler Jensen, now approached the podium.
His entire bearing commanded attention, from his shoulder length wavy chestnut hair pushed back behind his ears, to his sexy sideburns and piercing hazel eyes. She guessed him to be thirty-five, about five years older than she. Clever, rich, tall,…
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Added by Morgan Mandel on July 16, 2009 at 2:40pm —
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Do you ever check the trees to see what is up there?
You would be surprised at what you can find.
Over at
Powder Burn Flash.com, Aldo Calcagno has posted a story of mine concerning the once in a lifetime things that a teenager has discovered in
"The… Continue
Added by Cormac Brown on July 16, 2009 at 2:33pm —
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