Timothy Hallinan's Blog (10)

. . . and in Asia. I'm here to write the fourth Poke Rafferty Bangkok thriller, THE ROCKS. And the third, BREATHING WATER, is due to come out this August/September from HarperCollins. I don't usually weigh in on the quality (or lack thereof) of my books, but I have to say that I think BREATHING WATER is the best yet. And the people at Morrow agree, to the extent that they made up special bound manuscripts and sent them out in advance of the ARCs in the hope of developing quotes from some good w… Continue

My second Bangkok thriller, THE FOURTH WATCHER, will be released on June 24 by William Morrow, with a terrific company and an aggressive support campaign. I'm currently in Southeast Asia, writing the third in the series, tentatively titled MISDIRECTION, so I'm out of the loop for some of the pre-bub activity, but there's still plenty to do. It's interesting to watch all the activity from this distance -- almost as though it all concerns someone else's book. But, of course, as soon as I get back… Continue

Just sent off two book proposals to my publishers. If accepted, they’ll provide the starting points for the next two Poke Rafferty novels.

I hate writing book proposals. What publishers usually want is a synopsis of the plot, and at this stage I have no idea whatsoever what the plot of either book is going to be. Plotting is something I let my characters do, so to speak. I come up with a situation that needs to be resolved,

… Continue

I’m between books at the moment, and I wouldn’t wish it on Kim Jong-Il.

Yesterday I finished the (presumably) final editing pass on The Fourth Watcher. The copy edit and galley review are still hovering spectres in the future, but those are mainly mechanical exercises, rather than creative. The world I was inventing in The Fourth Watcher has moved into the past tense now, and I haven’t begun the next one.

… Continue

I’ve been on tour, and today I drove from Tucson to Phoenix, across a hundred-mile stretch of Arizona. I passed a lot of towns I’d never heard of, and it got me thinking: We all know about the Arizona towns with butch names — Tombstone, Deadwood, Red Rock, even Yuma. But we don’t hear much about towns with names like Florence and Queen Creek. With nothing to do except drive, I asked myself why, and below is the reason I came up with.

… Continue

In the wake of the recent Chinese ban on unlicensed reincarnation, Reuters reports another interesting religious development: On Tuesday, officials of Nepal’s state-run airline sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, because the airline was having trouble with one of its Boeing 757s.

Assuming for the moment that this approach is not suggested in the Boeing Users Manual, I think the airline officials de

… Continue

Being published is an odd experience. First you spend a year all alone, hunched over a keyboard, talking to yourself and trying to coax a story and some people into being. Then your agent finds a publisher, and suddenly the emphasis is on the second book: What’s it going to be? How soon can you finish it? So the writer spends another year all alone, hunched over a keyboard, and eventually turns in roughly 100,000 words that take

… Continue

I don’t know about other writers, but I get most of my really good ideas in the shower. There’s something about standing dead-center in a stream of hot water that dissolves blocks, brings characters to life, turns mental pictures into streams of words, and generally makes me feel as though there’s literally nothing I can’t write. Improve the opening of Dickens’ “Bleak House”? No problem.

… Continue

In what has to be the most gaga news story of the week, the Chinese announced that it is now illegal to be reincarnated without official permission. This is obviously a maneuver that anticipates the death of the current Dalai Lama; the Chinese government wants to be the sole authority on who the new incarnation is.

So I can understand the goal, even if I don’t sympathize with it. My questions conc

… Continue

People always ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?”. The question seems to suggest that they think a writer gets an idea and then sits down and writes it. For me, though, it’s usually the other way around. I write to find out what my idea is.

Today was the ninth day of working on the new book, the third of the Poke Rafferty series that begins with A Nail Through the Heart. And, as usual at this stage of a book, I’m writing literally eve

… Continue