16 year old Jesse tries to survive a post-apocalyptic New York City.
At the end of the world, it’s hard to trust anyone–even yourself.
Jesse and a ragged band of survivors crawl through the wreckage of New York City. They escaped the Chasers–for now. But the infected zombie freaks are getting bolder, stronger. So when they begin to see signs of human life, they can’t believe their luck. Now they’re the chasers, looking for someone to tell them the worst vacation ever is over. Of course, luck can be good and bad. And the enemy could be closer than your reflection in the mirror. . .

ALONE: Survivor is published in Nth America and Russia next month, covers below.

ALONE: Survivor USA and Canada cover

ALONE: Survivor Russian cover

JP’s ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

School mash-up ALONE cover

So, after high school I started off in Architecture, studying at RMIT. While an architecture student, I worked for a couple of years for the firms LAB and Bates Smart on the Federation Square design team. If you want to know more about the design, here’s a good old article from AA Magazine here.

At Fed Square I worked as a model maker, along with Bill McCorkell (who you may know as a character from my LACHLAN FOX stories). Here’s a 1:50 model of the Atrium space, looking south towards BMW Edge:

Bill’s still designing, but for me the process of studying and working in architecture, and the prospect of doing that for 30 or 40 years before I even tried to finish the novel I’d been tinkering at, made me realise that I should follow my ultimate dream.

And so, I took a year off to write full time (FOX HUNT), then switched university courses to English/Lit, worked for five years at The Age, did post-grad study, and long story short have now published 9 books with plenty more on the way. I still love architecture and all that it can achieve, and I’ve designed and built my own home, but I am glad that writing is my profession and design my hobby, rather than the other way around.

On Melbourne, here’s an interesting snippet from a good book:

Mark Twain describes the splendour of Melbourne and reflects on how this “majestic” city grew from the most inauspicious, convict-laboured start. He concludes:

“Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer, and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful of lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.”

The stories start with Twain’s arrival in Sydney, where he finds the harbour “superbly beautiful” and then, on a “natural impulse … gave God the praise.” The local he said this to suggested that Twain had only captured half of Sydney, stating: ‘God made the Harbor … but Satan made Sydney.’”
FROM:
The Wayward Tourist: Mark Twain’s Adventures in Australia by Mark Twain, with an Introduction by Don Watson, Melbourne University Press, 2007.

First up, I’m delighted that so many of my readers have enjoyed my ALONE trilogy around the world, and next couple months sees a few more big countries getting their turn: first up will be the USA and Canada, then Russia and Brazil. I can’t wait to read through the feedback that follows and hearing how the story translates and resonates with readers in such diverse cultural backgrounds.

Talking of feedback, I’ve had a couple hundred emails this August and September asking where the next Lachlan Fox thriller is, so let me address that here. The last 7 years I’ve had a book published around this time of year, and this is the first year I don’t; it’s because of the publication schedule from my publishers Hachette and Scholastic. For instance: last year we published two novels, SURVIVOR and QUARANTINE, and the year before was the two novels CHASERS and RED ICE. Next year, it’s another two novels – a thriller, and a YA – then 2014 it’s 12 YA novels: yep, a book published per month, and another thriller. So, it’s not that I’ve stopped writing – far from it, as I’ve written my next 15 books – it’s just you’ll have to wait a little bit for the publishers to catch up.

Since Fox #5, RED ICE, I’ve published a long-ish Fox short story titled TRUST, which occurs about 6 months after the events of RED ICE, and has to do with Wikileaks’ “thermo-nuclear device”. TRUST was published in the GET READING anthology of last year, and if you missed it don’t worry, I’ll soon make it available. I do know where I’m taking Fox next, and have been quietly researching it for a while. It’s a big story and as usual it reflects the world around us and how Fox is our man in the arena. As a character Fox is still exciting for me to write: from his troubled past and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, to where we met in in FOX HUNT living on an Australian island, to all his work as an investigative reporter with GSR, to where he is now – living on another island, in Malta. He’s gone to hell and back on more than one occasion while he’s very changed by it, I can’t help but feel that I’ve created something of a monster. I’ve lived with the guy in his current guise since I was 20. He was 30. I’m now 33, he’s now 35. With the passage of time I guess our world view has slightly changed. Neither of us suffer fools. He’s a blunter instrument than before, more wary, resolute. I’m more precise, more conservative, settled. He’s bigger, harder, meaner: a handsome brute. I’m driven to entertain. So, while Fox #6 is not in the pipeline at the moment, it will happen.

Meantime, I’m writing a new thriller with a new character. What can I tell you about him… well, his name is TOM WALKER. That’ll do for now. Ok, a little more. It takes all the elements that worked in my Fox series and amplifies it. It’s got more story than a Fox novel but is leaner and meaner in every way. What I’m most excited about is my new protagonist and the twists and turns he navigates. Think the character Don Draper (when he was mysterious and we didn’t know his true identity) as written by filmmaker David Ayer (“Training Day”, “Harsh Times”, and “Street Kings”). Well, amplify that by ten and you’re just about there.

So, mark September of 2013 in your calendar, or what the Mayans would call September of 1.

As for the big YA project I’m developing… I’ve spent the last 24 months developing a new series for Middle Grade/Young Adults/Adults (since distinctions in readership age seem to have disappeared these days). The size of the world is immense, both in the story and the number of pages for the series. 13 books, and each at around 35,000 words, so on their own they’re not huge stories but as a series there’s so much scope to explore. As a rule of thumb, each novel has about the same amount of words/pages in planning notes, research, drafts and cut material. The past 6 years of giving talks at schools and meeting many thousands of kids has helped me shape this storyline to (I hope!) exceed their story expectations. Getting so much feedback has shown me a very interesting confluence of pop culture, to a point where essentially nothing is fringe that cannot be taken by a corporation and commercialized by it, and a young generation galvanized socially in a collective way. The teens I meet are connected and communicating 24/7. So, it’s a curious time to be a storyteller, and I’m more than ever interested in finding out what’s alive, what’s the pulse, than mourning any loss.

When people ask me why I have four or five things in development, here’s the answer. Paraphrasing John Lennon, a career is what happens when you’re making other plans. I once had a gap between BLOOD OIL and LIQUID GOLD and out of that ALONE was born. Actually, another project was developed that didn’t get off the ground: THE HISTORY CLUB. That was too big a series project to tackle between annual thriller deadlines, and I shelved it in favour of a trilogy. It is four years since writing ALONE #1. And four years since writing BLOOD OIL, which I consider my first decent novel in many ways. To me, that period was vital for me to continue. The ALONE trilogy gave me an injection of life that I very much needed, and all my writing has benefited from daring to take such a narrative risk as I did with that first book, CHASERS. Pushing myself with the deadlines of creating the ALONE trilogy while writing and publishing my yearly FOX installments left me reinvigorated, and at the most basic existential level, I needed this next challenge of creating a big new world in the new YA series. It helped that I had as good an experience as I did creating ALONE. To came back from BLOOD OIL, my darkest and most violent thriller, to move into Jesse’s world was brilliant, and a while later meeting the Scholastic publishing team about THIRTEEN was extraordinary. They suggested the title and some concepts around the number 13, and I instantly saw the world I wanted to create. This was my chance to write a series about the dream world, a concept that had been with me since reading Roald Dahl’s BFG as a kid.

I had always thought that I’d develop the dream story idea into a film script, as I thought that visual medium would be better suited. Yet one of the things I love most about being a novelist is that you create the entire world; to me it’s by far the most free of the creative writing mediums. Sure, I have set release dates for my books, as films do, which means that my production scedule needs to be well-managed so that it does not then encrouach on the post-production of editing and promotion before the release – that’s the same as film world too. Other areas of creative writing are full of constraints and compromise, eg film, where if you are creating the scale of story that I write, you have to be working with a bunch of producers, production companies, studio peeps, other writers, director/s, etc. At every stage your work gets reinterpreted – which can be a very good thing if you’re working with great artists. Film is a medium that requires large investment, and as a storyteller on this scale, there are only five guys who can write their own ticket; James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Chris Nolan, and Michael Bay. The rest of the creators can only do certain things and they are mostly linear. Much like a novelist, you learn your craft little by little, and you do it publicly. You make mistakes in front of an audience (small ones we fix in re-prints, bigger narrative ones are there forever). That said, looking at film, a series like this has a similar constuction time to a massive blockbuster: from the initial idea to the plannign and research to the plotting and writing and the rewriting, editing, packaging, promoting, and finally releasing… it’ll be a 4-year journey from begginging to end… and that’s just the start! As a novelist, I stared out with international thrillers and have done post-apocalyptic YA, and now a huge project that is designed to appeal to 10 year olds as much as 60 year olds. This was a huge opportunity for me to step beyond where I was, and explore a broader creative zone through the same uncompromising narrative my readers have come to expect. I hope to see THIRTEEN live on in the reading world for a while to come, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s adapted to screen. I’m always aware when creating characters and story points that the reader has room to write their own story, and it’s the same with adaptation: the characters and their world certainly has the scope to be explored even further that I’ve managed.

I appreciate the feedback I get from my readers, so if you want to get in touch please do so through this web site, or via Whosay, Facebook, or Twitter.

Well, that’s it for now — back to creating my stories. Until next month, happy reading,

JP.

Also, check out regular posts at Twitter and WhoSay.

Re-wrote my novels SURVIVOR and QUARANTINE, both released in English this year, US and translations next year.

Spent Jan in China, where I met my lovely Chinese lit agents, ate mysterious food, observed how the top military in communist countries sure get paid well, and noticed a lot of weirdos driving around in grey vans – snatching people off streets. Fun times. Oh, and polluted much?

Wrote my next adult thriller. Finished PhD. Wrote the first six books of a new teen series. Re-worked some screenplays. Read some good books, started some appalling ones (Tom Clancy, really? Your last piece of co-written crap damages our genre and cheats readers), and noticed an increasing amount of unreadable fiction being published.

Saddened we lost Jobs, Hitch, Havel, my grandpa Tas (dedicated RED ICE to him), and my good friend Woody (dedicated QUARANTINE to him).

Glad we lost Bin Laden, Gaddafi, and that Nth Korean shit-bag. There’s a few more still out there, from Cambodia and Indonesia to Syria and Iran and a few places between, who have been sucking up our air for too long. Makes you wish there was a permanent tribunal that can prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes – kinda like the ICC with a sense of urgency. Can’t we have a Grey Man-type group out there cleaning things up? Perhaps some ex-Blackwater types who are skilled up, cashed up, and looking for a little adventure? Alas, only in fiction…

Happy to see troops out of Iraq. Afghanistan’s a nightmare. Timor’s still forgotten. Makes you wonder if liberators think about consequences before they act. Or what things would be like if election terms were longer and if that would lead to more accountability. If only we were all wiser.

Arab Spring: bitter sweet. That it still, in 2011, costs so many lives and liberties of women and children to get rid of corrupt fat-cats is beyond disappointing. I understand freedom from tyranny has a price, but tyranny from violent men should be borne by violent men. And it’s frustrating that such greedy scumbags continue to go unchecked in this day and age of precision weaponry. Maybe Palin would be a good president for a little bit: kill a moose, kill a despot. Better yet, give her an M110 and send her to the front lines. Or maybe not.

Banking crisis… well, it’s nice to see that we keep throwing money at them, that should fix the problem. Whatever happened to free markets, where if you’re shit, you fail – then you learn and try better next time or you don’t so pack up and go home. And whatever happened to elected governments making laws to make our lives better? Regulate much?

Australian politics predicable as ever: we’re digging deeper, learning less, doing little of any worth given the potential we have to do so much. Nice to see that human traffickers of asylum seekers are turning a profit; there’s a word for such guys, which I’ll leave to your imagination. Amazing to hear politicians waste vast amounts of precious time debating whether or not we’re polluting our habitat. We continue to waste expenditure on a vast scale. And ’round and ’round we go…

So, 2012 looms and it seems like a fun year head. I’m writing like mad until April, so that I’ll be 14 books ahead, with 2012 and 2013 publications sorted. Plenty of travel and book touring to do, aiming for more time spent with family and friends, and planning to relax on a quiet beach somewhere.

Happy reading.

jp.

A couple weeks ago I caught up with my mate Jeffery Deaver when he was in my home town of Melbourne to promote his James Bond novel, CARTE BLANCHE. It’s a cracking read and his fans and mine, as well as those of the Bond books and films, will love it. I told Deaver about my new secret thriller (another thriller writer, Michael Robotham, sewed the seed that become this storyline, when, a few years ago when we were in New York, he told me about a true story… that in turn went on to give me the book idea via a NIGHTMARE. Beat for beat, I dreamed the outline of the book, and now, finally, I’m writing it – I hope in getting it down it will leave me alone…) and he loved it, which is a good sign that the idea is working (my agents and publishers love the outline too, but it’s those who are really in the trenches – fellow novelists – who I most trust for such feedback). While we were talking about our mutual respect and appreciation for Ian Fleming and Bond, I recalled that ages back I’d got my hands on a mind-condish copy of Fleming’s travel book, THRILLING CITIES. Given the recent riots in London I was specifically reminded of a section in the book when Fleming is in Los Angeles; he spends some time talking with his friend Captain James Hamilton, head of intelligence of the LAPD. What Hamilton had to say about crime, particularly juvenile, has a lot of relevance over 50 years on:

“Crime among youth is encouraged and nurtured by:
1. The decline and fall of mid-Victorian values in Anglo-American civilisation, leaving the individual to mature in a society that fails to establish a clear moral definition of right and wrong.
2. The direct influence of adult criminality or, in other cases, by a passive contempt by a large section of our adult population for law and order.
3. The increasing emphasis of our society upon not only materialism, but upon ‘materialism without effort’.
4. A cultural imbalance between man’s advancement in technology and a commensurate level of conduct. Thus we are attempting to substitute scientific proficiency for social responsibility.”

What else am I reading? Re-read an old favourite, HAM ON RYE BY Charles Bukowski. Soooo funny. A few other non-fiction books, mainly about literary theory for my PhD work. Most recent fiction is my friend http://www.nickearls.com/ THE FIX, a well-written thriller which I highly recommend, Adrian McKinty’s 50 GRAND, and my mate JJ DeCeglie‘s unpublished crime novel.

I will be at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival from Sept 6th-10th, talking to masses of school groups and a couple sessions open to the gen pop, as well as participating in their online festival and conducting a thriller-writing workshop. Check their site for details.

In prep I’m reading some fellow novelist’s work, such Emily Rodda’s THE GOLDEN DOOR, who I’m on a panel at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival titled:
Saturday, 10 September
38 Writing for Children
Successful children’s writers Emily Rodda, James Roy and James Phelan discuss the tricks of the trade and the joys of writing for children.

As with DELTORA QUEST, my buddy Marc McBride did the illustrations on this book.

Another panel I’m involved with at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival titled: ‘War games: Fact and Fiction’ Peter Stanley is a prolific author and the Head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. I look forward to reading his book Simpson’s Donkey: A wartime journey to Gallipoli and beyond – the story of John Simpson’s donkey before and after Simpson’s death.

Oh, and as I’m forever re-reading Hunter S Thompson, I found this relevant piece in his collection of writing, KINGDOM OF FEAR, from which I quote:

“My opposition to war is not based upon pacifist or non-resistant principles. It may be that the present state of civilization is such that certain international questions cannot be discussed; it may be that they have to be fought out. But the fighting never settles the question. It only gets the participants around to a frame of mind where they will agree to discuss what they were fighting about. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil and are made according to a very definite technique. A campaign for war is made upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people are worked upon. By clever tales, the people’s suspicions are aroused toward the nation against whom war is desired.
Make the nation suspicious, make the other nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and no conscience and a press whose interest is looked upon with the interests that will be benefitted by war. Then the “overt act” will soon appear. It is no trick at all to get an “overt act” once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.”
- Henry Ford

Meantime, I’m writing away on my next projects, have a busy Book Week where I’ll talk to a few thousand kids (did a quick calculation the other day, over 20,000 students spoken to at schools and universities so far this year… I hope they’re all buying my novels!), and am looking forward to the upcoming world-wide publication of ALONE: Quarantine. It’s first out in Australia and UK/Commonwealth countries this October, US/Canada and some translation languages next year.

JP

Plenty of emails lately asking if there’ll be a Lachlan Fox thriller this year… no, there won’t be a novel, but there will be a Fox short story published in the Get Reading! anthology – free this September (see their site for details).
I wanted a short break from Fox, since his life has been intwined with mine for the last five years, and so next year I have a NEW thriller appearing around September – introducing a new character and style. Also next year, you’ll see the first installment in a secret 13-part project I’ve been working on – will write more about each soon. Right now I’m headed to sunny Cairns for my 2nd last Lit Fest of the year.
Happy reading,
JP