The story of my book: The Firebird Mystery
My first love is writing, but my second love is procrastination. Writing The Firebird Mystery went something like this:
- Write for ten minutes.
- Go to the refrigerator and stare inside as if searching for the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
- Write for five minutes.
- Peer out the window, wonder why the neighbour’s garbage bins have not been collected after three days and gnash my teeth.
- Write for seven minutes.
- Return to the refrigerator and inspect the freezer box. If ice-cream is inside, its existence is doomed.
- Write for two minutes.
- Develop a sudden interest in taxidermy. Spend thirty minutes researching it on the internet.
- Decide that coffee is needed.
- Buy a coffee. Drink it. Have a brilliant idea whilst walking home.
- Write down the brilliant idea, then decide I’ve ruined the brilliant idea by writing it down.
- Write for eight minutes.
- Gnash my teeth.
- Wonder how much a dentist will charge to fix my gnashed teeth.
- Repeat the above for seven hours.
Bizarrely, this process worked for me while writing The Firebird Mystery. The book began life as The Steampunk Detective, a self-published ebook on Amazon.
Mention self-publishing to people and you get a variety of reactions. Some look at you as if you’ve confessed to the Kennedy assassination. Others start gnashing their teeth as if you’re responsible for their kids not reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A few instantly regard you as a machete-wielding maniac.
After The Steampunk Detective came a slew of other self-published books. A conversation with author Toni Jordan led to a meeting with Text Publishing. To their credit, there was no mention of JFK, Huckleberry Finn or machetes. Instead, they offered me an eight-book publishing deal, and The Steampunk Detective was been re-edited, expanded and now reborn as the first Jack Mason adventure – The Firebird Mystery.
Jack is a fourteen-year-old orphan. Exercises of the mind are not his forte. He’s far better at walking tightropes, taming wild lions and balancing upside-down on galloping horses, handy skills when he becomes an assistant to Ignatius Doyle, the world’s greatest detective.
Mr Doyle loves cheese and conducting strange experiments. He lives in an apartment a little like a second-hand shop, Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory and backstage at the Bolshoi ballet.
Fifteen-year-old Scarlet Bell approaches them to help locate her missing father. A fan of the Brinkie Buckeridge novels (a cross between Harlequin romance books and the Die Hard movies), she is intelligent, cultured, and a feisty young suffragette.
The Firebird Mystery contains plenty of clues – and not all of them relate to the mystery at hand. References to Sherlock Holmes and Victorian literature abound. Eagle-eyed readers will spot these. Younger readers will simply focus on the action and humour.
I’m currently working on edits of books two and three in the Jack Mason series. My first love is still writing, my second love procrastination. It’s amazing I get anything done at all.
Maybe I should check the fridge again and think about it…
