Well the good news is that I have finally finished the beta of lovejunky, my latest novel, and it is currently away with Agent Allan who will hopefully be shortly telling me whether it’s in a fit state to be sending out to potential editors/publishers for their perusal.

In total: 8 months. 115 chapters. 68,000 words.

(Yeah that’s right, 115 chapters but only 68,000 words which makes it an average of 600 words a chapter!)

It’s taken me far longer than I would have liked to get to this stage considering that I was trying to rush to get it done for one outlet in particular (who might or might not still be interested), however the practicalities of work and family life meant that this was about as fast as I could have been without it been shite.  I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out so will await the feedback on it.

For any of you who are interested I’ve created a new page for it with a blurb and some other details and will be updating it as necessary as and when any developments arise.

So I’m in the final stages of revising lovejunky, my latest work-in-progress but this time things are different and it’s making me a little nervous.

Last year I was approached by a fairly prominent New York based editor of a crime fiction line who had read Katja From The Punk Band and really liked it. He called me, we chatted and he was interested in seeing something else from me – unfortunately I didn’t have anything else available (CZP had first dibs on Guerra and as it was they ended up accepting it) so said that I would just write something geared towards his tastes.  After all how often will any writer have an editor chasing them for work, never mind a fairly important one?  This contact led to me getting picked up for representation by Allan Guthrie of Jenny Brown Associates and so as of January this year I officially had an agent for the first time in my writing career.

So now, for the first time, I am writing something with at least two people expecting it to be good (or really good) whereas in the past I’ve not really had to worry about anyone liking it. I would just finish the books off and send them out then see what happens without any real expectations.

With lovejunky almost done I’ll soon be passing it on to Allan to see what he thinks, if he thinks it’s any good or worthy of sending to the editor or anyone else for that matter and I’m not ashamed to say I’m nervous about it.  Katja has done reasonably well for me which is great but it also means that there is a certain expectation there that has never been there before.  Perhaps it’s all my head but it’s certainly something I’m going to have to get used to either way.

Interesting times …

One of the things which really seems to help in the marketing and promotion of a book is to get lots of reviews from those who have read it onto various sites such as Amazon and Goodreads or even on people’s own blogs.

And so, to go alongside the “Punk Your Profile” promotion which CZP and I are currently running until May 20th, I am going to try running a review push in parallel to ensure that the book can get extra momentum behind it.  Not only that but since CZP’s Review Contest is still going then you are also in with a chance of eBooks from said wonderful publisher!  For each review that you write just head on over to http://chizinepub.com/contests/review-contest/index.php and enter the details of the review in their submission form – and each review you write counts as a separate chance of winning!

So if you have read any of my books (Katja From The Punk Band, I-O, Rohypnol Brides, Nothing Is Inflammable and Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void) and haven’t already done so then I’d greatly appreciate it if you would post a review, no matter how short or how positive/negative, to Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, Chapters or Goodreads.  Feel free to cross-post too, so if you’ve already placed a review in one of those locations, cross-post it into the others too!

Particularly at the moment, with the price of Katja dropped to only 99c, a combination of increased sales and more reviews may well help to bump it up the various charts. 

So let’s get Katja and the others a little bit of attention

My publisher ChiZine Publications are currently running a promotion for Katja From The Punk Band in which you can not only have a chance to win my complete eBook collection but also to have a character named after you in the KFTPB sequel!

All you have to do is change your Facebook avatar to that of your favourite punk icon (or even of yourself as a punk!), then Like the Official CZP Katja From The Punk Band fan page and post the following into your status:

Punk your Profile and be immortalized! Until May 20, punk your profile by changing your profile picture to your favourite punk or even yourself as a punk. “Like” The CZP Katja from the Punk Band page then copy this message into your status and tag it to have a chance to win Simon Logan’s complete eBook collection or have a character named after you in the Katja FTPB sequel!

(Remember to use Facebook’s @ command before the phrase “The CZP Katja from the Punk Band” to tag it so that we know that you’ve done it!)

On or after May 20 we will draw the winners with 2^nd and 3^rd place getting my complete eBook collection (I-O, Nothing Is Inflammable, Rohypnol Brides, I-O, Protohuman and, of course, Katja From The Punk Band) and the winner getting all the eBooks plus a character named after them in the KFTPB sequel!

So jump on over to Facebook and get punked!  (And remember to pass the message on to your own FB friends!)

Last week I wrote the final scene in the first draft of lovejunky and it felt great to make it to that point.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that the first draft is complete as there are several bits I need to go back and work into the story line since I tend to avoid any major edits whilst I’m working on the first draft, preferring instead to just keep going and make a note to do it later.

With that said I don’t think it will be too much longer before I have an alpha version and then an even shorter time after that will be the beta (safe enough to show my agent and perhaps other certain interested parties) which all means that, my mind working in the way it does, I am already thinking about the next project.

I had a couple of ideas (including going back to Blue Light, the Lynchian detective story I put to one side to write lovejunky) but I am being strongly pulled in the direction of writing a sequel to Katja From The Punk Band.

For whatever reason Katja seems to have really struck a chord with people and looking back over the book as I was the other day reminded how fun it was to write.  I wrote the original after finishing my first novel, Pretty Little Things To Fill Up The Void, and I wanted to write something lighter, and faster.  Apparently it worked out quite well.

So I started thinking about plot ideas a couple of days ago and my mind has been pretty much exploding with them ever since.  I want to keep the essence of what I think people liked about the first one, and what I liked about it too, but also not just do a repeat.

Stay tuned for more info.

Well Spinetingler Magazine have just started the voting on a raft of new awards and I am one of the nominees in the Best Novel: New Voice category so, if you have the time and inclination, get your arses over there and vote! 

I’m up alongside John Rector, Simon Lelic, Roger Smith, Benjamin Whitmer and more so a pretty tough crowd to be be fighting against.

Katja From The Punk Band has already scooped a place in their Top Ten Crime Books of 2010 list and was joint winner of the Fireball Award for Best Opening Line, however this award is more for me as a writer rather than just the book so it might do me even more good as a general promotional tool. 

There’s only one vote per person (so no ballet stuffing!) but no reason at all why you can’t spread the word and encourage your friends to vote too.  There’s a host of other awards as well including Best Novel: Rising Star, Best Novel:Legend, Best Anthology, Best Crime Comic/Graphic Novel and more so whilst you’re there, give some props to those whom you feel deserve it most.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for this one thanks to recommendations from friends and a nifty little hand-written staff recc in my local Waterstones with a “If you liked Inception you’ll love this” tagline on it.

Whilst I did enjoy it I do wonder if listening to it as an audiobook did make it a tricky experience for me as there were a lot of sudden, abrupt reality changes that you really had to keep up with. As with any PKD it’s filled with lots of interesting, quirky ideas and there was a lot to enjoy in it for me, I just found that it didn’t quite all hang together as tightly as I would have liked.

The extra last-minute twist (again, similar to Inception) could either make or break the book for a lot of folks, I suspect – some seeing it as an “it was all a dream” style copout, others seeing it as underlining the philosophy of the book as a whole. For me it worked – but only just.

Overall good but didn’t light me on fire like I had expected.

So, into the final stage of the first draft of lovejunky now and I reckon there’s around 10K or so left to do, give or take.

This is where things get tricky.

It always seems like the first third or so of a book come fairly easily but then tighten up and get a bit entangled in the middle and towards the end, needing a firm and ruthless hand and a keen editor’s eye to keep it all together.  I suspect this is because when you start out writing something you can go off in pretty much any direction you want, you’re creating threads and perhaps weaving them loosely but at that point they don’t have to fit any specific pattern.

You get past that point however and that’s when you see that some of the various bits and pieces don’t quite match up – like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river and finding that they don’t quite meet in the middle.  You have to strip away some of what you have already done, correcting it along the way to ensure that it is inch-perfect, that it is seamless.

I already have a bunch of notes for edits and revisions to go back and do (I follow the approach that you just keep writing until you make it to the end of the first draft rather than looping back and stop-starting to make revisions along the way) but nothing major.  My main effort just now is keeping a tight hold of it all as everything comes to a head.  I know pretty much how it will all end but I’m not exact, yet, on how to get there – and until that is decided it could all change.

The Levels by Sean Cregan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A cracking, grimy, grungy crime novel that rolls along at a fair pace and manages to carve up the genre as viciously as the serial killer which roams the city in which it is set.



Reminding me heavily of Jack O’Connell’s work (in particular Word Made Flesh and Wireless) but a little more action-packed, The Levels hits the ground running and doesn’t really stop until the final page. Cregan wraps almost every chapter with a cliffhanger and although after a while it did feel at times a little contrived (creating a cliffhanger just for the sake of it) in the end it keeps everything moving along nicely.



On the same note I did feel the contrivance on a couple of other occasions, namely the framing of the Beast as a serial killer and the threat of a bombing at the end, but it speaks to Cregan’s skill that they didn’t bother me as much as they could have done and I was left entirely satisfied at the end of the book.



I look forward to reading more from him!



View all my reviews

Big thanks to Tiffany Leigh over at Goodreads for her wonderful 5–Star review of Katja From The Punk Band and for probably doing a far better job than I ever could of describing the book.

The book is like looking at an industrial Escher print, and Mr. Logan writes with expert skill. The characters hurtle through the narrative, which is strewn with double-crosses, near-misses, and violent, extreme collisions.

Though it has elements of a “day after tomorrow” sci-fi and hard-boiled crime fiction, in KATJA Mr. Logan has created his own unique genre – apunkalyptic noir, maybe. His prose is cinematic, and white- or bloody-knuckled in equal measure. KATJA FROM THE PUNK BAND plays out like a Coen Brothers’ movie set in Mad Max’s universe. I look forward to reading more from Simon Logan in the future. 

Read the full review over at Goodreads. 

(Have you posted a review of my work somewhere online.  Then tell me about it and I’ll be sure to repost and link to it from here!)