Tim Slee's Blog: How's the Serenity? - Posts Tagged "techno-thriller"

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This has been an ambitious project: a Clancy-esque technothriller running to 500 pages. To land it I've had help from a fantastic team of technical advisers in the police, armed forces and even defense systems contracting. Publishers Weekly BookLife reviewed the draft and said, "Realistic and original...a fast-paced thriller packed with action and suspense."

Step one, have dream come true...

Step two?

So, after two and half years of writing, self publishing, reading, writing, reading, writing and (yep) writing some more I landed a contract for one of my unpublished manuscripts. Yay!!

Now I have to deliver the book, but that's not the hard part. This book, BURN, is unlike any of my others (not hard since all my books are unlike each other - sci fi, noir, thrillers, historical fiction) because it is contemporary fiction, very Australian.

It therefore made sense for me to retire my earlier stuff and just focus on BURN, and on getting started on a follow-on novel in the same vein.

But I'm finding leaving the other titles behind, even if it is temporary, is like literary amputation! I unpublished them from Amazon, but Amazon won't take down paperback titles because they can still be traded second-hand, so they are still up there, like phantom limbs.

And it's only been a month, so people who got a copy earlier this year are still putting up reviews on sites like Goodreads. Which is a tweak of the knife when the reviews are like "Omg this book was absolutely amazing!":

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

So I tell myself it's all good, those earlier manuscripts were just a part of the journey to help you find your voice, don't look back, look ahead!

Still. I never thought about this part. I have the Beatles song playing on repeat in my head:

You say "Yes", I say "No".
You say "Stop" and I say "Go, go, go".
Oh no.
You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello"

Goodbye Charlie Jones, Freya Eriksdottir, Tully McIntyre ... hello hello BURN!

Hello, got this question on a book forum and thought I would clear up the mystery! In 2016-17 I published a series of novels that I had been working on since about 2013 - the main purpose being to raise some money for charity, the secondary purpose to experiment with self publishing and get some solid reader feedback on my work.

It turned out to be a great project and the books were well received; two were shortlisted in the US Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize for Fiction and 'The Vanirim' was the Grand Prize winner. Some, like the 'Charlie Jones' series and 'Queen of America' developed a devoted following (and there are sequels in the works, don't despair) and I enjoyed a lot of great interaction with readers.

But then ... in 2018 I submitted a manuscript to the HarperCollins Banjo Prize for unpublished Australian fiction and was fortunate to win a publishing contract! Which means devoting my energy to a new direction, so I've decided to 'retire' the earlier manuscripts for now.

All of these manuscripts are still available on request in e-Book format. Just write to me at teejayslee@gmail.com and I will send you a link from where you freely can download the e-Book.

Cheers,

TJ

"Readers looking to sink into a war saga rich with differing perspective–and gape at the possibilities of next-gen tech–will enjoy this thriller .... Great for fans of Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis’s 2034: A Novel of the Next World War." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BOOKLIFE review of PAGASA by FX Holden.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...