Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "caravaggio-on-fire"

A book takes a long time to write, and then it takes a while to sell. And another while to sell in another country, and another after that. So a writer’s smile spreads across time.

My long-term grin widened this weekend, when I signed with my UK publisher for my next two books. Not only because Atlantic, the excellent publisher which has brought out all four of my Palestinian crime novels, bought my next books. But because Atlantic is launching a very exciting new imprint called Corvus.

The new imprint is headed by Nicolas and Anthony Cheetham, a father and son team who made Quercus such an important imprint. They’ve taken on my next book MOZART’S LAST ARIA, which is already completed and being edited in New York by the delightful Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins, and the novel I’m currently writing, which has the working title CARAVAGGIO ON FIRE. It’s about the Italian artist who, incidentally, is thought to have died 400 years ago on Sunday.

Writers will know what I mean when I say that signing the contract is a wonderful marker, but also similar to many other things in a writer’s life – it seems like a big milestone, but no one’s around to witness it except you, so you have to go inside yourself to enjoy the moment.


Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

There are many theories as to why Scandinavian crime writers prosper in the bestseller lists. But I know why it is. Ikea.

I just bought a new set of Ikea shelves for my office. I’ll get into exactly how that has altered the configuration of my workspace, but at this point let me just note that it makes my writing room seem a thousand times more orderly, less cluttered. As any feng shui expert would tell you, a disorganized room will yield fractured thoughts and fill the mind of its occupier with distraction. For a writer who needs to focus on his manuscript and whose manuscript requires a consistent vision, that’s a bad thing.

So these shelves, produced by a company based in Sweden, have no doubt created the clean, neat spaces Scandinavian crime writers like Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo need to write their clean, neat stories.

I was in need of a little neatening in my office, because my research had started to create clutter. There were piles of books on Mozart, music and the Austrian Empire related to my forthcoming historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. Then new mountains of books and documents for CARAVAGGIO ON FIRE, my novel about the Italian artist which will be out in a year and a half.

But that’s not all. For my Mozart book, I learned the piano. So suddenly there’s a piano in my office. For Caravaggio, I’ve been learning to paint with oils, so there’s an easel and painting implements and canvases jostling for space with my guitars and bass guitars and amplifiers (those aren’t research; it’s a hobby).

Add to that the large numbers of foreign editions of my books I’m delighted to receive when I’m published in Indonesia and Romania and Iceland, but which I’m unable to give to friends due to the fact that I only know one Icelander, my Romanian landlord already read the book, and the only Indonesian I know is my editor and of course he has already read the book, too.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.