What Am I Doing?

When I’m hunkered down and mired in multiple-month stretches of daily writing – the in-the-trenches work of creating a novel – I still try to post an update once a month or so just to let y’all know I’m alive and working hard.

Wow, I picked a great day for it, huh?

I’ve rewritten this thing a half-dozen times, grappling in part with my desire to say something meaningful. The world is on fire at the moment, and my nation is wounded. And I’m just this person with a keyboard and I am nauseous and heart-sick.

What I’m grappling with right now is, what do people need? As an artist, what kind of work should I be writing and putting out into the world? I try to always be aware of what I’m promoting, what themes I’m working with, what kind of messages I’m putting forward, and that’s never been more important than now.

Vital distinction: I’m not talking about “message fiction” which boils down to a heavy-handed “here is an important social issue, and here is how you should feel about it and if you don’t you’re a bad person!” angle. That stuff sucks, nobody likes it. I’m talking about theme – a thesis, an underlying statement – which is present in all but the most cynically commercially-produced books. All art is an extension of the artist. I am not Daniel Faust (a bad review called him an “obvious author insert” once, and you cannot imagine how much my friends laughed about that), but when you read my books, you’re getting a piece of me, woven into the narrative.

I owe you honesty, I owe you care, and I owe you my best work. That’s part of the contract between an author and a reader. (And you owe me $4.99. That sound fair?)

So my challenge right now, with everything going to hell, is to figure out what my best work looks like. Do I deliver pure escapism? Sure, I can, but is that ideal? Do I try to deliver a narrative that challenges expectations? Again – is that the best use of my abilities? I’m figuring it all out.

Right now I’m leaning toward hope.

Writing is hard at the moment (just getting anything done seems to take forever), but the new Daniel Faust novel, Down Among the Dead Men, is coming along, and I’ve been thinking a lot about hope. Five years ago, when I plotted out the bare bones of this story arc (yes, five years ago – c’mon, you know me), this book was going to be the darkest, nastiest chapter in the entire series. But I was edgier then (in a bad way), I like to think I’m more mature now, and I put a lot more time into thinking “how is this story going to make my readers feel?”

Oh, it’s still dark, I mean, given the situation Faust is in, but I’m leaning a lot heavier into satire and black comedy. Is it going to be funny? Eh, I hope so. Comedy is one of the hardest things to self-assess (we’ve all seen enough terrible stand-up comics to know that), but some parts should, if I do it right, put a smile on your face. More than that, I’m using the setting to take a look at people, and how people come together and support each other even in the worst of times and places.

Hope.

Also, the action scenes are over the top, an enemy from Faust’s past makes a comeback, and we get to meet Caitlin’s sister, who manages a television station in hell. So, there’s that to look forward to.

We’re still on track for a July 7 release of The Insider, the second Charlie McCabe novel, from Thomas & Mercer Publishing. It’s a very twisty little thriller filled with deception, double-crosses and danger, and if you liked The Loot, I think you’ll like this one even more.

A Time for Witches, the follow-up to Ghosts of Gotham, is currently in my editor’s hands and we’re looking at an October release. It’s pretty timely in its own way and is also, at its core, a story about hope. It picks up one month after Ghosts ended, with another dive into a world of Greek myth and mystery. Catching up with Lionel and Maddie was good for my heart, and I hope you’ll feel the same way when it comes out.

Anyway, that’s it for today, I’m going to get back to work. Be safe. Please.

Black Tie Required: Now on Audio

I’m pleased to announce that the audiobook version of Harmony Black book six, Black Tie Required — as narrated by the fabulous Susannah Jones — is now available! It’s on Audible/Amazon now, and should be available on iTunes shortly.

With the sequel to Ghosts of Gotham now in my editor’s hands, I’m hard at work on the next Daniel Faust novel, Down Among the Dead Men. There’s not much I can say without big spoilers, save to say that this book will be taking the series (and Faust himself) to a place we haven’t yet explored, and I’m eager to be your tour guide. Just climb into this hand basket…

Be well. Be safe. I’m going to get back to it, and we’ll talk more soon.

Lockdown: A New Short

I hope everyone is staying safe out there! I'm currently reviewing the final files for the audiobook version of Black Tie Required; once I give approval (and I can tell you already that Susannah Jones did her usual fantastic job), it goes to Audible for final QA checks, and hopefully we won't be waiting long before it goes live.

Meanwhile, I was wondering what some of my characters were up to in this time of quarantine, and the next thing I knew, it became a slice-of-life short story. Just kinda happened. Stories do that sometimes. You can find it over at http://craigschaeferbooks.com/lockdown, and I hope it brightens your day a little.

Harmony Black: Black Tie Required is available now!

I'm pleased to announce that the sixth Harmony Black thriller, Black Tie Required, is now available in ebook and paperback. Susannah Jones will be recording the audiobook edition shortly (thank goodness for home studios) so that won't be far off. Here's the synopsis:

Las Vegas, Nevada. For some, a neon-drenched playground. For Harmony Black, a graveyard of bad memories. But when your job is protecting humanity from the horrors of the occult underworld, you go where the mission sends you.

The annual TechTopia conference draws Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, big thinkers, startup investors — and the Basilisk, a former German Military Intelligence officer turned freelance assassin. He’s in town to make a killing, and his target could be any of a thousand potential victims. To protect their source of information, direct action is off the table: Harmony and her team have to identify the target and stage a rescue without the Basilisk — or his mistress, the sadistic demoness Nadine — ever learning that they were involved.

Stranger things are brewing under the neon and glitz. The elite of the criminal underworld are flocking to the city like flies to a rotting corpse, rumors of a secret auction are swirling, and the assassin’s target has ties to Talon Worldwide — a corporation with a foothold on two parallel Earths. Soon enough, Harmony discovers there’s far more at stake than a single life. The consequences of this mission aren’t just global: they’re interdimensional.

Your virtual poolside drink is waiting. You can find the book at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086WFLGQH (at this moment, it looks like Amazon hasn't linked up the ebook and paperback versions yet, but you can find the latter by searching under my name.)

In other news, Thomas & Mercer Publishing is still set on releasing the second Charlie McCabe thriller, The Insider, on July 7. The ThrillerFest convention has unfortunately (but understandably) been canceled this year, so I won't be making an appearance to celebrate the launch; apparently they're working on some kind of online option so we'll see if I can come up with something fun regardless. I'm currently elbows-deep on the manuscript for the next Daniel Faust adventure and working hard to make sure it lives up to expectations.

I can also announce that the sequel to Ghosts of Gotham is done, and in my editor's hands. It's called A Time for Witches, and it will be out in October.

I hope you're staying safe out there! I'll be getting back to work now, aiming to keep you entertained.

On Current Events, and You

I’m seeing a lot of people resolve to use this time of quarantine to accomplish old goals or learn new skills, and that’s great. I’m also seeing people say everyone SHOULD be doing that, or worse, beating themselves up because they’re not getting any of those lofty ambitions met. That’s…not great. If you’re struggling right now and feel like you shouldn’t be, or feel like you’re failing, take some advice from an old hand at this.

My credentials: I’ve been a full-time writer for almost five years. I live alone and work from home, so what a lot of people are just now experiencing with quarantine is my normal life. I’m also, my readers know, an obsessive workaholic who writes three books a year and maybe takes one day off a month. Maybe. To be a writer, you have to be a self-starter; if you can’t motivate yourself you’ll never get anything done. Point being: productivity is my job. Discipline is my job. This is what I DO.

So you might be thinking, well, Craig’s fine. His situation hasn’t changed much and he’s used to driving his own business. Maybe he’s even more productive than usual!

Nope.

I’ll tell you the truth: I had a day last week where it took me nine hours to write five hundred words. Nine hours, to do what I can normally do in one. The uncertainty and fear of this month — worrying about my loved ones, worrying about how I’m going to get groceries, or what happens if people stop buying books, or the fucking toilet paper shortage of all things — it all just piled on and piled on, background radiation seeping in through my studio walls.

We are not living in this moment, we are surviving this moment, and survival is hard work. It’s hard work even when it feels just like sitting still. Being driven is something I have spent years training my body and mind for, and this is even hard for me. So if you’re in lockdown and new to the feeling, with nothing but time on your hands, and the best you can manage at the end of the day is watching Netflix? That’s fine. You’re fine. You’re surviving.

And if someone is telling you that you’re lazy or unmotivated because you’re not learning French or taking up the trombone or writing the great American novel, they’re dead wrong. And an asshole. And probably trying to sell you something. The fact is, you only have so much energy, and the world is a thief right now, sucking it dry.

If all you accomplish today is surviving, well…that’s a pretty damn great accomplishment. And I’m cheering you on.

Free Books? Free Books.

Heck of a month, huh? It feels like everything’s a giant mess out there, and people are enduring a lifetime’s worth of stress. I don’t have much power to change things, but I can do my little part: how about some free entertainment? From today until Saturday, three of my e-books — Winter’s Reach, The Long Way Down, and Sworn to the Night — are free to download. That’s one epic fantasy, one urban fantasy, and one dimension-hopping smorgasbord. Enjoy!

On my end of things, the virus situation has slowed everything down. The next Harmony Black novel is still in editing, and I’m still aiming to have it out in April, though I don’t have a hard date yet. There are so many moving parts in publishing, and it just takes one piece going out of action to slow the whole beast down. For instance, Susannah Jones is ready to record the next Harmony book, but the staff at Audible is working from home and quarantined, so even once the book and audio is ready it may (hopefully not, fingers crossed!) suffer added delays waiting for approval.

Likewise, The Insider is still slated for a July release from Thomas & Mercer Publishing. I don’t think anything can hold that up, and the advance copies have already been printed, but we’ll see. (And I’m still hoping to be at ThrillerFest in July but again…we’ll see.)

Presently I’m pounding away at the followup to Ghosts of Gotham. What about the next Faust novel? As I mentioned in the afterword to The Locust Job, I started working on that the second I typed “the end.” That said, sometimes plans shift in the air. Essentially a big chunk of it is done but I ran into a few second-act problems (the action isn’t exciting enough and a major plot point just doesn’t feel credible to me), so I put it on the back-burner while I sort it out. You know me — I don’t put my name on anything until I think it’s tight. Suffice to say that both books are getting worked on and I think you’ll be pleased with the end results, and you won’t be waiting very long for either one.

Stay safe, all. We’ll get through this together.

The Locust Job: Now in Audio!

I’m pleased to announce that Audible has run their final checks and officially cleared the new audiobook for launch: The Locust Job, narrated by Adam Verner, is available now! Adam did a great job bringing Daniel Faust’s latest adventure to life, and I’m pleased with how it came out.

Speaking of Faust, at the moment I’m officially back to work. The move isn’t quite over yet, a few odds and ends left to deal with (aren’t there always?), but I’m ensconced at my new workstation and finding something akin to a normal schedule once again. The next Faust novel is coming along smoothly — no plot or character issues have popped up to destroy my outline just yet, though something always does, that’s just part of the process — and I think having it out by the end of the year is a very attainable goal.

This is going to be a fun one. Some old familiar faces and foes who haven’t been seen in a long time will be popping up in the next outing (and if you’ve gotten to the ending of The Locust Job, you can probably guess why.)

We’re still deep in editing on Black Tie Required, the next Harmony Black outing, but as it stands we still look good for an April release. And Thomas & Mercer Publishing still has The Insider, the second Charlie McCabe thriller, penciled in for July 7. That one’s basically finished and ready: it’s gone through rewrites, developmental editing, more rewrites, and copy-editing, and now all we have to do is the final proofreading pass.

(On the day it comes out, I’ll be heading for NYC to attend the annual Thrillerfest convention. I won’t know if The Loot is a finalist for the 2020 Thrillerfest awards for another couple of months, but fingers crossed.)

And now I must move some boxes, unpack some boxes, break down some boxes, and also write. If there are a lot of mentions of boxes in this new book, now you know why.

Moving is awful. Also, an update.

Happy Monday, everybody! Hopefully. It’s Frantic Monday for me, as I’m presently in the middle of a move to a new apartment across town.

Moving is awful. It’s the worst. The last time I moved was halfway across the country; this time it’s a twenty-minute drive. I figured it’d be easier. Nope! It’s still endless checklists and to-do items and phone calls and “wait for this person to do a thing so this other person can do a thing, but also call these two other departments to make sure they do a thing first.”

I’m frazzled but still getting work done. Like proofing the audiobook version of The Locust Job, so we can get that out on Audible ASAP; I’m twenty chapters in and Adam’s doing his usual awesome job of narration. I’ve also finished reviewing copy-edits for The Insider, the second Charlie McCabe thriller, so all we have to do is the final proofread. On that note, looks like Thomas & Mercer Publishing finalized their back-cover blurb, so now I can share what Charlie’s second outing is about:

“Hard-bitten bodyguard Charlie McCabe is lucky to be alive after her recent foray into Boston’s criminal underworld. So she’s taking no chances with this next job: protecting Hayden Cobb, key witness in the trial against a trio of murderous cops known as the East Boston Three. If Cobb drops dead, the Three walk.

After an attempt on Cobb’s life, Charlie suspects the Three have somehow put a hit on him from behind bars, and the assassin’s still at large. And when notorious loan shark Jimmy Lassiter is dragged into the mix, he retaliates the only way he knows how—by striking at the heart of her family.

Now it’s personal. With her father held hostage and her client in profound danger, Charlie must act fast. Far too many lives are at stake, and though she knows she can’t protect everyone, she’s gonna try.”

That’s set for a July release. Meanwhile, the next Harmony Black novel — Black Tie Required — is still in heavy editing. I’m hoping for April on that one, fingers crossed.

Of course, my current major project is writing the first draft of the follow-up to The Locust Job, in between Running All the Errands and Doing All the Things. And with that, I’d better get to it.

The Locust Job: Launch Day!

I know I kept you waiting, but Daniel Faust is back. The Locust Job is the first of two Faust adventures scheduled for 2020 so – appropriately enough – it’s out on New Year’s morning. There’s even a scene where he battles an epic hangover, possibly in solidarity depending on what you were up to last night. The ebook and paperback versions are available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0834CZDWX (note, you may have to search by the title if the paperback isn’t showing up, it just went live and apparently the link is wonky for some folks). Adam Verner is in the studio this week, recording the audiobook version, so hopefully we’ll see that go live by mid-January.

This is a big installment in the series, with big changes in play, and I hope it puts a smile on your face. I’m currently hard at work on the next book, to make sure it can reach you by year’s end. I can’t tell you the title of that one just yet, though. It’s a spoiler.

Meanwhile I figured it’s the new year and lots of folks are unwrapping their shiny new Kindles, so why not have a sale? From now until Sunday morning, the first two books in the series – The Long Way Down and The White Gold Score – are free on the Amazon storefront along with Winter’s Reach (the first book of the Revanche Cycle). Sworn to the Night (the first book of the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy) is ninety-nine cents (though that sale doesn't go live for another few hours, because Amazon is weird). Boom.

2020. I still can’t get over how not-real that year looks. But here we all are, at the dawn of the new roaring twenties. So roar. Rise and shine. There’s a whole new year ahead of us, with highs and lows and mysteries and discoveries to be made, and it won’t be a party without you.

2019: A Letter at the Year's End

How is it almost 2020 already? And how is “2020” a real thing? Seriously, that’s a date from an 80s sci-fi movie, not a real, actual year that we’re going to live in. Oh, well; here comes the future, ready or not. Around this time of year I like to take a minute to look back over the past year’s work and then turn my attention to the road ahead.

I said last year that 2019 was going to be a year of experiments; I wanted (needed) to try some new things as an author, and I figured some people would be on board with it, some wouldn’t, some things would work out perfectly, some wouldn’t. It should be no surprise that this incredibly non-committal prediction came true.

Looking Back

Back in April, 47North published my first non-Faustverse novel, Ghosts of Gotham. This book was – is – personal to me. I mean, they all are (if art isn’t personally important to its creator, it’s probably not art and probably not good), but Ghosts is a love letter to someone very special in my life. I was pleased to see it got such a great response, and I’ll talk more about the future of that series in a bit, when we get to the “next year” part of this recap.

Then in August, Thomas & Mercer Publishing released The Loot, the first book in the Charlie McCabe series, and my first attempt at a non-fantasy crime novel. Writing it was a great experience and one that (I think) helped me to broaden my horizons as an author. Finally, October brought Right to the Kill, and the return of Harmony Black. In keeping with the theme of the year, I took some chances with this one instead of playing it safe (like switching from a first-person to a third-person perspective). I was beyond happy to hear so much positive feedback on this: writing is a process of constant failing, learning, failing again, and learning more. In this case, I think it was worth rolling the dice.

So that was my 2019: two totally new projects, and one sequel with a remix touch. I did not go with the safe and tested. Did it work out? I think so. Financially, I probably could have written three Faust sequels one after another and made a little more money, but none of this year’s releases were flops. Artistically? Hell yeah. Ghosts of Gotham was meaningful. The Loot put me in touch with the traditions of the crime writers who inspired me as a child. And Right to the Kill reinvigorated my own excitement for a series and characters who had been allowed to sleep for too long. So where do we go from here?

Looking Ahead

One week from today, Daniel Faust is back to help you through your New Year’s Eve hangover. Or just to share his. The Locust Job is the next installment in the series and…stuff is Happening. I think that in any long-running series, some books are going to be seen as more pivotal than others, and this is going to be one of the big ones. Without giving any spoilers away, I’m aiming to put a big smile on your face and make you curse my name, simultaneously. When you get there, let me know if I managed to pull that off.

While I inevitably juggle multiple projects at any given time, my current “on deck” manuscript is the follow-up book. I can’t even tell you the title, because it’s a major spoiler for something huge that happens in The Locust Job, but I can tell you that I’m going to do everything I can to have it out by the end of 2020. I felt bad about making fans wait while I experimented in 2019, and I’m aiming to make it up to you with a double dose.

The next Harmony Black adventure, Black Tie Required, is with my editor as we speak. While the last book was intended to serve as a new entry-point to the series, this one builds on the stories before it and brings some old familiar faces (and foes) back into the fray. When a string of abductions and assassinations target former employees of Talon Worldwide – including engineers who worked on a top secret dimension-gate project – Harmony and Jessie have to uncover the culprit and recover the stolen tech before it falls into enemy hands.

This story will definitively answer one of the longest-standing mysteries in all of my books. I speak, of course, of the mystery of what happened to Daniel Faust’s car.

Meanwhile, The Insider, the second Charlie McCabe novel, is nearly finished. We’ve completed developmental editing (which is where you sit down and hammer at the story itself, trying to punch it up and make it a stronger piece) and now we’re into the copy-editing phase (where you drill down into actual grammar, sentence structure, and proofreading for errors). Charlie’s sophomore outing involves a twisty little mystery, as she and her team are assigned to protect a critical witness in a police-corruption trial. An attempt on their client’s life results in a single bullet being fired…but two different guns are abandoned at the scene. Things get complicated fast, and what looked like a clear-cut situation is nothing of the kind.

Will there be more after this? I hope so! Thomas & Mercer originally contracted me for two books, and if book two is a strong seller, hopefully they’ll sign me on for more installments after this.

One project from 2019 doesn’t have a release window yet. This year I completed The Hungry Dreaming, a stand-alone novel set in the world of Ghosts of Gotham. It’s an odd beast, a sprawling story with a plot that runs through three ages of New York City, from the Revolutionary War, to the mid-1800s, to the modern day. And it’s big; nearly 200,000 words (where most of my novels run 90,000 words, for comparison). It’s about ancient Greek myth and modern surveillance culture, and what a commitment to truth means in an age when disinformation spreads like wildfire at the click of a button.

Anyway, I’m shopping it around, trying to find a good publisher-home for it. We’ll see how that goes. Writing is a business for gamblers, and the only sure thing is that when one project is done, you’ve got to start plugging away at the next one. And on that note, I’m in the very early stages of a direct follow-up to Ghosts of Gotham. It’s going to happen. Not soon, because I need to take a lot of time and reflection and get this exactly right, but it’s going to happen.

(Rumors that my outlining process involves sitting in a dark room, drinking gin from a water-spotted glass and listening to 1920s jazz on Radio Dismuke are grossly overblown. That’s only 20-30% of my process.)

It’ll get written. But it can’t just be a sequel; it has to be better than the original. So figuring out how to make that happen is my big goal for 2020 (and my gradually mounting pile of notes suggests this may actually end up as two books, one direct follow-up and another stand-alone set in the same world). It’s funny; I’m really displaced from time, in a sense. Most of what you’ll see from me this year is already written, done or in final edits right now. Most of what I’ll be working on now will go unseen until 2021 or beyond. And so I move like a ghost, trailed by manuscripts that show not where I am, but where I was a year ago.

And with that, I return to the story-hunt. Stay warm and stay safe. Be good to each other, okay? We are all we have.

Love always,

Craig