10 YEARS A KILLER

There was a very nice post from a happy fan on the Darren Shan Discussions fan page on Facebook, after he'd read Lady Of The Shades, the last book for adults that I published under the name of Darren Shan, before switching to Darren Dash for my more maturely-themed stories: CLICK HERE

I've always loved the diversity of my work. Ever since I started out, my agent and publishers have tried to get me to pigeon-hole myself, to just write straightforward thrillers for adults, or just write horror books for children -- or maybe, at a stretch, do both of those things, but no more than that. And they're absolutely right to try and drive me down those paths -- it's very hard to get your book into shops, and to become a commonly known name, and to convince people to return and take a chance on your future books. Lots of readers like to know exactly where they stand with an author, and pretty much all booksellers like to be able to easily present a new work from an established author as more of the same thing. That's the way the market works, and if you want to be a bestselling author, who need to bend around the market, as the market will almost certainly never bend around YOU.

The thing is, I never worried about being a bestselling author. Don't get me wrong -- I longed for success, and I've enjoyed it immensely with those books of mine that have scored big, primarily Cirque Du Freak and its sequels. But I was never prepared to chase it at any cost. I recall a rejection letter from a very nice editor when I was still at university and sending out some early work. She said that she enjoyed the book, but it was too weird and unmarketable, and if I just toned down the weird stuff and wrote a straight-up genre book, I would get published. But even at that early stage of the game I wasn't willing to bend. I didn't want to be told what I should and shouldn't write. I just wanted to go where my imagination took me, and damn the rest.

By my mid-twenties, I was hopeful of being able to make a very meager living as a writer, of making just enough to scrape by, and I was happy with that prospect. Money's nice, but it's never been a motivating factor for me -- I was never inclined to go get a "proper" job with a guaranteed big wage. I wanted to tell my tales, hopefully find a small audience for them, and just bob along quietly through life.

Cirque Du Freak changed all that, and the Darren Shan brand became a juggernaut for a while. I was more than happy to ride with that particular wave, and sell millions of copies of my books, and travel the world. It changed my life and I loved every single minute of it. But even when I was at my most commercially successful best, I still wasn't writing FOR the market, which I think is pretty clear if you look at all the different places that the storyline went to, and then that The Demonata books went to. All the experimenting and different styles, even different genres -- although I got pegged as a horror writer with Cirque, I didn't write a TRUE horror book for kids until Lord Loss! And then I threw in fantasy and sci-fi and James Bond and all sorts of other stuff.

I'm in a bit of a commercial lull at the moment. I've been self-publishing my adult books for a while now, and have had to do that as well with my latest books for kids and teens, the Archibald Lox series. I won't lie -- I'd prefer it if all those books were put out by traditional publishers, who could reach a much bigger audience than I can by myself, and which would leave me free to focus solely on the writing, which is what I enjoy most, and what I'm best at. But if the cost of that is not being able to release a thriller like Lady Of the Shades... then a weird sci-sci novel like An Other Place... then a Shakespearean-themed comedy like Midsummer's Bottom... then en epic, slow-building fantasy saga like Archibald Lox...

Well, as my actions have shown, I'll take the off-road lanes of variety and diversity over the more run-of-the-mill safe and predictable lanes that run through the commercial middle of the book market. Because life is short, and money doesn't mean a thing at the end of your days, and I want be able to look back when I'm on my death bed and smile and whisper, "What a weird and winding road I took. Wasn't that a blast!"

NAUGHTY MEME!

Oh, this Mr Crepsley / Steve meme is so wrong... yet so true!!! It made me laugh and wince at the same time. It was shared with me by a fan called Lacey, over on the Darren Shan Discussions Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/839821919370288 Thanks for sharing it, Lacey -- though I suspect blood's going to boil in the veins of many Mr Crepsley fans!!

WHO WROTE THAT?!?

I came across the above photo on the Daren Shan Discussions Facebook page and thought it was too sweet not to share! The writer, Maria, definitely has much nice handwriting than mine -- I think, if I ever released a page of handwritten quotes, very few people would actually be able to read what I had written!!! :-) Here's what she said about the photo: "I have a habit of scribbling down quotes I like when I see them in books to save for when I need some positivity. I have about ten pages across various notebooks with Darren Shan quotes on them..."

I love it when fans like Maria highlight old quotes of mine, not least because I'm often surprised by them -- there are very few that I actively remember, and sometimes I have no memory of them at all and have to ask myself, "Did I really write that?!?"

I try not to labour too long over the lines that I write. My goal is always to set a good working pace when I sit down to write, and I find that when a story is going well, nice lines tens to unravel almost by themselves. Sure, I go through my drafts over and over and over again (at least 6 or 7 times before a books sees print), and I do a lot of rewriting and tweaking and fine-tuning, but more often than not a truly decent line springs naturally out of the story and needs little if any shaping by me. Indeed, I'd go so far as to make a musical allusion and say that with a really good story, I feel more like a composer than a conductor...

FIRST LOVE

A writing professor called Kath Rothschild asked the following question on Twitter last month: "What’s the first book you read WAY too young?" It generated an avalanche of replies, including some by several people citing my books -- Lord Loss tended to be the most-mentioned. That was nice -- as a horror writer, you always hope your books leave readers shaken! -- but it also made me wonder what book did I read at too young an age, and the answer came to me very swiftly...

Salem's Lot by Stephen King.

I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I took my first bite of Stephen King, but I was still at primary school, so I was at most 11 years old... which, for a book like Salem's Lot, is ridiculously way too young!!! But, hey, it was the 1980s, and we did things differently back then. There were no horror books being released for children or teenagers (at least none that I was aware of), so if you were a fan of the genre, as I had been since the age of 5 or 6, you tended to make that leap to adult horror rather sooner than you should have, to King, or James Herbert, or Dean Koontz (though I never really got into his stuff).

I still vividly remember reading that book. I'd seen the second half of the 1970s TV movie adaptation of it a while back, which terrorised me (in an utterly delighted way). I'd no idea it was based on a book, or who Stephen King was, but then I saw THIS cover in a book store, recognised the characters from the film, and pleaded with my mother to buy it for me. These days, I think most parents would take one look at that cover and politely and quickly steer their child out of the shop and straight to a psychiatrist! But, hey, it was the 1980s, and mothers did things differently back then.

She bought the book for me and I flew through it. Like the film, it gave me nightmares, but I LIKED having nightmares, so that was OK. I was in ecstasy when I finished it, and knew that I'd found new levels to the literary horror genre that I hadn't known existed, and that I was at the start of a long, bloody, magnificent adventure into the realms of the dark and the doomed. Soon after, I read my second King book, Cujo -- it was the 1980s, and dogs did things differently back then -- and that was a bit TOO adult for me (I could feel my cheeks burning when I was reading some of the juicier sections in the car or living room when my parents were around -- I didn't quite know what they meant, but I knew I was way too young to be dealing with such material). So I put the adult horror books aside for a while, until I was a much more mature 12 or 13, and then I returned (probably with a re-read of Salem's Lot) and have never looked back.

IT'S A WRAP!