no such thing as bad publicity

Am back from a whirlwind month (Muskoka, London, Paris, Cape Cod) and expecting another in September (London, Sweden, the Trans-Siberian) but August will be quiet. Which is good, 'cause I got a whole lotta Book Four work to do.

While I was away, Quill & Quire (sort of Canada's answer to Publisher's Weekly) ran a very nice review of Invisible Armies. Meanwhile, in Australia, my publisher Hachette (motto: 'We Also Make Cruise Missiles') has issued a Publisher's Promise for Invisible Armies, which, is, basically, a money-back guarantee; if you buy it and don't like it, they'll refund the purchase price. This special label will only ever appear on a select few titles that we are confident readers will enjoy, they say. I am pleased.


And my hometown newspaper ran a (front-page!) feature on me. A fair-use sample:

To Evans, truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction. But it certainly does make for great fiction material.

The 33-year-old Waterloo native lives by the author's mantra: "Write what you know."

He wanted to set a book in the Balkans, so he went there, gathering material that fuelled his second novel, Blood Price.

Over the past couple of years he has dodged incoming mortars in Iraq and travelled through tumultuous central Africa on public transit. He has filled his mind with story ideas in Paris, London, Egypt, China and around South America.

"Every time I travel I see something that is defining, yet so deeply weird that I couldn't have imagined it on my own," he says between sips of coffee.

On this morning, Evans is relaxing in the comparatively unexciting confines of Java House on Toronto's Queen Street West.

It's a favourite haunt from his days as a computer programmer at a nearby firm.

He's decompressing, having handed in a manuscript for his next novel (tentatively titled Absolute Darkness) to his publisher just hours earlier.



It's a very nice and flattering article. But I gotta say, reading about yourself in the third person doesn't appear to get any less weird with repetition.

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