News from the North

I am pleased to report that I survived Paris, Dubai, India and Sri Lanka (escaping the latter 2 weeks before the terrible Boxing Day tsunami) and, continuing my pathologically nomadic existence, am currently escaping the Canadian winter in Los Angeles. Don't tell US immigration. Also, I finally have Official Publication Dates for the next year or so: Feb 2005 - Tvdlicher Pfad (German translation of Dark Places) (actually, it may already be on shelves) May 2005 - Dark Places , Canadian mass-market paperback Jul 2005 - The Blood Price , UK hardcover Jul 2005 - Blood Price , Canadian trade paperback (no, there's no 'The' in the Canadian title, just to be different; same book though) Oct 2005 - The Blood Price , US trade paperback Mar 2006 - The Blood Price , UK paperback

Spacey mood right now. Have dispatched stealth robot death ninjas postcards to all appropriate addresses. Had to scramble to beat Colombo-post-office-closure so don't expect a whole lot of verbiage. Wandering around Mumbai today, I kept passing places with elaborate wrought-iron gates and Devanagari-script banners above - temples? don't think so, Hindu temples tend to be a lot more colourful and decorated - which, on the banners, featured very large scarlet Om symbols next to very large scarlet swastikas. Talk about your semiotic dissonance. (I was going to insert a picture of each into this post, to let you experience it yourself, but, um, context being king and all, maybe not such a good idea.) Was reading my Rough Guide India today, in prep for exchanging it tomorrow, and came upon the fact that there are still uncontacted 1 tribes in the Andaman Islands, as in the Peruvian jungle. I'm weirdly fascinated by this notion, that there are people right now, in this satel...

Hampi, Karnataka Hampi, despite its unprepossessing name, is like another world. Its old name - "Kishkinda", a city out of legend from the Ramayana - would be more appropriate. The landscape here is unearthly, dominated by vast jumbled ridges of colossal boulders, balancing and leaning on one another in seemingly unnatural ways, somehow looking crystalline and water-warped at the same time. Roads and villages are built in the shadow of these boulders, like handfuls of fifty-foot-high pebbles dropped by the gods, and it's hard to shake the notion that this place was meant for creatures of far greater scale than us. (It reminds me a lot of Matopos in Zimbabwe, for those of you who have been there, though leafier and a little less stark.) And then there are the ruins. The bones of the once-mighty Vijayanagar kingdom are visible all around the fields and valleys here, and doubtless hidden beneath as well. Hampi itself is built around an ancient temple to Vishnu dominated b...

Palolem, Goa Here it's all about the beach. The single most perfect beach I have ever seen, two headlands anchoring a pale wide mile-long sunset-facing crescent. The thick fringe of coconut palms behind the beach shelters dozens of lodges and cafes-bars-restos, and the road behind them is full of shops and travel agents and Internet cafes, but it doesn't feel oppressively built up; the locals have kept a close eye on development here, and there are no two-story buildings or hotel complexes, and most people stay in simple thatched bamboo-stilt huts, rustic but civilized with fans, mosquito nets, electricity, and reliable if communal running water. The beach is big enough to swallow us all up and still leave plenty of space for solitude, if that's your thing. Or activity. There's a lot of activity. Swimmers and traipsters and sunbathers, of course, and mostly-placid dogs and cows wandering by, and Frisbee, soccer, volleyball, and cricket. That last is played almost exclus...

Arumbol, Goa Ah, the time dilation of travel. It's hard to believe I left Paris only six days ago. Feels more like a month. Being on the road actively extends your life, I swear, at least in terms of perceived time, and that's probably what it's all about, innit? Well, "extends" only if not "shortens". Today I hired a motorbike and bombed down Goa's coastal road for an hour, incidentally violating every motorcycle-safety law known to man other than "no headstands while in motion": no helmet! no protective clothing! first time on a motorbike in 18 months! unreliable Indian bike with unfamiliar gearing system! narrow Third World rutted pitted roads, occupied by pedestrians, oxen, dogs, autorickshaws, oversize pickups, and worst of all, other backpackers doing the same damn thing! Gorgeous, way-fun ride though. (Dear Mom, if you ever read this; uh, just kidding, in fact I've never been on a motorcycle in my life, okay? Great. Thanks.) Aram...

I arrived on the heels of a seven-year storm. Desert country, my ass , I muttered to myself as I sloshed through the inch-deep water flooding Dubai International's arrivals and baggage halls. The water had shorted out the baggage conveyor systems, leaving my planemates temporarily stuck; I, who travel with carry-on only, left them behind and hopped a cab, trying and failing to squelch a sense of soaring moral superiority. The rains had shut down all but one of the highway's outgoing lanes. Two BMWs and one Mercedes were trapped in a gigantic puddle that had swallowed the other two. I found a decent cheap hotel and crashed. Yesterday I explored Dubai, which is an interesting place and worthy of its own, more analytical post, which shall hopefully come in time. But today I want to tell you about today, which was one of my rare splashout travel days, in part because I'm flying out of here tomorrow and didn't have time to wander 'round on the cheap, in part because...we...

I am delighted to report a slew of good news: my next book has a final title, BLOOD PRICE; the same name on both sides of the Atlantic, this time. The UK hardcover is scheduled for July 2005, paperback in March 2006. US and Canadian release dates have not yet been set, but probably summer 2005 as well. even better, Hodder & Stoughton have signed me to write two more thrillers over the next two years. Hodders has purchased the rights to publish these books in the Commonwealth excluding Canada; movement towards Canadian and American deals has begun. as a result, I'm off to India to research book 3, which is very, very tentatively titled BLACK BLOC.

With National Novel Writing Month coming up, various friends and LJ-friends of mine are gearing up to write novels. This disturbs me greatly. Please stop. Eighteen months ago, I somehow stumbled and tumbled into a paying gig as a full-time novelist, and let me tell you, it's a damn cushy job - but it's also fraught with risk. If I don't sell books, I'll be back out on the street, or worse yet, in the office. And the competition is killing me. Every time someone walks into a bookstore, I'm already fighting for their attention with Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown, John Le Carre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, the list goes on forever. You think I want that list any longer? You think I want more competition? No freakin' way. There's this perception of the publishing business as a walled garden, protected by moats and spiky walls, whose denizens are for the most part actively hostile to wannabe writers and their attempts t...

If you have the overwhelming urge to see me make a fool of myself on national television (well, an obscure cable channel), now is your chance. My Mystery Ink interview will air on Wednesday, September 29th at 10 am, 6 pm and 2am on the Global Mystery channel. All showtimes presumably EST. Don't touch that dial.

I'll be spending the next few months living in Paris. Because, well, I could, and it's Paris. I'm pleased to report that DP/TOTD has recently received a spate of excellent reviews from publications as august as The Times of London, as far-flung as Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, and as, um, capitol-of-Canada as the Ottawa Citizen. Other reviews: "A well-paced thriller with plenty of twists and some creepy moments that keep the pages turning." - Time  Out London "A compelling thriller about the mysterious deaths of travellers in Third World countries, committed, the lead character suspects, by other Westerners" - TNT  Magazine Chosen by Metro Today as one of their 'Top Summer Reads'. "A sharp debut that never lets up on the tension, with a denouement that is both shocking and utterly right ... Jon Evans ... isn't about to develop into something special - he's already there." - January  Magazine "It's very, ve...

"I Survived The World's Most Dangerous Road" proudly proclaims the T-shirt I did not receive. Because they're out of shirts, not because I post from beyond the grave. 3600 vertical metres in 5 hours is quite a ride. We began in stark high-altitude where nothing grew but lichen and where the sides of the road were limned with ice, and, layered in many clothes, bombed down steep and exquisitely sinuous asphalt at speeds circa 70kph/40mph. Then, suddenly, two lanes shrank to one, asphalt turned to extremely rocky dirt, and the adrenaline began to seriously flow. To our left, about a metre or two away, sheer drops of up to 1000 feet. To our right, equally sheer cliffs (at one point we rode behind a waterfall for about fifty feet). Before and behind us, enormous trucks oozing their slow way up and down incredibly twisted rocky road. When they stand off, which happens fairly often, the downhill vehicle has to back up to a passing bay, aka one of the little projections of ro...

There is nothing quite so headclearing as four days of hard slogging through tranquil wilderness. The Inca Trail is a busy trail, far from remote, worn smooth by tens of thousands of boots a year, yes; but that doesn't detract even a little from its beauty. Am I glad I walked it. (For values of "I" that do not currently include my calf or quadricep muscles.) Roughing It DAY ONE. Stride up trail, manfully proud of carrying my own 12kg/25lb pack. Magnanimously make way for our stream of 18 sandal-clad porters, the largest of whom is six inches and forty pounds smaller than I, each weighed down by roughly 40 lbs each of food, water, tents, fuel, chairs, tools, pots, pans, plates, cups, etc etc. A glorious day, surrounded by raw wilderness, as I desired, entirely untrammeled by civilization, making our way on foot down the magical Inca Trail, like the Incas themselves, as it should be! The rest of the world should throw down their shackles of cars and fixed-wall buildings....

Am back in Lima, fighting off a 24-hour jungle bug. You'd think an evening spent in the grip of fever would spark Stokeresque visions and creativity, but in sad fact I feel all mundanely uninspired. So click if you dare, but I fear this travelogue will be less entertaining than usual. At play in the fields of the Lord Iquitos: a strange place. The largest city in the world (pop. circa 400,000) with no road or rail connections - everything and everyone must come or go by air or riverboat. This lends it a real frontier-town feel, which the DEA helicopters, downtown cafes dominated by a small crew of dissolute British expats, and gutted turtles and caimans (gators) for sale in the local market do nothing to dispel. Still, it's civilization; it has an international airport, banks, pharmacies, a cinema, cheap Internet cafes, a five-star hotel, and a thriving tourist industry, the last focused mostly on expeditions to lodges set in jungle proper. It's not at all apparent when in ...

Only 48 hours away from 60 hours of travel (but less than 2 calendar days; aren't time zones wonderful?) with the routing: Sydney-Auckland-LA-Miami-Lima. I do it for the love, yes, but mostly for the frequent-flier miles. The Blue Mountains Easter weekend was spent camping in the Blue Mountains, an hour west of Sydney (ok, 4 hours with Easter traffic), with two old friends of mine, who in order to protect their identities I shall call Chris & Chris, rather than Chong & Andrea. It was an uneventful weekend spent sleeping in tents and walking through peaceful verdant eucalyptus forest. Except for the eventful bits. The driving pointer rotated to me on Saturday, and I was eager to drive, as I'd never driven a left-hand-side stick-shift before - in fact, had only driven a stick maybe 10 times total before. My travel companions were considerably less eager. I thought I might get some pointers from them, some benefit from their vast experience, but sadly they unhelpfully spe...