News from the North

Lots of things going on. First off, as per this site's front page, I'm very pleased to report that Dark Places won the 2005 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Second, BLOOD PRICE is on the verge of publication. Tomorrow (!) is the official release date for the UK hardcover edition; July 13th is Canada's trade paperback release date; and October 10th is the trade paperback release in both the UK and the USA. (But generally books don't actually reach bookstores until 2-3 weeks after the official release dates.) Third, I've finished Book Three, which has the working title BLACK BLOC (which will almost certainly change). It will be published in the UK this time next year. I don't yet have a contract for this book in Canada, the USA, or anywhere else, but watch this space.

Insurgent mortars hit LSA Anaconda on a daily basis. (Don't worry, it's an enormous base, the chance of actually getting hit by one is astronomically small.) The other night a barrage of about half a dozen hit maybe half a mile away from me, waking me up even though they weren't loud - there's something about that crrrrump that kicks you into wakefulness. I went back to sleep, was rewoken by the red alert siren, and went back to sleep again, as did almost everyone else in the tent; you're supposed to find a hardened bunker for the duration of the red alert, if you're on active duty, but nobody here takes the siren seriously. It's the boy that cried Mortar. Here it goes again, as I type. Word is that one shell smacked into a shower trailer in which a soldier was showering. Fortunately for him it a) missed his stall and b) failed to explode. No word on whether the hot water was interrupted, or on whether he dried and dressed before leaving. Last night a stron...

Objectively, a day trip from Balad to the Green Zone involves very little actual risk. Subjectively is a whole other story. Typically, I was nervous up to the moment that I actually sat down in the outgoing Blackhawk; then I started to grin. It didn't help that the two passengers I flew out with were Airborne doctors who chatted breezily during the preflight about their recent patients; a "star cluster to the face" (don't know what that is, but it sounds nasty) and a piece of shrapnel that lodged on the inside of the victim's skull (without any brain damage). They talked wistfully about the "freedom birds", the airplanes that fly from Balad back to America, and the sad fact that they weren't on one. To fly a Blackhawk from Balad, you sign up at the space-available tent, and at your appointed hour a minibus takes you out to the flight line, where dozens of helicopters, mostly Blackhawks and two-rotored Chinooks, await. After grisly conversation you c...

More incoherent notes: I'm staying in a billeting tent, which is a tent dormitory with 18 cots, a few Porta-Johns nearby, and some showers and actual toilets a further walk away. Don't misinterpret "tent" - this one has wooden floors, fluorescent lights, two massive air-conditioning units, and a 15-foot-high ceiling. "The only things the army are really good at are erecting tents and lining things up in neat rows." (Presumably they're at least competent at the actual warfighting as well. And their engineers are well respected.) There are 28 such tents in the billeting area, plus a central check-in tent that features another huge TV, a small library, and the internet/phone center from which I now type. Backpacking is actually amusingly good training for living at a military base. There are plenty of bugs, kind of surprising for an alleged desert. (Though there is a nearby canal, and fields of green weeds grow outside the fence.) I showered late, night bef...

Random images from the last, lessee, 18 hours: 0400. (German time, GMT+1). Stepping out of a van onto the Frankfurt runway. The looming C-17, its high wings oddly twisted, looks enormous against the night. The interior is an enormous tubular cave, its ceiling covered by wires, duct tubing, crawl spaces and access platforms, the metal walls full of racks of odd tools, anchors, buttons, controls, nooks, crannies. The only windows are a few tiny portholes. The floor is all rollers, on which pallets averaging twenty cubic feet are stacked and secured by a mesh of seat-beltlike straps. It's hard to tell exactly what most of the cargo is. Passenger seats line the walls. Most of them are blocked by cargo, but there are enough free for tonight's four passengers. We listen to the lecture about our oxygen masks, life jackets, and fireproof breathing hood. I strap myself into a seat beneath an axe. The axe is mounted next to a sign that says 'FOR EMERGENCY EXIT CUT HERE'. Tonigh...

Quote of the day, from a taxi driver: "Anything is normal in Germany." This explains much. What I never appreciated about the military before is that once inside its protective shield, once you wave your magic ID card, all manner of things are provided for you. Some things are free (snacks, coffee, Internet, some transport, some accomodations, the gym) and the rest highly subsidized (nearby hotels, phone cards, everything in the base's restaurants and well-stocked shops). It's downright communist . In a "from each according to his orders, to each according to his rank" kind of way. No local laundromat though. Right now that is my most compelling need. I'm sure you're fascinated. I feel kind of redundant blogging the space-a experience, what with a friend of mine having already written about it compellingly , but what the hell else am I going to talk about, right? Also, the AMC space-a passenger-service people seem to have gotten their act together...

Outside a heavy rain falls on Germany. Let's hope it's not pathetic fallacy. I suspect I'll be typing at you a lot over the next few days, out of sheer boredom. But you never know; the gods of space-a may smile on me; I may be en route in the near future. I almost gave you a time there, but you know, security. (Kidding. Mostly.) Frankfurt Airport was cavernous, gleamingly clean, ghostly quiet. I guess Monday afternoons are not a thriving time. After some of what I expect I will grow to call "the usual military confusion" I hopped a bus to Rhein-Main AFB, on the other side of the shared runway. Taxiing after touchdown, I saw it to our left: a grid of huge bulbous cargo planes perched on the tarmac, all dull gray, opposite the sleek bright-logo jets across the way. What's most noticeable about my time so far in the military world - one hour - is how unmilitary it seems. If it wasn't for all the guys in uniform this could almost be a slightly down-at-heel civ...

A reminder: the mass-market paperback of DARK PLACES hits Canadian bookstores on May 4th (which, appropiately, is also my sister's birthday.) I'm pleased to announce that I've come to an agreement with DTV re the German translation of BLOOD PRICE, which should go on sale in Germany sometime in 2006. Oh, and the UK paperback release for BLOOD PRICE has been moved up to October of this year.

Airlines I Have Flown with destinations and amusing anecdotes, if any Spurred by the realization that I've somehow never flown Lufthansa. Aero Continente: Lima-Iquitos, Iquitos-Lima, Lima-Cuzco. Run by a notorious drug dealer and officially declared unsafe to fly by the USA. Air Canada: Bazillions of trillions of times. Have gone seriously downhill. Air China: Bangkok-Taiwan-SF. Only time I've had five seats to myself. And thank God for that, it was a transpacific flight and I was in rough shape. I forgave them the four-hour delay in the wee hours in Taiwan's airport where I was forced to reread Crichton's Timeline . Air France: Toronto-Paris-Toronto, back in '87. Air India: London-Delhi-Bangkok. Shabby but serviceable. Air New Zealand: LAX-Auckland-Sydney and back. Excellent. Air Niugini: Cairns-Port Moresby-Mt Hagen and back. Not bad by Third World standards. Mt Hagen was raked by a freak lightning storm as we approached, so we had to abort the first landing with...

You're not supposed to like Los Angeles. New Yorkers will tell you it's soulless suburban sprawl, you can't walk anywhere, you spend all your time stuck in traffic, breathing toxic smog. San Franciscans will warn you that it's full of plastic people, air-kissing backstabbing phonies who can't think about anything but flashy cars, chiseled abs, and which celebrity name to drop next. And people from other countries will know without ever having been that it exemplifies the very worst of narcissistic self-congratulatory America. But in the same way that Europeans don't get the USA - don't understand the size and diversity of the place, that there are at least a half-dozen Americas tucked uncomfortably into one legal nation - non-Angelenos will never grok L.A. Yes, it's sort of a relentless pea soup of suburbia thickened only occasionally by clusters of density, but hidden in this bland fog are a few terrific places. I'm now back in Canada (like a s...

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...