newsletter: october, 2002
For a writer it’s always a tough time just before you have a book coming out… you think that perhaps you should have gone back and changed things, revised a character, rewritten a chapter, an ending, or just scrapped the whole damn thing and started all over again…Mixed feelings, all kinds of them.
THE LAST DARKNESS, my new book, (HarperCollins, London) comes out November 4; it’s set in Glasgow and centres around one of the characters who was at the heart of my last novel THE BAD FIRE (2001), also set in Glasgow.
I usually don’t like the continuation of a character, although I’ve done it in the past with a character called Frank Pagan (Jig, Mazurka, Mambo, Jigsaw, Heat); there’s a tendency to write yourself into a corner, if the character becomes stubborn and refuses to change or grow - but I found myself coming back to the character of Lou Perlman, who features in THE BAD FIRE.
I can’t explain why one character grips and another fades away as soon as a book is finished. Who knows? It happens, and as a writer you sometimes find yourself enchanted by one character, and you want to know more about him or her…how does he live? does he contain the possibility of change? Whatever, I liked Perlman and decided I needed to explore him more - so the novel is concerned with Perlman and his immediate family, and a secret crime that threatens to wreck Perlman’s world…it’s about relationships as much as it is about crime. I welcome as always any comments from readers.
I appreciate the e-mails and letters I get from out there, and I answer them all. Even the critical ones; I’m not immune to criticism - if it’s good, you learn from it. I thank the people who still write to me about the memoir, All That Really Matters, because that book is still fresh in my heart.
Since the last time I posted a newsletter, a couple of my older novels are chugging along the slow road to celluloid. One is Jigsaw, the other Blackout…there’s a long way to go in the process of making a book into a script and then into a movie, and sometimes these projects collapse in a heap, or just out of exhaustion - but writers need to be optimistic about their projects coming to life. Not always easy, but always necessary….
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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