Patrick Lee Fiction Blog

Blog Comments I Didn't Know About Until Just Now

2011-12-31T11:36:00.002-05:00

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Hey everyone. Looking at the settings in Blogger just now, I found a "spam folder" for comments; I didn't know this existed until now, but for a long time it's been blocking certain comments without my even seeing them. Most of these were not spam. Needless to say I posted them right away. Apologies to anyone who thought I was screening them out for some random reason; I definitely wouldn't have done that.

The Breach is Very, Very Affordable Right Now

2011-12-14T01:29:00.004-05:00

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Inspired by the success of your friendly neighborhood crack dealer, for the next few days the eBook version of The Breach, the first book of the Travis Chase trilogy, is available for 99 cents.

UPDATE - The price is back up to normal again. Thank you to everyone who made the 99-cent promotion a great run!

Kindle Version

Nook Version

Official Launch Date for Book 3

2011-06-15T17:56:00.002-04:00

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The third (and final) book of the Breach series, titled Deep Sky, will be in stores on Tuesday, December 27 of this year.

The book takes place a little over a year after the events of Ghost Country, and deals with one of Tangent's strangest secrets: a fact about the Breach that not even Paige Campbell has been aware of until now. Travis and Paige dig into this secret and quickly realize it may hold the answers to every question they've ever asked about the Breach.

Congratulations Steve Ulfelder!

2011-05-09T16:38:00.003-04:00

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Among the many great things about publishing, there's the fact that you sometimes get an early look at a very cool novel. Case in point: Steve Ulfelder's debut, Purgatory Chasm, hitting the stands tomorrow. I think this guy is going to be around for a while.

Whoever the hell is pretending to be me, in Houston--

2011-04-24T19:26:00.006-04:00

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--this would be a good time to stop.

I've gotten e-mails from multiple women in the past few days about a guy in Houston passing himself off as me. He apparently goes so far as to tell these women that the author photo inside the back covers of my books is a picture of a model. Well gee, maybe I should be flattered. I'm not.

Whoever this person is, he'd be well-advised to knock it the hell off while it's still apparently just a dumb pick-up routine. If it continues, this will become a matter for law enforcement to deal with.

Excerpt

2010-12-21T18:31:00.005-05:00

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There's a long excerpt (the first 66 pages) of Ghost Country on the HarperCollins site: Link

Wow, two blog posts in eleven months. I better slow down before my friends stage an intervention.

Ghost Country ARCs

2010-08-14T20:05:00.002-04:00

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A couple of these showed up at my place this week. Picking up a copy of one of your books for the first time--I can't imagine that moment will ever get old. Thanks to everyone at Harper for a great cover! And thanks to Stephen Coonts for the blurb!

New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Lists

2010-01-14T17:05:00.005-05:00

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This is the part where I wake up and I'm back in seventh grade, studying the FOIL (First, Outer, Inner, Last) method for solving polynomial equations in pre-algebra.

The Breach is #29 on the New York Times mass-market paperback extended list, and #124 on the USA Today list. I remember reading these lists all the time in the newspapers, back in the mid-90's, around the time I was getting out of high school and considering taking a crack at writing. (I ended up going with screenplays for a long time, first, but obviously I had the book bug in me from the beginning.) Someone in my family must have had a subscription to USA Today, because it was always around, and I checked out the bestseller list every Thursday. Would've been fun to know that seven or eight hundred Thursdays later, I'd be on it. (For the record, neither of these listings will appear in the print versions of their respective papers; NYT prints the top 20, and USA Today prints the top 50, while the papers' websites show the full lists--and I won't be dwelling on this distinction for much longer than it takes to write this sentence.)

So many people to thank: Janet Reid, coolest agent in the business, and everyone else at FinePrint. My editor at HarperCollins, Diana Gill, as well as Christine Maddalena, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Danielle Bartlett, Michael Brennan, Carl Lennertz, and probably a few hundred others I just haven't gotten to meet yet. And a special thank you to Sarah Durand. I also want to thank Lee Child again (I was lucky enough to be able to thank him in person at Bouchercon) for a cover blurb which is probably having a bigger influence on potential buyers than I can know.

Above all, everyone out there who's reading the book. In the most literal sense, I can't say it enough: THANK YOU!!!

Guest Post Today on John Scalzi's Whatever!

2010-01-12T10:38:00.002-05:00

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The very cool John Scalzi invited me to write a Big Idea post about The Breach. His site, Whatever, is here (I doubt many people need that pointed out to them), and the direct link to the post is here. Needless to say I'm geeked! Thank you, John!

Pens Fatales!

2010-01-01T13:48:00.002-05:00

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Sophie Littlefield was kind enough to invite me to do a guest post today on the Pens Fatales blog. I won't ruin it, but I will say it involves Bigfoot, and a dark flashback to the pre-internet (at least for me) days of early 1995.

Guest Blogging on Babel Clash

2009-12-22T14:23:00.002-05:00

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This is fun! I'm guest blogging for the next week (minus a few days around Christmas) over at Babel Clash on the Borders website. The topic is the balancing act between creating the world of your story, and moving the action along quickly. Definitely something I spend a lot of time thinking about, so it's a great subject for this.

Check it out here: Babel Clash

Book Trailer

2009-12-09T11:58:00.006-05:00

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A huge thanks to everyone at Harper who put this together. Especially for following the #1 rule for making a cool trailer, whether it's for a book, a film, or a TV show: military helicopters are always cool. (FYI, a corollary to this rule is that, in the case of a comedy, monkeys are always funny; alas there are no monkeys in The Breach.)

Excerpt

2009-12-03T16:28:00.002-05:00

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The first few chapters of The Breach are available online now at the HarperCollins site! If you're not busy, you can check them out here. Hopefully you'll be hooked! (I'll settle for grudgingly compelled to find out how it ends.)

Thanks to my editor Diana Gill for the link, by way of a very kind post on the Eos Blog.

Starred review, and pick of the week, in Publisher's Weekly!!

2009-11-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

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Now officially entering pinch-myself territory: check out the review here.

Thanks to Jordan Foster at Publisher's Weekly, and everyone else involved!! I can't say it enough!

Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan

2009-11-09T00:16:00.003-05:00

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He would've only been 75 years old today. I was surprised to realize that, and reminded of how untimely his death was. It's hard to think about what else he would've written in these past thirteen years. Or the next thirteen, or more. If you've never read The Demon-Haunted World, I can't recommend it strongly enough. I've read it several times, and it's easily my favorite nonfiction book. And if you've never watched Cosmos, forget this blog post and get thee to Hulu. The whole series is there, and it's amazing how, after three decades, it's hardly dated at all. Just don't start it if you have any important work to do in the next thirteen hours.

Here are the first five minutes:

Bouchercon!

2009-10-20T10:39:00.003-04:00

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I went to Bouchercon last week, Wednesday through Sunday, after looking forward to it for months on end. It was an amazing time. I finally got to meet my agent, Janet Reid, more than two years after signing with her. I also met several of her clients, who up until then I'd only seen or talked to online: Gary Corby, Dan Krokos, Dana Cameron, Andrew Grant, and Eric Stone. Oh, yeah, and I got to thank Lee Child in person for the blurb that's going on the cover of The Breach.

Also got to meet a lot of people from HarperCollins, which was extremely cool. Great to be able to thank them in person for everything they're doing with the book. I know I can't begin to understand the amount of work they're all doing on this, but I'm very, very grateful.

Thanks also to Kathryn Kennison and everybody at the Indiana Humanities Council. The panel on Wednesday evening was a great time, and thankfully much less intimidating an environment than I'd imagined. (Speaking in front of groups is something I'm still working on; the two times in my life I've had to make wedding toasts, I haven't gotten much sleep the night before.)

The five days at Bouchercon flew. It occurred to me only later that I'd pretty much blocked out the entire world beyond the interior of the Indianapolis Hyatt. I got back to my place on Sunday afternoon, went online, and learned that the world had been transfixed for several days by the exploits of Balloon Boy. Wow. How did I manage to survive five whole days without exposure to the 24-hour news cycle? I must be like one of those monks who can slow down their metabolism by sheer willpower, and live for weeks without food or water.

Technical Difficulties

2009-10-12T10:23:00.002-04:00

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Anyone who happened to visit this site in the past month was probably a bit confused by what they saw. To make a very long story short, this site was under someone else's control for a while. The domain registration lapsed without my knowing (that's part of what makes it a long story), and someone else snagged it out from under me and turned it into an SEO site to advertise writing contests. Just the kind of thing you want happening, when your first book is a couple months from hitting the stands, and your website address is printed on the back cover.

Anyway, four very frustrating weeks later it's back in my clutches. I'll say this much: if you have a private domain, make sure your ownership of it is set up to auto-renew at each deadline, or at the very least, make sure you remember what the deadline is. In my case, two things went wrong: I thought I had auto-renew set up (I didn't), and I also changed e-mail addresses in the past year, and forgot to update the e-mail address I had on file with my domain registrar. So when my domain was getting ready to expire, they were sending me notifications, but I wasn't getting any of them. I didn't know anything was wrong until the day I went to my own site and found someone else's page there instead of mine. If you're looking to pioneer whole new ways of combining expletives at high pitch and/or volume, then I heartily recommend going through this experience.

Galleys!!

2009-08-04T14:02:00.003-04:00

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Five of these showed up in the mail (well, UPS) yesterday:

Boy... there are some pretty big moments for a writer, getting started, and this is definitely one of them. The first time you can actually pick up a copy of your book and flip through it. It's even got that ink smell that's somehow unique to the publishing industry, and hasn't changed by a molecule in probably a century or more. (I can personally only date it back to the first Dean Koontz and Stephen King paperbacks I read in the eighties.)

This feels surreal. And very cool.

Behind the Scenes at a Book Binding Company

2009-04-10T21:54:00.003-04:00

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This is like porn for any writer dreaming of that first hardcover. I'd embed it here, but for some reason YouTube has disabled that for this video. Anyway, enjoy:

Automated Binding of C-SPAN's Abraham Lincoln Book

You can even click the little HQ button toward the bottom right of the video frame, to watch it in high-def.

Oregon Trail

2009-02-06T03:49:00.002-05:00

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I remember it being just about the only game anyone ever played in the computer lab in my high school, in the early nineties... but for some reason I never got into it, and just now, a few hours after midnight on February 6, 2009, was the first time I ever played Oregon Trail. It's online here.

I went as a carpenter, and I made it to Oregon on my first try. Woo hoo!

Been a while

2009-01-20T18:54:00.002-05:00

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Looks like it's been a couple months since I've updated this blog. I was finishing off the second book, using an advance test model of one of those new Apples. I can't say I recommend it if you're up against a deadline:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Random Thing #42 Overheard at Grocery Store

2008-11-18T16:40:00.001-05:00

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"You don't sit down them gummy bears are goin' back on the shelf."

Just thought I'd share that.

Bob Dylan Didn't Have this to Sing About

2008-11-05T12:09:00.002-05:00

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I've had that Jesus Jones song Right Here Right Now stuck in my head since eleven o'clock last night. And Wind of Change by Scorpions. Maybe that sounds a little cheesy. Oh well. I was just starting high school when both of those songs became hits. The Berlin Wall had just recently come down, and the Cold War was ending. It was a big deal. It was a cool time to be fourteen, when everything already feels like a big deal.

Last night was the first time I felt exactly like that again. Like the world felt in those first couple years of the 90s. No matter which candidate you were rooting for, seeing those celebrations in Grant Park, and then in New York and Washington D.C. and at Spelman College in Atlanta, it had to hit you that last night was a very big deal.

Good time to be around, whatever age.

Comments

2008-11-01T14:37:00.008-04:00

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When I started this blog last year (and then left it sitting idle for a year) I seem to have disabled comments. I don't really remember why. Maybe I thought people would write things like, "Hey... why hasn't this been updated since October of '07?"

Anyway, all the comments on Janet Reid's blog, in response to her post linking here the other day, were extremely nice, and I felt dumb for not having comments enabled. So from now on I'll enable them. And I'm sure that as long as I avoid controversial subjects, nobody will come out of the woodwork to post anything insane, or be rude to other commenters.

Thanks to everyone for all the kind words! And thanks, Janet, for linking to the site!

Oh, by the way, soft drinks should always be called "soda," not "pop," toilet paper rolls should be positioned so that the leading edge hangs from the front of the roll, not the back, the 2004 election was rigged in Ohio, and the Voltron that was made up of fifteen vehicles was way the hell cooler than the Voltron that was made up of five lions.

Blurb is the Word

2008-10-27T17:58:00.006-04:00

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Here's a cool way to start the week. Get an e-mail from your agent that goes like this:

Your first blurb is from Lee Child.

"Audacious and terrifying--and uncannily believable."

My reply contained various amounts of positive profanity, which is really the best kind.

I'll tell a quick story that sums up why it's so cool (or why else it's so cool) to get a blurb from Lee Child, of all authors. Flash back to a little over ten months ago. The middle of December, 2007. I finish the first draft of The Breach and, for the first time, read it front to back.

Something doesn't work. A big chunk of the second half. And I don't know why. And the deadline is six weeks away.

That night I don't sleep much. I sit awake for hours looking for something on TV, settling for infomercials about knives and blenders, and a show called (more or less) The World's Dumbest-Assed Police Chases, with a narrator who says things like, "These punks thought they could steal a car and take a joyride down easy street... but they ended up on the hard road to the county lock-up."

Around four in the morning I go to a 24-hour store a mile from my place and look for a book. Something cool. Something that works. Something to remind me how to do this thing I've already been paid to do, by people who are under the impression that I can do it.

I find a copy of Lee Child's The Enemy. I read the back of it. Sounds pretty cool. I read the first few pages and conclude that, yeah, it is pretty cool.

Even right there, standing in an empty store in the middle of the night, I get a sense of what's missing from the second half of my own book. Something pretty obvious: there's not enough sh-t happening. (I could say stuff instead of sh-t, but this is one of those cases where the airline version doesn't work at all.) Here's what I mean by sh-t happening. Here's how The Enemy starts:

Jack Reacher is staring at a clock. It ticks to one minute before midnight. Then midnight. 1989 becomes 1990. Then the phone rings, and there's a dead General in a motel room, and Reacher spends the next 464 pages (my store only had the paperback) figuring out what happened in that motel room, and why. Every paragraph is about moving the hero toward the goal. Through and over and around obstacles, definitely, but always toward the goal. Every paragraph has sh-t happening.

It occurred to me that there were many, many paragraphs (about 150 pages worth of them) in my book that did not have sh-t happening. Not enough sh-t, anyway. It's amazing what you can overlook when you're writing. My mistake in the first pass at The Breach was the equivalent of a golfer leaving his clubs behind somewhere around the twelfth hole, and only wondering around the eighteenth hole why his game has suddenly gone so far south. For me, reading even the first few pages of The Enemy was like someone tapping me on the shoulder and saying, "Clubs, idiot."

And it worked. In the next few weeks I did the fastest writing I've ever done, and it felt great. I liked the result, too. I got rid of a lot of stuff that wandered and went nowhere, and replaced it with... yeah... sh-t happening.

So I have to thank Lee Child twice. For a very cool blurb, and long before it, a monumental dose of inspiration at the exact point in time when I needed it.

I'd... ah... offer to name my first kid after you, but the resulting combination would be pretty bad.

Bigfoot and Wildboy

2008-10-20T13:56:00.003-04:00

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Man oh man... this needs to be remade, stat. Better yet, just re-release it as is. What could be improved?

Wait a minute... there were vampires on that show, too? How could primitive cathode-ray televisions in the 70s handle that much awesomeness without imploding? Maybe they couldn't. Maybe that's why the show was cancelled.

A Blog Post One Year in the Making

2008-10-12T00:49:00.011-04:00

Wow. My last entry was just over a year ago, a post celebrating the deal on the first two books of the Travis Chase series. That was also the very first post of this blog. Way to light the web on fire.

Well, I've kept busy. At the time of the deal announcement, the first book was only a few chapters and a rough idea. (If that deal sounds like an insane leap of faith on the publisher's part, it's worth mentioning that they'd seen another manuscript of mine, which was complete, so there was at least some circumstantial evidence that I could string together a few hundred pages of sentences.)

I worked on the new book through the end of the year and into this past spring. It's called The Breach, and it should come out in the summer of 2009.

I'll probably be blogging more often from now on. After all, there's so much to blog about. Historical election. Worldwide financial extinction-level-event in progress. Impending feline invasion of Poland and France...

Assembling a Five-Hundred-Foot Shrine to Janet Reid as we Speak...

2007-10-11T13:46:00.004-04:00

It's still hitting me that this is actually happening. Here's an announcement from Publisher's Lunch, which I've shamelessly copied and pasted from Janet's blog.

FICTION: THRILLER
Patrick Lee's two untitled Travis Chase thrillers, starring an ex-convict who's a combination of Jack Bauer and Jack Reacher, with supernatural suspense reminiscent of Dean Koontz and James Rollins, to Sarah Durand at William Morrow, in a pre-empt, by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management (world).

The first book will come out sometime in early 2009. "Exciting" is such an understatement for this feeling that it's actually funny.

Thank you Sarah!!!

Thank you Janet!!!