It’s About Time

Everything seems to be about Time nowadays. I never had any intention of staying away from my own website, but that’s what I ended up doing, simply because I managed to leave myself without sufficient time to do everything I wanted to do. I had just enough time to do what I needed to do, but there was so much needing to be done, eventually, that what I wanted to do got short shrift, most of the time. I don’t have to dig too deeply to discover the source of that increase in demand, and most of my long-time readers will understand it, too. For the first decade and a half of my publishing life, I averaged a completed book once every eighteen months to two years . . . the first three novels were already written long before publication, so I was already working on my fourth when the first one, The Skystone, appeared, and from then until two years ago, I fell into a rhythm that was easy to sustain: one book every two years.

Two years ago, however, I entered into a contract to write three novels—the Knights Templar Trilogy—in three years, fondly believing that it would be a simple matter to write shorter books… That conviction, unfortunately, did not last long, because I came to appreciate, very quickly, something I had always known: big themes dictate big stories. So I had doubled my work schedule by signing that contract. I could have lived with that, too, had I not decided to publish a memoir in 2007 to mark my fortieth year living in Canada. It was called, appropriately enough, Forty Years In Canada… And while I was writing that I was also working on the lyrics for a new stage musical called Whitechapel, about the murders of Jack the Ripper. Part of me knew, going in, that I really didn’t have time to do that, but it was something I had always wanted to do and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’ve been pretty busy for the last couple of years . . . busier than I’ve ever been.

So, two of the three Templar novels, Knights of the Black and White and Standard of Honor are now published, and the third, Order In Chaos, is scheduled for Canadian publication in October of this year. They are on sale throughout the English speaking world via the Penguin Group in Canada and the US, and HarperCollins in the UK and Commonwealth. They’re also available in translation in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Brazil and Russia. The Whitechapel musical—my part, the lyrics, at least—is done, too, and the Memoir appeared last October. Which leaves me looking around for something to do next…

Luckily, I didn’t have to wonder for long, and I’ve signed a contract with Penguin Group Canada for yet another trilogy, this one set in 14th-century Scotland, with the working title of “The Guardians”. Each book will deal with one of the three greatest heroes Scotland ever produced, all of whom were contemporaries and knew one another. They were William Wallace, Robert The Bruce, and Sir James “The Black” Douglas. This will be my first venture into Scottish history, despite the fact that I’ve been steeped in it for most of my life, but the preliminary research I’ve been doing has shown me very quickly that I’ve been away from the native hearth for a long time, and so I’m heading for Scotland this year, to spend a couple of months in the late summer and early autumn trudging the sites and the locations of the various actions with which I’ll be dealing for the next few years… In the meantime, however, I’m going to enjoy catching up on my sadly neglected forum and updating this entire site…