THE BIG APPLE (BITES?)

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So, I’ve got this love/hate thing with New York City.

Put any thoughts of my politics aside as I confess this next: I loved the city under Mayor Giuliani. Post-Rudy, it’s been one big slippery slope into squalor.

Still, there are pockets of the city I love when I come down from my mountain and occasionally venture northeast to NYC.

A lot of my favorite bookstores are gone now, alas.

Time’s Square is just tourist hour all the time on overdrive these days: a blur of light and motion that could send the dead into seizures.

I do have a few favorite places that so far endure, and they’re just off the beaten path of that whole sorry Time’s Square scene.

Got back to the city last month for various reasons; some of it was very wonderful. Made a point of hitting one of my favorite streets for drinking and eating…that made the trip.

The heroine of PERMANENT FATAL ERROR is this young, aspiring novelist named Ashley McKnight.

Confession time: She’s me maybe a few years back.

After a harrowing escape from my current playpen (the Great Smoky Mountains), she makes her way back to the city for a pivotal meeting with her literary agent and a kind of mercenary/author who’s modeled on this gorilla I met at an unfortunate publisher’s party in the city a few moons ago.

The restaurant is this Cuban eatery named Havana Central—it’s got this wicked neon palm tree out front and serves up drinks with these cool swizzle sticks that feature curvy Cuban hotties with windswept hair and hemlines.

The Cuban sandwiches are state-of-the-art and the mojitos the most righteous mixed north of Key West. When I go to NYC, at least one meal happens in that place ’cause I love it so.

Not far from there is an Irish pub named “Connolly’s.” It also features prominently in PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, and not too many pages after Havana Central raises its head. The bartender described in the book is still pulling taps and mixing drinks there, serving them up with a smile and that Galway accent.

BY ANY OTHER NAME

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What’s in a name?

Everything, of course. For an author, maybe more than everything.

This is not complaining, let’s get clear on that up front: Gaining traction as a fiction writer is no mean feat, and few enough writers ever earn even a small but loyal following of readers.

Thing is, an author’s name becomes a brand, figuratively and literally. Readers tend to be very possessive of their authors, and once they’ve branded them—weighed and labeled them—they are too often loathe to let their branded writer display any pesky maverick tendencies.

The whole point of branding a calf is to establish ownership after all, to categorize them and fence them in. This tends to run against the grain for most creative types.

Chances are, you’ve possibly read one or more of my novels already. They are very different from PERMANENT FATAL ERROR… very different. And that’s the whole point of “Hadley Colt.”

Branding—reader or critical categorization—is too nearly always the cloying killer of creativity. Every once in a while, as a writer, you just want to be given your head and allowed to stretch your creative legs, to maybe run flat-out in some crazy new direction (it’s that whole maverick thing again, don’t you know).

My other novels have traveled far and wide beyond American shores (I’ll assure you of this much, I am U.S. born and bred) and as my bio claims, I have indeed established an international readership. I’m doing okay in that sense, thank you very much.

But I can and do want to write more than just the books that carry my real name. Yet the publishing gatekeepers don’t share my enthusiasm for straying outside the established lines they’ve laid down for me.

It’s that Rowling thing, really—if someone hadn’t outed my Scottish sister and blown her cover all to hell and gone, I think J.K. would be perfectly happy printing her next comparatively low-selling mystery novel to enthusiastic reviews and the delight of a small but devoted band of readers who on their best day would never goose Harry Potter-level Bookscan action for “Robert Galbraith’s” latest. JKR’s wanting to stretch, to erase that damned brand and to shrug off the yoke of reader expectation makes perfect sense to me.

My new novel, PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, is essentially about an author who can’t support the weight of his readers’ expectations and demands, so he simply disappears. Eventually, we learn he’s still writing, only he’s doing it under a different name.

In that sense, I guess I’m a little like Mr. Everett Hyde.

I don’t know if there will be a second novel by Ms. Hadley Colt.

Because there are other stories to tell, stories that aren’t even a little like PERMANENT FATAL ERROR—let alone the many other novels that were printed under my given name—I may yet come under your gaze again, in some other guise, somewhere down the road. It’s that whole “chameleon soul” thing, I suppose. And for me, at least, that’s fun.

It’s a thrill beyond description to see your name on a book, make no mistake about it. I still thrill to my real name on a novel’s cover.

But at some point, you want to protect your story and your ability to tell the tales that tug hardest at your hand. If that means sacrificing identity now and again because The Man just won’t let you go there, well, so be it and let the devil take the hindmost.

Still, I do enjoy a good game, and unlike J.K., I’m not necessarily hell-bent on staying hidden for all time.

So catch me if (and when) you can, my dear reader. Double dare you.

PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, THE BOOK TRAILER!

Here it is, the trailer for PERMANENT FATAL ERROR, my new novel from Betimes Books and available from Amazon.com in eBook format and trade paperback starting Wednesday!

The trailer was directed by the great Eddie McCaffrey and stars Chris Cox. It was produced by Joose. You can learn more about them here.

More about the novel at my publisher's site here.