Versailles

Two wonderful reviews have arrived for Versailles, one in this last weekend's Irish Times and the other in i-D magazine:

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/versailles-review-a-fable-for-our-digital-age-1.2822658

(favourite quote: "The perfect Christmas gift for Mark Zuckerberg")

https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/versailles-is-a-fable-for-the-digital-age

(favourite quote:…

It's out there now. Versailles is whatever people want it to be. People are reading the book, they've been messaging me and calling me, telling me what they think and it's such a good feeling because now it's not really up to me anymore. The novel is its own thing, its own beast, a monitor lizard escaped from the cage and making its way out into the world, beyond the gates.

Foyles bookshop on Charing…

Dear Everyone,

I suspect something may have arrived in the post for most of you by now, and if not you should expect your special holographic copy of my novel Versailles any day.

Doesn't it looks amazing?? Like my grandad said on the phone yesterday it looks like a jewel, a real treasure. And inside, at the very end are all your names, a list of all the people who made it happen. Thank you…

Hi everyone! Versailles now has a cover! I was sent it yesterday and I'm orbiting the moon with delight. You might remember me mentioning the involvement of award-winning designer Yehrin Tong (http://www.yehrintong.com). Well, here is what she's come up with and I think it's stunning. She's taken three of the key visual motifs of the book – eyes, monitor lizard scales and ocean waves – and woven them…

Time to break the silence as I finally have an update on Versailles, and it's all good news.

I've been getting a few messages from people who pledged for the book, asking about Versailles' whereabouts. Penguin/Random House, who are responsible for the printing and distribution of the trade edition, have deemed late summer 2016 the best time to publish the novel. It's a while to wait yet but timing…

Blammo!

Funded! Third to last pledger was a taxi driver I was riding with at the time! This whole thing’s been a rollercoaster and I want to thank everyone again who’s supported me. You’re part of this. Your names will be in the back of the book, woven into its DNA. People I’ve known and those who will know me through my writing. It’s very moving, actually.

Versailles will be my first novel…

So you might have gathered that Unbound are currently running a competition where current and future pledgers are entered into a prize draw. The winner gets to work with me in creating a bonus room in Versailles itself, the 100-room mega-mansion at the heart of the novel. I for one can’t wait to revisit the world of the novel one last time.

The rooms making up Versailles are like test-chambers…

Writing fiction is a kind of dreaming. I know writers talk about it all the time. They talk about flow. Inspiration. Losing yourself. But it's true. When I write I'm not all there. I'm in the other place, like opening your eyes under the surface of the swimming pool (no goggles). Writing is a kind of dreaming. Submergence. A relinquishment of self, or rather a division. Like a lot of modern writers…

Hey! So to mark this very last phase of the Versailles funding campaign I thought I'd share a final excerpt from the book. One last room. For the uninitiated, each of these rooms functions as a test chamber for Casey Baer's ongoing investigation into the human experience. I give you...

Room 17

Every Wednesday, under cover of darkness, a black minibus with tinted windows and no license…

I've always liked the number seven. And four. No real reason, I just like these numbers, their sound and feel and colour. So I put them in my fiction when I can. When I need there to be a number of something I'll make it four or seven or multiples thereof. It's all part of that thing of ritualising the writing process, creating patterns where before there was blank space.

So today I hit 77%! That…

In the six months I lived in Southend in Essex I wrote one-and-a-half novels, it was mental. Seven days a week, 2000 words a-day, I spent most of that time in a kind of trance state, blueberries for breakfast (proven to improve cognitive function!) and miles of skateboarding along the promenade. Something about that place. The sense of departure I think: cargo ships headed out into the North Sea…

So there’s anecdotal evidence that regular physical exercise can improve the brain’s flexibility in coming up with creative solutions, sometimes called ‘convergent thinking’. This has worked for me again and again as a writer. I’ll be typing away and suddenly something will interrupt my flow. It might be one of my characters not knowing what to say or do next, or an outright breakdown in plot…

To write a fiction is to create a system of belief, or rather suspended disbelief. So for me a title is like a shrine. Around which I build a temple. Around which I build a world through which my characters might pass.

            Versailles. I love this word. To me Versailles sounds and looks like what it is, or at least the thing we think of first: a palace. Versailles. It glitters in an imaginary…

I find empty buildings in the real world and occupy them with fictional characters. So for example there's a skyscraper in Philadelphia, it looks like this:

It was bought by the Church of Scientology back in 2007 with the intention of converting it into some kind of cathedral, but it's actually remained empty since. An empty skyscraper! It's things like this that really get me going. Something…

So one of the ways I start writing is by getting hold of a book of fine art photography, it has to be pictures of people. It doesn’t matter if the photographs are set up or documentary, as long as the pictures are of human beings, I’m gold. There’s something about this form. A captured moment. The artist Wolfgang Tillmans says he doesn’t make a distinction between a photograph that is set up and one…

The cache. A room full of drugs and guns. It is set out like a post-raid police exhibit, the guns lined up lovingly on folding tables like show and tell, the drugs piled high in their compact, bulbous bundles of shiny brown tape. Floor to ceiling. These are real drugs, real guns, from bona fide seizures around the world. There are even a couple of grenades. All this. Street value: $100 million…

My mum died a few years ago and I’m bringing this up now because after it happened, and I mean in the months immediately after, I experienced the most extraordinary period of creativity, focus and ambition. One day I was me. The next I was me writing Versailles, 2000 words a-day, seven days a week, until it was finished.

The novel isn’t about my mum. There’s no regret in the writing, no sadness…

Like shuffle mode for your music. Every time Casey enters this room it is a different experience. An incredible team of artists and technicians collaborating on the ultimate art form: life.

Every month they are given this space to work with and an organic budget. Sometimes the event will be very elaborate in nature, requiring long hours of preparation and the kind of ad hoc inventiveness only…

Casey’s childhood bedroom. The same dimensions, wallpaper, curtains, a false window onto a neighborhood that no longer exists. Every object, all the furniture taken from the original room and transplanted here. The mood is undisturbed crime scene. And yet when Casey visits, he acts as though he were returning from playing out on the street, or spending Saturday afternoon at a friend’s house. He…

Room 27 is a plane crash on repeat. A faithful reconstruction of a Boeing 767 cabin and cockpit, complete with full crew and passengers, all professional actors on Casey’s payroll. They might go for months without hearing from his people and then suddenly it’s every day for a fortnight.

Sometimes Casey takes on the role of drunken captain, but mostly he is a member of the public, taking his…

The money room. A place Casey comes to experience his wealth in the form of a kind of permanent, interactive conceptual art installation. A gigantic animatronic dragon guards a cavern filled with actual gold and treasure. Gold bullion, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, various precious artefacts, large chests brimming over with shiny coins. It’s the real deal, the dragon so convincing Casey has to…

What an amazing thing this is: to be able to talk directly to a future audience. I want to thank you early pledgers for your belief in Versailles, it means everything to me.

Writing a novel like Versailles is a strange experience. You pour all your love and soul into something, you draft and redraft and then one day you've finished, typos notwithstanding. Then the book's this presence in your life…