More Dog Sitting, plus… Iron Maiden?!
You don't get this combination from other authors, you know
Dog Sitting forever (or until 2025, at least)
In the last newsletter I mentioned I was working on a third Dog Sitter Detective book, and that I’d tell you more about it later. Well, here’s the news: I recently signed a series extension with Allison & Busby to write books 3 & 4 in the series. It was announced in The Bookseller:
I’m already a little over halfway through the manuscript for book 3 (working title The Dog Sitter Detective’s Deadly Rival) and once that’s done I’ll plunge into book 4 more or less straight away.
In the meantime, though, remember to pre-order the second book,
#TheDogSitterDetectiveTakesTheLead 🐶🔍 ahead of publication in January!
Gwinny Tuffel is preparing for her first acting role in a decade in the West End, but she is still dog-sitting on the side to keep the wolf from the door. So, when ageing rock star Crash Double needs help with his Border Collie, she jumps at the chance. After all, looking after the charming Ace on Crash’s Little Venice houseboat shouldn’t be an onerous task. But that’s before the singer’s dead body surfaces during the annual Canal Carnival festivities.
While the police dismiss the death as an accident, Gwinny suspects murder most foul. With a medley of suspects and some far-fetched motives to make heads or tails of, it is up to Gwinny, with Ace’s on the ground knowledge, to make sure the killer faces the music!
As always, I encourage you to order from your local bookstore where possible, but it’s also available online at all the usual places: see dogsitterdetective.com for details.
In addition to the hardback there’s an ebook edition, naturally… and an audiobook, which I’m told will be once again narrated by the fabulous Nicolette McKenzie. Nicolette did an amazing job with the first book, and many audio readers told me how much they loved her reading of Gwinny’s adventures, so I’m enormously pleased to have her back again.
Those of you waiting for a paperback of #TheDogSitterDetective 🐶🔍 itself, wait no more; in the UK that edition will be released in January alongside the book 2 hardback, and in the USA it’ll follow a couple of months later. Once again, you can pre-order the paperback now.
Upcoming appearance: Romily, Jan 25
On that very same release day of Jan 25 I’ll be launching The Dog Sitter Detective Takes The Lead at Serenity Booksellers in Romily, Stockport at 6pm.
Serenity is a new, community-focused bookstore and I was honoured last year to be their first ever guest author. It went so well that as soon as they learned there’d be a second Dog Sitter Detective book, they asked me to return.
Do come along if you’re in the area. Tickets can be booked via this link:
On This Battlefield, No One Wins
On a rather different tack, now: longtime readers (and listeners to my podcast Thrash it Out) will know I’m a lifelong metalhead, so I couldn’t resist when Z2 Comics asked me to write a story for Iron Maiden: Piece of Mind, an anthology of comics inspired by the songs on that album.
I chose The Trooper, one of Maiden’s most iconic songs, and collaborated with veteran artist Staz Johnson to create a piece we’re both very proud of. Z2, and Iron Maiden themselves, gave us a huge amount of creative freedom to tell an unusual story in an equally unusual style… and I’ll say no more than that!
The book is on sale now, in multiple collector’s formats. See Z2’s website for more details:
It’s Been a Long Road
I keep a count of all the writing work I’ve produced throughout each year (because of course I do, this is me after all 😅) and while updating it to include the Iron Maiden story, I realised that I’m currently writing my 8th novel, and my 22nd videogame (not even counting several game projects still waiting to be released).
In fact, I decided to do a tally of my career so far, and it’s kind of mind-blowing:
7 novels
21 videogames
20 original graphic novels
14 comic series (including Wasteland, which ran for 60 issues)
1 non-fiction book (+ literally too many articles and columns to count)
2 screenplays
6 short stories
…Not bad for a little over 20 years!
What’s especially funny (for a certain value of amusement) is how much of that tally came after I almost quit, back in 2015 after Wasteland finished. I wrote about that last year in this newsletter, but if you missed it you can now read it on my website:
We’re All Doomed
Keith Stuart wrote a good piece for The Guardian on Doom, the iconic video game which turned 30 this year, describing how its influence on the games that came after it is almost incalculable.
One point it mentions is a lack of focus on scoring points, which before then had been the most common method of ‘winning’ a videogame (with the notable exception of text adventures). Doom focused instead on progression and completion, with all of its design centred around helping or hindering you in that goal.
Innovations in game design have long been an interest of mine, and the piece reminded of a game called Chainsaw Warrior, created by legendary designer Stephen Hand for Games Workshop in 1987.
That’s a full six years before Doom’s release in 1993, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was the other way around; Chainsaw Warrior is a one-player (i.e. solo) game in which you play an unfeasibly strong soldier wading through hordes of monsters in order to reach the ultimate villain, an immensely powerful alien monster who threatens the world… sound familiar?
Although you tracked the game on a board, CW was a card game. Instead of moving spaces along a fixed path, every turn you drew a card from a shuffled deck to see what you were facing. You thus had no idea what was ahead of you, or when you might encounter the final villain, ‘Darkness’ – who was just a card like any other.
The obvious flaw with this design is that you might meet Darkness on your very first turn, which would spoil the game. CW’s innovation was to split the deck in two, and the Darkness card was shuffled into the second deck. You knew you’d have to fight your way through the entire first deck before you could reach Darkness; but once you started on the second deck, you had no idea when the final battle might commence. Simple, elegant, brilliant.
That in turn reminded me of my favourite Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Ian Livingstone’s City of Thieves, in which you’re initially told the villain can be killed only by a poison formed of three ingredients. After collecting all three, though, you learn this was a mistake and, to defeat him, you must use only two. Crucially, the book doesn’t ask you to choose which two ingredients until the very end – when you face the villain in final battle! A fantastic way to make the decision a matter of (fictional) life and death.
These are the sorts of things always on my mind. I never claimed to be normal 🤪
(And read the Doom piece anyway, it’s really good.)
Me on camera
A couple of podcast interviews from recent weeks:
First I chatted to Jason DeHart at Words, Images, & Worlds, in which we talked about growing up reading, how and why I enjoy working in all those different media, and much more:
And then I was on the Creative Writing Life podcast. Lots of conversation here about process, methods, and motivation, as well as talking about Atomic Blonde, writing for videogames, and more:
🎄 Happy Holidays 🎁
Finally, let me wish you all the best for the holidays. Wherever you are, however you spend the time, I hope it’s all you want. Unsurprisingly I’ll spend a lot of the holidays writing 😅 but I do plan to take a few days off around Christmas day itself.
As for 2024, well, as always there’s lots brewing. I have those two further Dog Sitter Detective novels to write; Emma Beeby and I will continue, and hopefully finish, writing the videogame Altered Alma; and I’ll be pitching a couple of slightly more unusual projects around in the new year. In fact, one of the things I’ll work on over the holidays is formulating the rather unorthodox pitch required by one of those projects. Your mileage may vary, but for me that’s a very happy holiday indeed 😉
Clear Planet, Blue and Green
Right now, authors are all scrambling to figure out which social media platform will eventually ‘win’ the ongoing battle for supremacy. For the moment, you can find me on just about all of them.
Search for my username @antonyjohnston, or check the Contact & Follow page of my site for links to the most popular networks: https://antonyjohnston.com/contact/