This post will be mostly images

The UK edition of Meddling Kids, published by Titan Books, on sale April 3. 

The US paperback edition of Meddling Kids by Anchor Books, coming May 29. It's the same, only smaller! (DISCLAIMER: NO, IT ISN'T. It's actually a few pages fatter because of all the extra content.)

And last but not least...

This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us. The new novel, courtesy of Doubleday, to land on July 31 (not Fall anymore, children!)

That's it for now. Next post will be mostly text, because I have to tell you about my tour.  :D

& Blanc

So, as I was telling you the other day, by early 2013 I had finished a manuscript in Spanish, with Noir as the setting and, in my opinion, an interesting enough private eye. Eyes. It's complicated.

While I was writing it though, my English debut The Supernatural Enhancements was sold to Doubleday. The size of that deal, added to the fact that I was being thoroughly ignored by publishers in Barcelona, forced me to focus on my work in English. However, I didn't give up on the other languages. This picture, taken in March 2014, shows the galley edition of TSE between two finished manuscripts: Catalan on the left, Spanish on the right. The Spanish one is the Noir novel.  

Because my Catalan- and Spanish-speaking characters longed for the spotlight, they poked their way into the English books. The leads in the manuscript on the left are glimpsed by the Eye in The Supernatural Enhancements. And the P.I. from the Noir novel sneaked into one chapter of Meddling Kids.

Despite my editor's suspicions, this doesn't mean I'm building a sort of "Canteroverse". That would require an architect's mind, and I'm a 36-year-old man who can't use a day planner. If anything, these crossovers mean that I can't focus in a single work. But they also mean that my new novel stars at least one (1) background character from Meddling Kids. And I've been dropping clues.

Oh, and Doubleday just showed the title on Tumblr yesterday, so enough with the hush-hush.

Source: tumblr/doubledaybooks

This Body's Not Big Enough For Both Of Us: my new novel, coming Fall 2018. *Blows party horn.*

Noir

For years now I've been a regular contributor to Spanish satirical magazine El Jueves. In late 2010 I began publishing a series of super short stories under the title Noir. They built upon detective fiction clichés (the dramatic sunlight through closed blinders, the laid-back private eye narrating in the first person) allowing me to skip through the descriptions and jump into the jokes. I guess I'd been reading Raymond Chandler at the time and wanted to try it. They looked like this.

I don't feel like translating it.
Take it from me: it's hilarious.

Noir ran for twenty weeks, whereupon I switched to the horror genre with a new series, Gotik, but I was always proud of some of the material and wanted to expand it into something longer, provided I found some genre-breaking element to throw in. Hopefully that would be an original detective, because my first-person narrators have this annoying tendency to resemble me.

When I came up with the detective, I wrote  a novel. This was late 2012; I had just finished The Supernatural Enhancements in English, but nobody had yet confirmed it was intelligible, so I exerted caution and went with Spanish for this one. I showed it to several publishers in the following years; they all passed. In late 2016 I translated it to English and showed it to my agent and my editor at Doubleday. Both said, "It's the best thing you've ever written." And it's my upcoming book. :)

Meddling Freebies #3: Teen Sleuth Rules

An idea for a series of badges: the rules of teen detective fiction (mild spoilers: all of them are struck out in Meddling Kids). These never went past the Photoshop stage.

By the way, if you don't own your MK copy yet, or want to own an extraordinarily dirty one, Doubleday is throwing a holiday giveaway of signed books! Signed, doodled and pencil-colored by an author with very little real work to do. Follow @doubledaybooks on Instagram for a chance to win now! The girls will be given away today, and the boys are on their way!

Meddling Freebies #2: Bookmarks

I designed these as giveaways at conventions when we were pitching swag for MK. I have shared the front pictures before: the foreground kids are mine, whereas the silhouetted adults were drawn by artist Jordi March, who was also the photographer for the story on the Pennaquick Telegraph in the book.

Each model included a different quote from the depicted character on the back.

A fifth bookmark contains the rules for Word Bluff, the official Blyton Summer Detective Club car trip game. Try it at home!