Event Alert: Meddling Tour!

The paperback edition of Meddling Kids is officially out! Perfect excuse to tick off a few states in my bucket list! I will read, I will sign, I will struggle not to mix three different accents in the same sentence—and fail spectacularly! Get your gang together, jump into your sleuthmobile and join me!

June 13 @ Subtext Books (6 West 5th Street, St. Paul, MN)

June 14 @ Boswell Books (2559 N. Downer Ave., Milwaukee, WI)

June 15-17 @ Denver Comic Con with Tattered Cover (Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO)

June 18 @ Book People (603 N. Lamar Blvd., Austin, TX)

And now for some extras

I just received my copies of the Meddling Kids paperback, published by Anchor Books. They're smol. They're shiny.

And they're two pages longer.

On sale May 29. :)

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. :)