کالین فالکنر

Colin Falconer

After eighteen years and almost twenty books Colin Falconer sat down and wrote THE END. He’d heard about writer’s block; he never thought he’d ever reach the point where he just couldn’t write anymore.

He doesn’t like to talk about the personal circumstances that brought him to that point, not these days.

He walked the camino, he ran with bulls in Pamplona, tried to find some spark to get him going again. Writing had been his life; he could not imagine any kind of life without it.
Unable to write, he started reading voraciously again; James Clavell to Barbara Kingsolver, Hilary Mantel, to Wilbur Smith.

Then a niece, who had struggled with dyslexia from a child, picked up one of his books - VENOM - and it started her reading. He went back and read one of his own books, Silk Road, that had never been published in English. ‘It reminded me why I loved writing in the first place. I also realized how much I’d learned while I’d been away from writing. I spent months on it, shaping it up, rewriting it. Then I thought: Now it’s ready.’

And so after five years he started clawing his way back. It wasn’t easy. ‘Publishers can smell fear better than a dog or a shark.’ His calls went unanswered. His agent retired., But then Atlantic in London bought SILK ROAD and two new novels, STIGMATA, out in August and a third novel (‘an alternative history no one’s done before’) due for the following year.

He also re-edited some of his back list (I hated how they published Harem in the US, and what they did to Opium in the UK). Opium became a five e-Book series that one critic described as ‘The Godfather meets James Clavell.’

‘It’s the story of a man who does a deal with the devil; it’s also the story of how the drug trade grew from a few sacks of opium thrown in the back of a Cessna in 1960 to a billion dollar business of the nineties.’

‘I can’t imagine being blocked any more. Now it’s just not having enough hours in the day to write the ideas I have.’

You’ll find Colin Falconer at http://colin-falconer.blogspot.com

BOOKS NOW AVAILABLE:

SILK ROAD (hardback, paperback and eBook pub 2011)

eBooks:

HAREM
SERAGLIO
WHEN WE WERE GODS
AZTEC
ANASTASIA
BITTER MOON LANE

Opium series:

OPIUM
AIR OPIUM
CHASING THE DRAGON
EYE OF THE TIGER
GODLESS

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