So I’ve been involved in a secret project for the last month or so and today I can finally announce it!

So What’s Happening? The Descent: Kobo’s Inferno Contest

Dante’s Inferno hopefully needs no introduction, but on May 15 Dan Brown’s new novel, also called Inferno is launched, based on Dante’s work.

For the lead up to the launch of the book, Kobo is running an exciting new kind of interactive online contest that you can enter for free in order to win fantastic prizes, including $5000 and Kobo Glo devices signed by Dan Brown himself.

The first step of the contest is a series of short stories, written by – yes, you guessed it, me EXCITING!

(The contest is only open to residents of US, Canada and the UK, but everyone else can still get the stories)

You can get the first story right now: Kobo.com/Descent

and here’s the official Kobo press release about the contest

Solve the clues in each of the stories and they will lead you to the next step of the puzzle.

It’s an extremely cool idea and I’ve had a total blast writing the stories, exploring aspects I haven’t yet done in my full-length novels. They’re steeped in the symbolism of the world of Dante’s Inferno as well as religious and supernatural themes that Dan Brown fans will love.

I haven’t been involved in the development of the rest of the contest, so I can’t give anything away, but from what I have heard, it is amazingly detailed and layered in symbolism, myth and literature. It’s worth reading Dante’s Inferno (a modern translation) in order to get the most from the competition. For example, you might not know that the center of Hell is actually ice, rather than fire, and the stories will inform the clues.

You can check out the Pinterest board here to see images of the various aspects of the story.

Here’s an intro to the stories – as you can see, the covers feature the wild creatures Dante encounters in the wood at the start of his Descent.

Story 1: Sins of Temptation

When the tortured and mutilated corpse of a wealthy author is discovered, the police officer sent to investigate finds a curious diary amongst the occult objects at the scene. Will he uncover the author’s secret at the ruined chapel, and does he really want to pay the price that it demands?

Available now on Kobo.com/Descent

Story 2: Sins of Violence

In a post-apocalyptic world, a young girl is about to be taken to the man known as The Minotaur for a Blessing that will end her innocence. Can her sister gain access to the fortified city of Dis in time to stop the ritual and wreak vengeance for her own lost youth?

Available on 2 May 2013 …

Story 3: Sins of Treachery

On the death of their Grandfather, twin brothers Simon and Gestas are left a map covered in alchemical symbols that could lead them to great wealth and power. But they find more than they expected in the frozen wastes of the Arctic north …

Available on 9 May 2013 …

Register To Read The Inferno Short Stories For Free

You can read the short stories for free on Kobo – the first one is available right now and the next two are released over the next few weeks.

REGISTER HERE => Kobo.com/Descent

You don’t have to have a Kobo device to read them, you just have to join the site to get the download and then read on your computer, your mobile device or other apps listed here.

Once you sign up, you will also be in the competition to win loads of great prizes, so now’s the time to check out Kobo!

The stories will be on sale after the game is finished but they are exclusive to Kobo for 6 months, so best get them for free right now.

You Can Also Listen To Story 1: Sins Of Temptation

I’ve also recorded the first short story as an mp3 file: www.JFPenn.com/sins 

Please do leave any comments or questions below. Enjoy the stories and good luck with the competition!

I met up with Amazon bestselling author Mel Sherratt at the London Book Fair and we had a great chat about her books. Her crime novel Taunting the Dead reached #1 in the UK charts and was also one of the Top 10 bestselling books of 2012 in the UK Amazon store.

In the video, we briefly discuss:

• How she portrays a sense of place in her books and incorporates aspects of her own town, Stoke on Trent, into a fictional estate. Not everyone wants to read crime books about London, New York or other big cities.

• Why are we so fascinated with reading and writing violence? Mel uses violence in her crime novels but she wants you feel compassion for the victim and care that justice is served.

• Readers of Martina Cole and Lynda La Plante, as well as Casey Kelleher would enjoy Mel’s books.

• Why is crime writing so popular in the UK? It’s about a sense of forboding and solving a puzzle as well as giving readers a thrill.

Here’s my own review for Taunting the Dead on Goodreads:

I really enjoyed this fast-paced crime novel that centres around a northern crime ring and the Police who must try to rein them in. There are only a couple of sympathetic characters which makes it all the more fun to bump off the nasty ones! High body count towards the end as the tension ratchets up, a great, fun read.

You can buy Mel’s books on Amazon now.

When I write, I primarily want to provide entertainment and a few hours of escape from the world. But I also bring my obsessions of religion and psychology to the books, along with extensive research to create another level of reading.

So I am delighted when readers “get” this side of my books, and I was really excited to do an interview with Russ Lockhart for the Dream Network Journal Volume 32 No 1, Summer 2013.

There’s an extract below and you can download the whole article as a PDF here. You can also check out the journal, subscribe or buy back issues at Dream Network Journal.

RL. Tell me, Joanna, what have been the most important influences on you becoming a writer?

JP. Probably the first writer that led me to feel this is what I want do was Umberto Eco, with The Name of the Rose and also Foucault’s Pendulum. Have you read those?

RL. Oh, yes.

JP. I’ve always been interested in religion, and Eco showed me it was possible to write about religion in a fiction book. Trying to write like Umberto Eco obviously was not something I was going to do and that froze me up a bit. But then Dan Brown came along with The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons and this made me realize you could write fiction with religion, history, architecture, and archeology, deep and meaningful things, but in a fast-paced way that people would enjoy. Dan Brown helped me decide to write this way. Eco and Brown are two ends of a spectrum. I’m a massive reader and read very widely. In thrillers now, I like James Rollins. He [sometimes] writes from a religious angle.

RL. Your ARKANE trilogy is certainly a thriller. The thriller is often described as “escapist” literature, a kind of distractive entertainment from the drudgery of everyday life. I’ve never been happy with this idea of escape. To me, fiction, no matter how great or poorly done, offers a portal of possibilities, an opening into possible worlds, and has the potential of going deeper inside us then we often realize.

Are you writing for people to escape or does your fiction have a deeper significance and purpose?

JP. I have to say that when I started writing I had a job as an IT consultant. I really was miserable. Reading fast-paced thrillers was all about escape, about how to get out of this commute for 45 minutes before I get to my job and how to fill my lunch hour when I was really down. I’m lucky now. Since becoming a full-time author and entrepreneur, escape isn’t so necessary. But I want to write fiction on two levels, to make people think about deeper things and at the same time to have a really good ride. I will be writing more in my next series and think it is deeper than the ARKANE series. I‘m addressing some depth issues without trying to lecture people at the same time.

…

RL. After reading the name [ARKANE] the first time and [learning] what it meant it was clear you had an interest in Jung and archetypal psychology.

How did you get interested in Jung?

JP. It was when I studied theology at Oxford. I wrote a paper on psychology of religion and of course Jung was one of the first psychologists I studied. I was particularly taken with Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

While I was writing Pentecost, Jung’s Red Book was published, his personal journal of breakdown and filled with images. It brought out all the things I had learned about Jung in the beginning of my studies and let me investigate him again. In his life story I found he had been in Tunisia, and in America, and in these places I write about. And, in the Red Book there was this painting of the Pentecost flame (as right). That was amazing to me because as I was researching that whole synchronicity idea for the novel, it actually happened to me. What I love about writing these books is that as I research this stuff it seems almost to be true. I just tweak it a bit. It’s fiction, but it’s based on a whole load of facts.

RL. One of the things that impressed me was that you would bring in some fact that had just happened—like the story of Arafat’s poisoning—and mix it together with ancient arcane things. This brings together disparate things to create a meaning with a trajectory, not just some far out thing, but meaningful things that get through, that aim beneath the surface.

JP. That Arafat story was synchronicity again. And, just the other day, someone emailed me about a show on the Ark of the Covenant. People are always interested in these big archetypal stories. That was part of the reason for writing the books because I wanted resonance with the collective unconscious, the memory we have in our culture around these big religious questions.

RL. Do your dreams ever come into your work, or your work into your dreams?

JP. I don’t record my dreams as in writing them down when I wake up. I definitely dream richly and I have nightmares. I have quite a dark mind, as you will have found in my books with all those violent deaths and horror aspects. I think the supernatural can be horrific. I like the shadow idea and I like going into the darker side of us and I do sometimes dream very violent dreams.

Sometimes, I worry that when people read my books they think that’s me; that I am into violence and death. But part of what’s great about writing is that writing about these dark things helps us reconcile these darker issues. In fact, writers like Stephen King and James Herbert and hopefully me are actually more psychologically normal because we can tackle horror in our work.

Does something grip you and that becomes the basis [of the story]? Or do you plan out, outline, and write from there?

JP. Oh, the idea or image comes first exactly as you say. I am a very visual person. A lot of my writing comes from the places I’ve been—Israel in particular. I’ve been eleven times. A lot of my passion for these topics comes from things I’ve seen in Israel and other places. Also when I’m researching, things really happen! For example, Pentecost was originally called Mandala and was even more about Jung.

Then I was in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. I looked up and saw the Pentecost in those golden mosaic stones and this changed the whole book for me. That image. I had the idea for the stones. And then I saw the flame coming from the stones in Jung’s painting. This happens to me all the time. The other day I saw on a billboard a man with an octopus tattoo up his back and this image was seared into my mind. I wrote the scene yesterday in my new book. The man has become a woman with the octopus tattoo and she’s become a whole new character. I plot around the images. And then I do research and find nuggets that help to make it more real for readers.

You can download the whole article as a PDF here. A huge thanks to Russ Lockhart for a great interview!

If you have any questions about anything I have spoken about, please do leave a comment below. Thanks!

I’m pleased to announce that I have signed an audiobook contract for Pentecost with Gryphonwood, a small press in the US. The voice talent will be Jeffrey Kafer who reads a lot of thrillers so I’m excited about the project!

Gryphonwood publishes a number of authors, mostly in the thriller and speculative fiction genres, including David Wood’s Dane Maddock action-adventure series and Alan Baxter’s dark fantasy books. You can check out a complete list of the audiobooks they currently have for sale here.

The Pentecost audio will be produced through ACX so will be available on Audible on iTunes and Amazon, most likely in northern summer 2013. If it goes well, the likelihood is that I’ll get the whole series done.

Personally, I listen to a lot of audio and used to listen to even more when I commuted to my (miserable) IT job. The ARKANE books were written with the commuter in mind, as I want to take people out of their lives for just a little time to vicariously experience adventure.

Do you listen to fiction as audiobooks? I’d love to know if this is something you’re interested in.

I recently visited Death: A Self-Portrait, an amazing exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London.

The collection contains drawings, sculpture, photos, models and other artistic representations of death from different perspectives. I’m immersed in this world right now as I research death and dying for my next book, working title Hunterian.

I find myself increasingly fascinating with the duality between the death of the body and the mind, a theme I will be exploring within the bounds of essentially a crime novel.

The sculpture left is ‘Are you still mad at me?’ by John Isaacs (2001), a gory representation of a body that has been hacked apart, presumably in a brutal murder. There is a visceral reaction to looking inside human flesh, and the sculpture is made more real by the foot, still covered in skin.

In the video below, the collector Richard Harris explains his fascination and you get to see some of the art exhibits that focus around death.

I agree with Richard that you can essentially be a happy person but still be interested in death. Certainly, people question my own fascination with the morbid, but I feel it is an essential part of life and I can’t help but write about it.

Dying is a part of living, and I want to explore some of these areas that others shy away from. It’s also my own curiosity, for however much we study and explore, we can’t experience it ourselves until the end. These artworks fascinate because they make us think more deeply about an inevitable future, and help us to live more in the present.

Life is short, memento mori.

The Ark of the Covenant continues to inspire investigation and I did a lot of research for Exodus and loved weaving it into the ARKANE story.

Recently, ABC released a series of videos about biblical archaeology and in one of them, Christiane Amanpour visits the tunnels beneath Jerusalem and Aksum in Ethiopia (click here to view on ABC) looking for the Ark [8 mins].

Very cool!

London has so many layers of history and so many iconic places to visit that many forget the smaller museums, the hidden gems behind the busy streets.

One of these treasures is the John Soane Museum, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields near Holborn station.

Born in 1753, Soane was the son of a humble bricklayer and yet rose to become one of England’s greatest architects. He was Architect to the Bank of England and the Office of Works, so he was responsible for the government and royal buildings in Whitehall and Westminster. Soane was also a great collector and spent his wife’s fortune on acquiring sculpture, paintings and objects of beauty from around the world, storing them in a house that he converted to his particular needs.

The house and contents were given to the nation in an Act of Parliament in 1833. Soane gave directions that the house must be kept as he left it, and it can still be visited, laid out in the way he wished it to be.

I have visited the Museum several times, waiting outside until allowed in.

It is a place to get lost inside, both in a physical sense but also in time.

It has layers of history, just as London itself does.

Me outside the Grand Lodge of England, worked on by Soane and just round the corner from the Museum

Soane was also the Grand Superintendent of Works for the Freemasons during the height of his architectural powers in London. The United Grand Lodge of England is just around the corner, and he was instrumental in remodeling the hall and kitchens, but he also designed an Ark of the Covenant to be used in ceremonies. It’s nothing like the biblical Ark in design but it was constructed for a secret purpose and officially it was destroyed during the great fire of 1883

Here’s an excerpt from Exodus, ARKANE Book 3, when Dr Morgan Sierra visits the Museum in order to talk to the Curator, Sir Sebastian Northbrook, who keeps a secret about Soane’s involvement with the Freemasons, whose Grand Lodge of England is only a few streets away.

Sebastian pulled open a pair of narrow doors at the back of the salon to reveal a tiny corridor lined with pictures, engravings and paintings. It was lit with skylights cut into the walls and ceiling. Outside the window, a rectangular courtyard with classical sculpture and a water garden was reminiscent of a Roman villa.

The corridor emerged into a gallery, packed from floor to coffered ceiling with classical statues, casts of busts, original sculptures and objects from every historical era. Morgan gaped at the scene. Here was the goddess Sekhmet, a lion-headed stone figure that looked out over the riot of antiquities. There were slave manacles, rusty and worn, as if hacked from the body of the non-person inside them. Chinese dragon dogs played alongside basalt obelisks and a black marble head of Jupiter, six times life-size, gazed out with unfathomable eyes. A huge statue of Apollo looked down into the basement below, while relief friezes of conquest lined the walls about the god.

It was a labyrinth of early civilization, laid out in some kind of chaotic order, but her sense was of being overwhelmed. The brain was unable to process the sheer number of antiquities, the eye given no obvious place to linger in the face of so much choice. Morgan felt an urge to forget the Ark quest and immerse herself in this well of culture instead. To any lover of the classics, this was a kind of heaven.

“Is this all real?” she asked, well aware that the British of the Empire had done much salvaging of artifacts from throughout the world, some of it gathered through official means, kept safe and of benefit to future generations, but much of it ill-gotten and looted.

Soane kept the sarcophagus of Seti I in the basement. Amazing!

“Soane was a man who always got what he wanted,” said Sebastian. “But sometimes all he wanted was a cast, so many of the moldings you see are casts from the original. He was a poet of architecture, enamored of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires in particular. The juxtaposition of the objects here was calculated to produce a particular impression. Architecture was, for him, the queen of the fine arts, with painting and sculpture as her handmaids. Together they combine, and this place showcases his vision of the mighty powers of music, poetry and allegory. But come downstairs to the basement and see the real jewel.”

Sebastian slipped down some stairs, hidden behind yet more classical sculpture.

“I’ll remain here, it’s too steep for me” Ben said. “I can hear you from the balcony. Go on.” He indicated that Morgan should follow.

She descended into semi-darkness, but as her eyes adjusted she saw that the basement was crowded with yet more precious objects. Pale natural light streamed in through the skillful use of light wells cut into the walls, both vertical and horizontal, reflected in a series of mirrors. On sunny days, Morgan could see that the light would permeate into the nooks and crannies of this basement, alighting on the faces of long dead gods frozen in stone for centuries. Today, clouds muted the light, giving a ghostly pall to the figures within. Morgan startled a little as she passed a skeleton hanging in a closet, its bones a fused androgyny of male and female in a sculpted abomination.

The following video from the Guardian takes you into the John Soane museum.

So you know that there’s shooting and guns in my thrillers?

Well, sometimes an author needs to go get some practical experience!

Last weekend, I went to Budapest (with my very happy husband) for a shooting experience at Celeritas gun club. Check out the video below for the highlights.(Please note, this will all done with the highest safety standards.)

We also visited some of the places important to the violent century that Hungary has experienced – the synagogue and mass Jewish graves, the shoes left by the side of the Danube from those massacred, the offices of the secret police. It is a pretty harrowing place, as well as a majestic city with stunning architecture.

I will be writing an ARKANE novella entirely set there in the next 6 months, so you can expect more of Budapest then.

I hope you enjoy the video, and I’ll be announcing the launch of Exodus soon (and there are free review copies on offer for subscribers of the newsletter.)

I’m a huge reader and love to devour action-adventure novels as well as lots of books in other genres (you can check out my Goodreads reviews here). I also love to talk to authors about their writing process and what inspires them so I’ll be sharing more interviews with authors I enjoy, so you can discover them too.

Boyd Morrison is the author of the Tyler Locke action adventure thrillers as well as two stand-alone novels. His latest book, The Roswell Conspiracy, is out now. Boyd is also a professional actor and a Jeopardy Champion. The video interview is embedded below or you can watch on YouTube here.

In the video, you will learn:

• How Boyd became an author. He is an engineer by training and made a pact with his wife. He would support her through 9 years of medical training and when she was a full-time doctor, he would get the same number of years to pursue writing. It took him about 4.5 years to become a published author.

• How much of Boyd is in Tyler Locke, his hero? Boyd was an engineer and they’re about the same height but otherwise Tyler is quite different. Boyd wanted to make an engineering hero in the same way that Indiana Jones made archaeology cool. It’s not just nerdy Dilbert types, but a lot of adventurous people e.g. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. Boyd also comes from a family of engineers and he recently realized that Tyler Locke is based on his own father, who died when he was young. He was in the army and went to MIT and had that kind of adventurous spirit.

• Traveling is a love of Boyd’s and he has traveled for research. In Roswell, there is a chase on the jetboats in Queenstown which we have both done. As a writer, you’re always looking for new things to incorporate in the writing. It’s partly an excuse to go do research e.g. driving fast on the autobahn in Germany. We also talk about writing about places we haven’t actually been, using Google maps and YouTube as well as other online resources. On writing fight scenes, based on movie knowledge and workshops, like the ones from Thrillerfest. Raising the stakes is more important than the detail of the fight e.g. if he doesn’t land this blow, the bad guy will shoot the girlfriend etc.

• We also talk about scuba diving as we’re both huge fans. Boyd recommends the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, as well as St Lucia in the Caribbean. I mention Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia which is less visited than the Barrier Reef and spectacular. We talk about organizing a thriller writer’s scuba diving trip, and inviting James Rollins and Clive Cussler amongst others. It would be a lot of fun!

You can buy The Roswell Conspiracy on Amazon and at other bookstores.

You can find Boyd at BoydMorrison.com and on twitter @boydmorrison

One of the important clues in the next ARKANE book, Exodus, comes from a manuscript fragment found in the monastery of St Catherines in the Sinai, Egypt. No spoilers here, but Morgan Sierra must find a possible location for the Ark of the Covenant at the traditional place where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Codex Sinaiticus

St Catherine’s has one of the most extensive collections of ancient manuscripts in the world, mainly due to the fact that the monastery was never sacked. It is remotely situated in the Sinai desert but was also granted a protection from the Prophet Mohammed so the monastery was safe during the expansion of Islam across North Africa. The dry climate also makes it perfect for manuscript preservation.

The Codex Sinaiticus

The Codex Sinaticus is just one of the manuscripts that was found at St Catherine’s and it is now mostly held by the British Library in London, although fragments remain at the monastery as well. Written in the middle of the 4th century, it is the oldest complete copy of the Christian New Testament, and also contains the Septuagint Old Testament. It is written in ancient Greek and is so fascinating because of how many corrections there are, from individual letters to whole sentences, as well as the differences it represents to the Bible used today. This 2 min video gives you an initial view of the Codex.

The entire Codex has now been digitized and you can read it online – with some translation available if your ancient Greek is rusty! I actually did a whole semester during my Theology degree at Oxford translating John’s Gospel from ancient Greek so it is a particular thrill to me to be able to read the text itself. I have seen the actual book at the British Library, it’s indeed a marvel and I just had to include it in Exodus.

Palimpsests

Archimedes palimpsest

Palimpsests are pages or scrolls that have been used once, then scraped and used again, but with certain technologies, the original text underneath can be read and exposed. Because material for writing was rare and expensive, in ancient times, they often reused scrolls. One of the most famous is the Archimedes Palimpsest where a 10th century Byzantine prayerbook was written over the original mathematical text from Archimedes dated around 200 BC.

St Catherine’s monastery is now working with a team to digitize the manuscripts that remain - this article in the Washington Post (Sept 2012) discusses the preservation project and also the 130 palimpsests, the texts written under other texts, that have been found on the site.

I find the idea of palimpsests to be fascinating, and even the word itself is evocative. What riches could be found under the many thousands of ancient documents in the Vatican archives? What will researchers find with new technologies? And how does a fragment of such a text impact the plot of Exodus?

Images: Top Codex from the British Library,