Temple (60 page)

He is the Chosen One.
I ask myself, am I a 'bravehearted man'?
It is strange most strangewbut now, after all that I have been
through, I actually think that I am.
Worthy adventurer, this tale is at an end.
May these writings find you in good health and I wish you every
happiness in life and love.
Farewell.
Race sat in the back of the Goose, staring at the last page of
Alberto Santiago's notebook.
He was pleased that the kind-hearted monk had found happiness after
his adventure. He deserved it.
Race thought about Santiago's transformation—his transformation
from timid monk to stalwart defender of the idol.
Then Race looked at the prophecy again and thought about Renco. And
then for some reason that he couldn't fathom, he began to think
about the similarities between Renco and himself.
They both bore the Mark of the Sun.
And they had both fought with caimans, and they had each displayed
cat-like balance and movement.
Both of them had most certainly enjoyed the aid of brave- hearted
men, and they had both risked their lives for their cause.
And lastly, of course, they had both fallen from the— Wait a
second, Race thought.
Renco had never fallen from the sky…
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
I guess I always liked to write, but it wasn't until I actually
began writing my first novel, Contest, that I realised that I
wanted to be a writer. I was studying at university at the time,
and I took to writing the book in my spare time. I soon found that
I'd start writing at nine in the morning and suddenly it would be
seven at night—and yet it felt like barely five min utes had
passed! That was when I knew I was a writer.
Early signs were: in Second Grade at school I set out to write the
novelisation of the original Star Wars. It was going to be the
longest story ever written by a seven-year-old. I got to page 2 and
gave up. But the intention was there! And dur ing the HSC, for a
three-page 'creative writing' assignment I wrote a story which had
a twist in the last line. I think that says something.
When did you begin writing your first novel, Contest?
I wrote Contest in my first year out of high school. I was 19 when
I started it and 20 when I finished it. My motivation at the time
was to write a book that was all action—action from start to
finish—a book that thrust the reader back into his or her chair
because of the sheer pace of the storytelling.
To be quite honest, I'd been finding that the books I was reading
were too slow, or taking too long between action scenes. I also saw
no reason why books couldn't have really massive action scenes,
action scenes that were even bigger than those you see in
blockbuster Hollywood movies.
Movies are constrained by budgets. But with books, the limit of
your budget is the limit of your/magination. I like to think I have
a big imagination.
What is Contest about?
Contest is the story of a man who is placed inside the New York
State Library and told that he has been chosen to rep resent the
human race in a contest that is held once every thousand years. He
is told that six aliens have been placed inside the building with
him and that all the entrances and exits to the building have been
sealed. No-one is allowed out until only one contestant is left
alive. Seven enter, only one leaves. In other words, it's a good
old-fashioned fight- to-the-death. Lots of really scary aliens and
clever escapes.
More so even than either Ice Station or Temple, I like to think of
Contest as a roller-coaster ride on paper, a non-stop series of
hold-your-breath, foot-to-the-floor thrills. The movie ver sion
will be great—kind of like Die Hard meets Aliens.
What led you to self-publish Contest?
Simple. I offered it to every major publisher in Sydney and they
all rejected it! What drove me to go down the path of
self-publishing was my desire to see it get picked up. I hon estly
thought it had the goods and, on top of that, I kind of thought
that the publishers I'd offered it to hadn't given it a fair go
(some, I am certain, didn't even read it).
So I figured that I had to gbt the attention of a major pub lisher
some other way. I reasoned that publishers go to bookstores to see
where their books are placed etc, so if I could get Contest onto
the shelves of major bookstores, maybe someone in the publishing
industry would see it.
And so, with the help of my brother, Stephen, I published Contest
myself—complete with blockbuster-style cover art—and offered it to
bookstores in person. It cost me $8,000 to print 1,000 books at a
place called Image Desktop Pub lishing (a free plug for them but,
hey, they did do a great job.
Oh, and folks, these are 1996 prices).
In any case, Contest was seen in a city bookstore by the Pub lisher
of Mass-Market Fiction at Pan Macmillan, the kind folk publishing
this tome. She called me up and asked if I was writing anything
else. As it happened, only a few weeks before I had decided to
commence work on a new book, a little action ditty set in
Antarctica about a team of United States Marines sent to defend a
spaceship found buried deep within the ice. I sent the first 50
pages to Pan Macmillan and they signed me up on the basis of those
pages. That book was Ice Station.
At this point, I should add something about the stigma of
publishing your own book. People look down on writers who
self-publish their books. You should have seen some of the
absolutely disdainful looks I got when I told people, 'Oh, it's
self-published.' The look on their faces said, 'You must really
suck. If your book was any good, a real publisher would have
published it.'
Take the following true story: a guy I know (whom I didn't know
back when I self-published Contest) told me recently that he went
into a major Sydney bookstore (I won't name it) in late 1996 and
picked Contest up. He showed it to the sales assistant and said,
'What's this book like?' The assis tant said, 'It's self-published,
what do you think?'
Ouch.
Such comments fail to appreciate just how difficult it is for an
author (especially someone who doesn't know anybody who works in
the publishing industry) to get picked up by a major publisher.
Hell, I sent Contest to one of the biggest agencies in Sydney to
try to get in the loop. They lost the manuscript. That's how hard
it is if you're an unknown.
Ultimately, though, that self-published book got me a major
publishing deal. 'Nothing ventured, nothing gained,' I say.
So go easy on self-published authors, because as far as I am
concerned, at least they have the courage to back them selves and
see their books put into print.
I understand that you've sold thefilm rights to Contest. Is that
right?
That's correct. I optioned off the movie rights to Contest in early
1999. I've recently seen some of the ideas the movie guys have for
the film, too. The special effects will be absolutely out of this
world. Cannot wait to see it.
Will Contest—the novel, that is—be reissued by Pan Macmillan
?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Pan are going to re-release Con test
in late 2000. My humble apologies to anyone who tried to get it
after they read Ice Station. I only printed 1,000 copies and by the
time Ice Station came out, there were none left!
Where did the idea for Ice Station spring from?
For me, any novel starts with the question What would happen if…
You ask yourself that question, and the answer is your novel. The
idea for Ice Station came when I asked myself What would happen if
someone discovered a spaceship somewhere on earth ? My answer: the
country in whose terri tory it was found would grab it and hide
it—a kind of Area 51 answer, really, and as a novel, not very
satisfying.
So I extended the question to ask, What would happen if that
spaceship was discovered in Antarctica, the only place on earth
that isn't any country's territory? The answer to that question was
much more interesting: it would be a free-for-all. An all-
or-nothing race to see who could get the ship first. By making some
of America's traditional allies (such as the
French)countries which most Westerners don't usually see as
threatswthe villains in Ice Station, I felt I made the story a
little more geopolitically complex. Funnily enough, I wrote Ice
Station in 1997 and only this year—1999, two whole years later—an
Australian spy was caught by the FBI selling American secrets to
the French! How about that!
Has Ice Station been sold overseas?
Yes, it has. Ice Station has been sold to publishers in the US, the
UK, and Japan. Very cool. Can't wait to see a Japanese edition of
it.
Were you surprised by the success of Ice Station?
That's a tough question to answer, principally because I think
every writer thinks their book is a winner—and hence expects it to
succeed! The best way to answer that question, then, is to say
this: I think people like escapism, and that is exactly what Ice
Station is. Pure, unadulterated, escapist entertainment. People
experience so much angst and irrita tion in their everyday lives,
that when they settle down at the end of the day to read a book,
they just want to be enter tained, to let the writer do the work
for them. That's what I do, and that's why I think people liked the
book.
Will Shane Schofield appear in another book?
I think so. In fact, in recent months, I have been dabbling with
the idea of a sequel to Ice Station. Schofield is a very convenient
hero for me to have because, being a Marine, I can get him into all
sorts of trouble around the globe. In any case, I'd just like to
bring characters like Mother and Gant back for more adventures.
Mother in particular. She is one of my favourite creations, a
character who really came to life
off the page from the very first moment I created her. (Quick
writing fact: believe it or not, I had not 'pre-imagined'
Mother when I thought up Ice Station. The day I wrote the scene in
which she first appeared, I just sat back in my chair and said,
'Okay, so what's this Marine going to be like?“ In the space of
thirty seconds I had a 200-pound, six-foot-tall woman with a
fully-shaved head and a heart of gold. Boom.
Mother was bor.) Rest assured, when she returns in Schofield II,
she will have a titanium leg—to replace the one she lost to a
killer whale in Ice Station!
William Race is a very different hero to Shane Schofield, isn't
he?
William Race is very different to Shane Schofield. While Schofield
is a hero for all seasons—-a pure Indiana Jones type; a
fearless-but-kind fellow who can kill ten bad guys but still tell
the little girl standing beside him to cover her eyes— William Race
is more of an ordinary guy who must discover his heroic nature in
the most extraordinary of circumstances.
As many people would guess, I like to picture my heroes in terms of
the actors who might play them in movie versions of my books.
Schofield was always written with Tom Cruise in mind for the role
(he's even described in the book as being five-foot-ten with spiky
black hair!). William Race, on the other hand, was always Brad
Pitt—Brad Pitt with glasses and an unloseable New York Yankees
cap.
By making Race an ordinary man, however, I found I could have a lot
of fun with his fear. He is not a hero. He is just a guy. He gets
frightened, even when he is doing the most death-defying stuff
imaginable (lowering himself under speeding riverboats, leaping
from one moving aeroplane to another…). At one point in Temple, he
sees a skeleton in the temple which he thinks belongs to Renco—who
most certainly is a hero—and he thinks: that's what happens to
heroes.
But, like Alberto Santiago, the monk in the manuscript story,
he discovers that being a hero is really about one simple
'thing—doing what is right, whatever the circumstance.
How did Temple come about?
The genesis of Temple was a little different to that of Ice
Station.
With Temple, I asked myself: What if I could write a book that
switched between two stories set in different times? But on top of
that I asked: What if those two stories had twists that affected
each other?
In other words, I wanted to write a book that was set in two
different time periods, but in which twists in Story 1 would
actually affect Story 2 (for example, the mangled skeleton in the
present day story found by Race suggests to the reader that Renco
has met a grisly end in the past; conversely, in the past story,
Alberto learns about the quenko underneath Vilcafor, but it is Race
who uses this information for his benefit in the present).
The added bonus was with two stories I could get double the
action!!!
Ad besides, I have always had a fascination with the Incas. So I
figured I could write a no-holds-barred swash buckling adventure
set in 1535 at the same time as I wrote an explosive high-tech
modern-day thriller like Ice Station.
Sure, at times I felt like my head was about to explode, what with
all those characters running around in it, but it was worth
it.
Will William Race make another appearance?
Barring any unforeseen creative detours (such as George Lucas
calling me up and asking me to write Episodes II and
III for him—it could happen… George, are you reading this?), yes,
William Race will definitely be returning in a new adventure.
In fact, I recently dreamed up a new story for Race to be
a story that will involve him having to translate another
manuscript, thereby giving us a new split story to get into.
Although, given my desire to write a new Schofield book, I might
have to alternate between Schofield and Race books in the
future.
Since writing Ice Station, you've been featured in the media
somewhat, do you have any stand-out memories of your adventures
with the media?
Being in Cleo and Cosmo as an eligible bachelor and a successful
person under 30 was a highlight. What was most flattering was when
a friend of mine told me that in one of the following issues of
Cleo, a reader wrote in to the letters page asking where she could
get my phone number!
Apart from that, there was the time I told a reporter something
embarrassing about my mother's carpet, only to see it included in
the subsequent article, which, I should add, appeared in the
weekend magazine of a national newspaper!