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Christmas winners and a new prize!
For this week there will be one new winner!
The winner in the next week will receive a signed paperback first edition copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle and a signed advance copy of The Istanbul Puzzle, 2 books, posted free to wherever you are in the world!
The winner will be among the first to receive the physical copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle.
The winners of the Christmas 3 day competition were Lorely, Suzan Lacey & Reeca. A copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle & The Istanbul Puzzle, all signed, will be on its way to you all soon. If you are reading this please email us your address Suzan and Reeca (lob@yourasms.com)!
And now we have a new competition for anyone who didn’t win!
All you have to do to enter is to share this page on Twitter or Facebook (both if you can!) and comment below to tell me what you have done.
On next Friday morning 1 person will be chosen using a random number generator from the list of comments. I don’t expect more than about 30 to do this so you will have a reasonable chance. I will also run the same competition the following week so keep coming back if you don’t win this week! I expect to give away 20 books in the end, so you do have a good chance.
And thank you all for sharing and for all your support. The Jerusalem Puzzle is still doing well in the Kindle charts, a great result for a new author this year.
And if you have read The Jerusalem Puzzle please go to Amazon and review it on the US site here or on the UK site here.
I hope you win!
New for Christmas! 3 Day’s of Double Prizes!
For today, Christmas Day, tomorrow and Thursday there will be three winners!
Each will receive a signed paperback first edition copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle and a signed advance copy of The Istanbul Puzzle, 2 books, posted free to wherever you are in the world.
They will be among the first to receive the physical copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle.
The winner of last week’s competition was Hellena Middleton. A copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle will be on its way to her soon. If you are reading this please email us your address Hellena (lob@yourasms.com)!
And for all who enter check back on Friday for the winners and follow this blog to be notified too in my next post.
All you have to do to enter is to share this page on Twitter or Facebook (both if you can!) and comment below to tell me what you have done.
On Friday morning 3 people will be chosen using a random number generator from the list of comments. I don’t expect more than about 60 to do this so you will have a reasonable chance. I will also run the same competition next week so keep coming back if you don’t win this week!
Thank you all for sharing and for all your support. The Jerusalem Puzzle is at 122 in the overall UK Kindle chart, a great result.
And if you have read The Jerusalem Puzzle please go to Amazon and review it on the US site here or on the UK site here.
I hope you win and will do my best to give away as many copies as I can between now and the end of January.
Now win The Jerusalem Puzzle paperback! First copies are in!
I have just received the first paperback copies of The Jerusalem Puzzle from Harper Collins!
The winner of last week’s competition was Maria McAnamee. A copy of The Istanbul Puzzle will be on its way to her soon.
This week’s winner will receive a signed paperback first edition copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle, posted free to where ever they are in the world. They will be among the first to receive the physical novel. I have to admit the book looks and feels amazing. The title is embossed in gold on the cover!
All you have to do is share this page on Twitter or Facebook and comment below to tell me what you have done. One person will be chosen using a random number generator from the list of comments. I don’t expect more than about 30 to do this so you will have a reasonable chance. I will also run the same competition next week so keep sharing and your chances will go up!
Thank you all for sharing and for all your support. The Jerusalem Puzzle has reached number 68 in the overall UK Kindle chart.
If you have read The Jerusalem Puzzle please go to Amazon and review it on the US site here or on the UK site here.
Thank you everyone again for your continuing support on this journey! I hope you win and will do my best to give away as many copies as I can between now and the end of January.
Win a FREE ARC copy of The Istanbul Puzzle!
The Jerusalem Puzzle ebook will be released on the 3rd of December. You can pre-order it through one of the links to the right.
Every week, for 10 weeks from 26th November, a free paperback copy of The Istanbul Puzzle, signed by this author, will be sent to one of the people who share one of these blog posts to their followers on Facebook. Simply share with a button below and tell me you have done so by commenting below or emailing me at lpobryan@gmail.com
I will allocate a number to each share each week and pick a winner at random and then message you to get your address. I pay for postage, you get a signed copy to go with your ebook (out Dec 3rd 2012) or printed copy of The Jerusalem Puzzle, when it comes out on Jan 31st.
The picture below is of the Chapel of Golgotha, where Christ died, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, taken earlier this year.
A sense of mystery. What makes you read on? #3
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Before I start. I have been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards, Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award 2012 for The Istanbul Puzzle. You can vote from anywhere in the world here. The Istanbul Puzzle is half way down. Please vote for whatever novels you liked or just the crime novel you liked. Vote however you wish. Voting closes midnight GMT on the 18th November. I promise not to ask again.
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* I will tell you a little-known secret about why people read on. The secret concerns the way our brains operate. It will help you pull your readers forward through your story. As a writer, it is vitally important that you know this.
* The second secret is . . . wait, there’s someone at the door. I hope it’s not that guy who was waving a gun at me when I cut in front of him a few minutes ago. He looked like one mean mother. Wait . . . what the!
* The third secret of creating a sense of mystery is . . . hold on, I could finish this, but I think there are three people outside now. And one of them is around the back. And there’s another one upstairs! What the hell is that buzzing noise? Is that a chainsaw? Maybe two!
* The fourth secret of mystery is easy to guess. It goes back a long way. You know, I was always afraid of one thing. When I was a child it wasn’t men in masks that worried me. It was something more ancient, more hard wired inside me, more evil. Something I couldn’t escape. Do you know what it is?
* If you want to know the fifth mystery you will have to wait until the next time we get back to this subject.
To summarise, the five techniques for creating a sense of mystery in your writing, as used above, are:
* Foreshadowing and keeping people waiting for an answer.
* Putting your character in danger.
* Increasing the danger.
* Shifting the fear to something different, something older or more personal
* The cliff hanger.
These techniques must not be over-used, but if you use them well, in a new and unique way, you will drive your readers to read on. And that’s what we want, isn’t it, for readers to read our stories?
I wonder would you mind telling us, through a comment below, which other mystery techniques writers use, as this list isn’t intended to be complete, just a good starting point for a conversation?
And please sign up for updates above right, as I will be giving away Advanced Reader Copies of The Jerusalem Puzzle in December. And I will be able to tell you what to do to win one, if you sign up. And thank you for reading this. If you want to order The Jerusalem Puzzle or The Istanbul Puzzle there are links to the right.
This is the third in a series of four posts in the run up to the launch of The Jerusalem Puzzle on ebook December 3rd and in paperback in many countries January 3rd.
On starting the edits for The Jerusalem Puzzle
Yesterday I started the edits for The Jerusalem Puzzle.
I received two pages of notes from my editor at Harper Collins in London on Monday. Her comments included many compliments “powerful – expertly brought to life,” which are encouraging, but I won’t go on any more about, and suggestions for three extra scenes.
The first will be where Sean explains in detail why he wants to go to Jerusalem. The second will be where Henry’s involvement is expanded. The final one, at the end, will be where discussions take place about what happened in Jerusalem.
There are also notes from HC on each page of the manuscript, which need to be considered. This is all about 6 weeks work, editing maybe 2-3 hrs a day. After this we will have something truly interesting for you for January release.
Thank you for staying with me on this journey.
If you would like to follow a series of posts on fiction writing for the 21st century sign up for updates on the right.
There will be one post a month on the progress of The Jerusalem Puzzle towards launch next January and one post a month on writing craft issues. Here is the first post on writing:
http://lpobryan.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/get-your-writing-noticed-1-series-introduction/
You can preorder The Jerusalem Puzzle for UK readers here or for US/Aus/NZ here or Canada here.
The image below is of the Italian hardback edition of The Istanbul Puzzle, which is all over Italy at the moment. It was launched June 21st. If you know anyone in Italy please tell them it is available there. Thanks.
The 7th Puzzle: What does The Istanbul Puzzle symbol mean?
Over the past 7 months I have published a series of posts related to the mysteries of Istanbul. This 7th post will be the last in this series. Further posts will cover more general mysteries related to the series of novels coming up over the next few years and updates on writing each novel.
The 7th puzzle related to The Istanbul Puzzle is about the meaning of the symbol you will find below. This symbol is discovered by Sean and Isabel during their Istanbul Puzzle adventure.
Here is the symbol:
At first glance it appears to simply be a square with some lines inside it, which form an upward shaped arrow with 4 double-headed eagles at the compass points.
As I explored what this symbol might mean I uncovered a series of interpretations. These interpretations might help you solve the puzzle and win a £100 prize. The details of that prize are after the above link.
One of the first interpretations that struck me was that the shapes were also used in a Byzantine children’s game. The objective of the game is to see how many shapes you can create with just four basic elements. The first test in the game, under the old rules, is to see how fast you can create a pyramid and a devil shape.
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The second interpretation I found was that some astrological charts used the same shape to chart the positions of the planets at the moment of birth.
Here is an astrological chart taken from the Tractatus Astrologicus II, which contained the astrological charts of early European states. It was created by Luca Gaurico, one of Nostradamus’ teachers, and was published in Rome in 1524.
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The third interpretation of the image is as a Byzantine magic symbol.
The square is universally acknowledged as the magical symbol of earth and the triangle as the symbol of fire. These symbols can be seen on banners from the middle Byzantine period, around the time of the 4th Crusade.
The banner image shown here illustrate the original colours of the four Byzantine double-headed eagles.
The fourth interpretation is as a Kabbalistic symbol.
After the expulsion of jews on 31 March 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain many settled in Ottoman territories. Rabbeinu ben Adaret, a rabbi and early scholar of the Kabbalah, moved to Constantinople during that period. The symbol shown is taken from a commentary on his work published in Constantinople in 1574.
There are other interpretations of this symbol too. It was used by the Marcianius family, one of the earliest aristocratic families of the Byzantine period as their family symbol.
The symbols of the square and the arrow are also alchemical symbols for soot and zinc. The combined symbol is believed to be an alchemical recipe. The Byzantine eagles were part of the formula, whose meaning has since been lost.
And finally, at this stage of the plot, and because all the books in this series will form a complete story, the seventh interpretation of the symbol is a symbolic representation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
None of the above interpretations is the answer required to win the prize, however, but in them you will find a clue.
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an 1887 painting by Victor Vasnetsov. The Lamb is visible at the top. Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The 6th Puzzle: The Mystery of the Missing Link Mosaic
In my mystery novel The Istanbul Puzzle, Sean & Isabel discover a clue early on, a photograph of a mosaic. The mosaic is similar to the iconic Christian images of the Virgin & Child that are so well known all around the world.
Here is an example from the Louvre museum in Paris. This is a copper plate believed to have been “taken” from Constantinople in 1204. “Looted” is probably what they meant:
Photographed at the Louvre, July 2011
The puzzle for Sean & Isabel is that their mosaic is not Christian. But where is it from?
Images of a mother and child have been used for thousands of years as objects of veneration. Here is Isis, for instance, with her son Horus:
Isis & Horus statue at the Louvre, July 2011
Isis was a goddess in Ancient Egypt, whose worship spread all over the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the Queen of Heaven, the friend of slaves and the downtrodden.
According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, Isis was the only goddess worshiped by all Egyptians, whose influence was so widespread that she eventually became venerated all over the Greek world.
Worship of the Queen of Heaven was also picked up by Jews. It is recorded in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, circa 628 BC, in the context of the Prophet condemning such religious worship as blasphemy and a violation of the teachings of the God of Israel.
In Jeremiah 7:18: ”The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes of bread for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.”
Later the Romans used images of a mother and child for depictions of Aphrodite and Eros and other Roman and Greek Goddesses with their offspring. Here is another picture from the Louvre in Paris:
Virgin & Child from the Louvre, July 2011
The mosaic discovered in The Istanbul Puzzle is a clue that helps Sean and Isabel.
The imagery in the mosaic is so similar to what we all take for granted as an image of the Christian Virgin and Child, they assume it must be a Christian mosaic.
But it’s not. It’s a mosaic that shows where Christian artists got their inspiration from. Many such pre-Christian images of Virgins would have been destroyed as being pagan when Christianity came to power, but this one survived. The reason it did, and where it has been for almost two thousand years, are all key parts of the The Istanbul Puzzle.
To go to the 7th puzzle click here.
