by Matt Lynn, author of Black Ops: El Dorado
The story in the New York Times caught my eye immediately. In the murky interior of Columbia, the drugs barons who used to supply the world with cocaine had found an even more lucrative trade. With gold soaring in price, and the financial markets in turmoil, they had started illegal gold mining, using vast quantities of dangerous chemicals to wash out the precious metals that's were still buried in ancient mountains.
Gold, drugs, gangsters, money - what more could a thriller writer possibly ask for to start weaving together a story.
The Kindle and other e-reading device are a huge opportunity for writers. But they are not just about new ways of distributing our work to readers - although that is what most writers have concentrated on so far. They are also an opportunity to tell stories in a new way.
I've recently launched a series of e-book only novellas called Black Ops. The first one was called Black Ops: Libya, so it is fairly obvious where it is set. It was written as Tripoli was falling and the pictures were playing out live on the new channels on television. The second is called Black Ops: El Dorado, and is set in Columbia's illegal gold mining industry (Columbia, as it happens, is where historians believe the legendary lost city of gold the Spanish Conquistadores searched for was located).
The idea is to tell stories ripped straight from the headlines, and put them out instantaneously.
The e-book allows writers to do that. Traditional publishing takes a very, very long time to get a book to market. You suggest an idea to an agent, who then suggests it to a publisher. Getting a deal will take at least six months, if you are lucky. It might then take a year to write the book, and it will take another year for the publisher to bring it out. And that will be the hardback. By the time the paperback edition hits the shops another six months will have gone by. In total, three years might have passed since you first suggested the idea.
In today's world, that is too long.
Everything else has speeded up. We get our news instantaneously. We react and analyse it in real-time. People discuss it on Twitter. They share the information on Facebook, as well as on sites like this one.
But the publishing industry is still stuck in the pigeon post era.
Readers like immediacy. They like to read about things that impact their world right now - not stuff that happened three years ago.
Just about every other form of media has got a lot quicker over the past few years. Now, by using the e-book, fiction writers finally have a chance to catch-up.
No doubt there are hundreds of short novellas that can be written about events that are happening in the world right now - action-adventure stories about wars, political sagas about a Presidential election, and romances around a divorce scandal hitting the headlines. It is wide open to the imagination of clever, inventive writers. And if they do it right, they may get millions of readers back into devouring fiction - because it is more relevant to their lives.
As for my Black Ops guys? Well, there's a big sporting event in London this summer that might be threatened by terrorists. And something is going on in Syria that looks pretty dramatic. That should provide the material for their next mission.
Black Ops: El Dorado is published by Endeavour Press.