It is amazing how much one gets done when not wasting time on social media. My new book, Nirvana Nights, is soon ready for editing, and I have to admit it is a banger.
I write books that I would like to read myself. Explosive action, posh surroundings, brands, and a completely off-the-wall storyline. But every book rests on the shoulders of the one before it, and by now I have built an entire world that runs from early Egypt to the present day.
This time I have focused on Leif Martin, the son of my main character, John Martin. A great deal of detail has gone into his background and into what makes him tick. If you read my books you will be used to the Luxe Noir style by now. This one enhances it further.
What follows is not a plot summary. There is a thriller under this book and there is a mystery, and I am not going to say a word about either one. What I will tell you is who it belongs to, when it is set, and how it was written.
- Nirvana Nights is book five of the Feeder Series and it is close to ready for editing.
- It is set in 1994 and it belongs to Leif Martin, son of John Martin. This is the first novel in the series not told from behind the father's shoulder.
- Most of the detail work went into Leif: his background, his tastes, and the distance between who he thinks he is and what the reader can see.
- Luxe Noir is the genre I created. Champagne in a penthouse with blood on the marble. This one pushes it further than the first four.
- The series world now runs from early Egypt to the present day, which lets book five move faster than book one could.
- Small parts of the book are drawn from my own twenties, with the names changed and the edges sharpened.
- The plot stays sealed.
Table of Contents
- Leif Martin
- Giving the Book to the Son
- What Luxe Noir Is
- Why This Book Pushes It Further
- Standing on the Previous Books
- Writing a Decade I Was In
- Why 1994 Is Harder to Research Than 1794
- How I Write
- Where the Book Is Now
- Summary
- Sources
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Related Reading
Leif Martin
Twenty-three years old in 1994. Born late 1970, hours after his twin sister Lela Martin. Harvard, class of 1994, a degree he has no intention of using. Grandson of Bruce and Camilla Martin. Son of John Martin.
He plays bass in a band called Jaguar Filet. That is what he does with his life at the opening of this book, and he is good at it, and it is not why anyone is interested in him.
He has been handed everything his father had to take. John Martin was forged. Leif Martin was furnished. Readers of the first four novels know what this family does to people and how it does it. The boy does not, not yet, not the way you have to learn it.
Most of the detail work on this novel went into him. Where he was educated and what it did to him. What he listens to. What he wears and why, which in a family like this one is never a neutral question. Who he believes he is, which is a very different thing from what the reader can see. Getting that gap right took longer than anything else in the book.
Giving the Book to the Son
Four novels of this series have stood behind John Martin's shoulder. There is a real danger in that. By book five you know exactly how a man walks into a room and exactly what he does with his hands and exactly how long he waits before answering, and you will keep writing him forever because it is comfortable and it works. That is how series die. Not from exhaustion, from competence.
The safe way to hand a series over is to introduce the heir as a supporting player, give him a subplot, and promote him three books later once the original has run out of road. Readers can always smell a handover being managed. The other way is to simply give him the book, all of it, and let the father move at the edges of the frame like weather.
That is what I did. There is no easing in.
What Luxe Noir Is
Luxe Noir is a genre I created. It did not exist before my books. There was no label for what I was writing, no category on Amazon, no shelf in a bookshop, so I named it myself.
If traditional noir is shadow and rain and a detective with a cigarette, Luxe Noir is champagne in a penthouse with blood on the marble. That is the shortest way I can put it.
The longer version is that it sits where thriller, espionage, historical fiction, and crime meet, but filtered through extreme wealth, dynasty, sensuality, and moral ambiguity. The characters are not ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. They are powerful, cultured, ruthless, and unapologetically dangerous. A few things define it:
- Luxury as setting, not spectacle. The houses, the aircraft, the watches, the wine. They are not there to impress the reader. They are the environment in which power operates, and they shape every decision made inside them.
- Moral ambiguity as a rule. There are no clean heroes. The reader is never allowed to settle comfortably on one side.
- Generational power. Dynasties, bloodlines, inherited empires. What one generation decides lands on the next. Family is both fortress and prison.
- Real history under the fiction. Real places, real events, real people, researched hard so the invention has somewhere solid to stand.
- Empowered women. The women in these books are not accessories. They match the men in intelligence, ruthlessness, and ambition, and they set their own course.
- A global canvas. These stories do not sit in one city, because the power structures they deal with do not sit in one city either.
If you want the full argument, I wrote it out properly in What is Luxe Noir?
Why This Book Pushes It Further
Every element above is turned up in Nirvana Nights, and there is a simple reason for it. The man carrying this novel has never once in his life had to ask what anything costs.
John Martin came up through it. He knows the price of things because he paid it. His son does not, and the world therefore looks entirely different from where the boy is standing. The luxury in this book is not observed from outside with any awe. It is simply the air. That changes how every room in the novel reads, and it is the reason this one goes harder on the surfaces than the previous four did.
1994 helps. It was a decade of exceptional confidence about objects, about brands, about the idea that taste and money were the same thing. Dropping a young man with an unlimited line of credit into that particular year is close to cheating.
And the moral ambiguity is worse here than it has been. Not because there is more violence, but because of who is doing what to whom, and I will leave that there.
Standing on the Previous Books
Every book rests on the shoulders of the one before it, and that gets truer with every volume.
By book five there is a whole world underneath the page that the reader never has to be shown directly. The Martin line and where the money actually came from. The long thread that runs back through Egypt and surfaces again centuries later, which readers of the earlier books will recognise the moment it moves. A certain object that has now appeared in every novel in this series and is doing more work than most of the characters.
None of that needs explaining in Nirvana Nights, because it is already built. A reader who has been with me since The Feeder will feel the weight of it without being told. That is the payoff for writing a series rather than writing sequels. The fifth book can be quicker and stranger than the first, because it never has to stop and account for itself.
Writing a Decade I Was In
I was in my twenties in the nineties, and that is both the advantage of this book and its trap. Spoiler: The opening of the book actually happened in 1994. Yes, the dane smoked it all!
The advantage is that I do not have to research the texture. I know what a night that goes wrong feels like from the inside, the specific way the hours stop connecting to each other, the way a room can turn without anyone saying anything. Small parts of this book happened to me first. Names changed, edges sharpened, but the texture is mine, and a reader can always tell the difference between a writer who looked something up and a writer who was there.
The trap is that memory is a liar with good manners. It smooths things. It rearranges events so that you come out of them better than you did. Every time I wrote a scene drawn from my own life I had to stop and ask whether I was writing what happened or the version I have been telling myself for thirty years. Usually the second. The version you have told yourself is always more shapely and always slightly more flattering, and it is almost always worse on the page.
Why 1994 Is Harder to Research Than 1794
People assume the recent past is easy and the distant past is hard. It is the other way around.
Set a novel in 1794 and nobody in your readership was there. Set one in 1994 and a very large part of your readership was alive, was paying attention, and remembers exactly what the world sounded like. Get a detail wrong and they do not simply notice, they are personally offended, because you have got their own life wrong.
So this book has cost me a great deal of checking. What was playing that summer. What the aircraft were and who was flying them. What you could and could not do with a telephone. What the paperwork looked like. What was going on in the world in the background, because 1994 was not a quiet year and a novel that pretends otherwise has not done its work.
How I Write
Once, at full speed, and no second drafts. I have it mostly preplanned or make it up. It comes to me quite easy!
That is not a boast and it is not advice. It is simply the only way I have ever been able to do it. If I stop to fix something I lose the thing that was carrying me, and the repaired version is always deader than the broken one. So I go through in one pass and I do not look back until the end.
What comes after is a continuity pass and a language pass. The language pass is the colder of the two. Out come the adjectives doing work the verbs should be doing. Out comes any sentence that is admiring itself. Small true things over adjectives. Cheap verbs. Full names, over and over, until the names carry weight.
And no AI. Not a sentence of this book and not a sentence of the four before it. I build with AI on the business side and I am open about that. The novels are written by hand.
Where the Book Is Now
Nearly ready for editing.
Release information goes to the newsletter first and will be posted here once the date is fixed. If you want to know before everyone else, that is what the newsletter is for.
Summary
- Nirvana Nights is book five of the Feeder Series, set in 1994 and close to ready for editing.
- It belongs to Leif Martin, twenty-three, son of John Martin and twin brother of Lela Martin. It is the first book in the series not told from behind John Martin's shoulder.
- Handing a series to the heir is a structural risk, and the only way it works is to give him the whole book rather than easing him in across several.
- Luxe Noir is the genre I created: luxury as setting rather than spectacle, moral ambiguity as a rule, generational power, real history under the fiction, women who set their own course, and a global canvas.
- This book pushes all of it further, because the man carrying the novel has never had to ask what anything costs.
- The series world runs from early Egypt to the present day, which means book five never has to stop and explain itself.
- Written by hand, once, at full speed, no second drafts. The plot stays sealed.
Sources
- JFK Løvlien, What is Luxe Noir? The Genre Behind The Feeder Series
- The Feeder Series, books one to four: jfklovlien.com
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nirvana Nights?
Book five of the Feeder Series, set in 1994. It follows Leif Martin, the twenty-three-year-old son of John Martin. There is a thriller underneath it and there is a mystery, and I am not saying a word about either one until it is out. {BUT there might be a song from the band Jaguar Filet included and more.}
When will Nirvana Nights be released?
The manuscript is nearly ready for editing. Release information goes to the newsletter first and will be posted here once the date is fixed.
Do I need to read the earlier books first?
No. It is built to stand alone. But a good deal of it rests on the first four novels, and several things will land very differently if you already know what John Martin is capable of and who Bruce and Camilla Martin were. Read Luxe Rage
Who is Leif Martin?
The son of John Martin and the twin brother of Lela Martin, born late 1970, Harvard class of 1994, a bass player. Readers of the earlier books will have met the family. This is the first novel that belongs to him.
What is Luxe Noir?
A genre I created because nothing existing quite fit. Luxury, power, espionage, dynasty, and noir storytelling in one place. If traditional noir is shadow and rain and a detective with a cigarette, Luxe Noir is champagne in a penthouse with blood on the marble. The full explanation is in What is Luxe Noir?
Is Luxe Noir the same as noir fiction?
No. Traditional noir is intimate, urban, and small in scale. Luxe Noir takes that darkness and expands it to a global, cinematic scope, then adds extreme wealth, dynasty, espionage, and inherited power. The mood is seductive as much as it is dark.
Why is the book set in 1994?
Because it is the last moment before everything became traceable. No phone in every pocket, no camera in every hand, no permanent record of where a person was and who he was with. That matters enormously for the kind of story I am telling, and 1994 is very close to the end of it.
Is Nirvana Nights based on your own life?
Small parts of it. I was in my twenties in the nineties and some of the rooms in this book are rooms I stood in. Names changed, edges sharpened. Leif Martin is not me. He is richer, better looking, and far more dangerous company.
What does the title mean?
That is answered inside the book. I will say only that it is not a reference to the thing most people will assume.
Is Nirvana Nights written with AI?
No. Not a sentence of it, and not a sentence of the four books before it. I build with AI on the business side and I am open about that. The novels are written by hand.
What order should I read the Feeder Series?
The Feeder, then Alien AI, then Goldblood, then Luxe Rage. Nirvana Nights is book five. Each one stands alone, but they gain considerably read in order.
