Month: January 2020

Past conversations with my cat – 42

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This is Chester.  Somedays, like today, he is an accomplice.

In what, you may ask.

I got a DM (a direct mail in Twitter) from someone who wants to ask a few questions and write a little piece about me in their blog.

Why? Chester asks.  He’s been sitting beside me staring at the same screen I have, and it finally got the better of him.

They asked I replied.

But what about the last person who tried to get simple answers to simple questions?

I was in a frivolous mood, I tell him.

That’s most days, isn’t it?  Unless, of course, you’ve dozed off after a long night trying to get words on theoretical paper.

OK, so he’s trying to annoy me.  It’s working.

The first question, tell us a little about yourself.

So, what do I say?  Suave and sophisticated.

A sidelong look from an obviously amused cat.  I can tell by the expression on his face.

And then the words, don’t use words of more than two syllables, and worse, use words you don’t know the meaning of.

That’s why I have a thesaurus and dictionary on the computer.

He lets that pass.

So I have been around long enough to have many experiences, go to many places, see many people, and do stuff.

Do stuff?  What the hell is ‘stuff’?

You know, stuff.  Looking at stuff, eating stuff, sitting on stuff.

Groan.

He gets up, gives me that pitiful look of disdain, and leaves.

I shrug.  Maybe tomorrow, when he’s in a better mood.

 

 

“Echoes From The Past”, buried, but not deep enough

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What happens when your past finally catches up with you?

Christmas is just around the corner, a time to be with family. For Will Mason, an orphan since he was fourteen, it is a time for reflection on what his life could have been, and what it could be.

Until a chance encounter brings back to life the reasons for his twenty years of self-imposed exile from a life only normal people could have. From that moment Will’s life slowly starts to unravel and it’s obvious to him it’s time to move on.

This time, however, there is more at stake.

Will has broken his number one rule, don’t get involved.

With his nemesis, Eddie Jamieson, suddenly within reach, and a blossoming relationship with an office colleague, Maria, about to change everything, Will has to make a choice. Quietly leave, or finally, make a stand.

But as Will soon discovers, when other people are involved there is going to be terrible consequences no matter what choice he makes.

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Short story writing. Don’t try this at home! (2)

This is not meant to be a treatise on short story writing.  Far be it for me to advise anyone on the subject.  I prefer to say how it is that I do it so you can learn all of the pitfalls in one go.

I like to think I fly by the seat of my pants, you know, like the reader who takes up the story and starts reading, not having a clue where it’s going to go.

I prefer that blissful ignorance, of course, until I have to start editing it into something that resembles a logical story,

It was a revelation when I discovered there are two types (possibly more) or writer, pantsers and planners.

I’ve tried both.  Both work.  But in the case of the latter, you need to know where it’s going to start what’s going to happen in the middle and have the end firmly planted in your mind.  Not much good if a rotten character is pissing you off and you want to kill him, excruciatingly.

Flying blind gives you a little more creativeness, and be able to go around a corner and see what’s there.  it also allows for those complete changes of direction you come up with in the shower, that place that is a fertile ground for new ideas just when you’re running out of them.

But, it can sometimes play havoc with word counts and if you’re trying to fit into 2,000 words, 5,000 words, or a lot less, taking the story where it wants to go is not a good idea, and sadly, I tend to let stories run their course.

And sometimes I like the idea of writing three different endings, and then can’t choose which one I like the best.

So, role model I am not.  I like writing, and when I’m in the ‘zone’ it’s like I’m in another world.

But, then, isn’t that the case for all of us?

More unclarity tomorrow!

I’ve always wanted to go on a Treasure Hunt – Part 33

Here’s the thing…

Every time I close my eyes, I see something different.

I’d like to think the cinema of my dreams is playing a double feature but it’s a bit like a comedy cartoon night on Fox.

But these dreams are nothing to laugh about.

Once again there’s a new installment of an old feature, and we’re back on the treasure hunt.

 

Whilst Boggs took the time to get over his assault, I went back to my job at Benderby’s because there was no reason not to.  Benderby himself had checked several times on how I was, and I was beginning to think he called just to see my mother. 

And the notion of those two together was not painting a pretty picture, knowing who he was.  But we were being treated better than we had and that was a good thing, or so my mother said.  She too was surprised at Benderby’s interest, but she was not writing anything into it.  She had a different perception of him that most others had.

I was careful to avoid Alex, not that it was difficult because he was rarely in the warehouse office, or anywhere on the factory site most days, except for a few hours in the morning, and to close up at night.  No one else seemed to miss his presence, but I was a little more suspicious as to what he was doing with the rest of his time, to the extent that once I went looking for him.

The only conclusion I’d come to, now that he had his own map, it had to have something to do with the treasure.

Getting a version of the treasure map to Alex via Nadia had been a logistical nightmare, and constantly fraught with the expectation that Alex might think he was being set up.  The fact it was Nadia doing it was not lost on me and I realized later we had played right into her, and her family’s, hands in fitting the ongoing feud between the families.  Nor was it lost on me the enthusiasm which she showed in carrying out the plan.

If it wasn’t for the fact both Boggs and I benefited from it, I would have had second thoughts about employing her.  And Boggs was right, a girl like that could never like a boy like me.  She would always be the province of the likes of Alex Benderby, and I told myself that it was going to be business only from now on.

She set up the meeting with Alex and arranged for me to be nearby to witness the transaction, though what her reason was for that I had no idea and I really didn’t want to be there.  For some reason, I didn’t like the idea of Nadia getting close to Alex, but it was necessary, she decided, in order to sell the story.

She had cajoled him into believing firstly his map was the real map mainly because she had used her feminine wiles on Boogs, talking him into showing her the real map, and, then, while he was away for a few minutes, she had copied it.

Then it was a matter of keeping the map a secret because firstly it would ruin the rapport she supposedly had with Boggs should they need him again, and as far as she was aware, Vince thought he also had the real map and which Boggs said was not, and to mess with Vince would immediately make him suspicious about the authenticity of his map and that would be the last thing Alex would want.

It was a treat to see how manipulable Alex was when she was making offers she knew she’d never keep.  Or at least not in front of me.  I didn’t expect that I meant very much to her and watching her with Alex was much like how she handled me, so I guess we were all manipulable in her hands.  She was a Cossatino, and in that regard, no end of trouble.

With Alex handled, she left him with so much promise and so little substance I was surprised he fell for it.  But, there again, even in school, Alex wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box.  I think the notion that he could pull off the treasure hunt might just get the monkey on his back his father had put there many years before.

Then there was Nadia.

Seeing her in action put her in a different light.  Whilst those midnight rendezvous at the motel may have given me a sense of false bravado, seeing her with Alex, and playing her games, I had to wonder if my feelings were just an infatuation.  Did I like Nadia all that much?  I guess I must a little, to be feeling angry when Alex touched her.  

I had to remind myself that I could never live in her world, that her first and last instinct would always be to lie and manipulate.  She was, after all, a Cossatino, and leopards, as they say, never changed their spots.  She might want to escape from her family, but saying it and doing it were two entirely different things,

I doubted her father, no matter how much he liked or hated her, should ever let her go, simply because as a beautiful woman, she could do so much for the family business.

Whether she wanted to or not.

I left once he agreed, and before she did anything with him.  Clearly, Alex was expecting them to work as a team, but she had declined on account of her father, who was as mad as a hatter, and might just start killing Benderby’s if he found out she was working with him.

Best to leave well alone and appear to go their separate ways.

Until the treasure was found.



I didn’t hear from Boggs for a week.  I’d decided that I was going to leave him alone until he called or sent a text.  Boggs and idle time were a bad mix so I knew when I next heard from him, he would have formulated a half-baked grandiose plan for us to go on our treasure hunt.

And I was busy working out how I was going to tell him he had to take a step back and watch and wait till the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s had launched their campaigns.  It wouldn’t take long.  Both sons of self-made men, Alex and Vince had a lot to prove to their fathers, and there was no doubt they were going to use the lost treasure as the means of getting back into favor.

That brought a problem to the table, not immediately, but down the road, when neither would be able to find it.  Their first port of call would be Boggs, the one who had supplied them with ‘faulty’ maps.  It would never be their fault, that they were too stupid to realize they were being played, or, even if it was the right map, still couldn’t follow the instructions.

But even I had that problem.  I’d seen quite a few variations with notations, diagrams and cryptic messages.  I was not sure how they were going to fare.  Perhaps he had been thinking of just that because I received a text message, asking me to come over the next morning.  

As Sherlock Holmes would say, ‘the game’s afoot’.

© Charles Heath 2019-2020

“Sunday in New York”, it’s a bumpy road to love

“Sunday in New York” is ultimately a story about trust, and what happens when a marriage is stretched to its limits.

When Harry Steele attends a lunch with his manager, Barclay, to discuss a promotion that any junior executive would accept in a heartbeat, it is the fact his wife, Alison, who previously professed her reservations about Barclay, also agreed to attend, that casts a small element of doubt in his mind.

From that moment, his life, in the company, in deciding what to do, his marriage, his very life, spirals out of control.

There is no one big factor that can prove Harry’s worst fears, that his marriage is over, just a number of small, interconnecting events, when piled on top of each other, points to a cataclysmic end to everything he had believed in.

Trust is lost firstly in his best friend and mentor, Andy, who only hints of impending disaster, Sasha, a woman whom he saved, and who appears to have motives of her own, and then in his wife, Alison, as he discovered piece by piece damning evidence she is about to leave him for another man.

Can we trust what we see with our eyes or trust what we hear?

Haven’t we all jumped to conclusions at least once in our lives?

Can Alison, a woman whose self-belief and confidence is about to be put to the ultimate test, find a way of proving their relationship is as strong as it has ever been?

As they say in the classics, read on!

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Sunday In New York

In a word: Park

We mostly understand that a park is an area set aside for recreation, and can have trees, flowers, a lake, and vast lawns.  These parks are also sometimes called ‘gardens’.

A great example of a park is Central Park in New York.

Nearly every city has a park or some sort, some have more than one.

But the word park has a number of other uses.  For instance,

You can park a car, or bike, or yourself; in other words, it’s a place where you stop for a while.  For cars, it is a carpark.

You could say ‘it’s just a walk in the park’, which means that the job is going to be easy.  I never understood that analogy because quite a lot of parks have walks that are difficult, and not so much ‘a walk in the park’.

It is also used to describe a place where animals are kept, other than calling it a zoo, it can go by the name of a wildlife park.  Zoos though are more for cities.  Wildlife parks can be quite huge and many are found in Africa.

A park can also be used to describe a sporting arena or field.

You can park a bag in a locker.

You can park an idea in the back of your mind and come back to it later, or if you are like me, it disappears into the ether.

It can be an area of land around a manor house, but there are very few of those left now.  The most notable of these are in England, and were designed by a man called Capability Brown.

 

Venice, a backdrop for some of my stories

Venice is definitely a city to explore.  It has an incredible number of canals and walkways, and each time we would start our exploration from St Marks square.

Everyone I have spoken to about exploring Venice has told me how easy it is to get lost.  It has not happened to me, but with the infinite number of ways you can go, I guess it is possible.

We started our exploration of Venice in St Marks square, where, on one side there was the Museo di Palazzo Ducale and, next door, the Basilica di San Marco.  Early morning and/or at high tide, water can be seen bubbling up from under the square, partially flooding it.  I have seen this happen several times.  Each morning as we walked from the hotel (the time we stayed in the Savoia and Jolanda) we passed the Bridge of Sighs.

Around the other three sides of the square are archways and shops.  We have bought both confectionary and souvenirs from some of these stores, albeit relatively expensive.  Prices are cheaper in stores that are away from the square and we found some of these when we walked from St Marks square to the Railway station, through many walkways, and crossing many bridges, and passing through a number of small piazzas.  That day, after the trek, we caught the waterbus back to San Marco, and then went on the tour of the Museo di Palazzo Du which included the dungeons and the Bridge of Sighs from the inside.  It took a few hours, longer than I’d anticipated because there was so much to see.

The next day, we caught the waterbus from San Marco to the Ponte di Rialto bridge.  Just upstream from the wharf there was a very large passenger ship, and I noticed there were a number of passengers from the ship on the waterbus, one of whom spoke to us about visiting Venice.  I didn’t realize we looked like professional tourists who knew where we were going.    After a pleasant conversation, and taking in the views up and down the Grand Canal, we disembarked and headed for the bridge, looking at the shops, mostly selling upmarket and expensive gifts, and eventually crossing to the other side where there was a lot of small market type stalls selling souvenirs as well as clothes, and most importantly, it being a hot day, cold Limonata.  This was my first taste of Limonata and I was hooked.

Continuing on from there was a wide street at the end and a number of restaurants where we had lunch.  We had a map of Venice and I was going to plot a course back to the hotel, taking what would be a large circular route that would come out at the Accademia Bridge, and further on to the Terminal Fusina Venezia where there was another church to explore, the Santa Maria del Rosario.

It was useful knowledge for the second time we visited Venice because the waterbus from the Hilton hotel made its first stop, before San Marco, there.  We also discovered on that second visit a number of restaurants on the way from the terminal and church to the Accademia Bridge.

Items to note:

Restaurants off the beaten track were much cheaper and the food a lot different to that in the middle of the tourist areas.

There are a lot of churches, big and small, tucked away in interesting spots where there are small piazza’s.  You can look in all of them, though some asked for a small fee.

Souvenirs, coffee, and confectionary are very expensive in St Marks square.

Harry Walthenson, Private Detective

Harry is embarking on his second case, this time with Felicity as his investigative partner.  This time it’s closer to home when his father goes missing leaving a cryptic note behind.  Harry’s mother becomes the client, giving Harry the job of finding him.

But, all is not what it appears.

His father’s colleagues are sure he’s just taken off with a new mistress, something he apparently does from time to time.  His associates seem unworried about his departure.

And when Harry and Felicity discover a connection between his father and a major crime family, people who are possibly responsible for the near-death experience Harry had during his last investigation, things start to heat up in more ways than one.

Who is Emil Florenz, a golf partner, psychiatrist, and property developer?

Who is Augustus Shawville, the proverbial international man of mystery?

Who is Orville Argeter, an accountant who has numerous clients who often find themselves on the wrong side of the legal ledger?

Then there’s a host of family connections,

The forever looming specter of Harry’s grandfather, Jeremiah Walthenson, deceased

His first wife, Giselle White, divorced, who works in the practice’s archive, disillusioned and disappointed in the way her marriage ended

Alicia Wentworth an alleged gold digger and the woman who stole Jeremiah away from Giselle, and is suspected by the family of murdering Jeremiah for his fortune

Harry’s mother, Elsie Wilkinson, one of the Boston Wilkinson’s who are wealthy beyond imagining, and who once had a relationship with Florenz.

Who, of these, knows the truth?

Well, it’s time to find out.

Short Story writing: don’t try this at home!

This is not a treatise on how to write short stories.  Everyone has one in them, possibly more, and me, well, it’s how I keep the wolves from the door.

Yes, I read my stories to them and they fall asleep.

Or maybe not, I’m never quite sure what effect anything I write has on anyone.  And, reading a lot of the posts on how to handle bad reviews and rejection, such a recurrent theme, I don’t think I want to.

Ignorance is bliss, is it not?

Well, one day I’m sure something will happen.  It’s probably in the seven stages of writing:

 

Euphoria

Planning

Research

Writing

Failure

Search for the guilty

Distinction for the uninvolved

 

I guess you don’t fail if you don’t put it out there.  Searching for the guilty, well, there’s only one person to blame, the editor, and distinction for the uninvolved, didn’t your friend, relation, confidente, significant other, say it wasn’t going to work?

But, despite everything, I like writing short stories and try to produce one in a single sitting.  I try to keep the word count down, but the stories, somehow they just evolve in my head and don’t want to end the main character’s story.

In reality, there is no end to the story unless they die, and then, of course, the story branches off, just like a family tree,

Some stories are so intricate, they need another story to fill in the gaps, and then another because the plot is running through your head at a thousand miles an hour and your fingers won’t stop typing, because if you do, it will all dissipate into thin air like smoke.

Stories can, you know, dissipate like smoke, one minute your mining a rich vein the next, you’ve hit a ton of worthless quartz.

Then all the constraints come into play, nagging at the back of your mind, and you find yourself waking up in a bath of sweat crying out, I didn’t do it, the crime that is, not lose the best 2,000 words you’ve ever written.

But that’s all of those words you write, isn’t it?

But I digress, and I’ll write some more on the subject, what was it again?

 

 

In a word: Dog

Yes, it’s that little or big furry thing that’s also known as man’s best friend, a dog.

But the word has a number of other meanings, like a lot of three-letter words.

It can also mean to follow someone closely.

If you are going to the greyhound racing, you could say you’re going to the dogs, or it could mean something entirely different, like deteriorating in manner and ethics.

Then there are those employers who make their workers work very hard, and therefore could be described as making them work like a dog.

Some might even say that it is a dog of a thing, i.e. of poor quality.

There’s a dogleg, which could aptly name some of those monstrous golf course holes that sometimes present the challenge of going through the wood rather than around it.

Tried that and failed many times!

A dog man used to ride the crane load from the ground to the top, an occupation that would not stand the test of occupational health and safety anymore.

And of course, in a battle to the death, it’s really dog eat dog, isn’t it?