To me, reading is an essential part of a writer’s life. We see what others write, we see how others write, and we see what they write about.
It is an education in itself on the genre we eventually want to write for. Call it homework, or very pleasant homework.
But…
Between everything else I have to do around the house, the time set aside for writing, the time set aside for maintaining social media, the time set aside for family, is there any time left?
About an hour before I go to sleep, though that time is considerably shortened if the book is boring.
Fortunately, quite often they are not.
The other problem is the intervals between new books from my favorite authors is getting less as they take on co-writers, such as James Patterson and Clive Cussler. And even more are now getting co-authors which means my to be read list is getting longer and longer.
It seems the only time I can steal more than an hour away is when I go away on holiday. This we try to do several times a year, and this year we’ll be going to Melbourne, and then a week in Tasmania.
There’s only one other problem involved, the fact books are so much cheaper there, and I’ll be buying more.
Damn. It’s a never-ending cycle.
But, at the moment, the list reads like this,
Len Camarda, The Seventh Treasure
Edgar Wallace, The Clue of the new Pin
Nicola Upson, Nine Lessons
Matt Gallagher, Youngblood
Sam Peters, From Darkest Skies
And, of course, about a hundred others.
As odd as it sounds I’m looking forward to the few hours in the plane seeing many airlines are now doing away with inflight entertainment. I’m sure food will be next.
Henry, for instance, had suffered the tragic loss of what he believed to be his one true love. That, in essence, had led him to that life at sea, away from everything and everyone, because all it did was remind him of what he had lost.
And, yes, he was not going to fall in love again, it was far too painful.
Trying to get over the overwhelming grief, still raw a year later, he hears the arrival of another guest, and curious discovers it is a woman about his age, one who is quite at odds with what he would expect as a guest, at this hotel, at this time of year.
It raises that inevitable question, why would someone like her be there?
This leads to an awkward dinner where, with only two guests in the hotel, would it not be better if they sat together? Neither thought so, but it seems impolite not to.
From there, of course, the conversation could only get worse, with each emphasising, in their thoughts, just how much they didn’t want to be there.
It is here we discover how these two are going to get along, or not, as the days proceed, not having realised that meeting others was a possibility, but meeting someone else who might be a match, never. Both know they’re at that hotel to stay away from everyone else, but, in the coming days, that wasn’t going to be possible.
This is not a treatise, but a tongue in cheek, discussion on how to write short stories. Suffice to say this is not the definitive way of doing it, just mine. It works for me – it might not work for you.
…
Now we have the where and the who. What’s the story going to be about?
I find inspiration in the most unlikely places.
Shopping malls are great, there is so many things going on, so many different types of people, there’s often enough to fill a journal.
Driving on the roads, you get to see some of the most amazing stunt driving, and it’s not even being filmed, it’s just playing out before your very eyes.
Waiting in hospitals, waiting for doctors, accountants, dentists, friends, hanging around coffee shops, cafes, bistros, restaurants, hotels, the list is endless.
But often a reliable source, the media and newspapers in particular, and a frequent go to, and the more obscure the headline the better. Then it’s simply a matter of letting your imagination run free, like:
Four deaths, four mysteries, all homeless.
This poses a few interesting scenarios, such as, were they homeless or were they made to look like they are homeless. If they are genuinely homeless how did they die? Are they connected in any way?
The point is, far from the original story that simply covers four seemingly random deaths, a writer can spin this into a thriller very easily.
It could follow a similar headline in another country where three headlines could be found, say, in London, where a man is found dead in an abandoned building, a week after he died, with no obvious signs of how he died.
A woman is killed in what seems, from the outset, an accident involving two cars, but the kicker is after three days, the driver of the second vehicle just simply disappears.
A man is reported missing after not reporting for work when he was supposed to return from a vacation in Germany.
And the third death, where an obscure piece says a man was found at the bottom of a mountain, presumed to have fallen in a climbing accident.
It’s all in the joining of the imaginary, yet possibly quite real, dots.
You could be on a train, and two people are acting oddly, note I didn’t say suspiciously, when going to or from work.
When on a holiday, you notice that a fellow hotel guest is in the same place at the same time every day but acting like he or she is waiting for someone or something. Then suddenly they’re not there.
But I’m not suggesting for a minute you should start investigating.
Just let the imagination work it’s tricks.
And, before you know it, you’re on that rollercoaster ride.
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.
It was an understatement to say I was dreading going to Boggs’ place.
In fact, in the hour it took to get through the morning chores I had time to consider how and why I was in this position. Boggs was a friend. We were friends at school and as best we could we had each other’s back when the bullies came out to play.
At times that didn’t amount to much because as everyone knows, bullies hunt in packs. Six against two wasn’t much of an equation. And it those days, the teachers spent more time hiding from the students than being in front of them.
It was simply a case of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
It didn’t feel like that, not for a very long time.
But, in the end, misfortune can make strange bedfellows, and in a town that depended on a single industry, it soon became apparent that there were more people against the Benderby’s and the Cossatino’s than for, and in small-town politics, that was more than an evening up. Out of school and separated from their acolytes, both Alex and Vince found that whatever influence they had once, was now gone, and all that was left was a grunt, and we were basically left alone.
Boggs was the dreamer.
He had idolized his father and when he went missing it broke him.
This map thing was the first signs of Boggs finally coming back to life, but the problem was, it was all pinned on false hopes. The Sherriff was right. Boggs was in over his head, playing with the two most vicious families from around here, and it was bad enough that his father had fallen foul of them, the Sherriff was not about to see his son go the same way. I was going to try and talk Boggs out of it.
Yet, on the other hand, it was people like us who needed a win, just to show there was still hope in this place. With threats every day that the factory might have to close, there were dark clouds hanging over everyone’s head.
If the factory closed, there was going to be a very large hole in the local economy and a lot of people in financial trouble. I’m not sure how finding the treasure might solve all of that, but I suspect Boggs’ had something up his sleeve.
I knocked on the door and his mother answered. She looked harried. She was a nurse and looked as though she just got home from the night shift at the hospital.
“Boggs is in his room.”
“How are you this morning?”
“Tired. And an afternoon shift, which I might not get to if I don’t get some sleep. You know where he is. Try not to make any noise.”
“Will do.”
I came in and closed the door, watching her dash off down the passage to the other end of the house.
She could not work endless double shifts for much longer, but like all of us, it was not out of desire but necessity. She had implored Boggs to get a job and help, but he seemed oblivious to the problem. I’d tried to speak to him, but he had that insufferable way of just not listening.
Boggs was in his room, sitting on the bed and staring at the ceiling.
“If only. I could use it right now to find something that’s missing>”
“Your cell phone?” Boggs was always misplacing something, of forgetting it. I’d lost count how many times he’d misplaced his phone.
“No. An underground river.”
OK. That was out of left field. I had no idea any rivers were missing, or, in fact, they could actually go missing.
Apparently, they could.
“There’s two,” he said. 300 years ago five or take this part of the coastline had several rivers that ran down from the mountain range. What we now call the hills on the edge of the coastal plain. There was also a lake, not very large, but it used to have several streams flow into it all year round and had an aqua flow that came out along the coastline.”
“And you figured all of this out from what? A copy of the treasure map.”
The moment he started quoting rivers, streams, and lakes, I remembered each of those geographical features appeared on several of the map versions. I had suggested, rather comically, that it would be funny if the treasure was buried in the lake.
It wasn’t all that funny. It was also possible.
“Imagine this. Drop anchor out to sea, in other words on the other side of the natural sandbar that formed at the seaward side of the river, get in the longboats and row inshore to the lake, across the lake, up another river to the base of the hills. Then do a little exploring, north or south, and find a cave. I reckon the treasure was buried in a cave. We know there are caves up there, not many, but I think there used to be more.”
“Someone already did a survey with some rather fancy electronic equipment with the same idea in mind. He found three, not very long, and certainly without treasure. Two had substantial falls inside, which is why they were buried.”
“There’s more.”
He jumped up off the bed and went over to the robe and opened the door. Tacked on the back was a copy of an ordnance survey map of this part of the coastline, and a tracing of the treasure map, to the same scale on top.
“As you can see, I think ‘I’ve found the correlation between the real, and what was real 300 years ago.”
Except there’s no rivers and no lake. And no sand bar as I recall. There was a small marina in what might have been where the river met the sea, but that’s gone. They filled it in and build a shopping mall on it. A huge, now half empty, shopping mall. A modern wonder 40 years ago that was supposed to bring business and shoppers to the town. For a few years it did, until another town 50 miles away got the same idea, sold the land for half the price, and made the rents a quarter of what they were here.
They called it progress.
We called it piracy.
“Then we can hardly row our boat inshore and up the stream, if it’s not there.”
I hated to state the obvious.
“But,” he said, looking like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. “What if it is still there, but we just can’t see it?”
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.
Time and I never quite achieved that level of understanding required for me to be where I was supposed to be at the appointed time.
It was why my mother always told me my appointments were an hour earlier than the right time, and while she was alive that worked well.
At Uni I simply tagged along with the others and was rarely late for lectures tutorials and exams.
But once that ended and I was cast out into the big unhelpful world it became a problem again. Time became my enemy.
It was that thought, along with a dozen other unrelated but equally worrisome thoughts that were uppermost in my mind.
I had an important meeting at 10am that morning, one that might just decide the course of the rest of my life.
I was lying awake staring alternately at the ceiling and that alarm clock, on one hand fearing I would go to sleep and miss waking up and on the other how unrelentingly slow time took to pass.
Only three minutes had passed since the last time I looked, and it felt like at least an hour.
Annabel had said she would stay with me and make sure I was ready, then take me, just to make sure I got there, but it seemed overkill, and surely, she had better things to do.
It wasn’t until about two hours ago that I finally realised what she really meant, and I’d been kicking myself for being so blind.
Several others had told me she liked me, but I thought she was being nice to a somewhat eccentric friend. Now I realised it was more than that, and I would have to make amends somehow.
I just didn’t understand the nuances of romance or women for that matter.
As daylight seeped in he the cracks in the curtains I knew it was time to get up, and I’d never felt so tired before.
I looked at the clock and saw that it was after six, so nearly four hours to stew over the questions they were going to ask and the answers I’d give them.
That mock session in my head lasted precisely ten minutes when there was a knock on the door.
No one came to visit me at this hour. No one came to visit me, period. I crossed to the door and looked through the viewer.
Annabel.
Then panic of a different sort set in. She’d never called by my place never expressed a desire to go there and now she was here.
I had never invited anyone home, it was always a borderline mess, but in an organised way, because I never thought that day would come, or that it be a girl who would want to.
The place was more disorganised than usual, I wasn’t dressed, and it had been impressed on me a long time ago that it would never do to be seen other than immaculately dressed, and I couldn’t leave her standing outside the door.
Whatever hope I may have had in fostering a relationship of any sort was about to go out the window. I took a deep breath and opened the door.
“Annabel.”
“Richard.”
And then I stood there like a statue, the extent of my social small talk exhausted.
She waited about thirty seconds and then asked, “May I come in?”
“It’s a bit messy, well, a lot messy. I wasn’t expecting visitors.”
She smiled. “You should see my room.”
I shrugged, stood to one side, and let her pass. I closed the door and leaned against it.
She did a 360-degree turn in the middle of the living room, ending up looking at me.
“This is what I would call a representation of you, Richard.”
I was not sure how to take that. There were piles of papers and textbooks on the dining table and chairs. Unlike some places I’d been, discarded clothes did not stay where they landed or languished on the backs of chairs. The kitchen bench was crowded with appliances and food boxes. The floors were clean, whereas stacks of books were not.
At least you could sit in the chairs.
“A place for everything, and everything in its place. You have a lot of books.”
She’d notice the four sets of shelves filled to overflowing.
“I don’t get out much.”
“Perhaps you should.”
A hint. Was she hinting she was available? I had not realised then that I was still in my pyjamas, and could feel the pinkish tinge of embarrassment.
“Sorry. Just got out of bed. Didn’t sleep much. Didn’t want to sleep through the alarm.”
“I thought I’d drop in. Just to make sure you were OK.”
“I’m sorry about yesterday. I wasn’t thinking. I appreciated the gesture, and perhaps didn’t quite…”
“You get dressed, Richard. I’ll make some tea and ferret out something to eat. Then we can talk.”
About what, I wondered as I went up the passage.
I wanted to believe that it might be about her and I, but I was realistic enough to know that there were expectations of her from her parents that didn’t include people like me.
And I was fine with that. Just to be her friend was enough.
I spent more time that I should, showering and dressing, and thinking of all the topics she might have up for discussion, and I finally came to the conclusion that this was probably the last time.
She had been mentioning the fact her parents were moving to the other side of the country, and she was to go with them. Her studies were done, and she was now ready to take up a management role in her father’s company.
I knew she was having reservations, starting at the middle, over the top of others who had to fight their way up the ladder, and the resentment it would bring. All I had said was it was a golden opportunity. It hadn’t been received very well and I had wondered later if I should have not agreed with her father.
That’s the trouble with words, once they’re out there, there’s no taking them back.
When I came back, she had cleared the table and sat, a cup of tea in front of her, and one on the other side, waiting for me.
She had a pensive look on her face. Or was it troubled?
I sat. It felt like a seat at the inquisition.
“I’m not going.” She used a tone that dared me to disagree.
“Going where?”
“San Francisco. Why would I want to go there? It’s the other side of the country, away from everyone I know, everyone I care about.”
Should I agree with her, or play devil’s advocate? I sipped the tea instead.
Perhaps if looked closer before I might have seen the hastily repaired eye makeup, a sign that she had been crying, or maybe shed a few tears? Had she been arguing with her father? I’d met him once and he was a force of nature, not a man I would cross.
And I just remembered last night she had been summoned to dinner with her parents and brother, an equally forceful type that I didn’t like. He’s once warned me that his sister would never be allowed to have a boyfriend like me, and I’d assured him that had never been nor ever would be my intention.
I was just surprised he could think that.
“So dinner didn’t go well.”
“Not after I threw my pudding at Leonard.” The seriousness left her face for a moment to allow a whimsical smile at the memory of it, then back to thunder.
“Well, that is an interesting way to decline an invitation, one I might add, most people your age would kill for.”
“I’m not a manager.”
That was another bone of contention. She completed her MBA, as well as a few other degrees, as a means of staying here. That was no longer a reason.
“Not what your qualifications paint you as.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Whose side do you want me to be on?”
A ferocious glare told me I was treading on very, very thin ice.
“Alright. I’m on your side. Stay.”
“Where? If I stay, no allowance, no apartment, no car, nothing. I was virtually told that I would have to be either a checkout clerk or a waitress in a sleazy bar.”
“Why a sleazy bar?”
“Leonard obviously frequents them, enough to suggest it.”
A thought came into my head, and I cast it aside instantly. “Would you?”
“No. A diner maybe, I can and have been a waitress, and it’s not all bad.”
“With an MBA at your disposal?”
She made a face.
“What do you really want to do. I mean, you have spent your life being someone else, someone who deserves more than just being a waitress.”
“There’s more.”
“How can there be more?”
“My choice of boyfriend.”
“I thought what’s his name, yes, William, was just the sort of boy who would be eminently suitable. You took him home one weekend, and what was it you said, they loved him, more than they loved you.”
“That was the problem, he was too perfect. I didn’t love him; I couldn’t love him.”
“Why?”
“Because… I care about someone else. Of course, he’s too blind to see what’s right in front of him.”
A new boyfriend. She’s been playing that one close to her chest.
“Then perhaps I should go and see him and drop some very unsubtle hints.”
Of course, it took a few more seconds for the cogs to turn, and the pieces fall into place. It was not another boy.
“I have no real prospects, Annabel. If it’s me you are alluding to?”
“Yet I know how you feel about me, how I feel when I’m with you, even if you are frustrating me into the middle of next week. You’re going to get that job, Richard, and then you will have prospects, certainly enough for me. You do love me?”
“More than you can imagine, I just never thought…”
“No. It’s what I love about you, you never assume, and you never take me for granted.”
“Where are you going to stay?”
“Here, of course, though it could do with a woman’s touch.” She smiled.
“Are you going to survive without the Davison billions?”
“I have an MBA, you said so yourself. I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Besides, when I told my father anything he could do I could do better, my mother muttered under her breath, ‘good for you Annabel.’. At least she had faith in me.”
Well, that seemed settled.
“When are you moving out of the penthouse?”
“Now. We have just enough time for me to move in before your appointment.”
“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?
I’m back home and this story has been sitting on a back burner for a few months, waiting for some more to be written.
The trouble is, there are also other stories to write, and I’m not very good at prioritizing.
But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.
Chasing leads, maybe
…
I’d expected more questions from her, but the ride in the train to Wimbledon, and then to the car, she had very little to say. There was no doubt she was intrigued by the offer, but there was some trepidation too.
But it didn’t auger well for her longevity if she trusted people this easily. I had expected a lot more questions if only to find out what the job was.
Then, by the time we reached my car, it seemed she had time enough to think about everything.
“How do I know you’re not going to kill me too?”
She was standing on the other side of the car, yet to open the door. I was about to get in.
I looked at her across the roof.
“I could have done that ages Ago if that was my intention.”
“Not in a public space unless absolutely necessary.”
She was quoting the manual.
“So, I’m about to take you to a quiet spot in the country and shoot you?”
“Unlikely. You don’t have a gun with you.”
“A knife then?”
“I’m sure you don’t have one of those either. Besides, there’s a few other ways that don’t require weapons.”
I was astonished this was the conversation.
“I asked for your help, and that wasn’t to practice my killing skills. But, where we’re going that might happen to either of us.”
“Where are we going?”
“To a residence in Peaslake. Do you know of it? It’s about an hour away, southwest, I think. I’m not expecting to find anyone, but I am looking for a USB drive.”
“This O’Connell character’s?”
“Yes.”
A few seconds passed as she took that in, then, “If you are not expecting anyone to be there, why do you need me?”
“Rule whatever number it was, expect the unexpected. And get back up if it’s available. And there are other people looking for these documents, and the USB. Not friendly people I might add. I have no idea if they have the same information I have, so I’m expecting the unexpected. We have worked together and you know me.”
We had performed several assignments together for training purposes, as each of us had with the other four. She hadn’t been the best, but she hadn’t been the worst.
I saw her shrug. Acceptance?
She opened the door and got in.
It took me 15 minutes to get to the A3 and head towards Guildford.
A few minutes later she asked, “What the hell did we sign up for?”
“What do you mean? I thought it was pretty straight forward. Something other than a dull as ditchwater 9 to 5 job behind a desk.”
“I mean, don’t you think it’s odd we do all of this stuff for 6 months, almost to the day, then get an assignment, and it all goes wrong.”
“That our instructors were frauds?”
“We didn’t know that, and apparently they didn’t either. Do you know if any of it was real?”
“Seemed to me it was. And we only have this Monica’s word that Severin and Maury are frauds. I mean, I was surprised to learn they allegedly didn’t exist, but you and I both know that in organizations like the security services have wheels within wheels, departments unknown to other departments, event MI5 or the police, so who’s to say what really happened.”
“And you say you now work for this character Dobbin, whose another department head. As is this Monica.”
Put like that, it seemed very confusing.
“There are others that I’ve run into, working for both Dobbin and for Severin.”
“You mean Severin is still out there?”
“Yes. He tracked me down.”
And when I said it out loud, it crossed my mind why he hadn’t come after her, but the answer to that was he might have thought I was the only one that O’Connell hadn’t killed.
“And he thinks you are still working for him?”
“It’s complicated. I’m kind of doing a soft shoe shuffle around all of them and trying to find out what the hell is going on while keeping them at arm’s length. That might go horribly wrong which is also a good reason why I need help. We really should find out what we got into.”
“I’d prefer not to. He hasn’t come after me.”
“He will. It’s only a matter of time. You’re in the system, and I have no doubt he has access to that system. You’ve just been lucky so far. And you equally know as I do, there’s no such thing as luck in our line of work.”
Another minute or so passed.
Then she said, “If you’re trying to scare the hell out of me, it’s working.”
It could be said that of all the women one could meet, whether contrived or by sheer luck, what are the odds it would turn out to be the woman who was being paid a very large sum to kill you.
John Pennington is a man who may be lucky in business, but not so lucky in love. He has just broken up with Phillipa Sternhaven, the woman he thought was the one, but relatives and circumstances, and perhaps because she was a ‘princess’, may also have contributed to the end result.
So, what do you do when you are heartbroken?
That is a story that slowly unfolds, from the first meeting with his nemesis on Lake Geneva, all the way to a hotel room in Sorrento, where he learns the shattering truth.
What should have been a high turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point every thing goes to hell in a handbasket.
He suddenly realises his so-called friend Sebastian has not exactly told him the truth about a small job he asked him to do, the woman he is falling in love with is not quite who she says she is, and he is caught in the middle of a war between two men who consider people becoming collateral damage as part of their business.
The story paints the characters cleverly displaying all their flaws and weaknesses. The locations add to the story at times taking me back down memory lane, especially to Venice where in those back streets I confess it’s not all that hard to get lost.
All in all a thoroughly entertaining story with, for once, a satisfying end.
Yes, if the temperature was 20 degrees below zero and the forecast for the net week was the same, then that would be the big freeze.
In a more understandable way of putting it, to freeze something is to preserve it at a temperature below zero.
Some things don’t freeze, like petrol.
And you want to hope that you put antifreeze in your radiator otherwise you are going to have big problems with your car in winter.
It also means to stand still.
You can also isolate someone by freezing them out.
And freeze in fear, unable to move, like a deer in headlights.
But the worst example of a freeze is when your computer stops, and you forgot to save that 200-page novel, thereby being lost forever.
No. That would never happen, you had autosave on, didn’t you?
Didn’t you??????????
Freeze is not to be confused with a frieze which is a broad horizontal band of sculpted or painted decoration, especially on a wall near the ceiling.
Or frees, which in some countries type of football described multiple free kicks, in one sense, and, in another, what you do when you let them go, e.g. he frees the dog.
Thrills, Spills, and just a dash of Romance 