We are now going to look at the individuals who are national heroes, looking to do some good in the twilight of their lives.
They have a name, they have a reputation, and it’s a recognisable commodity.
Selling range rovers or enticing young adults to join the armed services isn’t quite the post-service career move he was looking for.
The trouble is, he never got the opportunity to get rich like some of his contemporaries, and what there was went on a gambling addiction that just about took everything when he retired.
But the question is, is the General the person he portrays himself as?
Truth is, he needs to find a very well-paying gig.
And just lurking in the background, fuelling the rising trust issues between father and daughter, why is Agatha’s father promoting this particular celebrity?
The Art of Extreme Observation: What Georges Perec’s 60-Page Parisian Stakeout Can Teach Every Writer
Imagine sitting at a cafe table in the heart of Paris for three consecutive days. You aren’t writing a sweeping historical fiction novel, inventing dramatic plot twists, or even checking your phone. Instead, you are simply acting as a human security camera—writing down the make of every passing car, the colour of a pigeon’s feathers, the exact time a woman in a green coat walks by, and the hum of conversation drifting from the bar.
This isn’t a mindfulness exercise; it was a radical literary experiment.
Over a full October weekend in 1974, French avant-garde writer and filmmaker Georges Perec posted up in Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice. Armed with notebooks, he attempted to exhaust his subject completely. The result? An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a fascinating 60-page essay that redefines how we look at the world around us.
So, is this something every writer should do? And more importantly, why should you waste an entire weekend staring at ordinary life when you could be drafting your next masterpiece?
Let’s dive into the radical genius of Perec’s experiment and explore why hyper-observation is the secret weapon every writer needs.
What Did Georges Perec Actually Do?
Georges Perec was a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who enjoyed creating works using constrained writing techniques.
For his Place Saint-Sulpice experiment, Perec’s constraint was simple: record the infratrivial—the ordinary, the trivial, the background noise that people usually ignore.
Over Thursday, October 18, Friday, October 19, and Saturday, October 20, 1974, Perec sat at various cafes (Café de la Mairie, Tabac Saint-Sulpice) and noted:
The weather shifting.
Buses arriving and departing (Route 86, Route 63).
Dogs being walked.
The changing shadows of the Saint-Sulpice church.
Fragments of overheard dialogue.
He wasn’t looking for a murder mystery to unfold. He wasn’t waiting for a celebrity sighting. He was deliberately focusing on what happens when nothing special happens.
As Perec wrote in the introduction:
“What happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?”
Is This Something Every Writer Should Do?
Let’s be honest: you probably shouldn’t spend 60 pages detailing the license plates of cars in your local strip mall today. Most writers are already strapped for time, balancing day jobs, families, and actual writing deadlines.
However, every writer should adopt the mindset of Perec’s experiment.
Whether you write literary fiction, sci-fi world-building, high-octane thrillers, or creative nonfiction, doing a localised “exhaustion” exercise completely transforms your relationship with reality and your craft. Here is why you need to try it at least once.
1. It Cures “Writer’s Blindness”
Writers are professional daydreamers. We live inside our heads, plotting, planning, and worrying about character arcs. Because of this, we suffer from what psychologists call inattentional blindness—we stop seeing the actual physical world around us.
When you force yourself to sit still and record mundane details for an hour (let alone a whole weekend), the world snaps back into high definition. You notice how sunlight hits a cracked pavement, the precise way an elderly man adjusts his scarf, or the nervous tic of a barista dropping a ceramic cup. These are the sensory details that turn flat, generic writing into immersive, breathing fiction.
2. It Teaches You the Power of Constraint
In a world of infinite possibilities (blank Google Docs, endless plot directions), writers often freeze. Perec’s experiment proves that limitations breed creativity.
By restricting yourself to a single street corner, park bench, or coffee shop for a defined period, you remove the paralysis of choice. You stop worrying about what to write and focus entirely on how to capture what is right in front of you.
3. It Deepens Your Understanding of Pacing and Rhythm
Read An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and you’ll notice the text has a rhythmic, hypnotic quality. It mimics the natural ebb and flow of daily life—slow lulls in the afternoon, rushes of commuter traffic, quiet evenings.
By practising extreme observation, you learn the natural cadences of the real world. When you translate this into storytelling, your narrative pacing improves. You learn when to speed up a scene (like morning rush hour) and when to let the atmosphere linger (like a quiet Sunday afternoon).
4. It Retrains Your Brain to Value the “Infratrivial”
The best stories aren’t always about explosions, dramatic breakups, or epic fantasy quests. Often, the most resonant moments in literature happen in the spaces in between: a conversation over lukewarm soup, the silence in a car after an argument, the way someone stirs their coffee.
Perec teaches us to pay attention to the background noise. As writers, our job is to make readers care about the ordinary. If you can make a 60-page essay about a mundane Parisian square engaging, you can make any scene in your novel compelling.
How to Do Your Own “Perec Weekend” (Or Afternoon)
You don’t need to fly to Paris to channel Georges Perec. You can run your own micro-version of this experiment this very weekend. Here is how:
Pick a Mundane Location: Choose somewhere unremarkable—a local diner, a subway platform, a hotel lobby, or a bench in a suburban park. Avoid hyper-stimulating tourist hotspots.
Bring a Notebook (Not a Phone): Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. Use a physical notebook and pen. Digital devices invite distraction; paper demands presence.
Commit to a Timeframe: Start small. Give yourself one uninterrupted hour. If you’re feeling ambitious, try three hours.
Record Without Filtering: Write down everything. Do not judge whether it’s “interesting” enough. Write the mundane details: “12:15 PM. A pigeon with a missing toe lands near a discarded crisp packet. A woman in a yellow jacket walks past, looking at her watch. The hum of an idling delivery van.”
Review and Mine: Later, read back through your notes. Highlight the phrases, sensory triggers, and micro-moments that jump out at you. Drop these observations into your current work-in-progress to anchor your characters in a vivid, tangible reality.
Final Thoughts
Georges Perec didn’t write An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris to give us a plot blueprint; he wrote it to wake us up.
As writers, we are chroniclers of the human experience. But we cannot write about humanity if we aren’t willing to watch it—truly watch it—in its most unpolished, unscripted, and ordinary moments.
So, pack a notebook, find a bench, and start noticing. You might just surprise yourself with what you find when you stop looking for a story and let the world come to you.
There’s something to be said for a story that starts like a James Bond movie, throwing you straight in the deep end, a perfect way of getting to know the main character, David, or is that Alistair?
A retired spy, well, not so much a spy as a retired errand boy, David’s rather wry description of his talents, and a woman that most men would give their left arm for, not exactly the ideal couple, but there is a spark in a meeting that may or may not have been a setup.
But as the story progressed, the question I kept asking myself was why he’d bother.
And, page after unrelenting page, you find out.
Susan is exactly the sort of woman to pique his interest. Then, inexplicably, she disappears. That might have been the end of it, but Prendergast, that shadowy enigma, David’s ex-boss who loves playing games with real people, gives him an ultimatum: find her or come back to work.
Nothing like an offer that’s a double-edged sword!
A dragon for a mother, a sister he didn’t know about, Susan’s BFF who is not what she seems or a friend indeed, and Susan’s father, who, up till David meets her, couldn’t be less interested, his nemesis proves to be the impossible dream, and he’s always just that one step behind.
When the rollercoaster finally came to a halt, and I could start breathing again, it was an ending that was completely unexpected.
The Art of Extreme Observation: What Georges Perec’s 60-Page Parisian Stakeout Can Teach Every Writer
Imagine sitting at a cafe table in the heart of Paris for three consecutive days. You aren’t writing a sweeping historical fiction novel, inventing dramatic plot twists, or even checking your phone. Instead, you are simply acting as a human security camera—writing down the make of every passing car, the colour of a pigeon’s feathers, the exact time a woman in a green coat walks by, and the hum of conversation drifting from the bar.
This isn’t a mindfulness exercise; it was a radical literary experiment.
Over a full October weekend in 1974, French avant-garde writer and filmmaker Georges Perec posted up in Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice. Armed with notebooks, he attempted to exhaust his subject completely. The result? An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a fascinating 60-page essay that redefines how we look at the world around us.
So, is this something every writer should do? And more importantly, why should you waste an entire weekend staring at ordinary life when you could be drafting your next masterpiece?
Let’s dive into the radical genius of Perec’s experiment and explore why hyper-observation is the secret weapon every writer needs.
What Did Georges Perec Actually Do?
Georges Perec was a member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who enjoyed creating works using constrained writing techniques.
For his Place Saint-Sulpice experiment, Perec’s constraint was simple: record the infratrivial—the ordinary, the trivial, the background noise that people usually ignore.
Over Thursday, October 18, Friday, October 19, and Saturday, October 20, 1974, Perec sat at various cafes (Café de la Mairie, Tabac Saint-Sulpice) and noted:
The weather shifting.
Buses arriving and departing (Route 86, Route 63).
Dogs being walked.
The changing shadows of the Saint-Sulpice church.
Fragments of overheard dialogue.
He wasn’t looking for a murder mystery to unfold. He wasn’t waiting for a celebrity sighting. He was deliberately focusing on what happens when nothing special happens.
As Perec wrote in the introduction:
“What happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?”
Is This Something Every Writer Should Do?
Let’s be honest: you probably shouldn’t spend 60 pages detailing the license plates of cars in your local strip mall today. Most writers are already strapped for time, balancing day jobs, families, and actual writing deadlines.
However, every writer should adopt the mindset of Perec’s experiment.
Whether you write literary fiction, sci-fi world-building, high-octane thrillers, or creative nonfiction, doing a localised “exhaustion” exercise completely transforms your relationship with reality and your craft. Here is why you need to try it at least once.
1. It Cures “Writer’s Blindness”
Writers are professional daydreamers. We live inside our heads, plotting, planning, and worrying about character arcs. Because of this, we suffer from what psychologists call inattentional blindness—we stop seeing the actual physical world around us.
When you force yourself to sit still and record mundane details for an hour (let alone a whole weekend), the world snaps back into high definition. You notice how sunlight hits a cracked pavement, the precise way an elderly man adjusts his scarf, or the nervous tic of a barista dropping a ceramic cup. These are the sensory details that turn flat, generic writing into immersive, breathing fiction.
2. It Teaches You the Power of Constraint
In a world of infinite possibilities (blank Google Docs, endless plot directions), writers often freeze. Perec’s experiment proves that limitations breed creativity.
By restricting yourself to a single street corner, park bench, or coffee shop for a defined period, you remove the paralysis of choice. You stop worrying about what to write and focus entirely on how to capture what is right in front of you.
3. It Deepens Your Understanding of Pacing and Rhythm
Read An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and you’ll notice the text has a rhythmic, hypnotic quality. It mimics the natural ebb and flow of daily life—slow lulls in the afternoon, rushes of commuter traffic, quiet evenings.
By practising extreme observation, you learn the natural cadences of the real world. When you translate this into storytelling, your narrative pacing improves. You learn when to speed up a scene (like morning rush hour) and when to let the atmosphere linger (like a quiet Sunday afternoon).
4. It Retrains Your Brain to Value the “Infratrivial”
The best stories aren’t always about explosions, dramatic breakups, or epic fantasy quests. Often, the most resonant moments in literature happen in the spaces in between: a conversation over lukewarm soup, the silence in a car after an argument, the way someone stirs their coffee.
Perec teaches us to pay attention to the background noise. As writers, our job is to make readers care about the ordinary. If you can make a 60-page essay about a mundane Parisian square engaging, you can make any scene in your novel compelling.
How to Do Your Own “Perec Weekend” (Or Afternoon)
You don’t need to fly to Paris to channel Georges Perec. You can run your own micro-version of this experiment this very weekend. Here is how:
Pick a Mundane Location: Choose somewhere unremarkable—a local diner, a subway platform, a hotel lobby, or a bench in a suburban park. Avoid hyper-stimulating tourist hotspots.
Bring a Notebook (Not a Phone): Put your phone on Do Not Disturb. Use a physical notebook and pen. Digital devices invite distraction; paper demands presence.
Commit to a Timeframe: Start small. Give yourself one uninterrupted hour. If you’re feeling ambitious, try three hours.
Record Without Filtering: Write down everything. Do not judge whether it’s “interesting” enough. Write the mundane details: “12:15 PM. A pigeon with a missing toe lands near a discarded crisp packet. A woman in a yellow jacket walks past, looking at her watch. The hum of an idling delivery van.”
Review and Mine: Later, read back through your notes. Highlight the phrases, sensory triggers, and micro-moments that jump out at you. Drop these observations into your current work-in-progress to anchor your characters in a vivid, tangible reality.
Final Thoughts
Georges Perec didn’t write An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris to give us a plot blueprint; he wrote it to wake us up.
As writers, we are chroniclers of the human experience. But we cannot write about humanity if we aren’t willing to watch it—truly watch it—in its most unpolished, unscripted, and ordinary moments.
So, pack a notebook, find a bench, and start noticing. You might just surprise yourself with what you find when you stop looking for a story and let the world come to you.
50 photographs, 50 stories, of which there is one of the 50 below.
They all start with –
A picture paints … well, as many words as you like. For instance:
And, the story:
Have you ever watched your hopes and dreams simply fly away?
Everything I thought I wanted and needed had just left in an aeroplane, and although I said I was not going to, I came to the airport to see the plane leave. Not the person on it, that would have been far too difficult and emotional, but perhaps it was symbolic, the end of one life and the start of another.
But no matter what I thought or felt, we had both come to the right decision. She needed the opportunity to spread her wings. It was probably not the best idea for her to apply for the job without telling me, but I understood her reasons.
She was in a rut. Though her job was a very good one, it was not as demanding as she had expected, particularly after the last promotion, but with it came resentment from others on her level that she, the youngest of the group, would get the position.
It was something that had been weighing her down for the last three months, and if she noticed it, the late nights, the moodiness, sometimes a flash of temper. I knew she had one; no one could have such red hair and not, but she had always kept it in check.
And then there was us, together, and after seven years, it felt like we were going nowhere. Perhaps that was down to my lack of ambition, and though she never said it, lack of sophistication. It hadn’t been an issue, well, not until her last promotion, and the fact that she had to entertain more, and frankly, I felt like an embarrassment to her.
So, there it was, three days ago, the beginning of the weekend, and we had planned to go away for a few days and take stock. We both acknowledged we needed to talk, but it never seemed the right time.
It was then that she said she had quit her job and found a new one. Starting the following Monday.
Ok, that took me by surprise, not so much that it was something I sort of guessed might happen, but that she would just blurt it out.
I think that right then, at that moment, I could feel her frustration with everything around her.
What surprised her was my reaction. None.
I simply asked who, where, and when.
A world-class newspaper in New York, and she had to be there in a week.
A week.
It was all the time I had left with her.
I remember just shrugging and asking if the planned weekend away was off.
She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, hands around a cup of coffee she had just poured, and that one thing I remembered was the lone tear that ran down her cheek.
Is that all you want to know?
I did, yes, but we had lost the intimacy we used to have, where she would have told me what was happening, and we would have brainstormed solutions. I might be a cabinet maker, but I still had a brain, was what I overheard her tell a friend once.
There’s not much to ask, I said. You’ve been desperately unhappy and haven’t been able to hide it all that well, you have been under a lot of pressure trying to deal with a group of troglodytes, and you’ve been leaning on Bentley’s shoulder instead of mine, and I get it, he’s got more experience in that place, and the politics that go with it, and is still an ally.
Her immediate superior was instrumental in her getting the position, but unlike some men in his position, he had not taken advantage of the situation like some might. And even if she had made a move, which I doubted, that was not the sort of woman she was, he would have politely declined.
One of the very few happily married men in that organisation, so I heard.
So, she said, you’re not just a pretty face.
Par for the course for a cabinet maker whose university degree is in psychology. It doesn’t take rocket science to see what was happening to you. I just didn’t think it was my place to jump in unless you asked me, and when you didn’t, well, that told me everything I needed to know.
Yes, our relationship had a use-by date, and it was in the next few days.
I was thinking, she said, that you might come with me; you can make cabinets anywhere.
I could, but I think the real problem wasn’t just the job. It was everything around her and going with her that would just be a constant reminder of what had been holding her back. I didn’t want that for her and said so.
Then the only question left was, what do we do now?
Go shopping for suitcases. Bags to pack, and places to go.
Getting on the roller coaster is easy. At the beginning, it’s a slow, easy ride, followed by the slow climb to the top. It’s much like some relationships; they start out easy, they require a little work to get to the next level, followed by the adrenaline rush when it all comes together.
What most people forget is that what comes down must go back up, and life is pretty much a roller coaster with highs and lows.
Our roller coaster had just come out of the final turn, and we were braking so that it would stop at the station.
There was no question of going with her to New York. Yes, I promised I’d come over and visit her, but that was a promise with crossed fingers behind my back. After a few months in the new job, the last thing she’d want was a reminder of what she left behind. New friends, new life.
We packed her bags, threw out everything she didn’t want, a free trip to the op shop with stuff she knew others would like to have, and basically, by the time she was ready to go, there was nothing left of her in the apartment, or anywhere.
Her friends would be seeing her off at the airport, and that’s when I told her I was not coming; that moment, the taxi arrived to take her away forever. I remember standing there, watching the taxi go. It was going to be, and was, as hard as it was to watch the plane leave.
So, there I was, finally staring at the blank sky, around me a dozen other plane spotters, a rather motley crew of plane enthusiasts.
Already that morning, there had been 6 different types of planes departing, and I could hear another winding up its engines for take-off.
People coming, people going.
Maybe I would go to New York in a couple of months, not to see her, but just to see what the attraction was. Or maybe I would drop in, just to see how she was.
As one of my friends told me when I gave him the news, the future is never written in stone, and it’s about time you broadened your horizons.
On the way back to the hotel I thought about the idea of killing the Frenchman and dumping his body in one of the back canals.
Of course, that was the sort of unsanctioned act that quite often brought down a well-planned operation and it would not be the first time for me if that happened now.
I tried not to think about that moment in history and to this day still couldn’t say why I did it beyond the fact the person annoyed me. Those were young and brash days, long since gone from the repertoire.
Still, if he got in the way, or was going to compromise my plan he would have to go, and those back canals were begging for new prey.
When I finally returned to the hotel, it seemed almost stuffy in the small reception area, and the woman behind the counter nodded cursorily in my direction as I passed her heading for the stairs.
She was the sort of person who would miss nothing that happened in that hotel in or out of sight.
The elevator was old and tired, and I didn’t like to advertise arriving back on the floor where my room was located. Again, another memory of a bad experience involving an elevator has made me more wary since.
The stairs, in this instance, were well maintained, without the usual squeaks and groans susceptible to any other hotel. The fact it was only a few floors and not twenty was also a selling point.
If Juliet was waiting she’d have to be in my doorway for me to fall over her, and as I took those last few steps before the landing, I wondered if Cecilia was back in my room’ waiting for me.
If she was, and Juliet arrived that might throw that proverbial car among the pigeons.
Neither were either waiting or in my room which oddly enough seemed disappointing. Nor was anyone else who also brought up a memory or two that I’d rather forget.
Experience was a cruel master.
I looked out the windows over the canal, still able to be surprised by the amount of activity on the water even for that hour of the night.
In a few hours, a whole new group of people would be about those behind the scenes, delivering all manner of goods and services in those early hours before a new day began.
Behind me, there was a very light knock on the door and I swiftly crossed the room and looked in the peep-hole.
Cecilia.
I opened the door and she slipped in before I’d even got it partially open. She was in what I would call stealth mode.
“You’re up and about late? Nothing on for tomorrow?”
She shrugged. “Just the usual, so it’s unlikely they’ll miss me if I’m not there’ or late. Besides, there’s a producer I keep running into that’s beginning to be annoying.”
“I can deal with him if you want me to?”
“I can deal with him myself. No. It’s your girlfriend whose supposedly not your girlfriend.”
“Juliet? She’s not…”
“Of course not, just ragging you. She’s suddenly all apologetic, telling me how sorry she was about being catty. Then giving me a hug that was quite unsettling. Until I realised what she was doing.”
“Not making a pass I hope.”
“It wouldn’t be the first in the last day or so. I must have that look, whatever that look is. No. She gave me this.”
Cecilia held up a small folded piece of paper.
“Did you read it?”
“Do I look like the sort who would read other people’s love letters?”
I took the piece of paper and unfolded it.
It said, and reading it aloud, “I believe you know why I’m here and I can tell you it’s not what I want. I can’t discuss this with you otherwise he’ll know, so we need another way, perhaps through Cecilia. I’m supposed to deliver you in Sorrento, so we will need a plan to keep us both safe. Sorry for dragging your friend into this.”
“Not a love letter then.” She sounded disappointed. “How could she possibly know that?”
“In trying to get Larry to do something in haste which he has, it was not without its risks. She’s smart enough, given what she knew of me then, and that Larry has me in his sights, to realise it was not coincidental when I brought his name into the conversation.”
“Forcing an issue sometimes can have unintended consequences.”
“I didn’t want to drag it out for any of us.”
“Have you considered the possibility that this might be part of Larry’s plan, after all, he did tell her to get closer by any means possible. How much closer could she get pretending to work with you?”
A plan I considered more plausible given the hold he had over her. Alfie would have told me if such a conversation had taken place between them, but he hadn’t which meant it may have been before she embarked for Venice.
It made sense, from his perspective and the hold he had over her. Doing something as reckless on her part without his knowledge defied that threat, making it very difficult for me to believe it was a legitimate offer to help.
“What would you have thought if we didn’t know what we know?”
“It’s difficult to say since I’ve never been in that situation but first thought would be to considered it’s with the customary suspicion we have to view everything with.”
“Good answer. You’ll be coming with me and lucky for you, you will not have to play nice.”
She smiled. “At last a role I can get my teeth into.”
“We’ll go tomorrow, so be ready to leave. I’m sure you’ll devise a good excuse for leaving early. And watch your back tonight they might have a little surprise in store for you.”
“Not if I stay here. I came prepared,” showing me her pyjamas under the gym wear.
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 solace after disappointment turns out to be something else entirely, and from that point, everything 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.
There was a man in a red suit, a man in a blue suit, a woman in a green suit and another woman in a grey suit.
Grey suit spoke first, “Are all you people from the earth as tiresome as you are Captain?”
She was either the lowest rank or the highest.
“We are an interesting bunch when you get to know us, which, despite this turn of events, I hope we do. We have a predilection for interfering in matters where we see injustices.”
“Be that as it may, I would like to remind you, that what might pass as acceptable behaviour on your planet, might not be on ours. You should be aware that in your travels, everyone you may or may not meet has their own specific rules, customs, and regulations which can and will be a lot different to yours.”
“I accept that, and in fact, in the briefing we had before leaving earth, it was impressed upon us that very premise. And I understand that we may be seen to be interfering in matters that are not our concern. But, and there’s always a but, that’s how we humans think and rationalise the many situations we often find ourselves in, we don’t like injustices.”
“Does what might appear an injustice to one, not be one to another? There is ample evidence in your history that points to those overlooking so-called injustices for the greater good?”
“That may be true in the past, but we like to think we have evolved into a better civilization. But we are not perfect, as you point out. However, this instance does not qualify as an instance for the greater good, it is simply the selfish whim of a single person. We have people who are supposed to set an example too and don’t, because they don’t believe the rules apply to them, and I would like to believe that you, too, would not tolerate this sort of behaviour in your leaders. Your people have been living on our planet for some time, I gather, so you should know that.”
Blue suit had been looking rather severely at me. “It was a mistake to let you people develop space travel capability. Our efforts to delay it haven’t been as successful as we had anticipated. You are not ready.”
That someone or something had been manipulating our progress would probably not come as a surprise to some back home. My knowledge of the steps we took to get where I was now pointed to several disasters that set the whole program back nearly twenty years, if not more.
I wonder how the Admiral would react when I told him. If I told him.
“It was inevitable, like everything we do. Unfortunately for you, we thrive on adversity.”
“You are not the only warlike race in the galaxy you know. You may want to hold off meeting them for as long as you can, but they know where you are, so there’s more than one inevitability.”
“By uttering those words, does that make you look more like the aggressors than us? The thing is, we’re out her for better or for worse, and I think you know what has transpired here is an injustice, but the ramifications are unpalatable. We have an expression; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Blue suit looked as though he was going to explode. “It is no use talking to these primitives.”
Grey suit glared at him. “It is your house that is not in order, and we have tolerated it for long enough.” She looked at her fellow members and received nods. Blue suit disappeared, most likely transported back to the planet.
Grey suit: “You are, using another of your sayings on earth, “treading on very thin ice.”
Green suit took up the narrative. “We believe you would not adhere to a request to turn around and go back home, so, before you alert the galaxy that you are now participants in intergalactic exploration, take heed of this warning. Not all species are friendly. Most are bound by customs and rules which are nothing like yours, and it is possible you will commit the most heinous of crimes by just acting normally.
In this instance, you may have uncovered a problem that we were not aware of, and lucky for you, is a minor transgression in accordance with our customs. We are no longer those people and will rectify the issue. The prisoner in question will be allowed to remain on your vessel to do with as you wish. If you are to continue your travels, I suggest you do so with caution.”
Grey suit again, “We acknowledge you are not going to go away. So, as the first gesture of friendship between our worlds, we would like you to return the Princess to her home world, and before you do, we will provide you with an advisor to help you navigate the protocols of her world. We will also grant two members of your crew an audience with our scribes who will give you knowledge of our worlds and people, and that of others in this galaxy. The other ship does not get this privilege and must leave immediately. If they do not, they will be destroyed. There will be no negotiation on this matter. Do you agree?”
It was probably the best we could hope for under the circumstances.
“Yes.”
Grey suit to their captain. “I’ll leave you to work on the details.”
Well, when they too have the rug pulled out from under them, how much can they do?
Her best friend and fellow founding member of the charity, recently but no longer CEO, due to the new Chairman who had taken over during our main character’s incapacity, had been visiting her friend in hospital and relating the day-to-day events that had turned the running of their organisation into what she calls a circus
I’m going to give her a daughter who is a tenacious reporter and set her on the trail of a conspiracy, that of the so-called benevolent charities and the shady characters that manage to attach themselves to what she will call the charitable gravy train.
She also is the product of that echelon of people who are upper-class nobility, having resented from a young age being called Lady So and So, going to the privileged schools and being treated differently.
She is the rebel against her birthright, her parents, and everything they stand for.
And yet, as she gets older and sees the worth of those connections, those she had so willingly trashed for the sake of getting an editor to take her seriously, it’s going to be a tricky line she will have to walk if she is going to help her mother.
Perhaps her parents were not the monsters she believed they were.
There is more going on in the story front, and just to keep my mind active, or tortured, as the case may be, there are several other stories I’m working on.
In particular, there is the story with the description of what happens after an action-packed start.
Quite a lot. In the third section of the story, after being shot out of the sky, interrogated, flown into northern Nigeria, and then crossing into the Democratic Republic of the Congo to search for two men being held to ransom, our players finally made it home.
Previous attempts to rescue them had failed; this one had to succeed. It’s a matter of dealing with local militias who are tricky to deal with, and then getting out of the country after effecting the rescue.
At times, while writing it, looking at a map and using Google Earth to see what it is like, I felt like I was there looking down the barrel of a gun, and then, in the helter-skelter of getting to the evacuation point, I’m sure my heart rate had lifted considerably, particularly when the battered DC3 was about to be shot at with air to air missiles.
Just imagine this …
A DC-3 versus a very maneuverable helicopter. I was on the edge of my seat.
Next is the surveillance story where nothing is as it seems, which in the espionage business is nothing unusual. Nor is the fact that you cannot trust anyone.
It starts out as a routine surveillance operation until a shop front explodes a moment or two after the target passes it. In the ensuing mayhem, the target reappears, now in fear for his life, and our main character tracks him to an alley where he is murdered before his eyes.
Soon after, the two men whom our main character is working for appear and start asking questions that make our main character think that they had perpetrated a hit on him, and he decides that something is not right.
From there, the deeper he probes, the more interesting the characters and developments. Who was the target? What was he doing that got him killed? What does he have that everyone wants?
I’m about to start on the next phase of this story…
Then there is what I call comic light relief, the writing of stories inspired by photographs I’ve taken. Some, however, have exceeded the 1,000-word limit that I’ve set, only because I want to explore the story more, and some are spread over several stories.
The first book of stories, 1 to 50, is to be published soon. Currently, I’m working on number 148 of the third volume of stories, but number 88 is my favourite so far, simply because it involves a starship.
