Memories of the conversations with my cat – 72

As some may be aware, but many not, Chester, my faithful writing assistant, mice catcher, and general pain in the neck, passed away some years ago.

Recently I was running a series based on his adventures, under the title of Past Conversations with my cat.

For those who have not had the chance to read about all of his exploits I will run the series again from Episode 1

These are the memories of our time together…

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This is Chester. He’s finally got a starring role in one of my stories.

The thing is, I tried to keep it quiet so he wouldn’t get delusions, but it failed.

I made the mistake of leaving the page with the ‘cat’ part on the screen. The screen saver should have kicked in, but I think a well-placed paw brought it back to life.

So, the next morning, I come down and see him sitting on the desk, waiting.

It can either be good news or bad news.

“I see you’ve finally written a cat into the plot.”

“It was only a matter of time. I think you made your case a week ago by sitting on the keyboard until I agreed. Now, you’re in.”

“Yes. I see. Who’s idea was it to call the cat Herman? I mean to say, really, Herman?”

“I thought it was a great name for a cat.”

“What type of cat is it?”

“I don’t know. A cat’s a cat isn’t it?”

“Why not a Tonkinese, like me?”

“Alright, I’ll change it.”

“You made him jumpy, skittish even. I’m not like that.”

“It’s not you in the story.”

“So you’ve found another cat, who is it. It won’t last long when I get to them.”

Maybe it’s easier to write him out of the story. I don’t think I can take this criticism.

The cinema of my dreams – Was it just another surveillance job – Episode 21

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 prioritising.

But, here we are, a few minutes opened up and it didn’t take long to get back into the groove.

An unlikely ally?

“Wait.”

It seemed that I had managed to scare her. Either that, or she had decided to be a little more forthcoming. I stopped and waited until she caught up. I was nearly at the top of the stairs.

“Look, I have to go back to my people, and I’ll get them to look into those two people you don’t seem to trust, who were they, Nobbin and Severin?”

“I don’t think you want to do that. You start making waves, your people will send out feelers and they’ll get to hear about it, and they will know exactly where it came from, and it’ll come back and bite you. For your own peace of mind, I’d let the sleeping dogs lie.”

She seemed over-eager to get ahead using this as a steppingstone. I’d seen the type, in the training ranks, and in former jobs. She was clearly assigned this job because of her looks, and she might be a good agent too, but she hadn’t thought this through.

“Are you telling me to back off?”

“I’m trying to save your life. If I have no idea who to trust, then I have to assume both of them are theoretically the enemy. I’m still counting the blessings I’m still alive, but I suspect that will only last until the USB is found. The rest of my team are dead.”

Now that put the right amount of fear into her.

“If they’re willing to kill everybody that’s come in contact with this information, I doubt they’d stop at killing the both of us if we got in their way.”

“Then you have a plan?”

“At the moment that plan consists of one line. Stay alive and find the USB before they do. After that, I’ll see what happens.”

I caught sight of an incident, two people almost colliding, and one, I noticed, was more intent on his phone which is what caused the clash. And, a second later, I thought I recognised one of the two.

Maury. Severin’s offsider, and more likely cleanup man. My guess, he was the one searching O’Connell’s flat, and Jan’.”

I think it was safe to say she was compromised.

“Ok,” I said quietly, “we have a problem, well two problems.” And if I was wrong about her, and she was one of Severin’s people, which, seeing Maury just turned a probable into a likely, I had three.

If she was, I hadn’t seen that coming.

“What now?”

Time to test the water.

“One of Severin’s men is downstairs, mingling, which means he knows I’m here, and maybe you two.”

I did a quick check of my scan of O’Connell’s, thinking I might have picked up a bug. It was the only explanation why Maury was here. And, it was likely he was not alone.

Not me. Jan?

“Did you take anything from O’Connell’s?”

“No. Why?”

“Are you sure. Think”

While scanning the lower floor of the station looking, no doubt, for Maury, and anyone that might present a problem, she looked like she was recounting her steps.

“Damn. A pen. I left it there the last time I saw him.” She pulled it out of her bag and went to toss it in the bin.

I snatched it, and as someone brushed past me, I dropped it into their pocket.

A flash of annoyance, then, “Hey, that cost a lot of money.”

“Then be grateful it didn’t cost you your life. Yet.”

We waited, keeping far enough back from the stairs, but with still a good view of the station. I kept an eye on the man whom I gave the pen as he made his way across the floor towards one of the platforms. Luckily it was at the furthest end, and as he approached it, I saw three figures, and Maury slowly make their way towards him forming a blockade so he couldn’t escape.

“Time to go.”

She had noticed the movement too.

We went down the stairs and headed towards the first available exit. As we were going out the door, we heard a commotion, the team obviously apprehending the wrong man, who would be wondering why four burly men were accosting him on his way home.

We didn’t wait to find out what happened to him.

First Dig Two Graves – the editor’s second draft – Day 16

This book has finally come back from the Editor, so this month it is going to get a second revision, a second draft for the editor, and beta readers. second Zoe thriller.

…

I’ve been looking back at what’s been written, something you shouldn’t do when trying to get 50,000 words written in 30 days, but I’m ahead of the count, and a little checking is needed, just to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Not that any book written on the fly like this runs smoothly.

There are three themes to this story:

1 – Worthington, now head of the Intelligence agency, seeking revenge for Zoe killing his brother by mistake, a mistake that he caused

2 – Alistair’s mother deploys a collection of agents, some being Zoe’s colleagues once, to assassinate the woman who assassinated her son

3 – John’s ever-growing fear that Zoe is tired of him, and, after she leaves, even though she promised to come back, he doesn’t want to wait to find out he’s been dumped.

4 – Sebastian is always lurking in the background, ostensibly to recruit her as an assassin, but really because he’s jealous of John’s good fortune.

Our two intrepid heroes go off to save her in Marseilles where she learns of the identity of who is ostensibly looking for her and sets her off on a lone hunt for him.

We then deploy two new characters, Rupert and Isobel, who along with John will create a private detective agency, that John uses to locate Zoe by any and all means.

Isobel soon finds out that searching for Zoe on the internet brings risks, both at home and abroad, bringing her in contact with another hacker who seems to know where Zoe’s past is hiding. But can they be trusted?

John heads off to Vienna, after being supplied a file on Zoe, full of information he had not known about her. What he learns in Vienna leads him to Bratislava, when a photo identifying where she suddenly arrives on his phone.

John locates her, and she realizes he is being used as bait, and they leave, but not before the hit team almost completes their mission, and leave behind a trail of bodies as they get away, but not without injury.

John gets the answers he is seeking, that if he wants a life of looking over his shoulder, by all means, tag along. She is quite pleased to see him, not so much that he brought ‘friends’ but she might yet get to train him.

Sebastian, feeling left out, grills Isobel and Rupert, and gets sidelined by Worthington because anywhere Sebastian goes, trouble follows, and then convinces Isobel that John is in over his head and needs their help.

He’s not wrong because Worthington has dispatched another hit team to the main railway stations in Vienna where John and Zoe are looking to escape, only another shootout occurs as they once again escape when all the station’s exits are not covered.

The story has now reached a point where everyone is converging on Vienna.

Along with another person who John knows, and will least expect to arrive on his doorstep.

…

Today’s writing, with Zoe languishing in a dungeon waiting for a white knight, 3,999 words, for a total of 47,066.

‘The Devil You Don’t’ – A beta reader’s view

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 realizes 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.

…

Available on Amazon here: https://amzn.to/2Xyh1ow

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First Dig Two Graves – the editor’s second draft – Day 15

This book has finally come back from the Editor, so this month it is going to get a second revision, a second draft for the editor, and beta readers.

…

Today, we’re back in Vienna, with Zoe planning their escape. We’re off to the railway station and catching the train. Unfortunately, Worthington is able to track them and knows exactly where they are, and where to direct his hit squad.

And you guessed it, mayhem is about to erupt in the station. But, as Zoe knows all too well, chaos can be her best friend, and they escape.

Sebastian knows something is afoot with Worthington, because all of a sudden, he has disappeared.

That’s good for Sebastian in one sense, he can go ahead with the interrogations of Isobel and Rupert in his quest to find out where John, and ultimately Zoe, is.

But the thing is, they are disinclined to be helpful in any way shape or form, and Isobel in particular, tells him to bring on the torturers.

Weird maybe, but Sebastian knows she’s probably getting a kick out of it.

…

Today’s writing, with Isobel laughing in the face of danger, 1,905 words, for a total of 43,067.

Skeletons in the closet, and doppelgangers

A story called “Mistaken Identity”

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How many of us have skeletons in the closet that we know nothing about? The skeletons we know about generally stay there, but those we do not, well, they have a habit of coming out of left field when we least expect it.

In this case, when you see your photo on a TV screen with the accompanying text that says you are wanted by every law enforcement agency in Europe, you’re in a state of shock, only to be compounded by those same police, armed and menacing, kicking the door down.

I’d been thinking about this premise for a while after I discovered my mother had a boyfriend before she married my father, a boyfriend who was, by all accounts, the man who was the love of her life.

Then, in terms of coming up with an idea for a story, what if she had a child by him that we didn’t know about, which might mean I had a half brother or sister I knew nothing about. It’s not an uncommon occurrence from what I’ve been researching.

There are many ways of putting a spin on this story.

Then, in the back of my mind, I remembered a story an acquaintance at work was once telling us over morning tea, that a friend of a friend had a mother who had a twin sister and that each of the sisters had a son by the same father, without each knowing of the father’s actions, both growing up without the other having any knowledge of their half brother, only to meet by accident on the other side of the world.

It was an encounter that in the scheme of things might never have happened, and each would have remained oblivious of the other.

For one sister, the relationship was over before she discovered she was pregnant, and therefore had not told the man he was a father. It was no surprise the relationship foundered when she discovered he was also having a relationship with her sister, a discovery that caused her to cut all ties with both of them and never speak to either from that day.

It’s a story with more twists and turns than a country lane!

And a great idea for a story.

That story is called ‘Mistaken Identity’.

A photograph from the inspirational bin – 51

What story does it inspire?

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This is taken from a rather bleak part of the coast near Coffs Harbour in New South Wales, Australia.

There was something about the sea on a particularly bleak day and not the sort of weather anyone would want to be out doing the touristy things.

We, on the other hand, are ready to visit anywhere anytime in any condition.

We never quite got as far as the end of the cliffs, but the notion that there were caves, and once upon a time, pirates or smugglers makes for a good story.

Certainly, with our convict settlement beginnings, it’s not hard to imagine the convicts stealing a boat, and sailing south from Sydney, the only settlement at the time, and landing in a place like this.