Tag: Charles Heath

Saturday has come and gone

Although the main reason for its existence is to follow Friday, in some cases, it is the first day of the weekend.

Once upon a time, Saturday used to be a working day, you know, those days when we worked a 48 hour week.  Then it became a 44 hour week and we only worked in the morning.

Sd time progressed, we started working 40 hour weeks and had both Saturday and Sunday off.  Sunday, of course, was always a non-starter.  The churches made sure you were able to go to church on Sunday.

As time progressed, weekends started to begin of a Friday, with the day in question being granted by employers as a Rostered Day Off, provided you made up the time during the preceding two week period.

Now it seems the standing joke is we should work weekends, and have the week off.  Odd, it hasn’t quite caught on yet.

But, as usual, I digress…

After a week that got out of control, Saturday was supposed to pull it back into some sort of shape.

In a sense, it happened.  I looked at that list of things I had to do, picked one and got on with it.

PI Walthenson now had the intro to the plot diversion, and I’ve started putting the final edited versions of episodes 46 on, on the blog, ready to post them next week.

That done, I moved onto the helicopter story, otherwise titled ‘What happens after writing an action-packed start’, currently sitting at Episode 8, and now, with a solid few hours, had episodes written to 14.  These will be edited and transcribed to the blog for publication this or next week.

I never thought maintaining material for a blog would be so hard.

But…

Now I can say last week wasn’t a total disaster.

“The Devil You Don’t”, be careful what you wish for

John Pennington’s life is in the doldrums.  Looking for new opportunities, prevaricating about getting married, the only joy on the horizon was an upcoming visit to his grandmother in Sorrento, Italy.

Suddenly he is left at the check-in counter with a message on his phone telling him the marriage is off, and the relationship is over.

If only he hadn’t promised a friend he would do a favor for him in Rome.

At the first stop, Geneva, he has a chance encounter with Zoe, an intriguing woman who captures his imagination from the moment she boards the Savoire, and his life ventures into uncharted territory in more ways than one.

That ‘favor’ for his friend suddenly becomes a life-changing event, and when Zoe, the woman who he knows is too good to be true, reappears, danger and death follows.

Shot at, lied to, seduced, and drawn into a world where nothing is what it seems, John is dragged into an adrenaline-charged undertaking, where he may have been wiser to stay with the ‘devil you know’ rather than opt for the ‘devil you don’t’.

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Travel is part of the story, oh, the misery of a bad hotel!

Hotels can also be one of the major let downs of a holiday.

They can also be extensive fodder for writing material.  For the main stories I write, hotel stays feature prominently, and so each experience, no matter how insignificant, is another paragraph in my book of experiences.

So…

If you are going to use a travel agent to pick a hotel for you, make sure you check as much as you can before you see them, because no matter how it is described, seeing it, in reality, is always completely different than the pictures in a brochure and sometimes on the Internet.  It requires research and a good look at TripAdvisor.

Or word of mouth by someone you know and trust who have stayed there.

Take, for instance, staying in a five-star hotel, the usual stomping ground of the rich and famous.  It is always interesting to see how the less privileged fare.  Where hotel staff is supposed to treat each guest equally, it’s not always the case.  Certainly, if you’re flashing money around, the staff will be happy to take it, though you may not necessarily get what you’re expecting.

We were once lucky enough to be in the highest hotel loyalty level and this gives us a number of privileges; at times working in our favor, but it is not always the case.

Privilege can sometimes count for nothing.  It often depends on the humor of the front desk clerk and woe betide you if you get the receptionist from hell.

Been there, done that, more than once.

Then there is the room.

There is such a wide variety of rooms available, even if the hotel site or brochure has representative pictures, the odds are you can still get a room that is nothing like you’re expecting or were promised.

Believe me, there are rooms with a view, overlooking pigeon coops or air-conditioning vents.  And if you’re lucky, at Niagara Falls, it might be that six inches of window space that allows a very limited view of the falls.

Still, why should I complain, you can see the Falls … can you not?

A bone of contention often can be the location of the hotel and sometimes parking facilities, not the least of which is the cost Valet parking; given the extortionate cost sometimes it’s better to just forget a car.

It is nothing like the movies, you just do not drive up to the front entrance, get out, hand the keys to the concierge, and expect everything else to happen by magic.

It doesn’t.

One time we waited for over an hour for our luggage to be delivered, and that was after three phone calls to the concierge desk.

Sometimes you can be reasonably near transport, yes, if you could walk the distance (which feels like the length of a marathon) to the nearest bus or tram stop.

The problem is we both have trouble with knees and ankles and walking distances are difficult at the best of times, and for us, it is a long, long way when you can’t walk and that’s when the hotel starts to feel like a prison.  Taxis may be cheap but when you have to use them three or four times a day it all adds up.

Also, be wary when a hotel says it is close to public transport.  While that may be true in London, anywhere else and especially in Europe, you could find yourself in the middle of nowhere.

It’s when you discover your travel agent didn’t exactly lie but it is why that weekly rate was so cheap.  In the end, the sum of the taxi fares and the accommodation turns out to be dearer that if you stayed at the Savoy.

So, those front line experiences are fodder for the travel blogger, and people who are also known as road warriors, the true frequent flyers.

There is a very large gulf between five stars and three and sometimes three can be very generous.  And of course, l now have a list of hotels l would never stay in again, the names of which might surprise you.

 

Memories blur over time, differ from person to person

I was reading an article about the bible the other day, and what I gathered to be the writers intent was that the end result was an accumulation of many times retold and translated stories.  Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that, but…

It sort of relates to another story I read years ago and re-enacted with a few friends to check its veracity.  What happens is the first person is given the correct story, then having memorized it, relates it to the second and then along a chain of ten people.

The story related by the tenth person, when compared to the original, had only part’s of the original story and for some reason new elements that somehow were misinterpretations of original story elements.

This perhaps could be put down to the individuals upbringing and background, which always gets used in the interpretation of what they are told.  We all use different methods to remember things and this will always impact how we interpret and relate information.

It’s also the same when three different eyewitnesses to an accident will rarely agree on the details.  Certain elements will be the same, but others will not.

A case in point, when individual family members recall events involving all of them, each will remember seminal events differently, and usually, from their perspective, it will revolve around where they perceive they fit in the family hierarchy.  A stronger brother or sister will always see it differently to a weaker one.

My childhood memories are basically different to my brothers, and I suspect those events that he fails to recall are deliberately cast away because either they didn’t affect him, or there were so horrible, he deliberately cast them out.

We all tend to do that.  Some memories he has of the so-called old days I have no recollection of.

So it seems to me memories are a choice.  We choose to remember the good ones and cast out the bad.  Was that the case of when it came to putting the biblical story down on paper (or in stone as the case may be).

However we look at it, remember it, or relate it, the old days, the days of yesteryear will always be different.  For me, the ’60s and ’70s were horrible, for everyone else, well that’s another story.

Travel is part of the story, airlines, and car rentals … ugh!

Travelling is always a good source of material to add to the writing store.

Writers collect anecdotes, descriptions of their fellow travelers, more the idiosyncrasies than an actual physical description, and of the experience, though it is all the better if it turns out to be really, really bad than good.

This equally applies to experiences in hotels, with hire cars, tourist spots and especially fellow travelers.

Start with the airline.  This can make or break the start of a holiday and could be the difference between a great start or a horrid one.

We can usually accept the sardine arrangements, the lack of leg room, being within earshot of a screaming baby, or put up with the constant kicking in the back of the seat by the wretched uncontrollable child sitting behind you.

It’s having the person in front fully reclining their seat in your face that gets your goat.  For an hour and a half or eight hours, it is still the biggest bone of contention when flying.

We are taking one airline down to Melbourne the one that makes a big deal out of the full service it provides, and another airline back, formerly a low-cost airline but now trying to match its so-called full-service rival.

The flight down is smooth and the food reasonably good.  The landing, even though the pilot was battling sharp crosswinds, was very heavy and left us in no doubt we had reached terra firma again.  I’ve been on worse.

Hire cars are a rich field to pick over and I’ve read some interesting experiences involving even the best.  So far I’ve not had a problem.  I pre-booked as far in advance as possible to get a small fuel-efficient vehicle.  Sometimes we are upgraded and while they think they are doing you a favour, it is not necessarily the case, especially when you finish up with a large car that barely fits small provincial French roads one lane wide.  It does happen.

There is also the waiting time at the car rental desk, particularly when it’s the rental company you picked, while other company desks are empty.  You also quickly discover that most of the people in the queue didn’t think of pre-booking a car, which to my mind is expecting trouble with it being the peak holiday period.

We had to wait in a long queue after taking a chance it would be less crowded at the pickup point than the desk in the airport terminal.  It was no surprise to discover that a lot of other travelers had the same thought.

We get a small, spritely and economical car that is clean, and no sign of being in an end to end freeway crash.  It will do us nicely.

And, yes, there’s more…

A story inspired by Castello di Brolio – Episode 4

Another story inspired from a visit to an old castle in Italy.  It was, of course, written while traveling on a plane, though I’m not sure if it was from Calgary to Toronto, or New York to Vancouver.

But, there’s more to come.  Those were long flights…

 

Another fifty or so feet along, I stopped at an overhead grill.  The metal was showing on the tunnel side, but on the other, I could see bushes.

I think I knew where we were.  This was where the road crossed a small bridge and headed towards the castle entrance.  It was on the northeastern side of the old battlements, and going straight under the road would take us to the eastern wall.

Whether we could get out of the castle there remained to be seen.

I took a step and saw Jack stop and turn around to look back the way we had come.  A moment later a beam of light came from the break in the roof of the tunnel.  Perhaps the man had decided there might not be ghosts in the hole.

I heard the man’s voice travel up the tunnel.  “Looks like a cavern of something.”

That something he might guess to be a tunnel.

We had to go.

I moved quickly in the opposite direction, into the dark, the sound of more rocks falling from the roof following us.

Another hundred feet or so we reached a wall, a dead end to the tunnel.  It looked to me that it had been bricked in the recent past because it consisted of house bricks, not cobblestones.

The surface was wet, and there was the sound of dripping nearby.

Jack sat on the floor.  Nowhere to go, for him it was time to rest.

We couldn’t go back.

I pulled out a knife and poked it into the mortar, and the blade disappeared when I pushed it.  The mortar was soft.

I pushed hard on the wall midway up, and it moved.  I decided it might be easier to kick at the wall, making it easier if it collapsed.

It created a hole about a foot round.  Further kicking made it bigger so that I could stoop down and climb through.  Jack went first, and I followed.

It came out into a clearing surrounded by trees.  Through the branches, I could see the forest on the other side of a paddock.

Jack once again stopped.

Voices.

Jackerby and one of his men.

“I’m sure there used to be a drainage tunnel somewhere here.  Those men got into the tunnel yet?”

“Working on making a hole so they can jump down.  No long now.”

“Go back and help them.  I’ll keep an eye out here in case they find the exit.”

I heard the other man leave.

A minute passed, then two.  Then Jackerby said, “I know you’re there Sam.  I’m alone out here, and I’m on your side.”

 

© Charles Heath 2019

Conversations with my cat – 14

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This is Chester, the literary critic

 

It’s important to get that first sentence right

So, I’m rattling off a few lines to get his reaction

‘It was a day like no other’

‘Yes, I know’, says the all knowledgeable Chester looking down his nose at me, ‘it’s been used before’.

We are sitting in the writing room and as usual, Chester is trying to ignore me.

I’m trying to start a new novel, looking for that first line that’s going to hook the reader.

I read him a few lines.

He gives me a disdainful look, ‘Heard it all before old boy, try again’.

Once Upon a time?

‘You’ve been watching too much TV’.

It was a dark and stormy night.

He yawns widely, ‘As if you haven’t used that before’.

He’s right, damn him.

Why am I talking to this cat anyway?

He jumps up onto the desk and sits on the keyboard.

Ok, writing is over for the day.

“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

Are you keeping any secrets?

It’s a theme I have used in a number of stories because it fascinates me the propensity some people have for explaining the unexplainable, and actually, believe they have convinced the other person.

It works sometimes, but not everybody is prepared to accept their lies.  Especially when their alibi crumbles before their eyes.

Better not to have said anything in the first place.

Or, better still, don’t do anything that you have to cover up later on.

Or perhaps I’m turning a molehill into a mountain.

I’m suffering from indecision, one of those moments in a writer’s life where either you get on with it, take a holiday, start a new story, or finish another one.

I want to get on with it, finish it, sent it to the editor, and then move on, but I can’t.

I’ve written three different endings to this story and I’m not happy with any of them.

Over the last few days, I have taken a break away from it.  Every time I load it up and sit on the page where I want the end to start (a rather curious mix of opposites) it draws a blank.

Will I take it out with a ‘bang’?

Will I let a few of the secrets out of the bag?

Will I try to set it up for a sequel?

Wow!  So many possibilities.

The crux of the matter is relationships where people keep secrets from each other rarely survive, though sometimes it depends on how big the secret is.  In my mind, if I was the one who was thinking about keeping a secret (most likely impossible because I can’t keep a straight face) I would share it.

If it was my partner keeping the secret, I wonder how I would react.

It’s an interesting question and begs the question of how much of ourselves is woven into the fabric of our characters.

We can if we haven’t the experience of keeping secrets only guess at the outcome.  Or if we do, how much easier might it be?

Perhaps I’ll sleep on it one more night.

Monday came and went, and now it’s Thursday

I had so many things planned, those little bits and pieces that seem to get away from you.

It’s now Wednesday night and I have only just come back to this post to write some more or maybe finish it, but that should you some idea of how easy the simple things can get away from me.

To fill in the gaps in the story, I started to make a list of those bits and pieces, and that was the first mistake.

I frightened myself.

Tuesday disappeared in writing down what was on my writing slate. For instance,

Episode 10 of the helicopter story

Episode 3 of the treasure hunt

Episode 5 of the Castello di Brolio story

Episode 1 of the WW2 story – this has a start but is it Episode 1.  What bothers me is that I wrote some of this on the plane, but it disappeared somewhere, so I’m not sure when this may get done.

Episode 6 of Writing instead of insomnia

Episodes 36 through 40 of Being Inspired, Maybe. This is a series of photographs, and the story inspired by them

Episode 46 through 50 of PI Walthenson’s first case rewrite, still without a title. But, before Episode 46 there needs to be an introduction because for a few episodes we are off on a slight tangent that will feed into the story later on.

So, in addition, it will need an Intro Episode and a rerun of Episodes 1 and 2 which set up the next part of the story.

And, don’t get me started on where I am with Strangers We’ve Become, because the rewrite seems to have stalled at page 360ish. The book is done but rereading told me, or the cat did far more emphatically, there a few gaps.  This needs to get done, and I need to stick the courage to the sticking point.

Wednesday arrived and I was looking at the list wondering what I was going to do next and realized that I’d been putting off writing the next few posts on the traveling blog which desperately need to be done.

So…

Traveling blog times two, and now it’s Thursday.

Damn, where did the week go?