Tag: Creative Writing

Where is the good news?

I’ve spent the last few hours scouring the papers and the internet, looking for the good news.

The sad fact is, there is none.

But for fiction writers, it is manna from heaven!

It seems there are hundreds of people dying needlessly because guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  It’s an interesting theory, one that will no doubt fuel debate for all eternity, and still, nothing will be done.  Not while armaments are a large part of the American economy.  Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun sales rocket.

Just saying.

There are floods, and there are famines, and these are caused not by mother nature but people.  People seem to be responsible for everything bad that happens.  Of course, people caused the changes in our climate that is fuelling all these problems, but …

All of this is drowning out the fact that earth has been suffering these problems in the past, a long way into the past, and it is part of the evolutionary cycle.  Floods happen, famines happen, the sea gets warmer, the ice cap melts, we’ve been there and done that before.  The only difference, people weren’t there to record or observe it, so there wasn’t going to be a problem when the sea rises two or three metres.

Perhaps trying to get that ultimate sea view wasn’t the best of ideas.

Then there’s trouble of a different sort.

We’re heading for armageddon in the middle east, one way or another, and everyone is skirting the battleground.  Political posturing, as well as appeasement, has been going on for years, but it can only last for so long before someone does something stupid, and lights the fuse.

If that fuse gets lit, then we won’t have to worry about climate change or gun control.  A far more insidious death and destruction of civilization will await us.

Doom and gloom it is.  The newspapers, the political commentators, the politicians, the megalomaniacs, everyone need to take a step back.  Leaders of the larger nations of this world should be setting an example, not try to see who can make the most noise.  You have to remember that old, but very relevant saying, empty vessels make the most noise.

People with any sort of influence should be calling for detente, not push their own ideals or try to make money selling papers, magazines, or air time.  They should be trying to address the issues and make people feel safe, not add fuel to the fire of insecurity, whipping up hysteria against countries, religions and minorities.

Still not good news…

Then there is a looming trade war.  But here’s the thing.  If America doesn’t want to trade with China, there’s a whole lot of other countries that do.

OK, so there’s the good news, for some.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for the good news.  There has to be some, somewhere.

 

 

 

“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!

Purchase:

http://tinyurl.com/Amazon-SundayInNewYork

Sunday In New York

Was it just another surveillance job – Episode 13

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.

Am I working for anyone now?

 

So, there I was, walking along the street, hands in pockets, trying to look like my whole world hadn’t come crashing down on me when a car pulled over to the side of the road.

I may have been down in the dumps but not that far that I wasn’t still aware of what was going on around me, the training had been that good, so I hung back a little from the curb and waited to see if was me they were after, or just some lucky rich person being dropped off.

And ready to disappear into the crowd, not that there was one, but there were three exits available and within momentary reach if necessary.

I watched the rear window go down slowly then saw a familiar face.

Nobbin.

“Get in Mr Jackson.  We have more to talk about.”

I hesitated like anyone with the training I had would, as any person with common sense would too, I guess.

“It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”  He sounded reassuring.

A glance into the car showed only him and the driver, who was getting out of the car.  I watched him come around to the curbside and put his hand on the door handle.

“Sir,” he said.

He opened the door.  Nobbin had moved to the other side.

I shrugged, then got in.  A thought: how many people had got into cars such as this, and were never seen again?”

It was not a statistic that reached any of the newspapers.  Only the end result, a body washed down the Thames, with no indication of who it was, or where they came from, and no identification, or means of identification available.

The door closed, the driver went back to the front of the car, and then gently eased the car out into the traffic.

“I’m sorry for the theatrics surrounding this meeting, but it is necessary.  I’m sure you were told of the need for secrecy in this matter, and I’m just reinforcing that.”

“Just who are you?  And, for that matter, those people back in that building?  Or, if it’s not too hard to wrap your head around, who the hell have I been working for?”

“Good questions, all.  At least now I can speak freely.  As you can, Mr Jackson.”

“Except I have no idea who’s side you’re on, I’m on, or anyone for that matter.  This is not what I signed up for.”

“Well, to put some perspective on your situation, Mr Jackson, you were not supposed to live to tell about it.  It was an operation that was created with one purpose in mind, to find an agent named

William O’Connor, and kill him.  And everyone in the team assigned to the task.”

“By Severin and Maury?  If so, why didn’t they kill me in the alley along with this O’Connor?”

“That is a mystery to all of us.”

“And those people back in the room.  Who the hell were they?”

“Operations.  Trying to find out how a sub-section could be created and function within their purview and not be detected.  That’s what it was, run by two agents who had been expelled a few months back, but who were clever enough to work around all of the safeguards, recruit four agents, and then go after the man who caused the end of their careers.”

“Simple, it seems.”

“Very.  And, if it had not been for you, we would never have known who or why.”

“Perhaps we should be thankful there was an explosion then, otherwise we’d all be dead.”

“Or not, because as far as I know, that was part of the operation, designed to take the target, you and the surveillance member behind you.  It only did a third the job.  It didn’t go off at the critical moment.  No one was seriously hurt, by the way.”

“The policeman?”

“Critical but stable.  He’ll survive.”

“The police who were accusing me of being the bomber?”

“Our people trying to delay you, so our man could get away.  Seems they trained you better than we expected.  Did O’Connor say anything to you?”

“There wasn’t much time before I found him, and Severin shot him.”

“Anything at all?”

“He knew who I was.”

“Then he knew the whole team, and who was running it.”

“He killed two of them.”

“In self-defence.  They were not only surveillance but also assassins.  Different training before they joined your group.”

I had thought there was something odd about them.

“Anything else,” he asked again.

“Yes.  He said to tell you he found something he should, and that the evidence is…  And that’s when he was shot.  He didn’t tell me where it was.”

“He didn’t have to.  We had set up three prearranged drop sites, so it must be in one of those.  Here’s my card.”

He handed me a white card with a name and a phone number.  The name was not Nobbin.

“If this Severin contacts you again, call me.  I am available any hour of the day or night on that number.”

“If he doesn’t?”

“Then you will hear from me in the not too distant future.  The fact you’re a survivor tells me you are resourceful and have the makings of a good agent, one I can use in my department.”

“And those others back at the office?”

“You won’t hear from them again.”

The car stopped outside an underground staircase.

“This is your stop, Mr Jackson.  Thank you for your co-operation.”

Perhaps my career wasn’t in tatters.  I got out of the car, and watched it leave before heading for the underground, his card safely tucked away in my pocket.

 

© Charles Heath 2019

The first case of PI Walthenson – “A Case of Working With the Jones Brothers”

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

Coming soon!

PIWalthJones1

In a word: Clip

It was in the news, and seemed odd to me, that a word such as clip would have any significance beyond that of having a haircut, but apparently, it does.

Maybe they’re referring to the clip of ammunition for a gun?

But for us, a clip can be part of a haircut, letting the scissors loose.

And for those children who had a father who was a hard taskmaster, you would be familiar with a clip around the ears.  It can just as easily be used, say when a car clips another car when the driver loses control.

There’s a horse that runs at a fast clip, and can be anything for that matter that moves quickly.

It can be a spring-loaded device that holds all your papers together.  Or just about anything else for that matter.

You can clip an item from a newspaper, aptly known as a news clipping.

it can be a portion of a larger film or television programme, but to me, sometimes, when a series has a clip show, an episode where someone reminisces and we see clips from previous episodes.

And last but not least, clip the wings of those so-called high flyers at the office.

As a matter of fact…

But, is it?

This oft used expression is one we pull out of our argument arsenal every now and then, but the problem is, are we quoting actual facts, or are we just trying to get a point of view across?

What are facts?

There seems to be a wide disparity of explanations on what facts are, depending on what purpose they’re used for.

We’re all familiar with a certain line of information being put forward as factual in defense of a particular wall, but are these facts?

Can we disprove these facts with other facts, and are these facts factual or otherwise.

The real facts may never be known because they may well be buried underneath a welter of auxiliary information that is factual but can be twisted any which way.

So…

Would we be better of with conjecture?

To be honest, I’m not quite sure what conjecture is, but at a guess, conjecture is a series of assumptions based on facts (oh no, here we go again!)

Over here we built a fence to keep out the rabbits.

Walls, fences, it didn’t work.  It cost a lot of money but didn’t achieve the intended result.

Humans are more inventive than rabbits.  We seem to be better keeping them in, rather than keeping them out.

And I’m off track yet again, distracted by current affairs.

I just wanted to say that any story can be based on fact, and then generally go down the path of conjecture.  Historically, we might keep people who have died alive, places that have disappeared in place, follow history accurately for a while and then make assumptions of what might have happened rather than what did.

Unfortunately, it involves a lot of studies, and, sometimes, the unearthing of a fact that no one really knew about.

Make of that what you will.

What happens after the action-packed start – Part 26

Our hero knows he’s in serious trouble.

The problem is, there are familiar faces and a question of who is a friend and who is foe made all the more difficult because of the enemy, if it was the enemy, simply because it didn’t look or sound or act like the enemy.

Now, it appears, his problems stem from another operation he participated in.

 

I could truthfully say I was blinded by the light.  Whoever my next visitor was, came in and turned on the lights just about blinding me after the ethereal darkness I’d been in for several hours.

Of course, it had to be Lallo.

“I trust you had an uneventful journey and got plenty of rest.”  He seemed to be in what might be called a jovial mood.

Perhaps they were going to let him use his instruments of torture on me now we had arrived.  I was sure that the Geneva Convention, if we were still a signatory to it, was left outside the door to this building.

“Well enough.  Whose idea was it to put me in casts and make me think I had been severely injured?”

“I doubt that would be of interest to you now.  Just be thankful it wasn’t purposely done to you.  I had been an option, but Colonel Bamfield apparently has you in mind for a job he needs doing, so we opted for subterfuge.  You can thank us later.”

Or not at all.  I was right.  Bamfield, or they, whoever they were, needed me alive.  And in one piece.  I was not sure I liked the sound of that.

“More questions?”

“No, not at the moment.  I’m going to have a chat to the source, you remember me telling you we were bringing him over with us.  He was not so lucky as you, as you’ll soon discover.  I want you to sit in on the session, I want you to listen and assess what you think about what he tells us.”

“In what capacity?”

“Just listen.  I’m told that you have conducted a few interrogations, and have a sense about the target, whether they’re lying or telling the truth.  We won’t be using force initially, so let’s hope he opts to tell the truth.”

So did I.  The last thing I wanted to see was a messy interrogation. Those I’d been on were relatively simple.  A man at the end of a gun usually told the truth or felt a great deal of pain and suffering if he didn’t.

It had never been my favourite job, which is why I’d not done very many, and I had hoped I’d never see Lallo at his worst.  Perhaps, then, that was the point of this exercise.  They were not finished with me, so he’d make an example out of someone else, letting me know the extent to which he would go, thus making me more co-operative.

A bit pointless, really, because I didn’t know very much.  Maybe the Colonel forgot to tell him that.

“There are clothes in the cupboard over there,” he nodded towards the corner of the room where there were two doors.  One I figured was the bathroom.  “Clean yourself up, get dressed, and let Monroe know when you’re ready.  Oh, and take it easy for the first few minutes, the serum we gave you tends to make your legs turn to jelly when you first try to stand up.  It’ll pass.  Just be careful.”

 

© Charles Heath 2019

“What Sets Us Apart”, a mystery with a twist

David is a man troubled by a past he is trying to forget.

Susan is rebelling against a life of privilege and an exasperated mother who holds a secret that will determine her daughter’s destiny.

They are two people brought together by chance. Or was it?

When Susan discovers her mother’s secret, she goes in search of the truth that has been hidden from her since the day she was born.

When David realizes her absence is more than the usual cooling off after another heated argument, he finds himself being slowly drawn back into his former world of deceit and lies.

Then, back with his former employers, David quickly discovers nothing is what it seems as he embarks on a dangerous mission to find Susan before he loses her forever.

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whatsetscover

In a word: Cell

For those who break the law, they will be very familiar with the eaning of the word cell.  It’s a room a jail, not very big, with an uncomfortable bed, and no sharp edges.

And I’m sure the prisoners are not supplied with knives so they can dig through the mortar and remove bricks on their way to the great escape.  That, I’m sure only happens at the movies.

A cell can also be a building block in the creation of humans, animals, fish, and plants.  No doubt there are a million other things that require cells.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this cellular activity is whether or not there is life, and therefore cells, on Mars.  I’m guessing we’ll have to wait a little longer to find out.

We can have a cell phone, which in some parts of the world is also the name of a mobile phone.

Don’t get me started on what I think of cell phones, or how intrusive they are on our everyday lives, the number of people who seem to be continually glued to the screen, or how many near misses there are in the street and crossing the road.

On the other hand cell phones in the hands of a writer are very useful because when we get flashes of story or plotlines in one of those once awkward moments, we can now jot it down on a cell phone scribbling pad.

A cell can also be used to describe a smaller unit within a larger organisation, or, if you are a thriller writer who dabbles in espionage, you will be very familiar with the concept of a sleeper cell.

Who knows, in reality, there might be some living next door to us and we would never know.  Oops, been watching too much television again.

Digging deeper into the more obscure definitions of the word cell, we come up with a single transparent sheet that has a single drawing on it, one of many that make up an animated film, or film.  If a film runs at 32 frames per second, that means there are 32 cells.

There are fuel cells

There are dry cell batteries

And as a general warning, don’t go too near cell towers or you will be a victim of radiation that might be extremely harmful to your health.

Where did July go?

The trouble with living in Queensland, in Australia, in winter is that invariably there is no winter, well, not winter like most people know it.

If we want winter, we have to go south to Victoria or Tasmania, or over to New Zealand, and the south island.

We were in New Zeland last year for the winter, but that was so that our grandchildren could experience snow for the first time, as it does not snow where we live, and, in fact, at this stage of winter, the end of July, the temperatures have been hovering around 23 degrees centigrade.

That’s not cold.

But, the nights are reasonably cooler and we’ve been getting temperatures from 6 degrees to 12 degrees centigrade.  About the same as the daytime temperatures down south.

Would I prefer to go back?  No.

If I want to experience Winter, I will go to Canada, where we have also been recently, and where it was minus 21 degrees, the coldest I have ever been.

So…

Where has July gone?  I’ve been doing more than just observing the weather and fighting with Chester, the irascible cat.

From the last WIP report, I am still working on four stories, updating the progress in an episodic form on this blog, namely

A war story based around a castle in Italy

A story that started with a helicopter crash, and only got worse for the protagonist

A story about a surveillance gig that has gone wrong

A story about a treasure hunt, but with a few sidebars.

Then there is my private detective novel which is nearing completion, the editing had got as far as episode 101 out of 110.  The end is in sight.

And Chester continually provides me with laughs and at times anguish, some of which ends up in this blog.  I’m not sure how I’m going to cope without him if anything happens.  He is getting on, and at last count, I believe he is about 17 years old and much more in cat years.

But like any other writer, there is always more going on, and I have several other novels and an anthology of stories based on photographs about to be completed, and, hopefully, by September, published.

That is the plan, and as you all know only too well the best-laid plans of mice and men can always go astray.

Let’s hope, for once, they don’t.