Day 101

So here’s the deal – you’re not as good as you think you are.

…

I can attest to that. I’ve been through a story a dozen times, and still there is something to be changed, or a detail or nuance missed. Our eyes play tricks on us, they seem to see what you eant them to see rather than what is there.

It’s why we have other people look at our work.

Everyone can get hold of a style manual, a thesaurus and a dictionary.

My biggest bugbear is continuity and names, plot timing, and making sure events happen when they’re supposed to, not just when you write about it and hope it fits the timeline.

I have a problem with that right now with a story I’m writing, where people are living the events in two different time zones, and I need to get it right.

This is where a spreadsheet comes in handy, because you can use a formula to work out the time in a different time zone and run the event timeline in both zones.

It’s always great when the pilot tells you just before you land what time it is at the destination. Scary too sometimes when you’re flying from Brisbane backwards through time to London and find you’re landing 13 or so hours before. I left at 10 pm, and I’m landing at 5:30 in the morning on the same day.

And a surefire way of discovering what your text sounds like, run it through an AI text-to-speech converter and listen. When it sounds really weird, and it will at least once, then you know where to fix it.

Day 100

Writing Exercise

You need a good first line, one that grabs your attention and makes you want to read on…

…

I woke up that morning believing it would be the first day of the rest of my life.

I stretched and luxuriated in the comfort and warmth of the bed, after a dozen years of suffering a very hard, uncomfortable, and cold cot, if it could be called that.

Prison life had been harsh. Being unjustly imprisoned had been harsher, and the years of battling to have the evidence that finally exonerated me finally paid off.

Release.

Perhaps it was not a coincidence that the day I stepped out of the prison was the day the snow started, the first of the season, bringing with it the winter chill. I would not have survived another winter in that prison.

Perhaps it was also not a coincidence that the ex-girlfriend of the man I had supposedly murdered in a jealous rage arrived on my doorstep the same day I was released. It was her evidence, circumstantial at best, but convincingly relayed in the courtroom, a performance even the newspapers said was worthy of an Academy Award.

She still firmly believed I was guilty, evidence or not, and that I would be damned to hell.

That might be true, but not from the so-called murder of her ex-boyfriend, but the deeds I had to do to survive in what could only be described as hell on earth. I tried to tell her that I’d paid my dues, as unjust as they were, and that was the end of it. She had got her pound of flesh.

The parents of the ex-boyfriend were not as unforgiving and wished me well. They had never believed that I was guilty, no surprises because their son and I had been the best of friends from a very early age, when they moved into the house next door.

Those years were gone, as was the house, and everything else. It had been burned to the ground by a bunch of vigilantes riled up by Samantha, who marched on the house just before my arrest. Nobody was blamed for the deaths of my parents, caught in the fire, but the judge did admonish Samantha, in a monologue that all but handed the blame to her. It was, he said, going to be a battle for her conscience.

Now I had nothing.

My lawyer said it was a clean slate, and to put what I needed into a backpack, and get on the first train out of town. There was nothing for me, no reason to stay.

The very thought in my mind when I woke and looked out at the sea of white, and the steady downfall of snow drifting down from the sky. The forecast was snow for a day or so, then clearing. It would halt the trains, so I would be here for at least another day.

Enough time for Samantha to round up another mob and come burn down the hotel.

That was reason enough not to get out of bed.

Except…

The phone beside the bed rang, one that had a shrill insistence about it.

I slipped out from under the covers, shivered slightly in the cool morning air then picke dup the receiver.

“Yes?”

“There’s a Miss Andrews here to see you.”

Miss Andrews. It was a name that lurked on the fringe of my memory, in the life before prison section, and was not quite coming to me.

“Did she state her business?” I assumed it was a reporter here to get my story, one that they were hoping, no doubt, I would be suing the state for false imprisonment.

“No, but she is insistent she sees you.”

“OK. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

…

During the time it took to throw on some warm clothes, I ran the name through my recollection of people I’d met, and her name didn’t come up. I expect she was a reporter, or perhaps a junior from a law practice looking to get me to hire them for the law case against the state.

I took the stairs, it was only two flights of stairs, and I needed to warm up. For some reason, the passageways and then the foyer felt cold. The front desk clerk saw me step off the last stair and nodded over towards the fireplace, where some large logs were burning.

Sitting on one of the chairs was a woman, about my age, who looked like someone’s mother. I had no doubt she would appear to be disarming and polite, but then strike like a cobra. IT was how I came to view both Lawyers and reporters.

She had seen me coming from the stairs and stood as I approached.

“Mr Peverell?”

“You could hardly mistake me for anyone else.” Maybe not the first words I would have said, but I was tired, and steeling myself for a pitch.

I saw her mentally brush aside my attitude and smile. “How are you this morning, not that the weather is being polite.” I saw her glance outside through the large panoramic windows. The carpark was slowly disappearing.

“Not the sort of day to be out on a whim,” I said. I still couldn’t place her.

“No, indeed. Please,” she motioned to a chair by the fire, two together.

I sat. She sat, then arranged the layers. It had to be quite warm with the coat she was wearing. She had removed the fake fur hat. It actually looked good on her.

“What is so pressing that you had to see me?”

“I need your help.”

“How could I possibly help you or anyone with anything. You do realise I have just spent twelve years locked away from the real world. I’m lucky to remember my name, let alone anything else.”

Yes, the warden and his officers had tried very hard to take everything from me and all the other prisoners, some of whom would never get out of that prison.

“Of course. But left me to introduce myself. My name is Bettina Whales. I’m a private investigator, and I have been commissioned to find out who murdered David Lloyd-Smythe.”

Odd, but then, it just occurred to me that now I was exonerated, the real killer was still out there. It had been on my mind briefly the day before, but I decided I was over it. The murder had robbed me of 12 years of my life. Enough was enough.

But there was an element of curiosity. “By who?”

“Your wife, of course.”

I shook my head. She had dumped me so fast once I was arrested, it made my head spin. Of course, her parents had probably kidnapped her and kept her prisoner from the day she was arrested until yesterday, but I thought if there was a way she could just tell me why she had abandoned me, it might have been tolerable, but she didn’t.

I had decided long ago that she was gone and I would never see her again.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. You are here for some other reason, one I’m not going to like.”

She smiled. “She said you’d say that. And I’ll admit when she explained why you would, I had to say I agreed with you. But she can tell you herself. She’s right over there, coming in the door.”

I stood, faced her, and watched mesmerised. Twelve years had not aged her, not like they had me, and she still had that ability to take my breath away. And she still could command a room simply by walking through it. All eyes, and particularly the men, were on her.

Then she was in front of me. That loose way of standing, the smile, the disarming manner.

“You thought I had forgotten you?”

“I didn;t know what to think, other than a part of me had died.”

“And I am sorry about that, but you know my parents. I had to disappear, lest shame be brought upon the family. Been in Europe, in a castle no less. It took me an age to find the people running your case to get out, and then I had to surrupticiously hire an army of lawyers. The lady behind is the one who found the evidence that got you off. She’s the best of the best. Now we’re going after the person that put you there, the real killer.”

Just like in the old days, the take-charge girl, even if you didn’t want to do anything. She, like her father, had no ‘off’ button.

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Don’t be silly, Pev.” She looked at the private investigator. “Get yourself a room if you haven’t already. Pev and I had things to talk about.” She looked back at me. “I can see you threw something on, so we can go back to your room and talk. Or whatever.” She took my hand. “We have twelve years to catch up. Then we’re going to hunt down the bastard that took you away from me. Miss me?”

I gave her hand a squeeze. “I did.”

She smiled. “Good. I hope you have a good room.”

…

© Charles Heath  2025

Day 100

Writing Exercise

You need a good first line, one that grabs your attention and makes you want to read on…

…

I woke up that morning believing it would be the first day of the rest of my life.

I stretched and luxuriated in the comfort and warmth of the bed, after a dozen years of suffering a very hard, uncomfortable, and cold cot, if it could be called that.

Prison life had been harsh. Being unjustly imprisoned had been harsher, and the years of battling to have the evidence that finally exonerated me finally paid off.

Release.

Perhaps it was not a coincidence that the day I stepped out of the prison was the day the snow started, the first of the season, bringing with it the winter chill. I would not have survived another winter in that prison.

Perhaps it was also not a coincidence that the ex-girlfriend of the man I had supposedly murdered in a jealous rage arrived on my doorstep the same day I was released. It was her evidence, circumstantial at best, but convincingly relayed in the courtroom, a performance even the newspapers said was worthy of an Academy Award.

She still firmly believed I was guilty, evidence or not, and that I would be damned to hell.

That might be true, but not from the so-called murder of her ex-boyfriend, but the deeds I had to do to survive in what could only be described as hell on earth. I tried to tell her that I’d paid my dues, as unjust as they were, and that was the end of it. She had got her pound of flesh.

The parents of the ex-boyfriend were not as unforgiving and wished me well. They had never believed that I was guilty, no surprises because their son and I had been the best of friends from a very early age, when they moved into the house next door.

Those years were gone, as was the house, and everything else. It had been burned to the ground by a bunch of vigilantes riled up by Samantha, who marched on the house just before my arrest. Nobody was blamed for the deaths of my parents, caught in the fire, but the judge did admonish Samantha, in a monologue that all but handed the blame to her. It was, he said, going to be a battle for her conscience.

Now I had nothing.

My lawyer said it was a clean slate, and to put what I needed into a backpack, and get on the first train out of town. There was nothing for me, no reason to stay.

The very thought in my mind when I woke and looked out at the sea of white, and the steady downfall of snow drifting down from the sky. The forecast was snow for a day or so, then clearing. It would halt the trains, so I would be here for at least another day.

Enough time for Samantha to round up another mob and come burn down the hotel.

That was reason enough not to get out of bed.

Except…

The phone beside the bed rang, one that had a shrill insistence about it.

I slipped out from under the covers, shivered slightly in the cool morning air then picke dup the receiver.

“Yes?”

“There’s a Miss Andrews here to see you.”

Miss Andrews. It was a name that lurked on the fringe of my memory, in the life before prison section, and was not quite coming to me.

“Did she state her business?” I assumed it was a reporter here to get my story, one that they were hoping, no doubt, I would be suing the state for false imprisonment.

“No, but she is insistent she sees you.”

“OK. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

…

During the time it took to throw on some warm clothes, I ran the name through my recollection of people I’d met, and her name didn’t come up. I expect she was a reporter, or perhaps a junior from a law practice looking to get me to hire them for the law case against the state.

I took the stairs, it was only two flights of stairs, and I needed to warm up. For some reason, the passageways and then the foyer felt cold. The front desk clerk saw me step off the last stair and nodded over towards the fireplace, where some large logs were burning.

Sitting on one of the chairs was a woman, about my age, who looked like someone’s mother. I had no doubt she would appear to be disarming and polite, but then strike like a cobra. IT was how I came to view both Lawyers and reporters.

She had seen me coming from the stairs and stood as I approached.

“Mr Peverell?”

“You could hardly mistake me for anyone else.” Maybe not the first words I would have said, but I was tired, and steeling myself for a pitch.

I saw her mentally brush aside my attitude and smile. “How are you this morning, not that the weather is being polite.” I saw her glance outside through the large panoramic windows. The carpark was slowly disappearing.

“Not the sort of day to be out on a whim,” I said. I still couldn’t place her.

“No, indeed. Please,” she motioned to a chair by the fire, two together.

I sat. She sat, then arranged the layers. It had to be quite warm with the coat she was wearing. She had removed the fake fur hat. It actually looked good on her.

“What is so pressing that you had to see me?”

“I need your help.”

“How could I possibly help you or anyone with anything. You do realise I have just spent twelve years locked away from the real world. I’m lucky to remember my name, let alone anything else.”

Yes, the warden and his officers had tried very hard to take everything from me and all the other prisoners, some of whom would never get out of that prison.

“Of course. But left me to introduce myself. My name is Bettina Whales. I’m a private investigator, and I have been commissioned to find out who murdered David Lloyd-Smythe.”

Odd, but then, it just occurred to me that now I was exonerated, the real killer was still out there. It had been on my mind briefly the day before, but I decided I was over it. The murder had robbed me of 12 years of my life. Enough was enough.

But there was an element of curiosity. “By who?”

“Your wife, of course.”

I shook my head. She had dumped me so fast once I was arrested, it made my head spin. Of course, her parents had probably kidnapped her and kept her prisoner from the day she was arrested until yesterday, but I thought if there was a way she could just tell me why she had abandoned me, it might have been tolerable, but she didn’t.

I had decided long ago that she was gone and I would never see her again.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. You are here for some other reason, one I’m not going to like.”

She smiled. “She said you’d say that. And I’ll admit when she explained why you would, I had to say I agreed with you. But she can tell you herself. She’s right over there, coming in the door.”

I stood, faced her, and watched mesmerised. Twelve years had not aged her, not like they had me, and she still had that ability to take my breath away. And she still could command a room simply by walking through it. All eyes, and particularly the men, were on her.

Then she was in front of me. That loose way of standing, the smile, the disarming manner.

“You thought I had forgotten you?”

“I didn;t know what to think, other than a part of me had died.”

“And I am sorry about that, but you know my parents. I had to disappear, lest shame be brought upon the family. Been in Europe, in a castle no less. It took me an age to find the people running your case to get out, and then I had to surrupticiously hire an army of lawyers. The lady behind is the one who found the evidence that got you off. She’s the best of the best. Now we’re going after the person that put you there, the real killer.”

Just like in the old days, the take-charge girl, even if you didn’t want to do anything. She, like her father, had no ‘off’ button.

“And if I don’t want to?”

“Don’t be silly, Pev.” She looked at the private investigator. “Get yourself a room if you haven’t already. Pev and I had things to talk about.” She looked back at me. “I can see you threw something on, so we can go back to your room and talk. Or whatever.” She took my hand. “We have twelve years to catch up. Then we’re going to hunt down the bastard that took you away from me. Miss me?”

I gave her hand a squeeze. “I did.”

She smiled. “Good. I hope you have a good room.”

…

© Charles Heath  2025

Day 99

Don’t give up your day job.

…

OK, I know some of you do, and lock yourself away until the next bestseller is written, but that’s only an option if you saved up a million dollars so you could take the year off.

And if you are like me, I’d probably be out partying every day rather than put words on paper. Sometimes it is easier to just party.

However, for the more serious of us, our day job could work in our favour in several ways. Firstly, it gives us time away from the project so that we can dwell on how the story might progress the moment we get back in the door at home.

Besides that, the job may be so utterly stultifying that you can have the time to work through plotting and planning during the day, and writing by night.

There again you might have exactly the job that provides the inspiration for writing the story, and it is very useful.

That aspect worked for me because I was in the exact place that was a company like the one I was writing about, in a remote location, on an island with isolation and native people. And I had photos of the operations running since 1898.

All the more reason to seriously consider whether or not to give up your day job.

Oh, and there is one other thing. If you’re not living with your parents, you still need to pay the bills.

Day 99

Don’t give up your day job.

…

OK, I know some of you do, and lock yourself away until the next bestseller is written, but that’s only an option if you saved up a million dollars so you could take the year off.

And if you are like me, I’d probably be out partying every day rather than put words on paper. Sometimes it is easier to just party.

However, for the more serious of us, our day job could work in our favour in several ways. Firstly, it gives us time away from the project so that we can dwell on how the story might progress the moment we get back in the door at home.

Besides that, the job may be so utterly stultifying that you can have the time to work through plotting and planning during the day, and writing by night.

There again you might have exactly the job that provides the inspiration for writing the story, and it is very useful.

That aspect worked for me because I was in the exact place that was a company like the one I was writing about, in a remote location, on an island with isolation and native people. And I had photos of the operations running since 1898.

All the more reason to seriously consider whether or not to give up your day job.

Oh, and there is one other thing. If you’re not living with your parents, you still need to pay the bills.

Day 98

Writing exercise with the starting line – “What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.

…

“What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.

“Considering all the ways I’m going to kill you when we get out of this mess.”

“It’s not my fault. It had to be someone you’ve annoyed. I don’t have an enemy in the world.”

That might have been the case the last time I saw or spoke to him fifteen years ago, but I was not so sure that was the case now.

“Are you sure about that?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He had come to the airport to pick me up and take me back to the far, a place I had tried to get as far away from as possible, but luck, as it tends to do, ran out and ended my term in Washington. I’d backed the wrong horse.

I thought after so long away, the place would have changed, but it hadn’t.

Archie McKenzie was there, and made it quite plain that the bad blood between him and my brother was still running hot, had been for the past fifteen years, and now it extended to his ‘failure of a brother’.

We were lucky to get out of the terminal without a fight. That was not the worst of it, Archie had followed his father into the police, and he was now a Deputy, a Deputy driven by revenge, with a gun and a badge.

“And what would you call Archie McKenzie?”

“Misguided.”

“All these years, and he’s still mad at you.”

“I didn’t steal her away from him. She walked away, and he couldn’t take it.”

There were four different stories to that one incident, and not one of them explained his pathological hatred of my brother, and by proxy, my family.

“And now we’re here. We don’t get out of here, you know what that means.”

“How do you know he put us here?”

There were three reasons. First, he was hopeless at disguising his voice. Second, he still used the same aftershave, like he bathed in it, and third, one of his mates, Lou, said the same stupid stuff he did back when we went to school.

Archie was one of the three musketeers, or that was what they called themselves. When school was over, it took three months before I enlisted in the National Guard, and spent the next few years in places I’d rather forget. On the last tour, I sustained a few injuries and was discharged. Another guy caught in the same IED explosion asked me to come work for him in Washington as an advocate for soldiers’ care. He got elected to Congress, and I stayed on as his Chief of Staff until he lost the last election.

I thought I’d go home and work out what I was going to do next. Dying wasn’t supposed to be one of those options.

“Does it matter? We have to get out of here.”

I was working on the knots that held my hands together behind my back. Whoever tied them wasn’t very good at knots.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“Getting free.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is truly impossible. There’s just varying degrees of impossible.”

I managed to loosen the rope just enough to get one hand out and then untie the other. It was only a matter of a minute or so to get my feet free.

I stood up. The water had reached my ankles.

“Did you…”

“Yes.” I undid his bindings and dragged him to his feet.

I had a smaller phone tucked in the bottom of my trouser leg in a special pouch and pulled it out. It had a light and I switched it on. I would have to use it sparingly.

“Aren’t you full of surprises?”

I didn’t answer that. Instead, I looked at the floor, and the water coming in from what looked like a garden hose dangling down the side of the well, not far from us. It came from above, where there was a cover over the well. It was about ten feet wide, too wide, too smooth to climb up, but that hose presented a possibility.

To top was about twenty feet up. Putting myself in Archie’s boots, he obviously thought we would not escape the bindings and, thinking the sedative would keep us under long enough for us to drown before we realised what happened, it was a fait accompli.

Archie had never been one to consider the consequences of his actions. He always had a small-town sheriff for a father to get him out of trouble. We were not going to be able to simply go back to town. He had wanted us to disappear.

For a moment, I wondered how many other victims he had disposed of were in here?

“I assume we’re going now?”

“Not yet. I think we need to be closer to the top. I don’t think that hose will be anchored enough, and if we pull it down now, we might never get out. It will at least give us something to hold onto as we go up, so we don’t have to try too hard to tread water.

“It’s going to be cold and wet, and a long time at this rate.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d been in the well for about half an hour, and it was only six inches deep. It was going to take about twenty hours.

“If you’ve got a better idea, please tell me.”

His silence told me that it was going to be a long wait.

…

Two hours and a foot deep, we heard a truck coming. Was Archie coming back to check on his handiwork? I tried hard to listen and see if it made the same engine noise as the one that had brought us to our watery grave.

Too hard to tell. It was a little after eleven at night. It was dark by the time we were taken off the truck and put down the well. They had removed the blindfolds, but they had their faces covered, so it was not possible to recognise them. Nor had they spoken unless it was necessary.

As for the surroundings, the night was overcast and no moon, so everything was cloaked in darkness. I thought I had seen a farmhouse or a shack, but I couldn’t be sure. I had thought it might be one of the disused farms. Several had folded after a drought struck twenty years ago, the latest disaster to befall the county and the straw that broke most of the farmers.

“You hear that?”

“It might be the people who own the place.”

“This is Dead Man’s Folly. I’m sure of it.”

I knew of it. Six farms in a small group, all suffering from the drought. This well, if it was Dead Man’s Folly, had been dry for years. The farmer spent the last of his savings digging the well, only for it to come up dry. Shot the well digger, his men, his family and then himself.

Where were the ghosts?

We hear the scrunching of tires on the gravel, a skid to a stop, then the engine running for a minute and then silence. A door opened and then closed.

There were no footsteps, or none that I could hear.

A few minutes later, the hose moved as if someone was pulling on it. Then it went limp. Someone had turned off the water flow.

Five or perhaps six minutes after that, there was a crashing sound of a sledgehammer on wood. It was the wooden cover, suddenly splintering and shards raining down on us. A dozen or so more blows and there was a hole, big enough to see the moon-lit sky.

And then the outline of a person.

“That you, Sam, down there?” A girl’s voice.

“Who are you?”

“Beth McKenzie.”

I just barely heard Jack mutter, “Jesus Christ, we’re dead.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2025

Day 98

Writing exercise with the starting line – “What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.

…

“What are you doing?” he asked, while the water rose.

“Considering all the ways I’m going to kill you when we get out of this mess.”

“It’s not my fault. It had to be someone you’ve annoyed. I don’t have an enemy in the world.”

That might have been the case the last time I saw or spoke to him fifteen years ago, but I was not so sure that was the case now.

“Are you sure about that?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He had come to the airport to pick me up and take me back to the far, a place I had tried to get as far away from as possible, but luck, as it tends to do, ran out and ended my term in Washington. I’d backed the wrong horse.

I thought after so long away, the place would have changed, but it hadn’t.

Archie McKenzie was there, and made it quite plain that the bad blood between him and my brother was still running hot, had been for the past fifteen years, and now it extended to his ‘failure of a brother’.

We were lucky to get out of the terminal without a fight. That was not the worst of it, Archie had followed his father into the police, and he was now a Deputy, a Deputy driven by revenge, with a gun and a badge.

“And what would you call Archie McKenzie?”

“Misguided.”

“All these years, and he’s still mad at you.”

“I didn’t steal her away from him. She walked away, and he couldn’t take it.”

There were four different stories to that one incident, and not one of them explained his pathological hatred of my brother, and by proxy, my family.

“And now we’re here. We don’t get out of here, you know what that means.”

“How do you know he put us here?”

There were three reasons. First, he was hopeless at disguising his voice. Second, he still used the same aftershave, like he bathed in it, and third, one of his mates, Lou, said the same stupid stuff he did back when we went to school.

Archie was one of the three musketeers, or that was what they called themselves. When school was over, it took three months before I enlisted in the National Guard, and spent the next few years in places I’d rather forget. On the last tour, I sustained a few injuries and was discharged. Another guy caught in the same IED explosion asked me to come work for him in Washington as an advocate for soldiers’ care. He got elected to Congress, and I stayed on as his Chief of Staff until he lost the last election.

I thought I’d go home and work out what I was going to do next. Dying wasn’t supposed to be one of those options.

“Does it matter? We have to get out of here.”

I was working on the knots that held my hands together behind my back. Whoever tied them wasn’t very good at knots.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“Getting free.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nothing is truly impossible. There’s just varying degrees of impossible.”

I managed to loosen the rope just enough to get one hand out and then untie the other. It was only a matter of a minute or so to get my feet free.

I stood up. The water had reached my ankles.

“Did you…”

“Yes.” I undid his bindings and dragged him to his feet.

I had a smaller phone tucked in the bottom of my trouser leg in a special pouch and pulled it out. It had a light and I switched it on. I would have to use it sparingly.

“Aren’t you full of surprises?”

I didn’t answer that. Instead, I looked at the floor, and the water coming in from what looked like a garden hose dangling down the side of the well, not far from us. It came from above, where there was a cover over the well. It was about ten feet wide, too wide, too smooth to climb up, but that hose presented a possibility.

To top was about twenty feet up. Putting myself in Archie’s boots, he obviously thought we would not escape the bindings and, thinking the sedative would keep us under long enough for us to drown before we realised what happened, it was a fait accompli.

Archie had never been one to consider the consequences of his actions. He always had a small-town sheriff for a father to get him out of trouble. We were not going to be able to simply go back to town. He had wanted us to disappear.

For a moment, I wondered how many other victims he had disposed of were in here?

“I assume we’re going now?”

“Not yet. I think we need to be closer to the top. I don’t think that hose will be anchored enough, and if we pull it down now, we might never get out. It will at least give us something to hold onto as we go up, so we don’t have to try too hard to tread water.

“It’s going to be cold and wet, and a long time at this rate.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d been in the well for about half an hour, and it was only six inches deep. It was going to take about twenty hours.

“If you’ve got a better idea, please tell me.”

His silence told me that it was going to be a long wait.

…

Two hours and a foot deep, we heard a truck coming. Was Archie coming back to check on his handiwork? I tried hard to listen and see if it made the same engine noise as the one that had brought us to our watery grave.

Too hard to tell. It was a little after eleven at night. It was dark by the time we were taken off the truck and put down the well. They had removed the blindfolds, but they had their faces covered, so it was not possible to recognise them. Nor had they spoken unless it was necessary.

As for the surroundings, the night was overcast and no moon, so everything was cloaked in darkness. I thought I had seen a farmhouse or a shack, but I couldn’t be sure. I had thought it might be one of the disused farms. Several had folded after a drought struck twenty years ago, the latest disaster to befall the county and the straw that broke most of the farmers.

“You hear that?”

“It might be the people who own the place.”

“This is Dead Man’s Folly. I’m sure of it.”

I knew of it. Six farms in a small group, all suffering from the drought. This well, if it was Dead Man’s Folly, had been dry for years. The farmer spent the last of his savings digging the well, only for it to come up dry. Shot the well digger, his men, his family and then himself.

Where were the ghosts?

We hear the scrunching of tires on the gravel, a skid to a stop, then the engine running for a minute and then silence. A door opened and then closed.

There were no footsteps, or none that I could hear.

A few minutes later, the hose moved as if someone was pulling on it. Then it went limp. Someone had turned off the water flow.

Five or perhaps six minutes after that, there was a crashing sound of a sledgehammer on wood. It was the wooden cover, suddenly splintering and shards raining down on us. A dozen or so more blows and there was a hole, big enough to see the moon-lit sky.

And then the outline of a person.

“That you, Sam, down there?” A girl’s voice.

“Who are you?”

“Beth McKenzie.”

I just barely heard Jack mutter, “Jesus Christ, we’re dead.”

…

©  Charles Heath  2025

Day 97

That old enemy – Editing

There’s going to be an analogy – starting with jagged and unwieldy rocks, and after chipping away at those rough edges, what remains is a smooth, enjoyable object.

Ah, if only it were that easy….

I’m sure most of us would like to think that the first time we write the pages, it’s perfect. Why would I need to go over it again?

I might have thought that a long time ago, but back in those days when I thought I could walk on water, a friend of mine picked up a few pages of one of my manuscripts and offered to read it.

I didn;t like the idea, but he insisted.

Well, three pages and about 11 mistakes, punctuation, grammatical issues, sentence structure, and spelling. How could it miss spelling when I had the spell checker on? And what grammatical errors, I ran the grammar checker over it?

I think I realised by then that no man-made assistant tool was going to be 100% perfect, and I would have to read and edit it myself properly. Which I did, over 535 pages, and took nearly a year, and at times a wealth of frustration.

I found plot holes, one place where a character’s name had completely changed halfway through the story, and inconsistencies in the factual parts of the story.

Fact checkers? Where are you?

It caused me to make a summary of each chapter with the plot points, a chart that followed the characters and where they were participating, a timeline to make sure things didn’t happen out of order, and a family tree to get the characters in their correct places in the family hierarchy.

In other words, I should have planned it from the start!

Well, maybe.

I think in the end it was easier just to write the story than do all the planning from what I had. I found that I might not have been able to produce the story I had if I’d tried to think of everything in the beginning.

Now, I follow that, after spending a little time getting the story off the a good start, developing where it might go, and with those ideas in mind, let it run its course. And the characters do end up in their trees and timelines, as I go, so that going back and fixing problems is not so hard.

Of course, as always, I’m open to new ideas, extensions or improvements on tried and tested methodology, and any ideas you might have, I’m always open.

Day 97

That old enemy – Editing

There’s going to be an analogy – starting with jagged and unwieldy rocks, and after chipping away at those rough edges, what remains is a smooth, enjoyable object.

Ah, if only it were that easy….

I’m sure most of us would like to think that the first time we write the pages, it’s perfect. Why would I need to go over it again?

I might have thought that a long time ago, but back in those days when I thought I could walk on water, a friend of mine picked up a few pages of one of my manuscripts and offered to read it.

I didn;t like the idea, but he insisted.

Well, three pages and about 11 mistakes, punctuation, grammatical issues, sentence structure, and spelling. How could it miss spelling when I had the spell checker on? And what grammatical errors, I ran the grammar checker over it?

I think I realised by then that no man-made assistant tool was going to be 100% perfect, and I would have to read and edit it myself properly. Which I did, over 535 pages, and took nearly a year, and at times a wealth of frustration.

I found plot holes, one place where a character’s name had completely changed halfway through the story, and inconsistencies in the factual parts of the story.

Fact checkers? Where are you?

It caused me to make a summary of each chapter with the plot points, a chart that followed the characters and where they were participating, a timeline to make sure things didn’t happen out of order, and a family tree to get the characters in their correct places in the family hierarchy.

In other words, I should have planned it from the start!

Well, maybe.

I think in the end it was easier just to write the story than do all the planning from what I had. I found that I might not have been able to produce the story I had if I’d tried to think of everything in the beginning.

Now, I follow that, after spending a little time getting the story off the a good start, developing where it might go, and with those ideas in mind, let it run its course. And the characters do end up in their trees and timelines, as I go, so that going back and fixing problems is not so hard.

Of course, as always, I’m open to new ideas, extensions or improvements on tried and tested methodology, and any ideas you might have, I’m always open.

Days 95 and 96

Story and book titles

…

This is an exercise in getting you to work on book titles, looking at the existing titles and working on whether there could be a better alternative, and as an aside, considering why you chose the one you did.

Often, to me, it seems like it’s very much akin to plucking a piece of paper out of the air, one of about a thousand.

The quest for a title for my current project took many a twist and turn, starting out with When The Planets Line Up, which, of course, was going to happen, but it was not the crux of the story. What came to me, when the story moved from a short story to a novel was “The Fourth Son, simple because that was what he is, and from all the woes and sour grapes we’ve endlessly heard from the infamous Second Son, or Spare, I thought, what if the impossible happened.

Titles have not always been that easy, and my editor sometimes has a few words to say about the titles I pick.

It was just the case with my David and Susan novels. I was going with Double Trouble and the Triple Trouble, but it seems What Sets Us Apart and Strangers We’ve Become were more suitable. There’s a third, and I have tentatively titled it “From Russia With…” but that might not last.

Quite often, stories I have written quite a few years back are still looking for an appropriate title, and three in particular that I wrote as a trilogy suddenly found themselves with titles after I read a series of Robert Ludlum novels and noted how he titled his stories.

The bottom line is that sometimes finding the right title is like creating the right cover, and then editing.