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.

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.

More about my story

…

Is this one of those moments where it is a good thing he has a partner, and a bad thing that she is a woman?

We all know pain killers and alcohol at a bad mix, and trying to ward off the despondency of messing up what could have been a useful interrogation, he drinks too much, makes a pass at the partner and fails miserably at achieving anything but collapsing on the floor.

She is amused.  And annoyed he took matters into his own hands.

Of course, there are questions to answer, like,

Why did he go back and tackle the men who, as he said, were acting suspiciously?  Firstly, the police inspector and then, with a lot more suspicion and threatening behaviour, the head of the secret police.

Yes, a man in the street type would not be talking about anything, especially when he knew there were suspicious types, like the rebels, around.

Who is he, then, to be doing this?

Nosey reporter, very nosey reporter, with a little too much devil may care, ergo the bullet wound.

But if you want the story, you need to take the risks.

The inspector wants to know how there was an exchange of gunfire, without saying that the rebels didn’t shoot at each other, and he simply says he was shot, it was a shock, and by the time I got over the shock of it, they were gone.

After all, if he was complicit, where was the gun?

More about my story

…

Is this one of those moments where it is a good thing he has a partner, and a bad thing that she is a woman?

We all know pain killers and alcohol at a bad mix, and trying to ward off the despondency of messing up what could have been a useful interrogation, he drinks too much, makes a pass at the partner and fails miserably at achieving anything but collapsing on the floor.

She is amused.  And annoyed he took matters into his own hands.

Of course, there are questions to answer, like,

Why did he go back and tackle the men who, as he said, were acting suspiciously?  Firstly, the police inspector and then, with a lot more suspicion and threatening behaviour, the head of the secret police.

Yes, a man in the street type would not be talking about anything, especially when he knew there were suspicious types, like the rebels, around.

Who is he, then, to be doing this?

Nosey reporter, very nosey reporter, with a little too much devil may care, ergo the bullet wound.

But if you want the story, you need to take the risks.

The inspector wants to know how there was an exchange of gunfire, without saying that the rebels didn’t shoot at each other, and he simply says he was shot, it was a shock, and by the time I got over the shock of it, they were gone.

After all, if he was complicit, where was the gun?