My writing

Editing by the Author

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When I first started writing, I would write a couple of pages, then review and edit what I had written.  When I had completed a chapter, I would go back to review and edit that chapter.  When I finished the book, I would review and re-edit the entire book.  At each of these three stages, I found mistakes or text that I wasn’t happy with, and I made changes.  A professional editor would then take over, and finally, I would check what the editor had done.  (In most cases, the editor had done an excellent job correcting typos and syntax errors.)

My first four novels were what one might call ‘four dimensional’.  That is, they told a story about characters, events, places and times.  Most novels are four dimensional.

My fifth novel has two additional dimensions: a spiritual dimension and a philosophical dimension, and as I was writing the last few chapters, I began to realise that my editing of the entire novel would have to be far more rigorous.  I became concerned that some of the material in the earlier chapters would not fully support the spiritual and philosophical dimensions that I wanted the reader to understand.

So, now that I have finished writing the last chapter, I am going back to the beginning, and reviewing each chapter.  This review is much more rigorous than before.  I spot whole sections (one of more paragraphs) which were either not interesting enough to the reader, or did not support the spiritual or philosophical dimensions.  I delete or completely re-write those sections.  (I think it is easy for a writer to become ‘mesmerised by his/her own writing’ and get carried away in prose.)  I found, also, that I had to add small pieces of text to help clarify the spiritual and philosophical messages.

It is necessary in this fifth novel that the central character changes his identity and his values, but I noticed that what I had written before did not support the vulnerability of this character to the changes that come later.  So, I had to make subtle changes to his character.

In the second, more rigorous, review of each chapter, I was also sensitive to accuracy of time, place and characters.  (See my post on Accuracy.)

During this review, I tend to be merciless about what I would call ‘ordinary writing’.  That is, writing which lacks uniqueness and character.  For example, rather than write that a character ‘fell to the floor, sobbing’, I’ll write ‘she collapsed onto the floor, hiccoughing with sobs’.  Doesn’t the latter version better convey her desperation?

And of course, each time I review something I have written, I’ll find typos, awkward syntax and punctuation errors.  (That’s a never-ending battle!)

So I no longer trust my self to ‘Get It Right First Time’, as the quality gurus like to say.  For me ‘Getting It Right’ is the result of at least six re-reads and improvements, and some of the improvements can be pretty extensive!

Lady Chatterley and Sex in Writing

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The Daily Telegraph carried an article last Tuesday in which the author Julian Barnes suggested that the failure of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity prosecution in 1960 opened a whole new world for writers. Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Prize in for The Sense of an Ending.  He said that upon hearing the outcome of the prosecution when he was 14, “At last, I remember thinking, British literature would be able to catch up with foreign, especially French, literature, which for a century had been far more truth-telling – and far more titillating than its British equivalent.  But having a new freedom and knowing what to do with it were two quite different things.  Instead of a blanket prohibition, there was almost the reverse: not a writerly desire, but a commercial obligation to write in a detailed way about sex.  And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by new misleading cliches.

“It’s easy to mock, and each generation will mock the previos one because each generation needs to imagine that its attitude to sex strikes just about the right balance; that by comparison its predecessors were prim and embarrassed, its successors sex-obsessed and pornified.  And so writing about sex contains an additional anxiety on top of all the usual ones: that the writer might be giving him or herself away, that readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.”

This is an interesting point of view.  Some I agree with; some I don’t.  While the Lady Chatterley prosecution may have been a watershed at the time, in my opinion, it has little effect on literature today, 50+ years later.  What affects literature today is what the public wants to read and what critics think they should read.  Critics don’t speak with one voice on the subject of sex: some criticise authors for attempting to write about it, and others point out the blank space left by its omission.  Some readers today may be ‘prim and embarrassed’, but others, as the success of Fifty Shades of Grey shows, are quite happy to be immersed.

For myself, I don’t feel any ‘commercial pressure’ to include sex in my novels.  I include it because it helps to define the personality and values of the characters involved.  Here, for example, is a passage from Efraim’s Eye:

Paul was suddenly awake.  There was someone in the room.  A slight, pale figure had slipped almost soundlessly past the door.  The figure made no threatening movements.  He tried to see through the gloom.  Like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis, the figure dropped its robe.  It was Naomi.  She lifted the bed covers and climbed in beside him.  She was trembling.

“What’s the matter, Naomi?”

“He tried to attack me.”

“You’ve been dreaming.”
”It was horrible.”

Still trembling, she clung to him.  Gently, he stroked her hair, which cascaded across her face and shoulders.  There was peaceful, utter silence in the room.  She lay on her side, against him, her head on his shoulder.  He kissed her forehead, and stroked her back.  Gradually, he felt the tension seep out of her.  There was the faint scent of her perfume.  He felt one of her breasts against his chest.

“Thank you, Paul.”

Desire swept over him.  “I want you Naomi.”

She said nothing.

She stroked his chest, and her hand strayed down across his belly.  “Oh!”  For some time she continued to hold him.  “Do you have a condom, Paul?”

“No, but I’ve had a vasectomy, and . . . and I have no . . . “

“no STD’s,” she finished the sentence for him.

She continued to caress him.  Then deliberately and languorously, she slid on top of him.  Reaching down for him, she guided him.  She gave a little groan of pleasure and began to move.  He was almost passive, knowing that his time was later.  He caressed her face, her breasts, her back, her arms.  “God, you feel lovely!”

She gave soft mewling sounds as her passion flamed higher, and the pace of her movements increased.

Then, suddenly she convulsed, buried her face at his throat and gave a long sighing groan.  He could hold out no longer, wrapped his arms around her, and succumbed to the surge of ecstasy.

They floated down; lay on their sides, her back against his chest, pressed tight against him, his arms still around her.  She felt blissfully safe.

They fell asleep.

This passage is intended to reinforce several points about the characters.  Naomi can be child-like and she is very frightened by the terrorist; she views Paul almost as a father figure; she did not come to him for sex, but for security.  Paul admires Naomi, and would not normally have tried to seduce her, but her naked presence is too much for him.

I don’t agree with Barnes that the ‘old euphemisms’ and the ‘new cliches’ are necessarily ‘misleading’.  It is not a word I would have chosen.  I think what he probably means is ‘ill-conceived’.  For me, this is the challenge: how does one choose the right words and construction to have the reader feel what the characters are feeling – no more, no less?

I think that Barnes has a point when he says that ‘readers may conclude, when you describe a sex act, that it must have already happened to you in pretty much the manner described.’  I had a friend who emailed me after reading Efraim’s Eye to the effect that he felt he now knew me better, “including your sexual experiences ha ha!”  My reaction on reading the joking email was to shrug.  He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he knows.

 

Accuracy

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It seems to me it is frequently the case in movie thrillers, particularly the complex variety, that inconsistencies and errors creep in.  For example, I noted several errors/ inconsistencies in Arbitrage, the news film starring Richard Gere.  Gere plays a billionaire hedge fund manager who is leading the good life.  (He has Laetitia Casta, no less, as a mistress.)  An investment in a Russian mining venture turns sour because the Russians will not permit the metal to be exported.  This is rather unlikely, though it is possible that the Russians have decided to use all of the mine’s output domestically.  But, in that case it would still be making money.  Could the hedge fund get the money out of Russia?  Even oligarchs fleeing Russia are able to get their money out of the country.  Not a credible scenario.  It would have been more credible to have the venture fail for environmental reasons, but no savvy billionaire investor is going to make a mistake like that.  Then to cover up the $400 million hole in his fund, he borrows $400 million from another investor.  (Gere wants his fund to look like a winner so he can sell it.)  Whoever wrote this into the script doesn’t understand accounting.  A four hundred million dollar loss can’t be offset by borrowing the same amount.

Gere has an automobile accident while driving with Casta.  She is killed, while he has superficial injuries (?).  To protect his good name, he flees the scene of the accident, and, at a gas station, he makes a collect call to a young black man whom he has befriended in the past.  The young man picks up Gere and takes him home at 4:30 am.

A police detective suspects that Gere was driving the car and has left the scene of the accident.  He says that Gere’s cell phone records show that he went to a gas station.  (I doubt that this is possible: the location of a cell phone can be traced at the time, but not historically; to do so would require the service providers to store enormous quantities of data.)

To put pressure on the young man, the detective produces a photo, taken at a toll booth, of a car with which has his license plate.  This is intended to prove that the young man was in his car, when he says he was home.  The story line is that the police altered the ‘tapes’ from the toll booth.  How this was done is not clear.  Wouldn’t it have been more sensible for the police to have doctored a photo with software?

Apart from problems like these, I took an immediate dislike of Gere’s character.  He pretends to be a loyal family man, but this is clearly not the case: he is late for important family gatherings.  So, at the end, when Gere’s future hangs in the balance, I have no sympathy for him.  For me, when writing about a villain, I think the reader should have a trace of sympathy for the villain, or at least understand him.

I think it is fair to say that it is not to easy, in a book, to ‘pull the wool over the reader’s eyes’.  It’s all there in black and white.  If one were to write in chapter 9 that a character wore a pink dress, but in chapter 3 it says ‘she hated pink’, what would the reader think?  He would think that the writer was either sloppy or didn’t remember.  Technical (or accounting) details can be important to some readers.  If these details are inaccurate, some readers may not notice, but those who do will question the author’s credibility.

I frequently find my self going back to check something I had written earlier.  If I find an inconsistency, something has to be put right.  Sometimes I write about something on which I’m not an expert.  In The Iranian Scorpion, for example, opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Since I knew this was possible, I could have just said: “The opium was harvested and converted to heroin.”  But to take this shortcut would have taken a great deal of significance out of the story.  So, I did the research, and in The Iranian Scorpion, it tells exactly how opium is harvested and converted to heroin.  Harder work for the author, but it makes it more interesting for the reader.

Empathy

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In my post ‘Emotion’, I have touched already on the importance of a writer of fiction feeling the emotions of his characters.   This is a kind of follow-up on that post.

The other evening at about 6:30, my wife came home from her work.  I was in my office upstairs working away on my latest novel.  She came upstairs and put her head in the door.  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

“Henry’s son was just killed,” I said.  (Henry is the key character in my fifth novel.)

“Oh,” she said, “I thought something was wrong.”

In fact, something was very wrong: William, Henry’s son, for whom he had great admiration and fondness, had been killed.  For me, this felt like a tragedy.  One might ask, ‘Is it really necessary for a novelist to get so emotionally involved with his characters?’  Perhaps it is possible for a writer to maintain a level of detachment, but for me, that wouldn’t work.  One might also ask, ‘You knew that William was going to get killed – in fact, you plotted his killing – how can you be so sad when you kill him?’  First of all, I didn’t kill him.  I wrote about how he was killed fighting Somali pirates.  And secondly, fore knowledge of an event doesn’t necessarily protect us from an emotional response to the event itself.  For example, when you know that your daughter is going to get married, you may also know that you’ll be feeling a little weepy (as I did), but that slight anticipation doesn’t stifle the watery eyes when you start down the aisle.  At least it didn’t stifle the tears for me.

Emotion is one of the features of humanity which makes us so interesting, and separates us pretty definitively from the rest of the animal kingdom.  (As a dog lover, I knows that animals have feelings, but not the grand passions of their human masters.)  Emotion, or the lack of it, can go a long way to define our character and our values.

For me, Van Gogh was an artist who understood the power of emotion, and his canvasses reflect this understanding with their powerful brush strokes, brilliant colours and fluidity.  Just look at ‘Starry Night’:

Starry NightFor me, Van Gogh has captured the wonder we feel looking up at the night sky.  In a similar way, I believe that the novelist must try to capture the feelings of his or her characters.  And what better way to capture them than to feel them yourself.  Emotions are only real if you can feel them; if they are not felt, they are only synthetic.  To feel the emotions of a character, one must know him or her, and to know her, the writer must define her.  Then, one can begin the process of empathising: I am him, in this situation, how do I feel?  Angry?  How angry?  What’s unique about my anger?  If my anger is only a stereotype, it doesn’t define me as a person.  The writer not only has to empathise with his characters, he has to capture the feelings of the character in distinctive language.

Death

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My wife and I went to the States this past week to attend the funeral of a niece.  She was not someone with whom I have had much contact, but as the daughter of my brother-in-law, who was absolutely devastated, I felt we should go.  She was about the age of my children (40’s), and she died in a tragic skiing accident.  She was an avid and very good skier, skiing with the man she hoped to marry.  She had stopped on the slope to clean her goggles, and was struck from behind by an out-of-control skier.  She was wearing a helmet, but the impact was so great that it broke her neck and she died instantly.  The out-of-control skier was not injured.

Many of us have had our parents, friends and relatives die, but I feel that the death of one’s child, particularly so un-necessarily, is the ultimate tragedy.  Our children are the ones who are carrying into the future not only our genes, but our values, beliefs and aspirations.  The death of a child not only leaves us in deep mourning, it constricts us: heart, mind and soul.  And in this case, one cannot help but wonder what if.  What if her goggles didn’t get fogged?  What if she had been three feet to the right or the left?  What if the other skiier hadn’t been so stupidly careless?  What if her man had been standing directly behind her?  (He was standing beside her.)

Death features prominently in the writing of many novelists.  A death is often used to make a point, and often the point is that death is senseless, un-justifiable, un-reasonable.  Often, in real life, that is exactly the case.  And some writers go on to make the point that if death is senseless, there cannot be a loving God, because a loving God would never allow a senseless tragedy to happen to His people.  But, in my opinion, this argument overlooks an important point: it may look and feel senseless to us.  However, in an unknowable, cosmic context it may make sense.  Why is it unknowable?  Because if it were knowable, we would also know God, and if we really knew God we would not have free will.  Why no free will?  Can you imagine that anyone who really knew God, and therefore knew his plan for us, would actually do something that God didn’t like?  In other words, I believe that God’s gift of free will carries a price: we can’t know everything.

Looking back on my writing, death and its messages have been present in all my novels.  In Fishing in Foreign Seas, Jamie’s father develops incurable cancer.  He is terrified, but, gradually, he comes to terms with his life and the blessings of his sons and wife.  In Sin and Contrition, Gary, the ego-centric politician from a poor background, is approached by his long-absent father for money for a vital heart operation.  There is an argument, the two fail to agree, and the father dies.  Gary’s mother has dementia, but Gary leaves her care entirely to his sister.  Gary later regrets his behaviour.  Efraim’s Eye portrays the mind of a pathological terrorist: so committed to revenge that killing on the way to his grand attack is incidental.  In The Iranian Scorpion, the Iranian gallows casts its shadow over Robert and his father.  And in my fifth novel, Henry slides into deep depression after his exceptional son is killed in combat.  But in each case, there is some redemption, as, I think, there usually is in life.

 

Doubt

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My wife and I watched the film Doubt last night.  We wanted to watch it for several reasons: it stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both of whom we think are excellent actors.  It also involves a dilemma in the Catholic church; we are Catholic.

The film was made in 2008 and is based on the Pulitzer prize-winning stage play, Doubt: a Parable.  In the film, Hoffman plays kindly a parish priest, and Streep plays the ultra strict and conservative principal of the school which is attached to the church.  Hoffman befriends the only black boy in the school, who is lonely, insecure and abused by his father.  Streep, a very un-trusting nun, suspects that Hoffman has formed an improper relationship with the boy, though she has no real evidence of this.  She confronts Hoffman, who denies any wrong doing; she tells Hoffman that she has spoken to a nun in his previous parish who told her that Hoffman had behaved improperly there.  Hoffman resigns from his current parish and he is immediately appointed by the Bishop to a larger, more important parish.  It turns out that Streep had not actually called his previous parish, and made up the story of improper behaviour.  She takes the position, however, that since he resigned, her allegation must be true.  At the end of the film, Streep confesses to a young nun that, “I have doubts . . . I have such doubts”.

The acting in the film by both Hoffman and Streep is excellent.  In fact, Streep is so cynical and so certain of her position that it is hard to believe that she has any of the doubts she finally expresses.  And Hoffman is so sincere in his denials that it is hard to understand his resignation except as a means to get away from Streep, but there is no hint of this.

Through much of the film, my wife and I were shaking our heads: we had doubts about the credibility of the story line.  We weren’t convinced that this could be a real situation: it seemed too forced.  I realise that it is difficult to create a situation where the audience (or the reader) has doubts about what actually happened, and what it might (or might not) mean.  But this is the essence of the film, and I think that rather than focus on the unique characters of the principal and the priest, it would have been more useful to present more ambiguous evidence of guilt or innocence that the characters can argue over.  As they argue over the evidence, their characters will be revealed, and the dilemma comes alive.  As it is, the only evidence we have is the priest’s friendliness to the boy, the fact that the boy was disciplined for drinking communion wine, and the fact that the priest placed a white shirt in his locker.

As a writer, I consider it absolutely necessary to pause and check the credibility of any twists in the plot, particularly twists which are essential to the central outcomes or messages.   For example, I am working on a novel which includes a sudden, catastrophic disaster which has terrible consequences for the main character.  To make that disaster more plausible and real, earlier in the book, I have the characters talk about minor versions of the disaster.  And, later, before the big disaster, I have the characters actually experience a real, but limited disaster.

One of my concerns in writing Efraim’s Eye was whether the reader would believe that the London Eye is actually vulnerable to attack.  Early in the novel, Efraim plans his attack in detail; there is no room for doubt.

The Iranian Scorpion

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My fourth novel (another thriller) has just been published.

 

 

In brief, this novel involves an undercover agent of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), who with the help of an attractive freelance journalist and a shadowy Taliban official learns the cultivation of the opium poppy in Afghanistan and how to convert opium to heroin.  He follows a heroin shipment into Iran and traces it to New York City where it has been sent by The Iranian Scorpion.  When a bust is made in New York City, The Scorpion orders the agent captured and executed.  Will the agent’s connections  including his father (a US Army general),  the journalist, a 15 year old Afghan boy and some Iranian dissidents be able to save him from execution?

The full synopsis follows: 

Robert Duval, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Agency, volunteers for a reassignment after years of trying to stem the stream of drugs across   Grande.  He is sent toAfghanistan with a mission of developing a strategy to stifle the flow of drugs to Iran and on to the US.  Robert meets Kate Conway,  a freelance journalist in Kabul, and she introduces him to Vizier Ashraf, a shadowy figure in the Taliban, who also has a religious interest in reducing the cultivation of the opium poppy.  In preparation for the Afghan assignment, Robert has developed fluency in Pashto, and, at the urging of the vizier, he disguises himself as Abdullah, as a migrant peasant farmer.  In the village of Nad-e-Ali, in Helmand province, Robert finds work on Azizullah’s large poppy farm.  Under Azizullah’s direction, Robert learns how the poppy is cultivated and its liquid opium is harvested.

After the harvest, Robert, Azizullah and three other field hands take the opium cakes to the owner of a make-shift conversion ‘factory’.  There is a violent falling-out over price, and that night, Azizullah, Robert and the field hands raid the factory, killing the owner and his helpers.  Robert questions the owner’s fifteen-year-old son, Rustam, who knows the chemical conversion processes.  Rustam is taken captive; the chemicals and equipment of the ‘factory’ are hauled away to Nad-e-Ali.

A new ‘factory’ is established in Nad-e-Ali, and Rustam, chained to Robert, begins to convert the opium to white heroin.  Men from Rustam’s village attempt to retake the factory.  They are repulsed, but Rustam fears that his old neighbours will kill him for the shame he has brought on his village, if he returns to it.  As an inducement for Rustam to stay in Nad-e-Ali, Robert persuades Azizullah to find Rustam a wife.  Rustam is married to Padida, a twenty-three-year-old war widow.

General David Duval, Robert’s father, is frustrated with his assignment to Pentagon logistics, and at the urging of his young girlfriend, he accepts an assignment with the International Atomic Energy Agency.  In Tehran he joins an IAEA delegation, which is reviewing the Iranian nuclear program.  David meets ‘Lisa’, the secretive widow of an anti-government activist. ‘Lisa’ is well connected in the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, and is not averse to using her body to obtain evidence of the duplicity of the Iranian government.  She provides David with test data showing that an enrichment level of 42% U-235 has been reached, as well as the wiring diagram of a prototype nuclear weapon.

Azizullah, Robert and Rustam cross the fortified border into Zabol, in southeast Iran, with 15 kg of heroin to find a buyer.  They are able to sell it, but Rustam protests that they have failed to find the principal buyer: The Scorpion.  On a subsequent exploratory trip, Robert and Rustam find that The Scorpion is actually the provincial governor, and they make arrangements for the sale of 25 kg.  Azizullah joins his employees for the sale, which takes place in the governor’s palace in Zahedan, the provincial capital, and is attended by The Scorpion and General Khorhoushi, the commander of the Republican Guard in the province.

Robert is able to learn where the consignment of heroin has been shipped.  He reveals his true identity to Rustam, and persuades the boy to accompany him on a trip to Kerman and Bandar Abbas, where the destination and method of shipment of the heroin are discovered.  Robert advises his boss, James, at the DEA, of the destination: a carpet dealer in New York, who is the Scorpion’s cousin.

The Scorpion guesses that it was Robert who had his cousin arrested, and he orders General Khorhoushi to find the agent.  Robert is captured and imprisoned, but Rustam eludes capture.  Rustam uses Robert’s phone to advise Kate and James of Robert’s capture.  The Scorpion is concerned that if Robert is released, he will inform Tehran of the governor’s involvement in the drugs trade.  Robert is tried by a kangaroo court, found guilty of ‘espionage’ and is sentenced to death. Tehran officials, notified by the US government of The Scorpion’s drugs trafficking, demand that Robert be released to them at once.  The Scorpion sends Tehran a premature message informing them that Robert has been executed. 

David Duval is informed of his son’s execution, and decides to take vengeance.  ‘Lisa’ supplies him with a ‘sticky bomb’.  He travels to Zahedan, and attaches the bomb to what he thinks is the governor’s limousine.  He learns, instead, that he has killed General Khorhoushi.

(You’ll have to read the novel to learn how it ends.)

Efraim’s Eye

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Efraim's Eye

My third novel, Efraim’s Eye, has now been published and is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Briefly, it is about a lone wolf terrorist who has a fanatical hatred of the British, and who is financed by his half-brother.  Efraim intends to destroy the London Eye and kill the eight hundred passengers.  Standing in the terrorist’s way are a middle-aged British financial consultant and a beautiful Israeli charity worker.

A (nearly) full synopsis is as follows:

Efraim has designed a plan to sever the supporting cables of the London Eye, using shaped charges, causing the Eye to fall over into the River Thames.  All 800 passengers will be killed or drowned in their capsules.

But first, he must call on his half-brother to provide the funds with which he will buy the ingredients for the shaped charges.  Having obtained the money, he travels to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya, where he obtains the RDX high explosive, the polymer binder, and he has the casings manufactured.  He kills two Taliban who try to steal from him, and a Russian agent who tries to entrap him.  He visits prostitutes and agonises over the Qur’an’s proscription of ‘unclean women’.

Efraim’s half-brother, Yusuf, is chief executive of the Moroccan chapter of the British charity, Global Youth Enterprise.  GYE provides loans and mentors to young entrepreneurs who have a business idea, but no funding.  The CEO of the British GYE suspects that all is not well in his Moroccan chapter, and he engages Paul, a senior financial consultant, on a pro-bono basis, to assess the Moroccan chapter.

Paul is a well-to-do, widower in his late fifties.  He has worked in large practices, has joined Charitable Consultants LLP., and now has his own practice in the City.

Paul is joined in Marrakesh by Naomi, the operations director of the parent GYE.  An Israeli by birth, in her mid-thirties, and beautiful, she speaks seven languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and English.  In their week-long assessment of the Moroccan GYE, they find much that is wrong, including lack of financial and operating procedures, lax board governance, and rumours of fraud and embezzlement.  But they can’t find proof of illegality.  Yusuf’s evasiveness and hostility frustrate them at every turn.  Efraim appears threateningly, and his malevolence reminds Naomi of events in her childhood.  She draws close to Paul and they become lovers. 

Reportedly, Efraim is a fiery, fundamentalist imam at a minor mosque, and secretly, Paul and Naomi attend Friday prayers.  Paul records Efraim’s talk and Naomi confirms its venomous intent.

On his return to England, Paul informs Sarah, his divorcee lady friend, of his affair with Naomi, and Sarah leaves him.  On hearing Paul’s report, the Accreditation Board of British GYE decides that the books and bank accounts of Moroccan GYE should be properly audited, and Paul is sent back to Marrakesh to perform the audit.  A careful inspection of the bank statements reveals that fraud has been committed, but they lack the evidence of embezzlement until Naomi finds it.  Paul and Naomi secretly hear Efraim speak again; he gives clues that his target is the Eye. Just before fleeing to England, Naomi is abducted and severely beaten by Efraim.

Paul succeeds in convincing Scotland Yard of the seriousness of the threat, and a thorough plan of prevention is set in motion.  The attack is expected on Sunday.  Paul decides that he and Naomi should visit the Eye on Saturday.  They find Efraim hurriedly laying out the shaped charges. 

(You’ll have to read the book to discover the conclusion.)

Time Line

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In many cases, when writing fiction, a writer does not have to be concerned, particularly, about the sequence of events.  One simply has to tell the story in time order, and all will be well.  Sometimes an author will want to interrupt the sequence of events.  For example, a flash-back can be inserted later in the story, and as long as the reader understands that the events refer to an earlier point in time, and they make sense  in that context, it should be fine.  Even a flash-forward into the future is possible.  Fishing in Foreign Seas begins with a prologue which is set it the future, and in it, Elena, the purported author and the daughter of the key characters in the book explains how she came to write the story, much of which is linked to the quite recent past.  The novel ends with an epilogue in which Elena tells the reader what happened to her parents and siblings after the main story concludes.

My two thrillers which will be published soon did not present me with a time line problem.  In each case the story unfolds largely in time sequence.  In Efraim’s Eye, the scene shifts back and forth between Efraim’s activities in preparing the explosives, and the other two (good guy) characters, Paul and Naomi, who will discover his planned attack.  The two streams run parallel and converge at the end.  Efraim has two dreams which act as flash-backs and help the reader understand his character and what motivates him.

The Iranian Scorpion has a somewhat similar structure, which  focuses primarily on Robert’s experiences in Afghanistan and Iran as he learns the means by which opium is converted to heroin and how it is exported through Iran to the US.  Toward the end of the story, a parallel stream opens in which Robert’s father, a retired US Army general, is assigned as a UN weapons inspector in Iran, and becomes involved in attempt to avenge his son’s apparent execution by the Iranians.

For these two novels, it was not difficult to keep the events in a credible sequence.

Apart from the prologue and epilogue, Fishing in Foreign Seas follows a sequential time line.  There are two aspects of the story that required attention to the sequence of events.  First, there are linkages to real events: the  first Gulf War in which Jamie was injured and decorated, and the evolution of the US power generation industry at the  beginning of this century.  Secondly, there is the growth of Jamie’s and Caterina’s children during the course of the story.  One has to be careful that a child who can be no more than six is not behaving like a ten-year-old.

Sin & Contrition had some of  the same challenges at Fishing in Foreign Seas: linkages to real events, and keeping the behaviour of the various children consistent with their ages.  In terms of linkages to real events, for example, LaMarr, as a Marine recruit, fought in Vietnam, and his  subsequent experiences in war zones have to match reality.  There is also the complication in Sin & Contrition that the novel is not structured on a simple time-sequenced basis.  Each chapter deals with a particular sin, and characters move in an out of the story depending on whether or not they are involved in a  that particular sin.  In a broad sense,  however, the characters age from 13 to 62 as the novel  progresses.

The novel that I am currently working on is the (fictional) autobiography of a man who believes he hears the voices of surrogates for God and the devil.  Gradually, he develops a philosophy about life as he experiences great joy and terrible grief.  For the first time, I’ve had to write down a sequential time line as part of my ‘blue print’ for the novel.  This blue print lists key milestones so that even when an event is reported out of sequence (as it might be when one is recalling his life’s events) the events – taken in their overall context – make sense.  Keeping the ages of the characters consistent, tying in real external events, and maintaining order in what might otherwise seem chaotic is my latest challenge.

 

Writing While on Holiday

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I’m on holiday in Sicily at the moment.  It is very pleasant to get out of the constant rain of London.  You may have read that, early this year, the water companies in England issued a ‘hose pipe ban’ meaning that no one was allowed to use a hose (for watering the garden, washing the car, etc.).  It was OK to use a watering can or a bucket, but no hose.  The ban was imposed after two years of  ‘exceptional drought’.  Almost as soon as the ban was imposed, it started to rain, and it has been raining almost constantly since!  During one day last week, there was one month’s rain that fell in one region of England.  There has been a lot of flooding, the reservoirs are overflowing, and the ban has been lifted.

I’ve been in Sicily just over a week, and there has been bright sunshine every day.  No rain.  It’s quite hot: 35 degrees C (97 F) during the day and 25 degrees C (79 F) at night, but there’s no need for air conditioning at night.  There’s always a cool breeze.  In my experience Sicily doesn’t experience the 90%+ humidity that the East Coast of the US often gets in summer.  My sister, who lives in Philadelphia, told me on Sunday that she was in for another ‘100 – 100 day’, meaning 100 degrees F and near 100% humidity.

Here the sea is refreshing, and the food is simple but excellent.

My wife and I are here with my older step-daughter and her three children: two boys, 3 1/2 and 2, and a girl 6 months.  They are lovely kids, but a bit of a handful.  So, with the shopping, gardening, general handyman work, swimming, cooking, and playing with the children, I’ve had very little time to write.  I forgot to mention that I’m reading a novel by Susan Sontag (The Volcano Lover) and also working on a needlepoint belt for my son-in-law.  Moreover, when the kids are in the house, it can be quite noisy and distracting.  As a result, during the first week I was here, I did little more than finish the last few pages of a chapter 0f novel no. 5.

But recently, and happily, I’ve found a solution.  The kids have a ‘quiet time’ from 1:30 until 3:30.  They can either sleep or watch videos.  That time gives me an excellent window in which to work: it’s quiet, too hot to be in the sun, and the shops in Sicily are closed from about 1:30 until 4:30.  (Then they re-open until 8.)  Actually, when the children go to the pool at 3:30, I can stay behind for another hour, avoiding the still intense sun, and writing.

So, the last few days I’ve been able to write two pages a day, which is not far off my pace at home, and besides: my objective had been to finish chapter 7 and write chapter 8 while in Sicily.  I think I might be able to do it!