Beginnings - some samples

BEGINNINGS - PUBLISHED SHORT STORIES

I CELEBRATE MYSELF

The stench was overwhelming, a mixture of mildewed fast-food, feces, rotten fruit, used sanitary towels, crumpled tabloid sheets of the New York Daily News and God knows what. I gagged and fought back the bile that threatened to lead a revolt of my stomach as I crawled over trash in the shadows. If my husband could see me now, he’d have a fit.

NOT TO COUNT THE COST

Up to that time I thought we could cope with anything.  Until the snow struck. It wasn't the predicted heavy snowfall but a freak intense blizzard: ice spicules pummelled the canvas-covered trucks, sent up a deafening rataplan from the vehicle bonnets; the temperature plummeted to minus ten degrees.

THE END IS NIGH

All the churches in the world were full. And the synagogues. And the mosques. As an atheist I wasn’t surprised that all this prayer wasn’t working. Unfortunately, nothing else was, either. Science had no explanation. For five years now there hadn’t been a single baby born. Not one. Plants and flowers no longer bloomed. They didn’t die, they just never blossomed into flower, their leaves a dull grey.

NOURISH A BLIND LIFE

Not long now. My tenacious hold on this mortal coil is weakening but I have no regrets as I look down and for the first time in sixty years see myself, lying there, still trapped within that faithful, old husk. There is no bitterness in me; the poor body served me well enough, impaired as it is: it kept me going until I met her and fifteen years beyond.

OUTCAST

She came out of the godforsaken planet's seasonal mists, struggling under her immense weight. She wasn't welcome.

THE HOUSE OF AUNTY BERENICE

Purple was etched beneath her wide eyes. The slightly built girl in the shadowy doorway wore an eggshell-blue dress and apparently nothing else. Some people answer and look as if they're truly at home, in body and spirit; somehow, she didn't seem to belong, not here in this dilapidated house, not in shadow.

DUTY BOUND

A mountainous landscape populated by dragons strode out of the swathes of sauna steam and approached me. Hiroki Kuroda was tattooed over his entire torso and down to his wrists and calves; at a glance he gave the impression that he was wearing long johns, instead of which he was a walking exhibition of yakuza body art. As a member of the yakuza, a Japanese criminal organization similar to the Mafia, he endured hundreds of hours of pain simply to show that he could. Hiroki waved with his left hand; the little finger was missing at the first knuckle.

ENDANGERED SPECIES

He had large eyes, big ears and, surprisingly, his middle finger was very long on each hand.  ‘He looks cute,’ I said, lowering the photograph of the little aye-aye. His hair was black and he had a long bushy tail. His eyes seemed to be expressing surprise at finding himself in a cage rather than the diminishing rain forests of Madagascar.  Perhaps the daylight conditions affected him too, which wasn’t strange really, as his kind is nocturnal. ‘But,’ I added, shaking my head in mock-concern, ‘my fiancée wants something a bit more exotic. Know what I mean?’

BEGINNINGS – PUBLISHED NOVELS

THE BREAD OF TEARS

God knows, I didn’t mean to kill him. As a rule – how we religious delight in our rules! – nuns don’t kill or maim. I was just approaching the dogleg in the alley when he came rushing round the corner out of the darkness. As he thudded into me, methylated spirit fumes fanned my face in heavy gut-wrenching waves.

MISSION: PRAGUE

Foreword

The agent who called himself Mr. Swann entered the Queen’s Hotel bar at 2PM, just as he had promised. In my business I’d met a few spies and all of them were nondescript. After all, to be a good spy, you need to blend in, be unmemorable. Swann just didn’t fit that category, so I wondered if I was wasting my time on this mysterious appointment…

Chapter 1: August, 1968

Six Soviet officers stood on the balcony overlooking St. Wenceslas Square and the definition through the sniper-scope was so good that Tana Standish could detect the black-heads round their noses and the blood-shot eyes that testified to late-night celebrating with alcohol. She had ten 7.5mm rounds, more than enough to kill all of them.

MISSION: TEHRAN

Foreword

 We were in our usual booth, where we couldn’t be overheard. ‘We can’t keep on meeting like this,’ I said.

Chapter 1: Friday, September 8

Iran

Dressed in his sinister black SAVAK uniform, Captain Hassan Mokhtarian looked every inch the evil man he was. A man who deserved to die. Tana Standish could see him quite clearly through the telescopic sight, even making allowances for the poor light as dusk descended over Tehran and the city’s surrounding mountains, turning the overshadowing snow-capped cone of Mount Damavand a delicate shade of mauve. At least today the city smog didn’t obscure the peak of the volcano which still belched out sulphurous fumes from time to time and killed the odd stray sheep.

THE $300 MAN

‘$300 – that’ll do nicely!’ said Bert Granger as he finished thumbing through the billfold Corbin Molina had been encouraged to hand over. As added persuasion, Bert held a revolver in his other hand.

DEATH AT BETHESDA FALLS

James Thorp eased his sorrel horse to a halt on the outskirts of the small town of Bethesda Falls, which nestled at the base of the mountain’s foothills. He was dressed entirely in black. Black because he was in mourning. Mourning the men he had killed.

THE MAGNIFICENT MENDOZAS

Rope restraints prevented Josefa Mendoza from moving her svelte body out of harm’s way. Wrists and ankles tethered, she felt her insides churn in fearful anticipation. Her cinnamon skin was beaded in sweat. Abruptly, an enormous knife blade thudded into the wood to the left of her ear and tiny grains of sawdust powdered her bare shoulder. The sound was deafening as it hit.

Writing - beginnings change

Recently I was tagged by a FaceBook friend to produce 7 lines from page 7 of my Work In Progress, To Be King.  I managed that, but it set me to thinking, as you do.

The original beginning of the WIP is actually now Chapter 2! The point of this post is to highlight that while writing a novel you do not have to feel that you must stick with the beginning you created. There may not be anything wrong with it, but it is always possible a better alternative may present itself as the story evolves. And of course it’s all subjective anyway. Be flexible.

Here is a snippet from the original beginning.

As you will observe, it is fantasy, set in mythical Floreskand, being the second chronicle after Wings of the Overlord:

CHAPTER 2: Contenders

“To see what is right and not to do it is to want of courage.”

– Dialogues of Meshanel

 
Lord Tanellor draped his once-magnificent scarlet cloak on top of the overseer’s bloodied mutilated body, and then raised himself into an upright position. He glanced to the crest of the steep, striated Oxor Rift. Through a thin miasma of blue dust, the sun flared dazzlingly, casting various shades of mauve and purple for a brief instant, and then it dropped out of sight behind the jagged rock ridge. He ran the back of a hairy hand across his creased brow, tired and sickened by the senseless death that surrounded him. Death in war he could understand, and even condone, but this, this made his blood boil. Negligence killed these men. And, by his insistence that the miners worked longer shifts during the Kcarran carnival, Saurosen had murdered them as surely as if he’d struck them down himself.

            A few marks away, the towering broad-shouldered Aurelan Crossis busied himself counting corpses. Beyond, Bayuan Aco, the sergeant of the palace guard and ten of his men hauled bodies from the gaping maw of the mine. At the entrance shrine, the Daughter of Arqitor prayed intermittently and also offered a pitcher of water to the men.

            “What’s the tally now?” he asked in a weary voice.

            Aurelan did not raise his flinty grey eyes from his grisly task. He jotted figures in his dog-eared tally book. His voice boomed, a deep bass: “Seventy-four.”

            “So many?” he whispered, in despair. “I fear there are more to be recovered yet.”

            Aurelan shut his book. “Sadly, these are not just numbers in a tally book. I know these men. Two of them even have brothers in my palace guard.” He eyed Tanellor. “Lord, we do not have the time to dig out any more.” Aurelan then stepped over the corpses and moved to Lord Tanellor’s side. His hair was short, cropped, and coppery, the lobe was missing from his right ear, the mouth a cruel line in a pitted face. An old scar ran along the left side of his neck, one of many tokens from his fighting days, Tanellor surmised.

***

And so on…

As a beginning, I think it worked, thrusting the reader into a situation that raised a number of questions. I haven’t shown Tanellor arriving with his men, or the actual explosion. It is colourful, intense with imagery, and reveals tragedy and character. But I felt that here was a missed opportunity; I wanted to study the miners before the tragedy; and I perceived that by doing so there would ultimately prove to be a link to the arcane Underpeople my co-author alluded to frequently… So, the new added beginning starts thus:

Chapter 1: Dust

“Everything in the past died yesterday;

everything in the future was born today.”

- The Tanlin, 204.10

Caged purblind birds sang, their high-pitched tones echoing through the maze of the Oxor cobalt mine tunnels. A mixture of tree trunk and hartwood props groaned as they supported the rocky ceilings.

            “The king can’t deny us our festival,” growled Rujon Sos. His words echoed in this small underground amphitheatre that joined several tunnels. His bare muscular torso gleamed with a sweaty sheen. Though this section only accommodated twelve miners, all of whom now stopped hammering at the rock walls, there were six other dark shadowy entrances to tunnels where more men hacked at the rock and sweated, their implements echoing along the passageways.

            “Like the rest of us, you’re just a miner, a vassal of King Saurosen,” snapped Dasse Wenn, his rat’s nest of a beard dust-covered. His beefy features twisted in distaste, grey eyes full of hate. Sos suspected that Dasse was a weasel – albeit a short brawny weasel – and regularly reported to the king’s minister anything that might earn him a few base coins.

            Saurosen IV had persistently deprived his people of their little pleasures; and now he had banned their annual Carnival. Considering these festivities had taken place without fail annually for 1062 years, commemorating the crowning of Lornwater’s first King, Kcarran, Sos thought the people had taken the edict commendably well, though he doubted if they’d abide by it, merely paying lip-service. He couldn’t comprehend why Dasse was so passive about the king’s contempt for his people.

            “We must withdraw our labour, teach Saurosen a lesson!” Sos’s strident voice echoed through the smalt mine. The tunnel to his left went quiet, save for the chirping of songbirds.

            “The king doesn’t take lessons from minions like us!” Dasse said in a guttural tone.

            Everywhere glimmered with a blue-tinged buttery glow as the candles flickered. Most candles were placed on rock ledges, but a handful of miners wore cloth caps with wax candles fastened to their brims. Each man simply wore a breach-cloth and thick, boiled leather boots, as the temperature deep in the mine was so intense that any clothing would become sopping wet and prove cumbersome and heavy.

            “You miss the point, Dasse,” snapped Sos. “Hear that silence? Most of our shift has downed tools already.”

            “The overseer and his men won’t stand for it. He’ll send for Lord Tanellor, who will bring troops, and they will force those fools back into the mine. We should have no part in that!” Dasse coughed on fetid air that was tainted a faint blue. “The vent shafts are next to useless!” His thin lips curled back in a sneer, revealing buck teeth. “I don’t fancy my head on a spike, Rujon Sos.”

            “That’s often the fate of Saurosen’s spies!” Sos riposted, rubbing a hand over the stubble on his square jaw.

            The others audibly gasped.

            “You’ll regret those words, Rujon Sos!

            “I have witnesses, Dasse. If you’re threatening me…”

            Dasse laughed, arms gesturing. “I’d rather work down here than die. Saurosen can have all the smaltglass goblets he wants, so long as I have a full pewter one in the Pick and Shovel when our shift’s done!”

            “That’s defeatist talk.” Sos ground his teeth together, turned and, gripping his hammer and chisel, scanned the ten other miners. “What say you all?”

            Only murmurs reached him, the whites of the fearful eyes of his fellow miners gleaming. He knew the majority agreed with him; but they also knew that Dasse wasn’t to be trusted.

            He jabbed his chisel at the nearest wooden prop. “Look, at this cankered wood, it’s not fit. We’re working in a death-trap. Lord Tanellor’s begged and pleaded for new material, but Saurosen won’t countenance it!”

            “He’s always been mean with his money, that one,” said a miner on Sos’s right.

            “Aye, and with his favours, as well,” said another.

            “What favours?” another demanded, derisively.

            Sos nodded, and persisted. “Despots like Saurosen can’t be allowed–”

            “Allowed?” Abruptly, he was barged by Dasse, shoved to the rock-strewn floor. He felt a stinging sensation across his cheek and brow and stared up into the hate-filled visage of Dasse. His hand came away covered in blood. Dasse brandished his chisel, sitting astride him.

            Sos twisted and heaved before Dasse could deliver another blow, thrusting Dasse off him. Most of the others shouted encouragement to Sos, though not all, he noticed.

            He scrambled to his feet, gripping his hammer; his chisel was discarded somewhere.

Now he felt his back starting to sting: his left shoulder-blade, which broke his fall.

            The pair circled one another. The first heavy impact had loosened Dasse’s long jet-black hair and it now trailed over his massive shoulders.

            “Sweet Arqitor, stop!” called one man.

            “Stop it before someone gets hurt!” another shouted, but neither Sos nor Dasse listened.

            Suddenly, Dasse rushed him, shrieking unintelligibly, wielding his chisel.

            Sos side-stepped smartly, and then slammed his hammer into the side of Dasse’s shoulder as he passed, and swiftly leaped onto the man’s back as he tumbled against a pit-prop.

            The wooden post groaned and the rock above crumbled, small pebbles skittering to the ground.

            “Stop it, both of you!” a man shrieked. “You’ll bring the whole mine down on us! Daughters of Arqitor preserve us!”

            Snatching, grasping, clawing, the pair rolled, hands slipping on sweaty skin, slicing with hammer and chisel, crying out in shrill tones as the tools sank into flesh. Then, within seconds, they both rolled against a small open conduit that collapsed at their pressure and it created a wide entrance that sloped down into blackness.

***

And so on…

One of a variety of hooks a writer can employ for the reader is conflict. In this case I created conflict between Sos and Dasse, which will worsen until they become trapped after the explosion. The scene also contains action, to move the story faster. I touched upon affairs pertaining to Lornwater, its citizens and their ruler, King Saurosen IV. Here, too, a little further in, I could introduce Tanellor and hint at other happenings and intrigues. All before Tanellor walks among the dead (now Chapter 2).

Significantly, these events begin on the same day as the beginning of Wings of the Overlord. It is a parallel separate storyline (as Wings is a self-contained tale that has links and threads to be developed later, some in To Be King, others in subsequent books).

Writers spend a lot of time on the beginning of their novels. It makes sense, to draw in the reader. Beginnings are fretted over more than any other part of a novel – more than the ending, even; because that beginning has been there to tinker with for the duration of the book.

My advice is: ‘…beginnings and endings are very important. But don’t fret over them too much – at least until the book is written. Then you can decide how you want to shape the beginning and ending.’ – Write a Western in 30 Days (p142).

 
As you can see here, an original beginning was eventually replaced (but not discarded). Now that I have the shape of the book planned and I’m 68,000 words into it, it is unlikely that I will alter it again; but it’s always a possibility.

Wings of the Overlord – by Morton Faulkner, hardback (paperback due in December)

 

Amazon COM here

Amazon UK here

Write a Western in 30 Days – by Nik Morton, paperback and e-book

Amazon COM here

Amazon UK here

Some other posts on writing beginnings:

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2015/01/writing-beginnings.html

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2013/09/beginning-hook_16.html

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Writing - Beginnings

How to start that novel is one of several perennial questions posed to writers – and even asked of writers by themselves!  It’s particularly relevant to genre writers.

There is no right or wrong way, though certainly experience suggests there are good ways to start.  Books published in the past were aimed at readers with perhaps more leisure time, so the authors could indulge themselves and ease the reader in gently, with description or even some philosophising.

Bloomsbury is publishing Dennis Wheatley’s many books in digital format (though controversially edited for the ‘modern reader and improved pace’…) Wheatley was a massive best-seller for about forty years. A good number of his books began like this:

The Duke de Richleau and Rex Van Ryn had gone into dinner at eight o’clock, but coffee was not served till after ten.

This doesn’t pull the reader in at all; but its familiarity seems somehow comforting: the heroes of so many adventures since The Forbidden Territory can still find time for a convivial evening – before the next adventure begins!

Nowadays, however, most experienced writers advocate not beginning a genre book with mundane events – a meal, for example, or the weather. Get into the action.

With short stories, that’s good advice too; where word-count is limited, there’s little room for atmosphere-building. I’ve tried to do that with my novels as well; here, for example, are the beginnings of four recent books:

Catalyst – 1^st in ‘The Avenging Cat’ series

 

Rock climbing was much easier than this, Cat Vibrissae thought. She did that for a hobby – though never at night – and enjoyed it. But climbing the outside of a modern building was something else. How those people could do it for fun was beyond her. What were they called? Stegophilists. Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates started it when they scaled the college buildings in the late 1800s – always at night. She was used to the adrenaline rush of climbing with bare hands and feet on cliffs above rugged rocks and aggressive waves. But this was very different. Tonight the effects seemed more pronounced: she was sure that she could feel the increased heart rate and her gut constricting. And her mouth was very dry. Still, if she was going to fulfil her vow to her father, she had no choice. This was the only way to penetrate the seventeenth floor office of Rick Barnes.

Catacomb- 2^nd in ‘The Avenging Cat’ series- due for e-book/paperback release 24 April

Despite the drizzle, due to the residual heat of the day the roof sent steam spiralling. A light breeze from the sea spat rain against Cat as she swung over the lip of the roof’s guttering. Suspended at full stretch, she landed with both feet on the narrow ledge. Her Nike soles provided sufficient purchase on the marble surface. She turned and straightened; her backpack pressed against the dark window. She was already drenched, her black jeans and cotton T-shirt clinging uncomfortably; tied in a ponytail, her dyed blonde hair would seem dark.

            June was the start of summer here and the forecast had been accurate enough: halfway through the month and this was the second day that it had rained. Now, she looked around. The evenings were not dark. Chuck Marston, her instructor had inculcated into her that if she had a choice: when at risk of being in full view, she should scale a building in wet weather. Her target apartment block qualified in that regard, as it was on the Promenade des Anglais, overlooking the beach and the sea, so on this occasion the rain, while dispiriting, was welcome. It averted the inquisitive eyes of any passing pedestrians.

The Prague Papers- 1^st in the Tana Standish series

Six Soviet officers stood on the balcony overlooking St. Wenceslas Square and the definition through the sniper-scope was so good that Tana Standish could detect the blackheads round their noses and the blood-shot eyes that testified to late-night celebrating with alcohol. She had ten 7.5mm rounds, more than enough to kill all of them.

      Tana had a steady grip but there was no risk of weapon-shake anyway as the new Giat F1 rifle rested on its bipod on the windowsill. As this weapon was fresh from the French production line, it could not be traced back to England.
      Dressed in his brown-grey greatcoat with bright red lapel flashes, General of the Army Ivan Pavlovsky cocked his head to the left while he listened attentively to his commanders. He was thickset, with small dark eyes and a pug nose whose nostrils bristled with hair.
      Try as she might, she could not detect any thoughts from the officers. But she was able to lip-read. They were in a self-congratulatory mood, since the invasion had gone well, with only a few Czech and Slovak deaths. Vodka had indeed flowed last night.

The Tehran Text- 2^nd in the Tana Standish series – due for e-book release 6 Feb

Dressed in sinister black, SAVAK Captain Hassan Mokhtarian looked every inch the evil man he was. A man who deserved to die.

       Tana Standish could see him quite clearly through the telescopic sight, even making allowances for the poor light as dusk descended over Tehran and the city’s surrounding mountains, turning the overshadowing snow-capped cone of Mount Damavand a delicate shade of mauve. At least today the city smog didn’t obscure the peak of the volcano, which still belched out sulphurous fumes from time to time and killed the odd stray sheep.
        Hassan exuded an air of danger with his pitted complexion and deep-set ebony eyes under a prominent forehead ridge.
        Standing in the open doorway of his villa, he exhaled smoke through his nostrils and dropped the Marlboro cigarette to the lightly coloured marble-tiled step, grinding it under the toe of his boot. His eyes glinted, as if he took pleasure in the destruction of even small things.

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***

You might also detect a few similarities running through each particular series – the climbing motif in the Cat books, and the gun-sight in the Tana books. A variation on the theme; echoes, if you will.

The Tana book beginnings are exposed further in an earlier post:

 
http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/recurrent-images-beginnings-and-echoes.html

So, my advice, for what it’s worth: begin with an event that grips the reader, poses questions, or conveys the tenor of the tale from the outset. Catalyst tells us immediately that Cat is on a dangerous mission, to fulfil a promise. Catacomb gives us more of the same, and highlights Cat’s expertise. Papers begins in 1968, Czechoslovakia, and shows us that Tana is a trained sniper and is capable of reading thoughts. Text emphasises Tana’s cold-blooded ability to target evildoers. I would hope that with a few words the reader is also placed in those tense scenes.

All of the above are/will be published by Crooked Cat Publishing, purchased from :

Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here

Beginning – the hook

I’ve said it a number of times, but it’s worth repeating: beginnings of stories and novels are important. They’re the hook for the reader. 

Many film directors appreciate this too. Pull the audience in quickly and then never let go. I’ve sat through a number of movies where the start was inauspicious, plodding, revealing nothing about the characters, the environment or the story theme – and then found that eventually the story (at last!) takes hold. Nowadays, that leisurely approach rarely works in the written word. The audience, the reader, needs to be sucked in by the first paragraph or two. He or she isn’t going to invest precious time in something that doesn’t intrigue, excite interest or raise questions.

That doesn’t mean the writer should spend ages on the beginning, honing it, striving to ‘get it right’ – the beginning might well not resolve itself until the work is completed.

I’m pleased to announce that I have signed a contract with Crooked Cat Publishing for Spanish Eye, a collection of short stories about Leon Cazador, private eye. The image is taken from the Crooked Cat Facebook page announcement (it isn’t the cover): https://www.facebook.com/crookedcatpublishing

Spanish Eye makes a great companion volume to my book Blood of the Dragon Trees, set in Tenerife, also published by Crooked Cat.

These stories were previously published by Solstice, but the contract expired; an extra short story has been added, so now there are twenty-two first person tales, a couple of them award-winners, all of them previously published in magazines (though lengthened in most cases). Here below are samples of a selection of beginnings from the collection (this post would be too long to include all of them!).
 

Relic Hunters

Angel Ramos held his breath as he carefully unlatched then lifted the ornate lid off the rosewood box. A distinctive smell emerged like a palpable thing, together with a fine miasma of dust that floated in the sunbeams slanting through the hotel window. It was the aroma of old parchment or vellum that harboured the dust of centuries.

Night Fishing

Dusk fled quickly, as it does out here in the south of Spain. The warm night air was humid and still. The full moon’s reflection glinted from the calm Mediterranean. Behind me, cicadas chirruped but I barely heard them as I was concentrating on the little fishing boat out at sea, with its nightlight casting a circle of white around the stern. From the cliff top, I watched the three of them through 10x50 binoculars, and my fears were confirmed. Old Salvador Molina needed his strong sons to haul the net in because it seemed to contain a heavy object. My heart sank.
            Sometimes, the night of unreason lurks in dark recesses, waiting to cloak the good earth, and it would seem that even this honest fisherman was not immune to the importuning of this evil night.

Grave Concerns

The mass grave by the roadside was not the first in Spain to be unearthed in the last four years and it wouldn’t be the last. On each side were carobs and bright yellow and blue wild flowers, a tranquil contrast to the macabre sight before us. Men in the trench wore gauze masks over their mouths as they lifted out human bones and strips of clothing and placed them reverently on a length of tarpaulin. Behind them stood an idle mechanical earth-digger, while beyond the fields of rosemary and artichokes rose the rugged mountains, mute witnesses to what had happened about sixty-seven years ago.
        
Off Plan
I was wearing a false moustache, grey coloured contact lenses, and my hair was dyed black. My brother, Juan, wouldn’t recognize me. In fact, I had difficulty recognizing me. I was no longer Leon Cazador but Carlos Ortiz Santos. Sometimes it was necessary to wear a disguise and take on a fake name to hoodwink the ungodly. This was one of those times.

Endangered Species

He had large eyes, big ears and, surprisingly, his middle finger was very long on each hand. “He looks cute,” I said, lowering the photograph of the little aye-aye. His hair was black, and he had a long bushy tail. His eyes seemed to be expressing surprise at finding himself in a cage rather than the diminishing rain forests of Madagascar. Perhaps the daylight conditions affected him, too, which wasn’t strange really, as his kind is nocturnal. “But,” I added, shaking my head in mock concern, “my fiancée wants something a bit more exotic. Know what I mean?”

Big Noise

“You’ve come to the right person, Mr. Santos!” Darren Atkins said, speaking louder than was necessary in the tapas bar that overlooked the Plaza Mayor. “My product is the best on Spain’s south coast, take my word for it! I’m the big noise around here!” Every sentence tended to end with an exclamation. This self-styled important person was big in other respects as well. Even when I use my real name, Leon Cazador, rather than my undercover alias of Carlos Santos, I stand six feet high in my open-toed sandals; yet Atkins was a couple of inches taller than me. His Hawaiian-style short-sleeved shirt bulged because he had big muscles and shoulders. Because he had shaved his head, his big ears appeared more prominent and tended to press forward like little radar. I wondered if that feature prompted him to go into the acoustics business.

Duty Bound

A mountainous landscape populated by dragons strode out of the swathes of sauna steam and approached me. Hiroki Kuroda was tattooed over his entire torso and down to his wrists and calves. At a glance, he gave the impression that he was wearing long johns; instead, he was a walking exhibition of yakuza body art. Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man sprang to mind, but this was no fantasy. As a member of the yakuza, a Japanese criminal organization similar to the Mafia, Hiroki endured hundreds of hours of pain simply to show that he could. He waved with his left hand. The little finger was missing at the first knuckle.

Burning Issue

Landscape defines some towns and cities. And even the people and the small mountain town of Cocentaina were perhaps typical. So I thought as I drove Jacinto Alvarez and his wife Puri along the A7 on our approach. The town had been under siege more than once in its history and I reflected that that was how the Alvarez couple felt right now.

Pigeon Hearted

Fireworks in daytime are not particularly spectacular, but that doesn’t deter my Spanish compatriots from setting them off. The clear blue sky was momentarily sprayed with silver and red stars as the single rocket exploded above the town square. Minutes afterwards, a profusion of colours darted above our heads, but this display wasn’t the transient starburst of more pyrotechnics. The palette that soared in the sky came from garishly painted pigeons released from patios, balconies, rooftops, and gardens. In the next few minutes, the number of male birds increased to perhaps seventy.

I hope they've given you a taster for the book, due out later this year!

The late Elmore Leonard famously stated ‘never begin any story with the weather’. He meant get into the character or the action immediately. I’d agree with that – though there are other considerations. Raise a question that the reader wants answered, create a visual image that lodges in the reader’s head. The above examples probably do some of that, I believe.
 

So, that’s the end of the beginning – for now.