As editing continues on FORCES, something a little different. Regular readers will know I write songs, (See Yotube for a small selection; EMILY, HOME, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE?) and have a 16-track demo CD of what I call 'film-noir romantic' piano ballads, titled SINGLE MAN'S DIARY. Anyway, after recording a rough 'live' demo of a new song of mine called THE KIND OF GUY I AM a couple of days ago, I had too much time on my hands last night and put together a video for it (of sorts) See Youtube here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn-Zyob_hiY&feature=youtu.be
Best wishes
Andrew
PS. FORCES feels like a good one.
Monday, 25 February 2013
Monday, 11 February 2013
First rough draft of FORCES complete and sample!
The first very rough draft of my 13th teen fiction novel, the supernatural thriller, FORCES was completed today, although weeks of polishing, editing and proofreading lie ahead. I couldn't be happier with the way it's turned out, and I don't say that lightly. As some people have already expressed some interest, I have polished some sample pages from the penultimate chapter. See below.
10
___
THE
STRIDER COMETH INDEED
It was indeed a
different London around them as they staggered through that blistering blizzard
which greeted them upon leaving Crates House.
The particularly
large-flaked snow, combined with its frenzied speed of fall had quietly but
profoundly re-sculpted the urban landscape that both men had been so blindingly
accepting of. Now they walked, hands
shielding eyes, through a white world of undulating drifts and white-coated
figures, of which there seemed to be a surprising number, and all hurrying too
quickly to be comfortable. Had something
happened?
Both men reached the end of Hatchett Lane and turned into Madeleine Road where Rupert said he was parked. In doing so, they passed the same bus shelter that John and the group of people once stupidly called the Red Liners had caught a bus to their collective slow-enacting doom a lifetime ago. Now underneath it huddled a group of people numbering perhaps fifteen, of varying gender, age and shades of white-coating, so they were clearly not all acquainted with each other. Instead, they stood huddled around a younger man holding an I-PAD, all looking at something, muttering and shaking their heads. Their expressions, as much as their grouping, made John and Rupert stop as one. You just had to.
Both men reached the end of Hatchett Lane and turned into Madeleine Road where Rupert said he was parked. In doing so, they passed the same bus shelter that John and the group of people once stupidly called the Red Liners had caught a bus to their collective slow-enacting doom a lifetime ago. Now underneath it huddled a group of people numbering perhaps fifteen, of varying gender, age and shades of white-coating, so they were clearly not all acquainted with each other. Instead, they stood huddled around a younger man holding an I-PAD, all looking at something, muttering and shaking their heads. Their expressions, as much as their grouping, made John and Rupert stop as one. You just had to.
“What’s happened?” said
Rupert loudly, and in a voice which demanded an answer.
“Plane crash in
Surbiton. But it’s weird! Look!” said the young guy, muffled by a blue
tartan scarf draped across his lower jaw.
The group shifted slightly, some giving up and moving away unhappily,
clearly having seen enough, and John and Rupert were allowed a reasonably close
look at the I-PAD. It would be a lie to
say both men weren’t also glad to briefly escape that eye-hurting, face-numbing
snow under the bus shelter’s protection.
Upon its roof, the snow already sat a foot thick easily.
John and Rupert wiped
their eyes and peered at the screen. It
was showing the BBC’s news channel on the Internet, repeating over and over on
loop a piece of eleven-second cameraphone footage. Beneath it scrawled a banner
reading;
Bizarre
mid-air explosion above Surbiton.
The footage scratched
and played again. It showed a
low-flying Harrier jet cruising through the white snow-choked sky, the tops of
grey buildings just below it in the distance, while excited young voices
commented on it.
Bang! The Harrier exploded in mid-air, but exploded
as though it had hit the side of a building, since the flames instantly spread
up and down against a hard line, as though against an invisible surface. ‘Bizarre’ was the kindest word. It....was awful, and yet confusing. The young phone’s owner and his friends gasped
and shrieked, and the utterly wrecked plane fell for what seemed like forever
to land across a mercifully empty roundabout, hitting the centre almost like a
grotesque bullseye.
The now-shaking
cameraphone held on the flaming wreckage for a moment, while screams grew in the background. The
footage scratched and played again.
Suddenly BREAKING NEWS blinked across the feed,
and the rather dishevelled and dark-eyed newsreader said something about a
different local eye-witness in Islington
“reporting a phenomenon that might relate to the mid-air incident that
occurred fifteen minutes ago over Surbiton, although that cannot be
confirmed. I repeat, this cannot be
confirmed.”
The screen cut to a
proper TV news camera swinging from the black rising clouds in the distance to
a rather wild-eyed, very fat middle-aged woman, barely visible inside a huge
dark green overcoat (nearly white from the snow), giant brown woollen scarf and
black woollen hat pulled low.
Occasionally the camera operator had to rather violently wipe the camera
lens to clear the snow that fell upon it. The microphone picked up ambulance
sounds and heavy voices shouting in the background. The woman’s voice was croaky and strained,
like someone who had been speaking too loud, too hard, for too long in such
weather. Her emotional state was sufficiently rendered clear by the affected
nature of her speech pattern though. She
seemed to have trouble with volume control.
“I’m telling you
there’s something THERE! I HEARD
it move. I saw my garden shed just
demolished right in front me! Not just the shed but for yards about it the
ground was all sort of ...compressed! And
I mean crushed flat! FLAT! Then I heard it pass over my house, I HEARD IT! I couldn’t see it but I HEARD IT! FELT IT! There’s
something THERE! OUT THERE! Oh God somebody do
something!”
The woman violently
turned and wandered off in the manner of someone having no particular
destination but unable to stay still. The camera followed her jerky stumbling
progress through the snow for another five seconds and then went black.
The footage cut back to
the newsreader in the studio, who touched his earpiece, looking
ever-so-slightly frustrated, which, for a BBC newsreader, suggested immense
frustration at what he was hearing.
“Do we...? No? No
more?”
“Let’s go,” said Rupert quietly into John’s ear, making him jump. “It’s a direct line from Surbiton to Islington if Red Corners is your destination, and Islington is only three miles away.”
“Let’s go,” said Rupert quietly into John’s ear, making him jump. “It’s a direct line from Surbiton to Islington if Red Corners is your destination, and Islington is only three miles away.”
“All for Joe,”
whispered John to only himself. “Coming
for poor Joe.”
“LET’S GO!” shouted
Rupert, making everybody jump this time, and he gave a vicious yank on John’s
arm, nearly pulling him off his feet. It
worked though, and John carried through the momentum into a brisk pace beside
Rupert.
*
* * *
The drive to Grosvenor
Lane was educational.
For a start, it was
more of a series of controlled skids, born on an endless, horrendously
straining number of stop-starts amongst a city falling apart practically and
emotionally. What should have taken
twenty-five minutes took nearly an hour, and that was only due to the endless amount
of dangerous decisions made by Rupert behind the wheel, who had never had
either his impressive skill, self-control or equally impressive giant black 4X4
put so majorly to the test.
Every road, lane,
pavement, street and alley (and he took all at some point) was adrift with high
angular hills of snow, or trampled brownish slush-piles. The streets were choked with cars populated
by wretched, pale, strained faces, and more and more, simply abandoned
cars. John peered out from his window in
the high vehicle, and personally witnessed perhaps seven or eight violent
confrontations, another three or so emotional breakdowns by tearful people
leaving their vehicles, and, perhaps ten cases of crashed vehicles. Some were serious; completely wrecked
right-offs but with no victims visible.
One was burning brightly but mercifully both the doors were open. Others were simply crunched or scraped just
enough to put them out of commission or initiate a shouting match/scrap between
the owners, creating further pile-ups and anguish behind them.
Rupert drove hard but
accurately and as effectively as any man could conceivably do under such
circumstances. He went up along
pavements, cut across parks, and even drove up a flight of concrete steps
outside a courthouse just to cut across to another street.
More significantly
though, huge plumes of black smoke rose now from perhaps ten different
locations across the city from where John sat.
Passing through Central London, they passed the Gherkin to see a huge
chunk taken out of one side about a third of the way up. Rubble, fluorescent warning tape and flashing
lights cluttered the base. Men in
yellow high-viz jackets stretched tight over heavily padded winter coats seemed
to be everywhere across the city. The
overwhelming impression was of a society trying to empty a rapidly flooding
cruise ship with a tablespoon. Some
things are just too much. Too big.
But the weather was
changing also.
The light was fading,
but earlier in the day than it should, possibly because of the giant banks of
charcoal cloud drifting across that formerly ice-white sky. It seemed to be getting darker with
every couple of minutes, although John didn’t trust any of his senses anymore,
so fatigued was he. Distant flashes of
lightning? Hard to say. Could have been
more explosions.
As Rupert snarled to
himself, trying to keep the 4X4 moving across a Trafalgar Square covered in
shiftless crowds of people dressed so heavily they seemed to have lost their
humanity and just become chess pieces, John closed his eyes to it all and rested
his head against the icy window, wincing slightly at the cold, but not really
capable of any big reactions of any kind.
As he did, he dimly
tried to recall his life before the trip to the Professor Laurence J.
Carrington Museum; a life that had seemed so entirely conquered, dull and
endless. He tried to recall the kind of
person he’d been back then, but his brain couldn’t do it. Wasn’t functioning
too well at anything at the moment, give the fatigue he suffered. He could
recall the interior of that living room though, surrounded by all those silly
models and props from a childish TV series.
Then he remembered, one by one, the faces of all the Red Liners, the
guys who’d stood about him because he’d told them to. A list of anti-social soldiers now dead
because their general had thought breaking into a Museum devoted to a
children’s author would be a laugh.
Would be as free of consequences as anything else that the shiftless,
angry young John Clay had done in his life.
Then his memory shifted
to the footage of that TV interview. He recalled David Frost’s rather smug
manner openly shrinking in front of that suddenly cold and cutting response
from the previously uncomfortable academic-turned-author. Yes, there had been something behind that old
man image, with his cardigan and comfortable slacks. Something so powerful that his equally strong
and piercing bombshell of a wife had been happy to wait nine years for her
fiancĂ©’ to come back to her. This line
of memory triggered the old question again, but never with as much ferocity.
Where the hell did
Professor Laurence J. Carrington go during those missing nine years?
And now, if he focused
on it, he could feel the coldness from the pendant, even through the wrapping
of that T-shirt, even through the heavy material of his coat and jumper.
A flash of lighting
behind his closed eyelids stirred him grudgingly back to the present. A moment later the 4X4 jostled heavily off
something and crunched the metal on the left hand side somewhat, forcing his
bleary strained eyes to open. The car
continued though.
“Grosvenor Lane,”
muttered Rupert, and never had a street name sounded so much like a declaration
of war.
They turned a corner
slowly, and were almost immediately stopped by a crazy mess of abandoned or
dented high-price cars parked higgledy-piggledy all over the street head of
them. Rupert smoothly steered up onto
the pavement and the car came to a stop.
Suddenly the hard, seasoned pro that Rupert always represented vanished,
and Rupert rested his head upon the wheel, breathing out a succession of
shuddering sighs, trying to gather himself after the nightmare journey. As he did so, John stared out of that window,
dumbly rubbing this breath-mist off the glass every so often.
Grosvenor Lane had
changed since his late visit. There was
a terrific amount of damage to the formerly elegant and astronomically
expensive houses in this ruined street.
Windows were dark, gaping, shattered holes in nearly every frame. A large number of slates had slid from most
of the roofs, exposing the underbeams.
There was a fire flickering behind one nearest to him, the actual room
moderately on fire inside, yet nobody was in sight. None of those abandoned cars had a visible
occupant, but a large number had their doors open. Whatever force had done all this damage had
driven people away long ago...and driven them quickly.
The sky above the
street was perhaps at its darkest here, indeed, as it broke up into more
fragment shards of grey and white in the great distance, an argument could be
made for this being the epicentre if one was so inclined to think so. John was.
They both got out of
the car, neither shutting the doors, both staring and stumbling across the
slushy surface to stand beside each other in the centre of that white-sprayed
street, the burnt sky above cracking every so often in a jerky flash of
lighting, although other flashes could be seen far in the distance, and no
thunder had yet been heard.
And there was no wind
here. That was the most powerful
thing. In fact it was almost silent.
Yes, the distant sounds of the city were very faintly there in the background,
but they seemed muffled beyond understanding here. The loudest sound seemed to be the men’s own
breathing, and the snow crunching under their boots where they found fresher
fallings.
But there was more than
that. Without a sound, there was the
palpable, almost painful sense of being too close to Something, like an insect
on that sinking cruise ship crawling across the top of one of its gigantic throbbing
engines. John and Rupert felt it in
the air, in their hair, in their fingertips, humming through their bones.
“What is this?”
whispered Rupert, looking as though the times were changing his character
faster than he could keep up with. Yes,
if that insect upon that giant engine could make a facial expression, it might
be similar.
“I...should go in
alone,” said John, not liking how loud his voice sounded, nor how little it
sounded like the voice he was used to.
It sounded rough and hoarse, an old man’s voice. The kind of voice belonging to the angry
drunks that occasionally drifted into The Court.
Rupert looked like he
was about to say something and then didn’t.
He merely nodded and then; “I’ll walk with you to the gate.”
“Thanks.”
And the two men trudged
off through that slushy two hundred yards, negotiating their way through the
jammed cars and open doors. John tried
very hard not to look in them, not wanting to take the chance that his
assumption that they bore no occupants was wrong. After all, how much had little John Clay been
wrong about lately?
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