Category: Thriller

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – O’ Brother Where Art Thou?

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 5 – O’ Brother Where Art Thou?

 
Commander Tom Knox sat on one side of a large oak conference table in Naval Station New York’s Reagan Boardroom. His duffel and backpack were on the seat and floor beside him. An athletically thin, middle-aged woman with thick, flowing, hip-length blonde hair sat across from him in a sharp black suit with lapel pins, a service patch he didn’t recognize, and neither a name tag nor an obvious place for one on her suit jacket. Two younger men, both sandy-haired, both clean shaven, both dressed as she sans the lapel pin, sat on either side of her with briefcases open on the table.

They stared into their open briefcases. She stared at him and he stared back. “What department are you with again?”

She ignored the question. “The San Jacinto is equipped with the latest Aegis, that’s correct, isn’t it?”

He looked down at the highly polished table top for a moment. “What’s on the ship’s manifest?”

The man on her left pulled a stapled, much handled report from his briefcase and slid across to Knox. It stopped right in front of him.

“You learn how to do that in school?”

The woman nodded at the paper without taking her eyes off him. “Is that the paper you submitted directly to the Joint Chiefs?”

He scanned his name under the title The Need for Confirmation of Objective Sans KeyHole, ALWYS, and Related Systems. “You reading other people’s mail again?”

“You subverted the Chain-of-Command on purpose?”

“You here to slap my hands?”

“Is your laptop available?”

He pulled it from his backpack. One of the woman’s aides reached across the table for it. “May I?”

“It’s government property. Go for it. For that matter, so am I. What do you want it for?”

The aide reached under the table to a network hub and ran a cable from the hub to the laptop. Tom could see the glare of the screen on the aide’s face as it came to life. The aide nodded at the woman and she nodded back without taking her eyes from Tom.

“You don’t blink much, do you, Miss…?”

“Are you familiar with MK-Ultra?”

Knox laughed.

The other aide slid paperwork and grainy black-and-white photos across the table to him. He glanced at them and laughed again. “These taken with Brownie Instamatics?”

“In all combat situations, there are certain combatants recognized as being able to tell where the enemy is, their number, their weaponry, whether a mission will succeed or fail, who will and won’t survive a mission, sometimes more. When these combatants are compromised or otherwise unavailable, missions suffer, people are lost.” She read where an aide pointed on his laptop screen. “You’ve met one or two during your career, correct?”

You must be a subscriber (Muse level (1$US/month) or higher) to view the rest of this post. Please or Join Us to continue.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 3 – We Can Get Whatever You Want

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 3 – We Can Get Whatever You Want

 
Lawrence Martin watched the newcomer. She came in confidently – a good thing, one-twenty pounds or so, five-six and something, dressed for the weather except for a silk scarf around her neck and over her shoulders with a bunch of cloth wadded up over her chest. The bell jingled over her head when she opened the door. She glanced up at it and smiled.

Her eyes swept the store in easy motion, what would be called windowshopping in a city or mall, before landing on Monique. “Hi, Monique.”

Like her movements, she spoke with a confident, easy grace.

“Hi, Stace. This your first time in town?”

“Except to drive through trying to find the highway out.”

Martin interrupted with his Yankee drawl in place. “Ain’t got no gypsie?”

Monique rolled her eyes. “Stace, meet Larry Martin, proprietor, who’s bullshitting you with that drawl. He’s only been here – how many years, Larry?”

Martin dropped the drawl. “Two so far.”

Monique nodded. “And if he doesn’t cut it out with the crazy accents, it’ll only be two.”

Martin offered his hand. “Someday this town’ll have a talent show and I’ll be in it.” He released Knox’s hand and leaned towards her. “Ever hear the one about the cityslicker lost in Maine?”

Stacey gave Monique a “What’s going on here?” look.

“Just go with it. He won’t let up until he’s got one or two jokes out.” Monique glared at Larry. “One, if he’s smart.”

“So this cityslicker stops at a small town in Maine and sees an old Yankee sitting in front of the general store in a rockin chair whittling a stick with a pocketknife. He says, ‘Lived here all your life?’ and the old Yankee answers without looking up or stopping his whittling, ‘Not yet.'”

Martin slapped the countertop and doubled over laughing.

Stacey gave Monique a “Is it safe to be in here?” look.

“He’s his own best audience.”

Martin pouted at them. “Oh, come on. That’s one of my best jokes.” His eyebrows formed a tent on his forehead like a little boy pleading with his mother for another cookie. “You liked it, right, Stacey?”

Monique came up beside Stacey and placed a protective arm in front of her. “You’re scaring the newcomer, Larry.”

Frank Sinatra poked his head out of the wadded scarf and hissed.

Martin crossed his arms underneath his apron. “Sorry, sorry. I get carried away sometimes.”

Monique snicked. “Sometimes?”

“Sorry, Ms. Knox. It’s Knox, right? Stacey? Can I call you Stacey? Sorry I upset your cat. What can I do you for?”

Monique made a show of browsing the jerky selections. “Looks like a middle-aged Clark Kent still hoping for a date with Lois when he does that, doesn’t he? And don’t worry, he’s safe. One of Larry cum Clark’s his best qualities is his nosiness. Should your phone, internet, and carrier pigeons fail, Larry’s Acra’s reliable community switchboard.” She pointed at Frank. “He she it friendly?”

“Usually.”

Monique reached out slowly. Frank’s blue eyes crossed following her hand towards him. “Good kitty. Good puss puss.”

She rubbed his ears. Frank sank back into the scarf’s folds and quietly purred.

“I didn’t know you had a cat. He she it got a name?”

Stacey made sure Frank rested snugly in the scarf. “Frank Sinatra.”

Larry perked up. “Ol’ Blue Eyes. I get it.” He waited for their acknowledgement.

Monique stood in front of the dairy refrigeration units. “Love the way you’re modernizing the place, Lare.” Her voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “He’s replacing the old equipment a little bit each month. Stay away for two months and you won’t know where anthing is.” Her voice returned to its conversational knacker. “Or is that your plan, Larry? To keep people coming in?”

He nodded vigorously. “The plans are for internet access in the cafe with a few machines.” He looked hopefully at Stacey. “What d’you think? Cool, huh?”

Monique shook her head. “Isn’t it endearing when a middle-age man uses ‘cool’ in everyday language? Makes you think he’s one of the bitchin’ boss boys in the band, doesn’t it?”

Martin paid no attention. “You just bought the Kristoffersen place, right? Been vacant as long as I’ve been here.”

You must be a subscriber (Muse level (1$US/month) or higher) to view the rest of this post. Please or Join Us to continue.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

An Experiment in Writing – Part 12: Overwriting, Toing and Froing

Overwriting: Putting more on the page than is necessary for the story to move forward.

Toing and Froing: What happens when an author feels a need to move characters around in order to set up a scene rather than starting the reader at the point in the scene where the action (== interesting stuff) occurs.

 
Think I’m onto something? Take a class with me or schedule a critique of your work.
Think I’m an idiot? Let me know in a comment.
Either way, we’ll both learn something.

Pick up several dozen copies of my books because it’s a nice thing to do, you care, and I need the money.

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 2 – Get Real

Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 2 – Get Real

 
Monique Modine kept two vintage pink Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz Converibles – a ’57 and a ’59 – up on blocks in her barn. She had a FWB mechanic in Albany come out the first day of each Spring, take them down, inspect them, give them a once over and make them road worthy, and first day of each Fall to winterize them and put them back up on their blocks. She, her Cadillacs, and her mechanic FWB were all the same age, and that’s how Monique liked it. She purchased the ’57 at a mid-state auction. She’d already done her research and knew which mechanics within an easy drive of Acra worked on older cars. The first garage she went to she was met by a Clearasil faced kid with his head stuck under the hood tuning his barely legal hot rod. She yelled to get his attention. He banged his head standing up and greeted her with a hockey player’s toothless smile.

“Your father or grandfather around?”

“No, Ma’am. I work here alone.”

She kept her best top-selling real estate agent smile firmly in place. “Good for you.” She asked for the address of the next shop on her list. He scratched his head and picked up a pad of paper and pen in grease covered hands. “No, that’s okay. You can just tell me. I can remember it.”

The next garage was owned by a fossil in blue-striped mechanic’s overalls. He hacksawed a pipe at about one stroke per minute.

He didn’t seem aware of her until she stood in front of him and cleared her throat. He continued his one stroke per minute momentum without looking up. “Help you, Miss?”

She smiled. Only someone as ancient as this one would call her ‘miss’. “Any reason you’re sawing that so slowly?”

“Best reason in the world. I’m ninety-eight years old.”

She asked for directions to garage number three.

A man came out from under a car on a creeper, held up a grease covered finger to signal “in a minute,” put his other hand into a tin Mione container on his workbench and came up with a glom of what looked like shiny vaseline. He thoroughly rubbed the glom onto his hands before rinsing them in a service sink and wiping them dry, then came out to where Monique waited.

She handed him her card. He glanced at it but paid more attention to the ’57 and smiled. “Your car’s got tits.”

Monique, not shy in the tit department herself, returned his smile. “Oh, we’re going to get along fine.”

You must be a subscriber (Muse level (1$US/month) or higher) to view the rest of this post. Please or Join Us to continue.

Previous Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapters

An Example of the Experiments, 4 – Fains I – A John Chance Mystery

We left off in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I with the promise of sharing the original Fains I opening and the rewrite making use of multiple storycrafting techniques.

I shared the original first ~900 words in An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I and here I share the rewrite, now the first chapter in a work-in-progrWe left off in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I with the promise of sharing the original Fains I opening and the rewrite making use of multiple storycrafting techniques.

I shared the original first ~900 words in An Example of the Experiments, 3 – Fains I and here I share the rewrite, now the first chapter in a work-in-progress, the Fains I – A John Chance Mystery novel.

My first question is, as a reader, does this appeal more to you than the original version? If yes, because…? If not, because…? Figure out what makes it better or worse and you’ll have some excellent handles on your own crafting.

Now to analyze…

First thing, what happened to Tim and his family?

Remember my writing “I realized the rewritten opening sucked because I didn’t know enough about the characters to really care about them. The shift from teenager going to the prom to elderly man on his deathbed drove the story in the correct direction and not enough.” in An Example of the Experiments, 2 – Fains I?

I was correct that the story had an older cast of characters (demonstrated in the rewrite above).

I also wrote “This brings us back to An Example of the Experiments – Fains I’s First Question: Who Owns the Story?”

As written earlier, the core piece – someone dies and Tim’s involved – was solid enough to carry the story, but nothing I came up with made Tim interesting enough to me to write about him and, as noted previously, readers will only be interested in your characters if you’re interested in you’re characters.

How to make “Tim” more interesting to me? Hmm…

The original story had a car accident resulting in a death. Too random. Yeah, there could be guilt and an accident is an accident is an accident, and accidents happen.

Give Tim

  1. a reason to murder someone and
  2. make him remorseless about the murder because
  3. he feels justified in the killing.

Okay, psychosociopathic youngsters are interesting but can be limiting because a youth doesn’t have the life experience to have those attitudes fully realized, so an older “Tim” who feels justified and has no guilt.

Gosh golly gee. Tim’s becoming quite three-dimensional here. He’s interesting.

What if the older Tim had committed several murders, believed all of them justified and remains remorseless and guilt free?

This Tim’s obviously got a) a history and b) some issues.

And the best part is such psychosociopaths are usually pretty good at hiding who they are from public view.

Sometimes you can let the reader know more about a situation than the characters know about this situation.

 
Alfred Hitchcock gave a great example of creating audience interest, empathy, and tension: Have two people eating lunch or having a drink at a picnic table or a an outdoor cafe. Now put a ticking bomb under the table and make sure the audience sees it and knows what it is.

Doesn’t matter if the audience likes or dislikes the people at the table, they’re interested in what happens.

So there’s a psychosociopath loose, no one knows it, and the reader learns it. Great! Excellent.

But don’t tell the reader everything at once. Foreshadow. Hint. Mislead and misdirect, all of which now stars with the novel’s A John Chance Mystery subtitle (Search – The First John Chance Mystery has already signalled regular readers more John Chance novels are coming and new readers Fains I is part of a series).

Ooo. This is getting better already. We’re starting to have a story.

The last part mentioned previously was have an interesting person in an interesting place doing an interesting thing and “Give the reader an interesting person in an interesting place doing an interesting thing. If you only give one, it’s got to be incredibly strong. Two is good, three is dynamite.” along with Relatability and the four basic ways people relate to things:

  1. they’re familiar with a place (Setting)
  2. they’re familiar with what’s happening (Plot)
  3. they’re familiar with the people involved (Character)
  4. they’re familiar with what’s being said (Language)

and remember to throw in And add in what makes a great opening: conflict, tension, oddness, …?

Throw all this in the pot, let simmer, stir occasionally, season to taste, and we get (I hope) something closer to what’s the story, a first pass of which is shown above. A detailed (pretty much line-by-line) analysis is below:

You have to be a paying subscriber (Muse level (1$US/month) or higher) to view the rest of this post. Please or Join Us to continue.

All Fains I posts.

Chapter 1 – The Good Earth

 
Stacey Knox kneeled in the cool, dark, freshly tilled earth with a bag of wooden garden stakes, ten or so packets of seeds – tomato, cucumber, lettuce, mostly vegetables with a some marigolds, echinacia, and purple cone flowers thrown in to draw the pollinators – a ball of gardener’s twine, and Frank Sinatra placed in logical order by her side.
Frank kept meowing and moving, some times pawing a bag of seeds out of the way so he could stretch out in the sun, destroying Stacy’s logical order.
One blue eye winked at the ball of twine before closing and starting what Stacy called his “sleepy-cat purr.”
She ran a hand over his soft, gray fur.”Too much work going after the string, Frank?”
He responded with a slightly louder purr.
“Don’t kittens love going after string?”
Purr.
“You’re telling the court all the documented evidence is false, Mr. Sinatra?”
Stretch, purr.
“So much for book learning, huh?”
She and her brother, Tom, were raised in Ithaca, New York, in the shadow of Colgate University. Both parents were academics and emphasized desk-based scholarship over real-world exploration since early childhood.
She’d tied her long brown hair in a bun but one strand kept misbehaving and dropping in front of her left eye. Each time she’d blew it out of the way rather than take off her soil-covered gardening gloves to pin the strand back. Each time it came back to taunt her.
Farming, she decided, could be damn annoying.
Frank opened his eyes and focused on nothing at all. A moment later she heard a car come up her dirt driveway followed by the engine stopping and a door opening and closing.
Frank stood up and arched his back.
Stacy leaned back with hands on her thighs like an aikido player waiting their turn on the mat. “I’m out back.”
A tallish man in some kind of police uniform, salt-and-pepper van dyke with Ray-Bans covering his eyes, came around the house. He took off his sunglasses and hat as he approached and Stacy assessed him as mid- to late-fifties due to close-cropped gray hair matching his van dyke. He limped slightly on his right side and her years of high stakes malpractice cases opened like a textbook before her.
No, I’m not a lawyer any more, I’m a farmer.
If not a legend, at least an attorney to be wary of. She demonstrated a keen, seemingly intuitive awareness of when people were lying and not, and even then she could recognize the deliberate fabrication from the unintentional mistake of memory, something both friends and foes jokingly referred to as her Spidey-sense, friends to her face and foes behind her back. Hank Ingram, well-known competitive poker player and senior partner at Osborne, Nash, and Vogel, and son-in-law of the firm’s founder, Edgar Nash, publicly said, “I’d never play a game with you, Stacey. You cheat, I can’t figure out how you do it, and worse, you won’t teach me how to do it.”
Everybody laughed. She nodded and winked and laughed along with everyone. But she knew it wasn’t reliable. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. Biblically accurate when it was, frustrating silent when it was not.
Secretly she laughed about it. She told her brother, Tom, about it once when they were kids.
“It’s your guardian angel, Sis.”
Stacey blinked the memories away and looked up. The man stood about ten feet away and smiled down at her with a face criss-crossed by deep crows’ feet and laugh lines.
Frank Sinatra stood in front of Stacy, hissed, poofed his tail, and bristled the hair along his spine. That strand of hair fell across her eye again. It lifted on its own and buried itself deep in her bun, the sensation of a parent’s loving hand grooming a child, and Stacey turned rapidly to see if someone had snuck up behind her.
The man’s eyes went from Frank to Stacy to the garden and woods behind her. His lower face smiled but his upper face frowned. “You okay?”
Stacey waved her hand at her garden, her yard, her orchards, and the woods beyond. “Yes. I’m fine. Just new to all this.”
Frank arched his back.
“Your Cat doesn’t like me.” The man held out his hand. “I’m Vincent Currals. Local sheriff. Heard there was someone new in the old Kristoffersen place, decided to come by and say hello.”
Stacy stood up. Frank backed to between her feet and kept his eyes on Currals. She took Currals’ hand and he offered a good, strong grip, rough and calloused, and simultaneously gentle, neither threatening nor intimidating. “Hello, Sheriff. I’m Stacy Knox. But you probably already knew that.” She pointed down. “He’s Frank. Very territorial. Is there a problem?”
Currals released her hand and returned his to the brim of his hat, both hands holding it in front of him and slightly down so he could keep Frank in his peripheral vision. “Oh, no, Ms. Knox. No problem. Like I said, I’m sheriff. We’re a small town. I’m the only law here. Most times I’m really Andy of Mayberry.” He paused. “That was an old TV show.”
She nodded. “Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Frances Bavier. I know.”
He frowned and cocked his head. “Really? You don’t look old enough to have seen it.”
She laughed. “You’re good at conversationally gathering information. Being a sheriff teach you that?”
He looked down and blushed. “You caught me. I apologize.” He pulled a packet out of his back pocket. “Here’s some information may be useful. Mostly refrigerator magnet stuff. Emergency numbers and the like.”
Stacy thumbed through the packet’s contents. “Monique gave me something similar.”
“Monique Modine, yeah, she handles most of the real estate business around here.”
Stacy picked Frank Sinatra up and cradled him in her arms. He wiggled free, climbed to her shoulder, and perched facing Sheriff Currals. His hiss turned into a growl.
“He a Persian? Siamese?”
“You know cats?”
“Neutered?”
“Is that a requirement for cats here?”
Currals held his hat between them like a shield. “Sorry, I forgot I was talking to an attorney. Not being nosey, Ms. Knox, just getting to know who’s in town. ‘Case I’m needed.”
“Monique fill you in on all my particulars?”
“Can we make this a friendly conversation?”
Stacy scanned Currals’ face, his eyes, watched little twinges along his hair line, his lips, his nostrils. She picked up the patterns in his speech and echoed them back at him. “Sorry. Old habits. Hard to break. Give me an hour. I’ll meet you at the general store/cafe/post office. Buy you a cup of coffee. That work?”
Currals stared at her and his face reddened again. She wondered if he knew or sensed what she’d done. He put his hat and glasses back on, turned and walked away without offering his hand or waving goodbye. “Look forward to it.”
Stacy whispered to Frank. “What do you think, Frank?”
Frank climbed down, nestled in her still cradled arms, and continued to growl until Sheriff Vincent Currals drove away.
“Yeah, Andy of Mayberry he’s not.”

{end}
Close