Chapter 33 - Blackmail

Chapter 33 - Blackmail can be found on the right under 'Good stuff'. ... 

Tarot is back! 'Chapter 32 - The Fool' audio file...

... is now available on line. Just click here!

And here you can see a picture of me recording it for your listening pleasure.

Chapter 32 - The Fool

The Fool - Rider Waite Tarot

I've drawn up my plan, I've written my chapter summaries and I've even cleaned my desk, there's no excuse not to produce the next chapter. So here, a week after I promised, it is:

The story so far ... Celia Thomas, a Munich based art restorer is working on a project to rescue some 16^th century paintings in Croatia. While in Zagreb she glimpses somebody she believes to be her journalist brother Ned, who was apparently killed in Bosnia in 1995. As she starts to investigate his disappearance she stirs up a lot of trouble for herself and those around her.

The paintings are packed up and on their way to Munich for restoration. When Celia gets back home she finds some bad news waiting for her... 

Chapter 32 – The Fool can be found on the right under 'Good stuff'.

The Final Phase

Outlines for the seven remaining chapters

 Happy New Year to everybody for 2015. I hope you had or are having enjoyable holidays and are able to deal with the continuing adventures of Celia Thomas.

Because although I have not posted anything for a while I’ve been busy over the last ten days working out how to end this story. It has not been easy.

The difficulty was that I had too many strands that needed to be resolved. Nine in fact, so one of them had to go and I decided to ditch the idea which I introduced in the last chapter that Celia and the Colonel were about to find treasure in the secret cabinet in the wall behind the paintings. It’s kind of a shame as I liked the whole Famous Five adventure element that having buried treasure introduced and I had gone to a lot of trouble quite early in the book (Chapter 11 – Marcus mentions that the X-ray photographs reveal a hollow space in the wall behind the panels) to introduce the idea of there being something in the wall. Now I shall either have to rewrite various chapters to eliminate it, or else just leave it as a red-herring for readers to get excited about. I haven’t decided yet.

This still leaves eight themes that need to be dealt with:

1 What happens to the pictures in the chapel?

2 Does Tomi reappear?

3 What about Timothy Arnold and the Department of British Export Development?

4 How will the theme of human trafficking and Morfeus Herman be resolved?

5 Is the Colonel a good guy or a bad guy? Does he win his election or end up in jail/dead?

6 Are the tensions between Celia and Franz really all resolved? Should she tell him about her fling with Tomi?

7 What can Tante Ilse and Max contribute to the final stages of the story?

8 Is Ned still alive or not?

I’ve now managed to sketch out an outline for how to bring all these elements together which – according to my calculations – means that there are now only seven chapters to go. How long these seven chapters will take, I don’t know exactly, but let’s be optimistic and say that with luck I should be finished by June 2015. This is something like two years after I had originally planned, but – hey – what’s that between friends?

So, dear readers, stay with me as we approach the final phase. I hope to be able to post chapter 32 by the 11 January. Keep your fingers crossed!