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!

The power of language - ethnic cleansing

I had an interesting comment the other day. I'll re-post it here so you don't have to hunt it out:

A special language challenge for you, if I may: Your plot summary refers to "ethnic cleansing". There is nothing clean about "ethnic cleansing". How about an alternative, more appropriate term instead? Not easy, perhaps, but worth the effort surely. 

I had a long think about this. If I haven't misunderstood the post, the proposal is that we should not use the word "cleansing" in the context of an activity that involves the persecution of one group of people by another, because the word "cleansing" is intrinsically positive. If we use "cleansing" then perhaps to some people the persecution may sound reasonable, acceptable.

There is something to be said for this point of view. I'm a believer in the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf theory (language influences thought and also some aspects of non-linguistic behaviour) so I can see how this might work. We can see positive examples of this in the changes in attitude during my lifetime towards various groups thanks to the banning of abusive / patronising language about those groups in the public sphere.

So, should a writer avoid using a language chunk like "ethnic cleansing" and look for  / create something else? "Ethnic displacement / expulsion / forced relocation" perhaps?

At the moment  I'm not sure. To be honest "ethnic cleansing" is excellent shorthand and I know my audience will understand exactly what is meant. Nor will they think it is something positive because it has only ever been reported as something bad. If I use another expression the audience will have to pause to try to work out what I mean and I don't necessarily want that.

Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting point and I shall continue to ponder the issue. Any thoughts welcome.

Lisbon and the relics of the Saints

Relics and busts of saints in St Roque, Lisbon

November has been a very busy month in my bread and butter job, which hasn't left time for continuing the novel. 
However on a trip to Lisbon at the end of October I visited a great church - the Church of St Roque.
Like all towns which were centres of trade in the past, everybody lived in fear of the plague. St Roque was a plague survivor and became the person you prayed to when you were feeling poorly.
In a chapel of this church I found this amazing collection of saintly bones. What made this collection unusual was that there was also an artist's impression of what the saint looked like in bust form, sitting on top of the glass casket with the bones, something I've never seen before. For some reason they all seemed to be female saints in this chapel (and fairly hot saints according to the artist).
Now I'll give you three guesses what Celia and the Colonel are going to find in the hidden chamber in the chapel as described in Chapter 31...

Chapter 30 – Discoveries and Chapter 31 – Evidence

Recently I went to a packed workshop held at ‘The Munich Readery’ run by Rita Banerjee who teaches at the Ludwig Maximilian University.

The title of the workshop was Character Development and playing with persona and we looked at the different types of characters you have in a novel, specifically ‘flat’ characters who don’t develop (e.g. Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice) and ‘dynamic’ characters (e.g. Elizabeth Bennet or Mr Darcy in the same novel) who do.

Rita then introduced us to a simple but powerful character development tool. By answering a set of very wide-ranging questions about the character (e.g. attitude to authority, dream life, fridge contents etc) you develop a clear mental picture of him or her before you even start writing.

I found the tool very helpful and applied it to the new character, Morpheus Herman, that I introduced in Chapter 29 – The Inquisitor. Morpheus is a ‘bad’ character, but I was dissatisfied with my first version. He was just a cardboard cut out baddie and I didn’t find him very convincing. By answering all these questions about Morpheus for myself, I was able to establish a back story for him that partially explains the way he is now and makes his actions more plausible. You can see the result in Chapter 31- Hidden Treasures below.

For the first time in this blog, I’m putting up two chapters at the same time. I hope you enjoy them.

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.

Celia is back in Croatia to supervise the removal of the paintings to Munich for restoration. Meanwhile her husband Franz is examining two sources of information that might reveal something about what happened to Ned.

Chapter 30 – Discoveries and Chapter 31 - Evidence can be found on the right under 'Good Stuff'