Luke Bellmason Interview, Part Two

Here is part two of M Joseph Murphy's interview with author Luke Bellmason:

You did the cover for Canterbury Tales yourself. It’s very impressive, a rarity for authors. Simple and yet instantly recognizable. Is there a difference, for you, between writing and creating visual art?

Thank you for saying so. I am so critical of my own work and it's almost impossible to judge yourself. I think there is link between all of the creative arts. music, painting and writing and it's aesthetics. It's such a difficult concept to grasp because it's entirely subjective. Two people might agree that something looks beautiful but ten others might not. Who is right? I know when I've done something that looks right image wise, but I can't explain how. I just look at it and say to myself "yes, that's right." When someone else agrees that's very pleasing. I only wish it were that easy with writing, I am never quite sure whether that's good or not. There's a lot less certainty.

I think I must have a visual sort of mind, I tend to visualize everything in the story before I ever write it down. The writing part is the last part, like the events have happened and the words are just the 'reporting' of those events. I did a two year course in visual communications about six years ago and, even though I can't draw that well and have never seriously considered working in the industry professionally, I learned how to present things professionally. How to 'sell' yourself and take a professional attitude to manage deadlines and such. It seems like something so simple now, but before going to college I would start projects and never finish them, or never plan them out to how I would complete them. I'm a lot more workman-like about my writing as a result of that and it's certainly come in very handy to know how to do typesetting and produce stuff for print and all that.

The other great thing I learned at college was to be experimental. You have to do something which will stand out. Everyone has access to Photoshop and computer imaging software these days but they are just tools. There's a great temptation to let the computer do all the work but then you'll simply end up with something which looks exactly like everyone else's.

At college, they would encourage us to go out and photograph 'textures' or to collect unusual objects, or do something else totally random. Then we'd have to incorporate these into our work. It made us think differently and come at things from another direction. I have certainly tried to apply this ethos to my writing.

Like the story I'm working on at the moment, which has the plot line of 'discovery'. The main character discovers something which ends up changing his life and leading him in turn to discover something fundamental about himself. I took the word 'discovery' as a theme and 'discovery' wrote the first draft instead of carefully outlining it like I normally would. The result was a different story to the one I would have written if I'd planned it, probably. I don't actually know this for certain of course. I would be inclined to say I learned 'to think outside of the box' if that phrase wasn't so hideously overused.

Describe your writing process? How often do you write and how long per session?

I write do a lot of my writing at work, in the truck or sitting in the driver's waiting room. I can easily clock up three or four hours of sitting-around-time a night. Having said that, I do have an iPad and waste a huge amount of that time on twitter, or watching TV shows and movies.

I recently set up a very convoluted system for making myself write, which involved writing a text adventure game. Check my blog for more details. It's completely crazy, and I know it's crazy, but it seems to be working. It goes back to what I said about being experimental. Nobody in their right mind would waste time creating a text adventure game to help them write a novel, but doing the obvious and the expected is only a sure route to creating something obvious and expected.

The first four tales took over four years to write, but it allowed me to develop a kind of production line system where I start out with a concept, themes and a plot then go on through drafts on to a final version.

Link: Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama

So to begin with I draw up (with coloured lines and everything) an outline for each main character. If you've seen that video of Kurt Vonnegut explaining Cinderella and other classic tales, you'll get the idea. That outline forms the basis for the first draft, which is a really free-flowing exploration of all the ideas I've had for the story. I don't hold anything back, I just chuck everything in. Usually the story has been gestating for months and rolling around inside my head. I like it best when the first draft spills onto the screen in a couple of weeks.

Sorting out the mess of the first draft is the task of the second draft, which is where I try and figure out where the scenes are, and each scene has to advance the plot. This is vital with a short story where space is at a premium, but it also keeps the story moving along and I like to switch up locations a lot too, have contrasts between scenes so the mood changes and the reader gets a sense of following the character through their journey.

The third draft is where I edit down, make things clearer, try to cut out scenes which aren't necessary or merge scenes. It's great when you can double up things too, like having dialogue which doesn't just explain the plot, but also describes a character and maybe foreshadows or sets something up for later. The third draft really has to get the story ready for publication, with line-editing to cut down the word count as much as possible. Someone once told me to 'imagine the editor is charging you for each word'.

Then there's the final draft, where I do the last bit of proof-reading and checking for overused words, like 'just' or 'decide' or 'wonder', which I seem to use a hell of a lot!

I am the worst procrastinator in the world and will do anything to avoid writing, but with this new system I'm hoping plan out my time much more carefully and get the next volume out in a year.

The ideal amount of time I've found for writing is about 90 minutes. You have to decide to make those 90 minutes sacred, keep away from Twitter and the internet. Even so, for the first half an hour is just messing about, getting the brain warmed up. Then I'll hopefully be in the zone for a good hour, before I stop. I stop at the end of the time, even unless things are going really well, because I'll go off the boil and stop producing anything any good.

One of the things I like to do at the end of a session like this as well is to set up the thing I'm going to be doing in the next session. Write the first few lines of the next scene or a few lines of dialogue. So I'm not coming to the work completely cold next time.

What do you think is your weak point as a writer? Or, to say that another way, describe something about your writing you would like to improve.

I often worry about my characters and whether they're all the same, or whether they're all just versions of me. I enjoy writing dialogue but it's so hard to get into a character if you're not sympathetic with them or if they're supposed to be the 'bad guy'.

My main gripe though is my lack of output, the procrastination that I mentioned. But then again, I would not be too unhappy to have written only one or two good books by the time I leave this rock by one means or another.

I used to read a lot of books on writing and listen to writing podcasts and go to writing workshops, but in the end I think you can overdo it. One tends to end up with analysis paralysis, where you end up doing nothing because you think everything you're writing is bad. There's a sort of bad writing hypochondria where you recognise every example of bad writing and think 'yes, I do that.' You can easily convince yourself you're writing is shockingly bad and that has the effect of stopping you from writing, which is the opposite of what you should do of course, which is write more and more until you get better.

Or, you could do what I do and just have your story told by a narrator and then blame all the bad writing on him.

Lastly, how many volumes are planned for Canterbury Tales? Have you thought about what you’d like to write after the series is finished?

There will be two more volumes of the tales to come, making up the total of twelve tales. Volume 2 should be out next year, with volume 3 following in 2015. Then I'll probably collect the three volumes together into one book, and I'm thinking that maybe I should add some new stuff for that version.

There could be an infinite number of follow ups, but I'm a big fan of ending things before they go stale. Leave your audience wanting more and all that.

The book after was planned so long ago, well before the Canterbury Tales were even conceived. But it's going to be a better book for the fact that I have honed my story-telling skills on this project first. I'm really aware of learning all I can from this project to build up to writing the next one.

It will also be based on video-games and the culture that surrounds them. It'll have two levels going on, a little like the Canterbury Tales has; firstly the group of players in an online game and also the events and characters they play in the game itself. It will also tie in with what I said about online games and the character's stories emerging from the players themselves, rather than having pre-written and scripted things in the game.

I'd love to explore the iteration between the players and their characters in a system which could potentially generate and manage an entire fictional universe drawn from all the world's literature and culture on the internet. A sort of automated AI storytelling machine which injects new stuff into a video game all the time. Such a game would be endlessly playable (not to mention highly addictive.)

Luke Bellmason Interview, Part One

Here's part one of M Joseph Murphy's interview with Luke Bellmason:

I met Luke Bellmason through our mutual friend Jae Blakney. She posted the preface to Canterbury Tales on her blog. I was immediately impressed by the quality of writing. Thankfully, Luke and I have talked several times and he recently agreed to an in-depth interview. Here is Part 1.

  

In your preface you discuss the process of coming up with Canterbury Tales. I think it’s a valuable story for young writers. Did you have someone give you helpful advice when you started writing? If so, who was it and what did they say?

I can't think of any one person who gave me advice when I started writing because I don't think I told anybody I was doing it! I was one of those writers who was scared to show my work to anyone because they might not like it. I am still like that and I imagine it's a natural thing not to want to hear criticism but I didn't even give my work to my friends to read.

Eventually I plucked up the courage to join a writing group and it covered everything you needed to know from fiction, to writing articles, to how newspaper stories are written, to poetry, to romance, to short stories to novels. I can remember reading out a story I'd written for the first time to the group. It was a ghost story about a submarine and it was quite 'atmospheric'. I read it out to the class and it was the very first time anyone had heard my work. A woman at the front of the class said she had been 'transported away' to the place I was describing and she could see the rolling waves, the rain and the dripping walls. I think that was the moment I realised the power that writing could have. Unfortunately, I had neglected to give the story an ending so she said she was dying to know what happened next!

That was the one experience I'd say that made me realise that being an author gave you a tremendous power to create anything you wanted inside people's heads. After that I was hooked, and even though sometimes I feel like life would be a lot easier if I didn't have this little writing demon nagging at me day and night to "sit down and write", I know I'll never be able to give it up.

Once you become a writer, you can never look at the world the same way again. Wherever you go and whatever you do it gives you a purpose; you're an observer, you get to look at things and think about why they are the way they are, what they would be like if they were different.

One if the other major events in my early writing days was finding Douglas Adams. When I first saw the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on TV, the old 80s series, I realised that I was Ford Prefect. I'd always suspected that I wasn't originally from this planet, so the idea of being a researcher for some intergalactic guide book really appealed to me. That and the fact that Ford (like his creator) managed to be a writer without actually doing that much writing. For Ford (and Douglas) the experiencing of things was far more important than the writing about them bit.

Sorry, I seem to have drifted somewhat from the original question.

No. That’s a perfect answer. In your introduction you mention a video game called Elite. Have you tried replaying it recently?

Yes, I did play a game called 'Oolite' a few years ago, which is a freeware version of Elite for the Mac. It's been updated and expanded quite a bit and has a great modding community, but it has a mode which lets you play it as the original Elite. What you tend to forget is how boring it was! Compared to modern games, there's really very little going on, so much of the game is in your own imagination. That's also the key to good writing I think. The more you cram into someone's head, the less work the reader, or the player, has to do which means they're less engaged.

I often wonder if playing Elite had an influence on my choice of career because I ended up as a truck driver! I even started learning to fly a helicopter about two years ago and there's a lot of that piloting, trucking kind of vibe going on in the my stories. A lot of the stories involve sitting trapped inside a box, and yet being free to roam the galaxy.

Are you aware that Elite has a sequel coming out (Elite: Dangerous). If so, do you plan on playing it?

Yes! In fact I found out about Elite: Dangerous from Twitter and I saw the Kickstarter page the day after it ended. There was an option on there to buy the rights to publish an official Elite book, but I just missed out! So I could have quite easily made 'The Canterbury Tales' into an Elite book, and it would have been nice to have been part of the big launch next year when the game and all the other books come out. The publicity would have been handy too. In another way though I'm glad I missed the deadline because a) I need the money for flying and b) this way I get total creative control.

From what I read the new game is everything we've been waiting for all these years. I played the original Elite sequel, Frontiers, but found it totally unplayable. They had given it realistic physics and made an astronomically accurate galaxy and solar systems, which was incredibly impressive in its own way, but it totally ruined space combat. The speed of everything was all relative to the nearest planet or star and enemy ships would whip past you at thousands of miles per hour, then circle around and whip back again just as fast. You couldn't even hit them!

So I understand that this new Elite has gone in for more of a classic feel, with much more detailed planetary systems, economics and political systems, and everything is supposed to be tied in with one online persistent universe, so when a system decides to build a new station, it will affect the commodity prices for the construction materials in the surrounding systems and so on. Wars can cause humanitarian disasters which will put the food prices up, all kinds of complex interactions will be going on all the time.

What interests me about all of this is the law of 'unintended consequences' and what happens when you let real people loose on an open world. Emergent behaviour is certain to create new and fascinating things in the game which the designers hadn't anticipated. I love all of that. I played EVE Online for a bit and liked how the stories in the game came purely from the player interactions rather than being put there by the designers.

One of the stories I'm working on now for Volume 2, the Miner's Tale, is based on my brief experiences inEVE Online. If Elite: Dangerous can somehow mix the chaos of an online game with the structure of the old Elite, it will be awesome.

If I remember correctly, you’ve never actually read the original Canterbury Tales.  Do you plan on reading it now?

I fear that the original Canterbury Tales is totally impenetrable to anyone who hasn't studied the medieval period and knows how to read “olde English”. Plus the fact it's poetry. I read somewhere that it wasn't just one of the first books published, but one of the first published in English. At the time, books were in German, French or Latin, and the English people spoke was far removed from what we speak now, it really is another language. Remember also that not many people would have been able to read or write when the Canterbury Tales came out.

I suppose in a way, the world of medieval England is as far removed from us now as the world of starships, faster-than-light travel and aliens, so maybe there's a neat sort of parallel.

I did find an updated version of the Canterbury Tales translated into a more readable kind of English, the Percy Mackaye version if anyone wants to find it. I could see myself reading this at some point, though it's still quite hard going. I actually based the language of the 'story-teller' in my book on the kind of language used in this 19th century version.

LINK: Canterbury Tales Kindle Version Translation by Percy Mackaye

The main problem in understanding the book for me would be not knowing much about that time period. The church was a much more powerful force in people's lives and a few of the characters in the original stories are related to religion. In a way, it would be like reading a science-fiction story with all the exposition removed, which might be an interesting exercise.

History fascinates me and I never took much interest in it at school. One of the hardest things about history is forgetting everything that you know and trying to imagine what it was like for people at the time. It's so easy for us to look at major events, like world war two or the sinking of the titanic for example, and look at them with hindsight. People knew and believed different things in the past and that shaped their actions. It's one of the things that annoys me about 'steampunk'. It's lazy history; it doesn't bother to filter out the modern world, it simply assumes everything was the same then as it is now. All steampunk is basically the 'Flintstones' to me.

 Part Two of the Interview Will Be Posted Thursday

For My Review of Canterbury Tales: Click Here

Purchase Canterbury Tales Now on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

 
 

Short Story: The Tarsus Secret

As my brother likes to say, Happy Old Year! Here's a short story for everyone who's ever thought of going on a cruise:

Photo: societylimo.com

Twenty casinos that never closed. Thirty-six restaurants. Twenty-five nightclubs. Five Olympic-sized swimming pools, plus all the smaller ones. Room service, massages, the botanical gardens, maybe a hundred or so cute little shops. Movie theaters, plays and musicals. Skating shows, magic shows, strip shows, kiddie shows, water shows and laser shows. Batting cages, tennis courts, basketball courts, running tracks and racing simulators. And the Daughter of Tarsus didn’t just have all this, she had all this in style. Always the little drizzles on the plates, always someone waiting on you in starched white cuffs. The mini-bar in Connor Meara’s stateroom was always stocked, his bed was always made when he returned to his room, and the hallway (the ornate hallway with the beautiful carpet and the little statues in the corners) was always well-lit and immaculate.

It was like living in hell. The noise, the racket, never stopped. And it wasn’t just the noise; it was the lights, the people, the whining children, the claustrophobic awareness of being trapped in a city of over twenty thousand people without even the option of jumping in the car and driving to the country.

It had all sounded so good a year ago when he’d let Louise from the office talk him into booking a cruise. “Endless possibilities!” she had raved. “So much to do and see, you’ll never find the time to do it all.”

As if he’d want to do it all. There was nothing stimulating, nothing challenging. Sure, there were people on board to play chess with, and plenty of other games to play, but that was all it was: just play. He wanted to take things apart, figure out what was wrong with them and fix them. He wanted to be useful.

Photo: hookedonhouses.net

So here he was. It was two a.m. and he was wandering. He had wandered into the main kitchen and been kicked out. (Yes, they were actually busy cooking at one-thirty in the morning.) He had wandered into a janitor’s closet, but even the vacuums, lined up neatly against the right-hand wall, hadn’t needed any tinkering. All three hoses were clear and all three brushes were free of threads and fuzz. Six filters had been washed and were hanging above their machines, drying, while the remaining three were clean and dry and installed, their vacuum ready for use. At the moment he was wandering down a hallway somewhere near the starboard bow, on a level he guessed was roughly halfway between the keel and the highest deck, and it was looking promising. Well, maybe not exactly promising, but at least it was looking less glitzy and more utilitarian than much of the rest of the ship.

This particular hallway was narrower and less well-lit than the one outside his stateroom, and there were no statues in the corners. The carpet wasn’t maroon and tan with an intricate scroll pattern and plush padding, but a no-nonsense grey-brown mottle that tended to hide stains because it already looked dirty. Ahead, near the ceiling, was an exit sign. He walked toward it.

Under the sign was a grey metal door with a crash bar and another sign across it: “Emergency Exit Only: Alarm Will Sound,” it announced in red block letters on a black background. But the door was standing open, held by a brown rubber doorstop, and if any alarm was sounding, it was silent here. He slipped through the doorway.

Photo: flickr.com

The deck where he found himself somehow reminded him of a street between abandoned factories after a rainstorm. It was a dark place with a clean feel and a smell that was somewhere between fresh and sharp. A few stars, very bright and distinct, were visible overhead, but most of the sky was blocked out by high walls and shadowy angular shapes. He assumed the shapes were a few of the steel beams necessary to give support and stability to the decks above.

And then he found what he was looking for. On his left and well over his head was a horizontal service duct about four feet in height and at least as deep. It carried ductwork for the ventilation system, he figured, along with plumbing and wiring. A hinged access panel stood open, leaving a rectangular hole about two feet across. A man in navy blue uniform pants stood with his feet on a ladder and his head and shoulders inside the hole.

Connor smiled. He would try to make eye contact with the guy, and maybe he’d let him help, or at least watch. At the moment of course, eye contact was impossible, and Connor didn’t want to interrupt him, so he would wait. But he also didn’t feel right about watching a guy who thought he was alone, so he shuffled his feet and drummed his fingers gently on the metal wall.

The man quickly pulled himself out of the hole, scratched his stomach with his right hand and turned to greet Connor, coming down a step or two on the ladder. His blondish hair was tousled but his face was freshly shaved. He looked worried, or maybe just tired.

Connor stepped forward, too, and in an instant, the man had a pistol two inches from Connor’s face, pointed directly between his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, “but you must be quiet.”

“Okay,” Connor replied in a near-whisper. “I’ll just leave.”

“No,” the man said. “You cannot to leave now. You already see this.” He gestured with his head, a slight jerk upward, toward the hole.

Photo: ieyenews.com

Connor hadn’t seen what was in the hole, didn’t want to see what was in the hole, told himself not to look. But he looked. By habit, by reaction, as soon as the man jerked his head up, Connor looked up. It was money. Bundles and bundles of U.S. hundred-dollar bills. He couldn’t begin to estimate how much was there, but he was sure that whatever the amount was, it must be a staggering figure.

The man had a soft-sided tool box slung over his left shoulder, and now Connor saw that it, too, was half full of the little banded bundles of hundreds. Apparently he’d been either putting them in or taking them out.

With his right hand still pointing the gun at Connor, the man reached out with his left and closed the access panel. It made a loud popping sound when he pulled it past the hinge-spring, and then smashed shut. Connor jumped, even though he’d been expecting the sounds. The man descended the ladder, closed the flap on his tool bag and said, “Let’s go,” twitching the barrel of the gun slightly toward the door Connor had just come through. Connor started walking.

The man followed him through the Emergency Exit door and fell into step beside him with the gun at Connor’s waist, doubtless hidden under the hem of his favorite ‘34’ jersey. Even if they did meet anyone in the hallways at this hour, it would look—pale as Connor must have been—that the man was helping a sick passenger to his room.

Photo: marketplace.secondlife.com

They did walk to a room—the man’s own room, maybe. It was on a different deck from Connor’s, but looked just like it. Even the immaculate hallway was the same, except for the statues in the corners, which were still there but depicted different individuals. Beside the elevator here was a flirting siren instead of a fierce-looking sea god.

Connor couldn’t learn much from the room at first glance. The bed, of course, had been made up perfectly by the housekeeping staff, and the room was tidy. A book in Cyrillic characters lay on one of the nightstands and a pair of brown slippers was lined up neatly under the edge of the bed.

The man walked him straight to the bathroom and ordered him to sit on the white tiled floor.

Connor sat, of course, his back against the cool smooth side of the whirlpool tub, his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the pistol, which was still pointed in his direction.

The man used his left hand to open the linen closet, remove the towels one at a time and stack them on the sink vanity. Next, still gripping the gun and watching Connor, he removed the shelves where the towels had been and leaned them against the wall nearby. He was smaller than Connor and looked like he might burn easily in the sun. The embroidery over the left pocket of his navy blue uniform shirt read “P. Smith.” Connor figured that probably wasn’t his name. “Stand up,” he instructed.

Connor stood.

The man pointed into the closet, toward the floor at the back of it. “You get chain,” he said. “Give to me the end.”

In the back of the closet was a sewage pipe, and wrapped around it at floor-level was a heavy chain of the type used for towing cars. Connor squeezed into the closet, got down on one knee and found the loose end. There wasn’t room to turn around in there, so he backed out. The man took the chain from him and Connor stood back, keeping his hands away from everything. He wondered if he would have to sit by the tub again.

Photo: wkrg.com

The man pulled a pair of handcuffs out of the tool bag by hooking it with one finger. Then he threaded one side through the end link of the chain and closed the other around Connor’s left wrist. “Turn around,” he said.

Connor obeyed, facing the bathtub. “I, um,” he began nervously, and hesitated. He put his hands up, surrender-style. The chain was heavy on his arm. “I’m not going to use it or anything, but I have a knife,” he said, staring at the swirly teal shower curtain and wishing he could see the guy’s face instead.

“Where is knife?” was the reply from behind him. If the guy was concerned about the knife, his voice didn’t show it.

“I have an inside pocket in my jeans,” Connor explained, “on the right side.”

“Okay.” The man pulled up the hem of Connor’s jersey, plucked the wallet out of his back pocket. “Take off shirt,” he ordered.

Connor pulled his jersey over his head without unbuttoning it and it slid along the chain to the floor.

“Turn around again,” the man said, and Connor did, making the chain clink and ring with his movements. The man checked near the neckband of the jersey and pulled Connor’s ATM card out from where he kept it between the tag and the back of the shirt, glanced at it and put it back. Then he felt the button band and the hem. “Now give me knife,” he ordered.

Connor slipped his index finger and thumb behind his waistband and pulled out the knife. It was a folded four-inch carbon-steel blade with a fiberglass handle that looked just like polished mahogany. He hated to part with it, and had even for the tiniest instant considered attempting to hold on to it, to keep it a secret from his captor. But a knife was no match for a gun, and it wasn’t worth risking his life for.

The man took the knife, slipped it into the tool bag. “What is in pockets?” he asked, waving the gun at the front of Connor’s jeans.

“Gum,” Connor replied, “and the stone for my knife, and my lighter, and a…well, I guess it’s a bottle opener.”

The man held his left hand out, and Connor emptied his pockets.

“Pull pockets out,” said the man.

Connor pulled out his pocket liners.

“You can put pockets back in and put shirt on now,” the guy said. He still held the contents of Connor’s pockets on the palm of his left hand, like a waiter holding a tray.

Connor pulled his jersey back along the chain, put it on and tucked his pockets in.

“You can take gum,” said the guy. “I will keep other things.”

Connor picked up the pack of hot cinnamon gum and put it back in his pocket.

“Take off shoes,” the man ordered.

Connor sat by the tub again and untied his sneakers, slipped them off.

Photo: adifferentstory.net

“Throw shoes out door into bedroom,” he instructed, and then, “Turn socks inside out,” and Connor complied.

“You can put socks on again. I must go now but I will be back soon,” said the man, and left the bathroom. A moment later, a rock band from the Eighties began playing at high volume, starting suddenly in the middle of a song. Connor didn’t hear the stateroom door shut.

He set to work looking for a way to escape. The end of the chain that was wrapped around the sewer pipe was securely padlocked, the pipe itself was very sturdy, and the handcuffs at his end weren’t going to let him go, either. He examined the chain: every single link was closed and welded.

He had just begun a systematic search for some way to get a message out when the music stopped abruptly. Seconds later, the man appeared in the bathroom doorway, the tool bag gone and his arms full of folded blankets. He set them down on the floor--three blankets and a pillow—and walked away again.

He came back with one of the plastic deck chairs from the balcony, set it down and sat on the toilet with the lid down. He gestured gallantly to the empty chair and Connor sat.

The guy had Connor’s wallet in his hand, and now he opened it and pulled out the driver’s license. “Connor,” he read. “I’m sorry I have to do this, and I’m sorry I cannot explain to you why it is necessary--or at least not now. Later perhaps there may be time to tell you. For now I will only say that I am not bad guy. I must do what I came here for, and I cannot let you get in way.” He slid the license back into place and continued looking through Connor’s wallet. “I told housekeeping do not to come in. I told them I will make own bed, I don’t drink and I want privacy.”

Maybe Connor should have done that: made his own bed and stocked his own fridge instead of going out in the middle of the night and looking for trouble. “What do you want me to call you?” he asked.

The man shrugged and scoffed. “You call me anything you want,” he replied, “or maybe you call me nothing, just talk. There is no one else to confuse: if you speak, I will know it is me.”

Connor shrugged, too. He looked at the name on the guy’s chest: “P. Smith,” thought of the Cyrillic characters on the book on the nightstand, and told him, “I’m going to call you Pasha.”

Note: I answered a call from Chainbooks.com to write just the first chapters for several novels, and The Tarsus Secret is one of them. If you'd like to contribute a chapter to The Tarsus Secret, or check out the other novels-in-progress at Chainbooks, click here.