Thrillers




Fiction with an edge




Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

Victory ... winning small battles leads to winning wars.

So, it looks like the public have spoken and Starbucks are going to start paying the tax they had tried so hard to avoid. Whether these payments will be of the order that will put the company back on a good PR footing with the general public remains to be seen. Interestingly, it was not just Starbucks who were playing the avoidance game. Amazon and Google http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20288077 ) have also been enjoying the fruits of their tax accountants hard work.  The point here is that, if the public vote with their feet, they can achieve anything. Now - how long will it be before the hard pressed citizens rise up and tell Government it must deal with the Starbucks, Amazons and Googles of this world before it hits the easiest and softest of all tax targets - the average man and woman - who have no choice but to pay tax and who, because Starbucks, Amazon and Google do not pay their moral fair share are being sunk by debt. Remember folks, if the boys and girls at the top paid their whack then the people at the bottom wouldn't be taxed to the degree they are. 

As an illustration of a girl at the top who takes her moral contribution seriously - I give you probably the most famous of writers, after Shakespeare - J K Rowling ( http://www.businessinsider.com/jk-rowling-on-high-taxes-2012-9 )  and from the article concerned I note the following:  

It is with this as a backdrop that it's worth recalling why the richest woman in the UK, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, says she remains a citizen of Great Britain even though she's now a billionaire.
The bottom line?
Rowling loves her country, and she wants her kids to grow up there. And, as someone who once depended on the safety net designed to help those going through hard times, she feels a debt to her society.
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug

Wednesday, 13 June 2012

Circle of Deceit

Three months ago Harry Miller decided to leave a lucrative directorship in business to write children's stories. His wife, Veronica, isn't pleased - she misses the high life. She nags him to go back. But Harry can't go back - and he can't tell her why. Veronica's efforts to push him into returning open a Pandora's box of intrigue and recriminations which has Harry questioning his marriage and his future.

My short-story Circle of Deceit (15,000 words) is on Kindle - you can read the beginning under the 'Pages' section to the right of this post. I hope you enjoy it.

Saturday, 26 May 2012

Friends ...

One of the most important resources a writer can have is friends. Friends are there when self-doubt creeps in - and it does with creative minds. Friends are there to say where you're going wrong - where that story needs tweaking - why the character you just spent a week creating, and think is brilliant, - isn't working. Friends look at your manuscript and tell you why a scene, which you absolutely love, doesn't move the story forward. 

Friends are there when you can't write, because life has just erupted, the car's just failed its MOT and you need to ferry the kids to dancing / judo / fencing / extra maths lessons - or your washing machine / freezer / central heating system has just gone down and it's Saturday night and no tradesman is going to call on a Sunday unless you raise a mortgage for the call-out charge. 

Friends are there when the people around you don't understand why you want to curl up in a ball and cover yourself with a duvet, because an agent has just told you that your story is not what he / she or anyone else in the western hemisphere is looking for. 

Friends are there when you see a TV mini-series which has the same storyline as the book you've been working on for the last three years - and it gets bad reviews. 

Friends bolster, boost, encourage, cajole, listen, but, above all, friends are people who tell you the truth, because they want you to be the very best writer you can be.

Friday, 16 March 2012

So near and yet ...

The last few months have been taken up with my edit / rewrite of The Paradigm Culture. Today I am at page 190 of 199 - so, close to the end. Once it is finished and I have read the hard copy a couple of times - then re-edited, I can hand out hard copies to the readers who have offered to provide critique on it. 

To a writer, those who provide critique are worth their weight in gold. Their feedback can make or break a story - or, indeed, alter it in a way that the author didn't see coming when it was written. Being close to the story can often be a double-edged sword for a writer. It can mean that we don't see the wood for the trees and the 'critique readers' can tell us that. 

The Paradigm Culture was a cathartic journey for me and one I will explain here when the book is finished. I will also post sample chapters in the same way that I have with The Messenger - here on this site.  

In the meantime I will leave you with this quote from a spokesperson for the alien race who created our universe as a sanctuary from war in their universe: "It was going to give us breathing space. Somewhere to rebuild, rearm … repopulate. We evacuated tribes to what we thought were viable planets, yours and others, but our people became ill and died very quickly. Your planet was the only one where they lived a little longer. So, we concentrated on it. We still lost people, but we realised that if we could create a new race using the planet’s animal life form we might have the means to build a new army."

So, no higher being - just an experiment in logistics.

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Masterpeace (Cairo) interview live on line.

After taking an interest in Jack Chandler and The Messenger, Masterpeace set some challenging questions in their interview:   http://goo.gl/UoSWj 

It's called: "Can one man change the world?" The one man isn't me, although I wish it were.