Rambling Sunday

I have three items of interest tonight.

First: I am guest posting tomorrow (Monday the 14th of March).
Rosie Connolly and Charity Bradford are kicking off their HONE YOUR SKILLS Blogfest on Wednesday and as part of their preparation they are hosting some published authors. I’ll be on both blogs on Monday SOOO check it out!

Second: Deb and I have had a mini-vacation.
This weekend is a long weekend in Victoria. We have our Labour Day holiday tomorrow.
Deb and I stayed overnight in Gippsland (eastern Victoria) last night. We came back this evening to avoid the worst of the traffic tomorrow.
I’ve taken some nice shots of various spots between here and Sale. I don’t have enough time or energy tonight so I’ll just give you a taste.Two piccies of the old jetty at Port Welshpool.Third: I’ve taken to giving a taste of my work on my WIP on Sundays so here is another section.
Poor Valentina got quite a surprise following Penelope last week. Here is what happened next.
Once again this is a first draft that might never find its way into the book.
A warning for those of you of delicate sensibilities, it does feature a little bad language.


Valentina Meshcova
Berlin 1948
The workshop was very dark, the only light seeping in was through cracks around the door frame. And that was the weak watery light of a grey Berlin afternoon.
I struggled between being a little girl frightened of the dark and a soldier ready for a fight.
I fumbled in my bag as my hand closed around the gun butt I was more like a soldier again. I slid it out and held it by my side. Where to stand? By the inner door, they'd come through the inner door. If they opened the outer one I might escape.
Not much chance of escape now, but I was a Soviet and I would take as many with me as I could.

I stood beside the door and waited. It was only a moment, the room blazed as someone turned on the lights. The click of a latch, another click as I cocked my gun. Confidently, almost casually Penelope stepped into the workshop, my gun came up pointing at her face.

The confidence fled, she hadn’t expected the gun. Her hands came up defensively. Slender white fingers, no protection against a bullet, or were they?
Her look of pure terror made me hesitate. I knew fear, it was not something I ever wanted to inflict. ‘Valentina, please…’

My anger surged, hate boiled, how dare she lie to me, betray me, risk everything.
I stepped close bringing the gun to within a centimetre of her eye. ‘Valentina, don’t’
‘You filthy spy, I’ll blow your head off.’
‘Put the gun down!’
A man standing in the doorway, a huge gun pointing right at my head. Penelope hissed urgently, ‘Fred don’t shoot!’
English! She spoke to him in English! Everything I had dreaded proven in that instant.
He was almost apologetic to her, ‘Sorry Miss, my call,’ he bellowed at me, ‘Put it down!’

My mind raced unbelievably fast. At this moment I hated her more than anything or anyone.
I could finish her lies and end my pain at the same time.
End the pain.
End the pain of loosing everyone and everything that mattered. Family, friends, future all gone.
End me.
It would be so easy. Revenge and death in a heartbeat.

It was Natasha who saved me again. A vision popped into my head: Natasha waiting for me to come back.
Waiting.
Alone again.
Waiting.

I couldn’t do that to her.

Ever so slowly I moved the gun’s barrel until it was pointing at the ceiling. Penelope sighed and stepped back.
If I wasn’t going to shoot her, I would go carefully, minimise any reason he had for shooting me. I eased the gun’s hammer down, then I carefully changed my grip so it dangled between my forefinger and thumb. Gradually I bent lowering the gun toward the floor.

I was about half way down when he surged forward. He hit me hard with his shoulder driving me sideways. My hands flew out instinctively to save my face from hitting the cobble floor, the gun skittered away.
There was no stopping my fall, no saving my face. One of his hands found the back of my head, his weight driving me down. My mind still racing, I thought stupidly that at least it was my scarred cheek that would hit the floor, I wouldn’t end up any uglier than I already was.

His weight drove my head hard into the cobbles, light and pain flashed through my brain. Matched by the pain of his knee driving into my kidneys, a sickening tearing feeling forcing all the air out of me.
As I lay on the floor I was barely aware of his weight trying to push my face into the floor and of his gun barrel grinding into the back of my neck. ‘You fucking bitch! You won’t pull a gun on one of mine so quickly again!’

Ronnie

This afternoon I have been doing a little research on Royal Navy (RN) ships. Specifically I have been looking at information on minesweepers. The first half (or so) of my current work in progress is set during WWII. Most of the novel takes place in Russia and other chunks of what was the USSR.

One of my characters comes to know Russia and Russians by serving on a RN vessel operating out of Murmansk and Archangel. Interestingly a number of RN ships particularly minesweepers spent months at a time operating from Russia, often returning to the northern ports over several years.

Now before anyone leaps to the conclusion that I am trying to recreate something like Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, I most emphatically am not. I like to write from differing points of view. In Veiled in Shadows (hopefully creeping closer to publication) for example I look at the events in Germany and Western Europe through the 30’s and 40’s from viewpoints as different as those of an SS officer and a Holocaust survivor. So my RN officer (his name is Ronnie by the way) is planted in the Soviet Union to give an outsider’s viewpoint.

Most of the research I am doing now will never directly appear in the novel. However, it is important to me to know as much as I can about a character. In fact, it seems I have to become intimate with them before they speak their stories to me. So I know quite a lot about Ronnie’s background. He is from a well to do family with a loving sister, a socialite mother and a distant father. Like a many young men in the RN during the war he has been thrust in over his head. He is in his early twenties but he has been given a command (albeit a small one) largely on the basis of a yacht-masters certificate he obtained before the war. This actually happened to quite a number of young RN Volunteer Reserve officers during the war.

Today in my imagination Ronnie has been guiding me through some of the material available through the wonders of the internet. We have been looking at the vessels of different classes such as Halcyon Class and Flower Class (aren’t they amazing names).

HMS Britomart a Halcyon Class minesweeper. Photos for this post are from Wikimedia Commons.

Then quite by chance (or perhaps Ronnie was nudging me) I found the HMAS Castlemaine site. Here in Melbourne is one of the few WWII minesweepers that still exist. Now to be sure HMAS Castlemaine is a Bathurst Class and so different to the vessels Ronnie would have served on, but she is similar enough to allow a far more accurate feel than any number of photos or plans could ever give.

HMAS Castlemaine a Bathurst Class corvette

As an aside for those of you who don't know HMS stands for Her (or His during WWII) Majesty's Ship while HMAS stands for Her Majesty's Australian Ship.

So if you ever read about Ronnie meeting Valentina at a dance in Archangel and if Ron has a bruise on his brow, you might wonder why? If he does it will be because he showed me on the Castlemaine how he cracked his head by not ducking as he left his cabin.

Can anyone guess where I might be going next weekend?

My Journey

As I mentioned all too briefly in my first post I have ambitions about getting the manuscript for my first novel Veiled in Shadows published.

Wait, stop right there Al!

I should say something about my work. Veiled in Shadows is a thriller/espionage piece set in Europe during World War II against a backdrop of the Holocaust. It explores a number of themes from the point of view of several major characters. Included in the themes are: loyalty and treachery; notions of good and evil and how different frameworks can alter individual's ideas of what is right; the capacity human beings have to endure almost anything; perhaps most important is an exploration of the differing effects years of suffering and inhumanity can have on people.

So what is my problem? Getting published of course!

I finished a draft I was finally quite happy with about eighteen months ago.
I'd done all the usual stuff, inflicting it on friends and family etc.
Next I thought I'd get a professional opinion. I sent it off to a manuscript assessor, I chose Driftwood Manuscripts in South Australia.
I had a couple of months of anxious wait, to be sure friends and family had all been positive, but that comes with the territory.

The response I received from Driftwood was on the whole really positive, with the assessor using terms like "enchanting package" to describe the work. The assessor also provided some really helpful advice on a few sections he/she (Driftwood maintain the anonymity of their assessors) thought were problematic. In particular a section of the plot relied too much on coincidence. They also suggested I get a copy edit to improve saleability. I would like to stress here that this was not a sales pitch from Driftwood, they neither offered a service nor recommended any service provider.

I went with Pat Stone from Canberra as a copy editor. I was very impressed with her fast turn around and very reasonable rates. Also she did my ego no end of good with more positive comments about the work. Pat also warned me that what I had done so far was the easy bit. She warned that getting published would be much harder than writing a book of any length.

How right Pat was.

Enough about my book for now.

Just for something completely different a couple of photo's I took last autumn at Merimbula.
These fellows are soldier crabs. They feed along tidal flats at low tide in numbers of hundreds or thousands.

They are cute little guys, the little ones about an inch across. The biggest I have seen are maybe three inches across.
They do this amazing little dance to see which is the biggest and toughest.
Mostly they just seem to measure each others size; but if they are about equal, there is often a bit of pushing and shoving to see who is boss

And just to close a sunset, also at Merimbula.