Excerpts

Excerpts from some of my books.

I hope you enjoy them, either on their own or to entice you to read an entire book.

Blocked.

  She was staring at her computer screen with a fresh document just praying to be written on, it was stark white with a little flashing vertical black line, almost goading her, rhythmically pointing out that it wasn’t going to stop.

  The document was waiting to come to life but still no words would magically present themselves.

  What Jasmine did see on the screen was a fly; she thought ‘what a cheek! Get away from my story to be’ but she didn’t shoo it away, she just watched it, after all, she had nothing better to do.

  She laughed at herself as she finally had an idea, it was such a daft idea but she began to type anyway and before long her silly little story was evolving from a few idle words into a short story, not a good story but at least she was writing.

  She chuckled at the thought of anybody ever actually seeing it and vowed to herself that nobody would.

  Jasmine knew that she would never publish it but that’s not why she wrote it, it was just a writer’s equivalent of an artist’s doodles, just a silly little thing to keep her writing, to prevent the creative juices from stagnating, or even worse, drying up altogether.

  I’ll add her musings in here, just so that you can get an idea of exactly how blocked she’d become with her serious writing, she decided to name it ‘A life in the day of a fly’.

  Even the title amused her but after she’d written a few pages of nonsense, mostly regarding a fly’s thoughts about landing on an old banana skin and settling onto a fresh steaming parcel that a dog had left on the grass, she saved the story, as it may help her with a blockage sometime in the future, she would be able to read through it and smile to herself and then by taking her mind away from the lack of serious words, she might find that something would just come to her, it was possible to try too hard, most of her ideas came when she wasn’t trying at all.

This was Jasmine’s writing doodle…

  A life in the day of a fly.  by Jasmine.

  Early one sunny Sunday in summer, as he was planning out his day, a fly was contemplating a passing dog as a possible means of transport to somewhere new and exotic.

  He’d only just woken up and was feeling pretty lazy.

  It was uncertain where in fact he’d thought ‘new and exotic’ might actually be, as he had little or no memory to speak of.

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Ferrying Riches

He knew that he and Gabe were trusted now but only so far, they hadn’t been told anything about drugs being hidden in the cars, he needed to get out of there and talk to Gabe, he was shaking.

  Ross and Spag continued their conversation as they walked away to go into the office, giving Derry a chance to slip out unseen.

  Derry wanted to tell Gabe right away but didn’t dare risk being overheard, so he had to bottle it up until they got home after work.

Later that night, Derry started to tell Gabe what he’d heard, Gabe said that as Derry had only caught part of the conversation, it’s possible that they were discussing a film, it was bad enough that they’d unwittingly been brought into ringing cars, adding drugs into it was far more than either of them could ever be comfortable with.

  It couldn’t be true; they didn’t want to give up the work.

  A sudden thought struck Derry, who was already on edge and he said to Gabe

  ‘That car we took on the ferry…’

He couldn’t voice the remainder of that thought, it was just too awful but Gabe immediately took on its significance and the blood drained from his face.

  Had they really taken a stolen ringer through customs, driven it right through France and into Belgium with a consignment of who knows what kind or quantity of drugs concealed somewhere in the car?

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If...

The begging letters hadn’t stopped arriving but there were a lot less each week, some days there would be none at all.

The girls had looked at several of the most local ones and had dealt with a quite a few already but they’d be able to really get into more of them, now that finding homes was no longer top of the to-do list.

  One man had wanted a suit for a job interview but with the sisters having been away on their travels for so long, the girls had missed the deadline for that one, they decided that they would still buy the suit in case he’d need one again in future.

   As the man was asking for so little and he hadn’t asked for money, they didn’t bother to check him out, they went to the nearest men’s clothing store and had the assistant help them to price up a decent suit, shirt, tie, shoes and a belt, then bought vouchers for a little over that amount.

  The girls wrote a reply to the man, enclosing the clothing vouchers and said that they hoped he had been or would be successful in his job search.

  They put the letter through the man’s letterbox and left, it felt good.

  A woman asked for a wheelchair and lots of home modifications to her house for her five year old child, Rosie, who couldn’t walk.

  It was a huge amount that the woman was asking for, so it needed to be checked out, as per the girls’ own self-inflicted rules.

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Life Returns

She felt that she knew the hotel when she arrived there in the taxi but then thought that of course she would, she’d seen the photos on the website when she’d booked it.

  When Jenny went inside the hotel, it was kind of familiar but different somehow, she had an image in her mind of people wearing more old fashioned clothing, some even in dark coloured uniforms, she thought that ‘these people were dressed just like other people of this era’, as soon as she’d finished the thought of ‘this era’, that had struck her as an odd thought, it seemed to her then that if she had lived here in another life, then it must’ve been in another era.

  The Hotel Stefanie was really old so that didn’t give any clue as to a possible timeline but it didn’t discount the possibility either.

  She settled into the hotel room, unpacked her suitcase and then went out to find somewhere to eat, looking at what was on the other diner’s plates, she started remembering the taste of these foods that she’d never had at home.

  It was too early to go back to the hotel, so she wandered around the streets for a bit and popped into a bar for a nightcap.

  Jenny returned to her hotel a bit later, after spending an hour or so in the bar, chatting to a couple of young tourists, and then she decided to phone her mum, to ask if she’d ever been to Vienna before, with her parents or with anybody really.

Her mum said that neither Jenny nor any of her family had ever been to Austria at all that she knew of.

  Jenny began to tell her mum about the feeling that she’d lived here before and that she thought that she was recognising things, places and even German words that she really shouldn’t know.

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Restless Spectres

The hair stood up on the back of her neck and on her arms as an icy feeling swept through her body, chilling her to what felt like the very marrow deep inside of her bones and she could feel a deep sense of fear as she turned around and saw nobody there.
   This entity was able to actually hurt people and it seemed hell bent on doing just that.
   Clara could sense the evil in the room, there was an eerie heaviness in the air all around her that caused her great anxiety, her heart was thumping wildly and she instinctively put her hand over her heart in a bid to contain the palpitations and try to hold it within her chest as she was sure that if it beat any harder or faster or pushed out any further, it might explode.
   It was the first time that Clara had ever encountered such a malevolent ghost and certainly the first time that she’d ever been so absolutely afraid of any spirit in her entire life. She hadn’t even known that such evil spirits really existed outside of fictional works.
   Clara was beginning to understand why hotel guests had never stayed there for very long
It also explained why the place had passed through so many owners since being built.
   Most people wouldn’t even be aware of ghosts or realise that they probably passed by them often but Clara had grown up with having them around, she could talk to them and they to her and sometimes she would even help them to pass over into the light once she was old enough to understand a little more about why some spirits stayed behind. ............................................................ 

Witch Spelling

The moon was his favourite place to go for complete solitude, there were places on earth where one might find peace for a while but there was always the chance that an aircraft flying overhead might disturb the silence.

On the moon, a wizard could find peace, a complete, undisturbed tranquillity.

Wiz had been there several times throughout his long life, he would magic a huge see-through bubble with a comfortable chair, fresh air inside and just the right amount of gravity to enable him to stay there with no ill-effects.

The first time he went there he had difficulty breathing for the first few seconds until he made his visit more comfortable, so for each visit after that, he would set up his bubble immediately.

Wiz loved to look out at the other planets, choosing a different part of the moon on each visit, sometimes he would see shooting stars, asteroids and comets but none were near enough to cause any noise pollution.

On one of Wiz’s moon visits, he had just settled down in his bubble with a good book, a drink and some snacks, when he saw what looked like a comet hurtling straight towards him, as it got closer, he could just make out that it was some kind of craft, it looked man-made, so before it got too close, Wiz cloaked himself and his entire bubble so that he could watch what was about to happen next.

Wiz had thought about transporting away from there but he was curious, he hadn’t heard of any humans managing space flight, he’d never come across aliens from another planet before and if it was another wizard, he wouldn’t need a craft, he could just transport in the usual way.

Wiz watched the craft land, less than a quarter of a mile from where he sat and after some time, he saw a ladder being lowered from the craft onto the surface of the moon, when he saw figures emerge, it became obvious to Wiz that they were human.

He was surprised at first but then a little peeved when one of the figures placed a flag into the surface of the moon, he then realised that these were Americans but he thought ‘what a cheek!, they’re acting as though they discovered the moon, or that they were the first to ever come here but Wizards have been coming here for centuries’.

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