Writing with a mission.

Tag: Fiction

The Re-education of Senator X

Just published a new short story that you can read free using the link below:

Senator Xavier Sanford wakes up in a strange place with no memory of how he arrived there. He quickly realizes something went horribly wrong at the party he attended the night before. Unable to leave, he is forced to cooperate with the bizarre demands of his mysterious host in a desperate effort to keep his daughter alive. The new psychological thriller short story by author C.L. Wells will keep you on the edge of your seat!

Read it for yourself on Medium.com: https://medium.com/@creativewriting777/the-re-education-of-senator-x-chapter-1-187e5e212f1f

Photo by Maria Lysenko on Unsplash

The Tucson Prophecy – Chapter 1 sample

Here is a sample of my newest book, The Tucson Prophecy, to be released this October.  Enjoy!

Chapter One

Tuesday, September 3, 2002

 

“Mr. O’Conner, it’s good to meet you,” the doctor said, extending his hand.

Jimmy shook his hand without saying anything, but that didn’t seem to matter much, as the doctor didn’t skip a beat.

“Your sister has told me so much about you,” the doctor continued.

Jimmy wasn’t one for small talk, and he didn’t much care for hospitals.  In fact, the only person in the whole world who could get him to set foot in one voluntarily was lying in a hospital bed in the next room.

“How bad is it, doc?”

“Straight to the point, I see.  O.k.  Well, Mr. O’Conner, your sister is in the advanced stages of heart failure.  As you probably already know, she had a VAD – a ventricular assist device, put in last year.  However, the disease has progressed since that time, and…”

“Just the bottom line, doc, please.”  Jimmy hated long explanations.

The doctor smiled mechanically before continuing.

“Of course.  I’m afraid that, unless we are able to find a heart donor, she has between two to four months left to live.”

Jimmy nodded his head up and down.

“And where could we find one of these donors?”

“Well, there is an organization called the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, which maintains a list of all patients in need of an organ transplant.  When a new organ becomes available, they match things like blood type, tissue type, size of the organ, and a number of other things in order to find a suitable donor.  Your sister has been on the donor candidate list for over a year.  If a heart becomes available, she will be one of the top candidates.  Unfortunately, there is no certainty that a heart will become available in time, or that she will be the candidate selected to receive the heart.”

Jimmy nodded his head up and down.

“You already discussed all of this with my sister, correct?”

“Yes, yes, of course.  At this point it is simply a waiting game, Mr. O’Conner.  We’ll keep her as comfortable as we can, and have her ready if a heart should become available.  We’ll be sending her home in a few days, since there’s nothing more we can do for her here at this time.”

“Thanks for the update, doc.”

 

 

Jimmy knocked on the door to his sister’s room and cracked it open a bit.

“O.k. if I come in?”

“Jimmy.  Come on in,” came a weak reply from his sister.

He went in the room and looked at his sister, who was smiling ear to ear at the sight of him.  He felt his heart sink when he saw how pale she was, but he didn’t allow himself to show any emotion other than a slight smile.

“Do you like the flowers I sent you?” he said, as he motioned to the bouquet sitting on the window sill.

“Yes.  You know lilies are my favorite.  Thank you, Jimmy.”

“Nothin’ but the best for you, Sis.”

He stared at her for a moment before continuing.  As far as he was concerned, Sarah was his only family.  She was his half-sister.  They shared the same mother, and she had passed away five years ago, God rest her soul.  Sarah’s father had died two years after that.  As for Jimmy’s father – if the bum was still alive, he didn’t care to know about it.  No, Sarah was it, and he would do anything in the world for her – anything.

“Did the doctor talk to you, Jimmy?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“It doesn’t look too good for me, Jimmy.”

“Yeah… I know.”

“I want to be buried beside mama, in Chicago.”

Jimmy felt a catch in his throat, but he stopped it before a sound escaped his lips and pushed the thought out of his head.

“If it comes to that, I’ll make sure it happens.  You can count on it.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.  I know I can always count on you.  Come here.”

He walked over to her bedside and she picked up one of his hands and held it in hers.  She looked up at Jimmy before continuing.

“I want you to promise me one more thing, Jimmy.”

“Sure thing, Sis, you name it.”

“I want you to get out of Chicago and start a new life… away from the business.”

Sarah never did like to say the word ‘mob’.  Whenever she mentioned it, she always used the word ‘business’.  Jimmy always knew she didn’t approve, but she never said so to his face, never talked down about what he did for a living.  The closest she ever came to it was saying, “Jimmy, you’re better than that.  I know you.  You’re a good person inside.”  He’d thought long and hard about it, too – about starting over.  He’d saved up some money, but it wasn’t quite enough to get out.  The Chicago Mob didn’t exactly approve of people getting out of the business.  It would require a new face, a new identity, a new job, and not just for him – for both of them.  Because if he left, they would come to her to get him back, and then whack them both.

Truth be told, he was tired of the life.  He wasn’t a young man any more, and being an enforcer with the mob required a certain physicality that was better suited to a younger man.  Still, at fifty years old, he was in good shape.  He ate good, exercised regularly, and combined with his impressive natural size and physique, he was able to keep up and do what was required.  But how long could he keep it up?  Another ten years?  Maybe, if he didn’t get injured or killed because he was losing his touch or getting too slow to react in a fight.  He’d been waiting for the right time, and for Jimmy, with everything that was going on with his sister, now was the right time.

“O.k.”

“You mean that, Jimmy?  You’re not just sayin’ that because I’m dyin’?”

“Yeah, I mean it, Sis.  I’ll get out, like you want.”

“Is it something you want for you, Jimmy?”

He paused a moment before responding.

“I’ve been thinkin’ about it, and yeah, I think I want it for me, too.  It’s no life to grow old in, not doin’ what I do.  Besides, I got a lot to make up for so I can see you in heaven.”

Sarah smiled, and Jimmy smiled back at her.

“Thank you, Jimmy.  Thank you.”

By the look on her face, it seemed like a great weight had lifted off of her shoulders.  She seemed to be at peace.  It made Jimmy feel good.

 

 

He left the hospital and drove across the street to a strip-mall where there was a Chinese restaurant called, The Little Dragon.  He settled down into one of the booths and ordered a General Tso combo with egg-drop soup.  He thought about the conversation he had just had with his sister, mulling over the details of what he would need to do to get out of the life while he waited for his meal to arrive.  When it finally came, he wasn’t very hungry.

He ate about half of the meal before giving up and signaling the waiter for the check.  While the waiter was gone getting his change, he opened the fortune cookie and popped it into his mouth, and then he read the fortune.  Suddenly, he stopped chewing.  Staring up at him from the small piece of paper he had just extracted from the cookie were the words of the fortune:

 

Save the girl, and your sister will live.

 

Copyright 20016 – C.L. Wells – all rights reserved.

City of the Lost – a book review

City of the Lostby Kelley Armstrong, starts out with an interesting premise.  Casey is a police detective with a secret.  Her closest friend, Diana, has an abusive psycho-stalker ex whose behavior is making life more and more dangerous for her.  Having hopped from city to city in attempts to escape both of their pasts, they are suddenly faced with the fact that they need a better plan.  Diana’s ex finds her and beats her up, landing her in the hospital.  Someone who knows of Casey’s past secret shows up and tries to kill her, leaving her boyfriend in the hospital.  Together, Casey and Diana decide to take advantage of the nuclear option – a town no one knows about in the Canadian wilderness where those who need to get lost from society can go to escape their pasts and start fresh.

Enter the town of Rockton, the City of the Lost.  For all of its benefits, Rockton may not be as safe a place for Diana and Casey as it first appears.  For starters, Casey is allowed to come to the town in part because they have a murderer on the loose and need a bonafide detective to help find the killer.  As the story moves on, Dalton – the town’s Sheriff – and Casey don’t seem to be making much progress, and the bodies begin to pile up.  Everyone is suspect, and it even appears at one point there might be more than one killer.

The cantankerous Sheriff and the feisty Casey start off with a rocky relationship that turns into one of mutual respect as they each learn to appreciate the other’s strengths.  However, with the list of victims getting longer and the killer’s path getting closer and closer to Casey, Dalton, and Diana, will they be able to find the culprit(s) in time?

An interesting premise, interesting characters, and a generally entertaining story help move the plot along.  The author spends a bit too much time early on in the story making Sheriff Dalton out to be a grade-A jerk, ad nauseam, and it made me want to put the book down at one point for fear the rest of the story would be as repetitive and grating.  However, I stuck it out, and after a slow several chapters post Dalton’s introduction, was rewarded with the story moving on to better territory.

In a town where everyone has a shady past, there are plenty of suspects to sort through, then there is the problem that, apparently, those in charge of letting people into the town may have let more than one psychopath through in return   for some large monetary donations.  The clues seem to point both everywhere and no-where, until suddenly, one conversation (which is NOT recorded in the book) appears to help Casey figure out the whole thing.  She confronts the killer, figuring out almost everything that happened and why, within the space of a few pages.

The author, who has a background in psychology, uses her knowledge of psychology to enable her characters to have lengthy conversations about why everyone is behaving the way that they are, plumbing the psychology behind their actions and generally hitting the nail on the head.  With this sort of psychological prescience, one wonders why they don’t raise money for the town with a counseling hot-line.  In my experience, real people aren’t nearly as perceptive or accurate as some of these psychological savants, unless they are your therapist or your significant other.  The story’s conclusion was also weak.  On one page, there is not even a good suspect, two pages later, Casey has figured out even intricate relational details of what motivated the killer, exactly what they did at each point, and why – totally not believable.

If the author re-worked the drawn-out introduction of Dalton, cut out the psycho-analysis many of the characters give when observing other character’s behaviors, and gave us a more believable path to Casey’s discovery of the real killer, I would give it a 4 or 4.5.  As-is, I give it a 3.5 out of 5.

Sex in Entertainment

Recently I was watching a series drama on Amazon Prime.  The show had a decent plot, was interesting, and kept me engaged.  Suddenly, there was a scene of a graphically sexual nature in the midst of the story.  It added little, if anything, to the plot, but there it was.  Whether watching a TV show or reading a novel, this experience is commonplace in today’s entertainment industry.  In fact, it has become so prevalent in entertainment developed for the adult population in our culture, that if your favorite show or fictional reading material doesn’t contain sexually graphic material, then it is probably either written for children, written specifically for a faith-based audience, or is a reality TV show dealing with hunting in the Alaskan wilderness.

This is one of the reasons that I started writing fiction with a mission.  I believe that, like me, there are many people who do not want their entertainment to be frothing over with naked men and women cavorting like fleas in heat.  If Jane and Bob are having sex with each other and it is significant to the plot line, then there are many ways to get the point across without spending five minutes showing them in the act (or describing the same in graphic detail as is often the case with the written word).  Frankly, in most cases, many of these storylines seem to strain to include such episodes, and often in a way that does little to move the narrative of the story along.

There are many reasons I oppose using descriptions and images of graphic sexuality (i.e. pornographic material) as entertainment.  As this is a blog post and not a research paper (or one of my novels) I will mention just one (Covenant Eyes, Inc., 2015, pp. 22-23):

In 1982 and 1984, Dr. Dolf Zillmann and Dr. Jennings Bryant conducted an experiment with 80 male and 80 female college-age participants.100 These were divided into three subgroups, and each group was shown 4 hours and 48 minutes of media over a six-week period: (1) the “Massive Exposure Group” was shown 36 non-violent pornographic film clips; (2) the “Intermediate Exposure Group” was exposed to 18 pornographic film clips and 18 regular films; and (3) the “No Exposure” control group was shown 36 non-pornographic film clips.

….Porn seemed to condition participants to trivialize rape. Participants were asked to read about a legal case where a man raped a female hitchhiker and then recommend a length for the rapist’s prison sentence. Males in the No Exposure Group said 94 months; the Massive Exposure Group said 50 months (nearly half that of the No Exposure Group).

Our culture’s obsession with graphic sexuality as entertainment is often a contributing factor in sexual crimes, such as rape.  For that reason alone, we should seriously consider reversing this trend as a society.  I, for one, have had enough.  I am starting a revolution in the entertainment industry, and I hope you will join me.

One reason I write novels is that I believe I can tell a darn good story and I enjoy doing it.  Another reason is that I have had enough of being bombarded with sexually-saturated storylines in what passes for entertainment, and I intend to help provide an alternative source of entertainment to counter-act this trend.  One of the commitments I make to my readers is that my fiction will NEVER contain graphic sexual descriptions.

So, I challenge my fellow-authors to join the revolution!  And if you want to read good fiction WITHOUT graphic sexual material, then I invite you to read one of my books.

Cheers!

C.L. Wells

Reference:

Covenant Eyes, Inc. (2015).  Pornography Statistics: 250+ facts, quotes, and statistics about pornography use.
Retrieved from http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornography-facts-and-statistics

 

14th Deadly Sin – a book review

Author:  James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

I give this latest book of the Women’s Murder Club series four out of five stars.  It is a fast-moving book with engaging characters – a standard with Patterson’s work.  I must confess that I am not a series regular, and have read only one or two other books in this series, so my review has the advantage of being almost from the perspective of a first-timer to the series.

First, what I liked.  Filled with strong female leads, as the series title suggests, these characters are by no means one-dimensional.  They struggle with relationship issues, career challenges, and the like.  Lindsay, the main character, struggles to balance life as a police detective and a new mother with husband Joe Molinari.  Patterson and Paetro do a good job going back and forth between the seedy and crime-ridden police world and the family scenes.  Any mom with a career could appreciate the joy and the struggle of trying to balance these two different sides of life.  The scenes with Lindsay’s baby daughter Julie do much to bring some humanity back into focus amidst the de-humanizing aspects of Lindsay’s police cases.  Yuki has a big shake-up in her career – which I won’t spoil for anyone with all the details.  Suffice it to say that she follows her heart and as a result faces challenges both at work and at home that allow her character to grow.  In the process, she questions her abilities, loyalties, and motivations for being a lawyer in the first place.  The book was entertaining and kept me engaged throughout.  The material regarding the police cases was interesting and kept me wondering what would happen next.

Now for what I didn’t like.  I thought there were a few scenes that were un-necessarily graphic in their description of torture.  Do I really need to know someone’s eyelids were sliced off while they were still alive?  If the person was tortured to death with a knife, I know what I need to know about how brutal the killer can be.  To me this is a turn-off and doesn’t add anything to the plot, and certainly not to my enjoyment of the book.  I felt that so many cops died in this story that it was world war three – a bit over the top in my opinion for the setting of the story, and it detracted from the believability factor a bit.  Lastly, both Lindsay and Joe Molinari end up in remarkably similar dangerous situations where bad guys get the drop on them, then both escape in record time and in a similar fashion – it was something I might expect from a first-time author, not from Patterson and one of his veteran co-authors.

For fans of the series and those who like an entertaining police procedural with plenty of supporting characters and storylines to keep you engaged, I would recommend this book.

South Carolina Writer’s Group

I just started a meetup for authors in the Charleston, SC area.  You can get the details at http://www.meetup.com/South-Carolina-Writers-Group.  I started the group for the purpose of creating a network of authors (and their supporters) who will partner together for the purposes of:

  • Writing and publishing great fiction/non-fiction
  • Building an author platform
  • Gaining exposure as an author

The group is aimed primarily at independent authors (a.k.a. indie authors), but we welcome all authors and their supporters.  One of the central ideas behind this group is that we can accomplish more together than we can individually.  By pooling our knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm, we can help each other achieve our goals as authors.

We will fulfill the purposes of this group by engaging in the following (not an exhaustive list):

  • Presentations/discussions on the process of writing, publishing, building an author platform, and gaining exposure as an author.
  • Networking with other authors/author supporters for the purposes of supporting each other in the writing process, and trading services (e.g. beta reading, editing, critiquing, cover design, author website/blog development, marketing support, et cetera).
  • Providing a knowledge base of resources for every stage of the writing process including idea development, writing, editing, publishing, and marketing.

Cheers!

Christopher

Inaugural Post

Greetings world!  This is the first post of my new author blog.  I will be using this forum as a place to post some of my work for others to enjoy/review, links to my new and previous books, as well as a place to write on life as an independent author and the writing process in general.  This will be a journey together as I navigate the world of independent publishing and marketing.  Writing good fiction is (I am discovering) only the first step in the process of becoming a commercially successful author.

Along the way I hope to share some information and insights that will help other authors, as well as to build community with and learn from you and the other readers/contributors to this blog.  So let’s get started!

Step one in our journey is me building this site!  I still have to add an email list widget, post some pictures from my first and current book project, and a host of other things that I probably haven’t even thought of yet.

I hope you will come back to check on my progress and keep in touch.

Cheers!

Christopher.

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