Maybe May

Over a year ago, before I was inclined to face the fact that my Munich consultancy client was on a slippery slope... speeding on the fast lane to hell in the proverbial hand-basket... I had the idea for a web-based project as described above. However when things started to get exceedingly tricky last summer I realized that I was not in a position to launch anything of the kind.

A couple of weeks ago, however, an email reached me, sent by someone interested in purchasing the URL from me. Bliss! The paltry sum involved ensures nevertheless that the month of May is not entirely without income! I shall watch with interest to see what the new owner has in mind...

However the main activity of the not-so-merry month of May has been the start of my new writing project, Seasonal Variance, summed up with the following blurb.

At theatre school his tutor had dismissed Mathieu Fischer as being incapable of evoking a ‘climate of fear’. But the young man learned fast.

Play on slumbering insecurities, amplify latent anxieties so that they bubble to the surface, no longer just niggling worries in the depths of the psyche but monstrous, marauding Fears crawling out of the swamp!

Then sell to the gullible and presumed vulnerable the costly panoply of gadgets and devices supposed to protect them in their homes. Segirtad – Safe as Switzerland. Mathieu learned well the tricks of the high-pressure hard sell.

After Isabelle Keppler’s grandparents died, with Segirtad indirectly to blame, she resolved that Mathieu Fischer merited a comeuppance.

She had no idea what her thoughts of revenge would trigger. For Fischer had been incited in the meantime to use his talents in an even more nefarious arena, one in which the potent factor Fear is dangerously allied with the seduction of pure Greed.

The narrative builds to an action-rich climax involving two aircraft, a helicopter and a sure-footed horse (not Pegasus… without wings) set at Europe’s highest altitude airport, an intervention averting a catastrophe equally far beneath the waters of of the sea Isabelle would call Mare Nostrum. For her neither Latin nor the ancient Roman concept of justice were dead.

Dead were others, some innocent, some guilty.

As this post was developing in my mind over the last few days I decided to be awfully brave and set myself the target of completing my storytelling before my meagre savings run out. Not that finishing my account of the adventure of Justitia-in-mirrored-Ray-Bans adventures would mean any sudden influx of earnings; in the interim I am ever more skeptical about the usefulness of sites like Authonomy and Slushpile, where Golden Dawn languishes largely unread and certainly not gamed upwards in the rankings.

The motivation, I felt, was largely the challenge. Not as with Sex&Drugs&Profiteroles is there with the current project the danger of the manuscript growing to over two thousand pages!

The outline is tight as a camel's arse in a sandstorm and, since starting writing on 5 May I have now reached the hundred page mark, which I see as the benefit of being able to devote eight hours a day... seven days a week... to the project.

However... since yesterday evening there is bad news and there is good news! The bad news is that I shall be unable to continue working as a full-time writer. The good news is that I have been assigned translation work which will keep my busy... and earning... for the next six weeks.

Picture me somewhat relieved!