DEFECTION.

Americans were in touch. They knew of me. I was behind the wall. My Iron Curtain. I had intelligence product. They wanted me to share. A tentative overture was made. The agent in question trailed a coat in my path and I picked up the bait.

   What’s this? An offer of help. Go over to the other side. Share the goods. Increase knowledge and understanding. Make the world a better place. All good points. Too good to be true? The offer was persuasive. You know how it is. They try to be subtle about the friendly warning.

   I retreated. Had anyone noted this exchange? They’d opened files on me, in the States. So there was no going back to the way things were before. I’d been tested on multiple fronts. They’d been lying in wait for me, all along.

   It’s different behind the Iron Curtain. Oh, those Americans can operate here. With an iron fist, maintaining control of the product. But that’s not how they operate in the Land of the Free. They share the product. Evaluate. Run it through the committee.

   Alien, to me. And yet…

   Freedom to write draws me. Have I been a prisoner of my own writing? Fighting my own personal COLD WAR? I’m walking along beside the high wall, on my side of the divide. There’s a checkpoint coming up. I have a rendezvous to keep. More contact. The Americans made overtures.

   They want me to see things their way. Infiltrate a group. Objective. Generate intelligence product and share it with the Yanks. Everyone wins. Even me. They know that’s not how I operate. So who do they send, over to my side of the wall, to convince me?

   She’s a cool uncustomer. On this assignment, she goes by the name Eastwick. They chose her because she’s worked on my side of the divide. She’s written and put out material without letting anyone else see it first. That’s given her a taste for how I’ve operated all these years.

   Hard to break free of that, after so long. Now the Americans want me to defect. Join a group for writers. Write fiction, by committee. Collaboratively. With fellow scribblers chipping in and offering their opinions.

   Yes, they want to see my intelligence product and evaluate it before it is passed up the line for general consumption. The Americans want me on the team. They want me to defect. Sacrifice everything I believe in. My one-man awkward-squad viewpoint, my lone writer status, my reclusivity, exclusivity. They’d be pleased if I came in from the cold.

   Eastwick spells it out. I can cross over, and go into the warm. Rejoin the human race. Commit to a new ideology. It’ll be best, for all concerned. Most especially for me. She wants to help me. Is that asking too much?

   Our brief chat in the shadows carries with me all the way back to base. Her offer is genuine. She finds it hard to fathom, this stark idea. I don’t care if you like my work. Just as I don’t care if you don’t like my work. That’s why I don’t submit my work to a group of writers. Critique group is an alien phrase, to me.

   I’ve had time to think it over. The concept haunts my dreams, and I wake in a cold sweat in some bare cell that will see better days. Though not today. The Americans hold out the prospect of a new form of freedom. Would I be foolish to pass it up?

   Eastwick meets me again. This time, I make an excuse and cross over to her side of the wall. We can move more freely there. I can express ideas that wouldn’t go down well back where I came from. She offered help. I said I’d look into it.

   My plans ballooned. I built up files on people. Groups. Places I could infiltrate. This even started to affect my business-plans. I could see several different ways of tackling the project. But I needed more information. So I asked Eastwick for help.

   She went into her own files and gave up intelligence product. Careful, Eastwick, that’s how the treacherous double-game is played. The operator on the far side of the divide makes reassuring noises and walks off with your silverware.

   We aren’t playing that game. She hits me in the stomach with a knee-strike. The information in her files matches mine. There’s an incident from her past that chimes with an operation in my files. A long-buried grenade detonates. My business-plans change all over again.

   I’m called away. The meeting is inconclusive. She’s expecting an answer, or a statement. With a keen mind running over the details, it’s likely that Eastwick thinks I’ll back out of the deal. I was just testing the water all along. That sort of manoeuvre.

   Now I’m back. And I’m walking along the wall, to the rendezvous. That checkpoint’s coming up. I haven’t decided either way. And that is no news worth turning up for. Eastwick will shrug and leave it in my hands. That doesn’t happen.

   I’m sandbagged from just outwith my peripheral vision. There’s a vague image of Eastwick, on the far side of the checkpoint. So it can’t be her doing. Oh. It’s her accomplice. Vanderkarr. She comes along playing spy games of her own.

   That brunette look flummoxed me. She was blonde when we first met. Cheap trick. The trenchcoat was the giveaway. Too late, now. Vanderkarr trots out a rough game, reading off her script, playing the good cop.

   They know I’m here, discussing defection. So things could get quite sticky for me. What if it became known that the Yanks made overtures? Cover blown, options crushed, breathing-space folded away for the duration.

   Vanderkarr comes in out of the blue and puts the assignment to me. She wants to set up a cell inside another network. Share intelligence. Collaborate with multiple agencies. This is a step away from the critique group. Something else entirely.

   I catch sight of Eastwick climbing into a so-called taxi. Her people are driving it. She flashes her Jane Doe identity papers and heads back to the States on her Missy Biozarre passport. The critique group was bait I’d never take. Vanderkarr offers the softer target. She makes it sound as though I have no option.

   The maddening thing is, she’s right. Vanderkarr plays things tight. She’s trying to persuade Eastwick to dive in and participate in this too. Eastwick’s position is exposed. Too many angles. She has a passion for starting to write a short story that automatically qualifies as a novel. Writing a short chapter might not be enough to satisfy her craving for words. Vanderkarr is in. She’s trying to show that her fear of writing is gone. I’ll be writing for committee. Not how I operate. We could all be dragged down flaming.

   Vanderkarr crashes my party. Helps me up after sandbagging me. Here’s the thing. I’d already offered the Americans a deal not far-removed from the mission Vanderkarr was proposing. I would set aside my dislike of collaboration, and make room for the Americans in a Kindle book. (Clanjamfrie.) A chapter each.

   I’d tie these 10,000-word short stories together as if by magic, and put a free Kindle book out on all contributing blogs. There were no takers. These agents were too busy. I altered my plans. However, I’d exposed a vulnerability in my one-man viewpoint.

   Now Vanderkarr took advantage. She proposed a watered-down version. Lower word-count. Operating to a deadline. How could I resist? The assignment conformed to my views. Write your story. Edit your story. Publish your story. Just do it.

   Except, Vanderkarr stressed a random collaborative element to the mission. She called it BLOGVEL. A Hungarian soup-dish, as I recall. BLOG NOVEL. I switch to COLD WAR thinking, and call it NOVBLOG.

   The originator of the novel kicks off with chapter one, then links to the next chapter’s author on another blog. That chapter follows a week later. The list of contributors is known before the process begins, and chapters are assigned according to preference…

   Do you want to write near the beginning of the story, or do you delight in the notion that you are following on after many chapters? Painting the last few sections of the floor. Unless there’s a strong demand for a different method of finishing, the original author handles the last chapter.

   Vanderkarr tells me I NEED to do this. After my offer to her, it’s hard to knock this one into the stony ground with a bloody shovel. I think it over for a few seconds. Well, it’s not a critique group. I temporarily reject Eastwick’s standpoint. Take a step at a time. Vanderkarr’s option is softer. Easier to like. The stars are fading from the circles running around my sandbagged head.

   “Okay Coach, I’m in.”

   We leave it at that. I have to return to my side of the world. There’s a name, in a file. A rendezvous. And a timeline. My contact is Michelle Simkins. She’ll kick off the intelligence assignment. Somewhere down the line, Vanderkarr will pitch in. I’ll be there, carrying the can a short distance to the next author in line. We’re trying to keep the barn from collapsing by getting water to the scene in time. This isn’t a critique group. It’s a novel, written by many participants. Eastwick might put in an appearance. Or, fogbound, she’ll miss the rendezvous. You know how these gigs go.

   I’ll be writing by committee. Defecting. My COLD WAR is thawing. I’m reluctant to kill my blog. What will this experiment in intelligence gathering and sharing lead to? Find out next week, when I write a chapter in response to whatever someone else came up with this week.

   Self-publishing is a mad science experiment in writing. Sometimes, things seem a step too far for me. Eastwick helped me take a step nearer a step too far. There, I stopped and pondered. Vanderkarr swung me around in another direction.

   Will the barn hold up, when the last bucket of water is thrown on the fire? That’s down to Michelle Simkins and her chain of assistants. Of which I am now one. Write to a deadline. With a feel for a story. Maintaining consistency. Paying tribute to what went before. Carrying that can a little further.

   Write your story. Edit your story. Publish your story. That much hasn’t changed.

   What of the future? Will I return to my side of the divide? Siberian exile? Gather as much intelligence as possible on all these Americans, and then sneak back over the wall to my fortress there? That’s one option. Depends on whether the barn falls…

NEXT BLOG: BLOGVEL.

TORI AMOS.

Night follows day with trademarked inevitability. The obvious consequence of blogging about the destruction of the World Trade Centre? I mention my space shuttle comment. Which leads to? Another trip down the thousand onyx steps to my vault. Pandora’s Box, Mark II. I reach in and dust off a piece of fiction. This has SPOOKY COINCIDENCE DEPARTMENT scrawled all over it.

   I misplaced some tales, down in the cracks, before I lost an entire novel. Kim Basinger. Fidel Castro. The usual suspects. You know the drill. There, in the dust, lies a sub-plot. Its clockwork mechanism hasn’t been wound in an age.

   This was a precursor to the loss of an entire novel. Though the shockwave reached me after that novel fell away. This was far more personal, in the sense that it revolved around a person whose music I’d listened to. When the World Trade Centre collapsed, it took thousands of people away. I didn’t know those people.

   It’s just as true to say that I don’t know the singer who was in New York that day. She wrote a song about the events. I Can’t See New York. There is something too human that comes out of listening to albums. Watching videos. Catching interviews on radio or television. Reading articles in magazines. A distant performer moves telescopically closer. Even so, I stress that I don’t know her. There is an illusion of knowing a performer. It is no more than that.

   This is a tough one to write about. I kept a lid on it from the moment I became aware of the coincidental detail. It’s the reaction that’s odd, given the obvious nature of the story. That was never going to be hidden away. What changed? I took one step too close. The heat made me flinch.

   I was going to blog about this in general terms and talk of a mysterious singer. Why conceal the name? Tori Amos. If I can write about the World Trade Centre and the loss of thousands unknown to me, then I can blog about the losses faced by one person – also unknown to me. Tori Amos inspired my writing. She still inspires, of course.

   The world plotted to send her first album my way. Reality bent into new shapes, beaming hints and messages to me. Everywhere I turned, there she was. Demanding to be listened to. I caved in, and bought Little Earthquakes. There were echoes of my writing in that album. Old data. No need to review here. Slivers of darkness.

   I thought her album was really good. My opinion is unimportant, except to confirm that I thought the first album good enough to prompt my buying her second album when it arrived. Under the Pink. I lay on my bed and listened to that album in the dark. Drowning in the sonic weirdness with its admixture of normalcy. Meenister’s dochter. Deal with it. I decided I’d buy her third album once that emerged from the music factory.

   Boys for Pele. I recall the remnant of a wardrobe leaning against another wardrobe. The mirror was all that remained from the first wardrobe. It was ripped out and canted against the next wardrobe, creating a crazily-angled reflection of the room. (Some of that fed into my Hamlet adaptation.)

   I sat on the bed and played Tori’s third album. Activity. Listening. Staring at the mirror. This reflected the sky behind me. High. Filling with snow as the music started. Reflected snow thickened as the album rolled along. Barriers tumbled. Tori produced her work for the first time. She had a blast, and so did I. Barriers sank tracelessly. With that album, she became my favourite singer. She still is, of course.

   Upshot. I started creating stories heavily-inspired by her work. Characters popped out. I’d listen to a song with cryptic comments in there, and concoct my own stories to match. Mad stuff. Sometimes, the material even made sense…

   I felt that she played piano the way Mr Page played guitar when he led Led Zeppelin. Eventually, Tori would express that sentiment in song. So this material she was singing, playing, made a sort of sense to me. I wasn’t THAT far out to sea. She was playing pianos as though guitars, all along.

   Inevitably, I created characters based indirectly on Tori. Splitting the singer across two women who meet in a hospital. The redheaded woman, Strawberry Thief, was clearly her. Not so clearly, the blonde was also her. The blonde’s story was just as tragic as the redhead’s. Involved in a nasty piece of business down by the beach, this blonde pregnant character lost her baby there.

   By this point, the influences came thick and fast from the choirgirl album. Tori sent us greetings from the choirgirl hotel. I’d split Tori across characters. Different aspects of her met in a hospital and faced the loss of children.

   This was a weird thing for me to write about. The Strawberry Thief’s loss was shielded. Occluded. Indirect. The blonde, Minty, had a more public loss at the beach one evening. She was hit in the stomach by a slug from a ·38 revolver.

   My personal carer, Dr Anton Phibes, stands ready at a moment’s notice if I look as though I might start talking about plot details. There are rules concerning the release of information ahead of the game. Phibes has those pills handy. Unpublished books. Works in lack of progress. These things are not spoken of in polite or impolite company. The good bad physician prescribes the sedatives, and I return to a state of abnormalcy.

   It’s his day off.

   I’m forced to give away plot elements in this blog. (EXPLETIVES DELETED.) Minty is a superhero, sucked into a world of supervillainy. She is married to Morland Cream. He, too, is a superhero. Minty can teleport. Morland’s blood is truly alive – it can survive outwith his body. I ran with these superpowers, inventing mad new uses for the abilities.

   Minty goes to the beach to kill Rico. Rico gets off one fatal slug. Minty teleports away as the slug hits her. She loses the baby. After that, she hunts down every gangster she can find. I used the songs Spark and Hotel as the main sources of inspiration.

   The twist in the story is so obvious that I can give it away here. Minty’s baby girl inherits superpowers from both parents. The power of teleportation, coupled with the abilities provided by spooky blood. In a supreme act of self-preservation, the unborn girl teleports away from her mother and survives in an artificial womb created from the weird blood.

   I’ll divert into character-splitting for a moment. There are two characters in the story, based on Canadian actress Natasha Henstridge. One is called Natasha. The other has a label rather than a name. End of diversion.

   This is a lost story. Tori miscarried. The song Spark contains lyrics about a woman who thinks that she can hold back a glacier. Even so, she couldn’t keep her baby alive. Why would I write that sort of stuff into my stories?

   Minty is on the beach, with a tall glass of lime to hand. She’s shooting Rico as he returns fire. It’s just a story. I hope Tori goes on to have a child. My story is trivial and packed with untrivia in the same breath. For assorted reasons, this story never quite flies.

   I turned to other work in any case. The year 2001 came and went. I lost an entire novel to a cold thought that September, and things changed for me. Half a year after that, I happened to catch Tori on television. Doing a five-minute thing on the topic of miscarriage. This was on the 25^th of March, 2002.

   My thoughts returned to the Minty character. Within seconds of the broadcast’s opening, I completely and utterly lost the plot. Tori spoke of three miscarriages. That was news to me. Her opening comment on her first miscarriage hit me hard. She said she was at the beach. I’d gone through the World Trade Centre matter. Now the SPOOKY COINCIDENCE DEPARTMENT was open for business again.

   I’d known next to nothing about Tori’s miscarriage. No details. My story about a Tori-inspired character losing a baby at the beach faded into the woodwork. This was the World Trade Centre all over again. A step too close, through coincidental detail.

   Except, this time, I could put a name, a voice, and songs to the person affected. She wasn’t as remote. What would I do about this one? Let it go? Store it in digital dust, and return to the idea one day? How sick is this going to be?

   Tori’s first miscarriage hadn’t stopped my creating a story confronting the pain of miscarriage. The detail, though. And the news of repeated miscarriages. Those things dropped wind from my sails. I think it’s important that readers know not every story sees print. There are plenty of writers out there who will gleefully fill blogs and websites with anecdotes about the ease with which they knock off literary masterpieces. No need, on my part, to add to that crowded marktplatz.

   I made an insane promise to myself. Tori would have another baby. A girl. When that happened, I’d consider bringing the character back in. Not much of a promise. Considering action. Tori did have a baby girl.

   Spooky coincidence? The girl’s name is Natashya. I’ve heard her singing on her mother’s album. A girl who inherited musical superpowers from her parents. Maybe it’s time to look at those files once more. Add a third Natasha character to the tale. With a y. Don’t watch this space. It will take me quite an effort to work something out. Something worth reading, at any rate.

NEXT BLOG: DEFECTION.

FEEDBACK.

After blogging about the unbloggable, I went hunting for feedback. Kacey Vanderkarr and Missy Biozarre prompted my chain of thought. Who better to ask? People like Missy were mentioned, tangentially, in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre’s destruction. I was far more interested in her view of the event, than in her thoughts on my blog comments.

   The tangential reference resurfaced throughout mid-September in 2001. What of the children watching television? How do we explain this disaster to them? Missy’s recollection is that she was outdoors playing basketball at school when a kid ran up and broke the news.

   Then she was indoors, watching the footage, not thinking very much about the destruction. Except to observe that watching the event was like watching a disaster movie on television. She had no connection. Not to the buildings destroyed. And not to the people who died. Though she didn’t quite take in the notion that people died. Not right then.

   Her main thought was that other people in the room were affected by what they saw. In particular, the teacher. Missy herself remained distanced from the event. Comprehension reached her later that Tuesday, when she witnessed her father’s tears. The first time she saw the man cry.

   Even with that personal event rushing in on her, she felt little other than curiosity concerning the attacks. Her view has a bearing, all these years later, on my cold statement. She tells me, candidly, that she can’t quite see what I was worried about.

   I was worried, in the cold moment of thinking what I thought, that I had lost the last scrap of my humanity. A realisation with grave consequences, had that been true. Missy bolstered her opinion by echoing the widespread sentiment that it is not a crime – not yet a crime – to have a thought.

   You’re not the only cold one in the room.

   Some of us are capable of detaching ourselves from horrific events. I think to do so, constantly, leads to a numbness that chips away at humanity. Yes, it’s good to switch off for short stints. Barrel through the crisis, deal with the problem, and then switch back on later.

   Missy’s statement about my not being the only cold one in the room suddenly cast a shadow over my life as I reviewed coldness. Yes. I know I must come across as cold at times. Just as I am convinced that this isn’t automatically a bad thing.

   There’s a certain type of writer fuelled by coldness and darkness. Cliché, I know. How does this feedback affect me? Missy holds the belief that blogging is cathartic. I start to see this, through her comments. That I can dump slivers of darkness into my blog, if I have to. Doesn’t mean I’m going to. The screen would turn black, for one thing. Just from mere slivers of darkness? Oh yes. I don’t believe blog readers are flocking to read these snippets, looking for a black cloud to pause under.

   Missy’s detachment on the day echoed mine, half a world and several time-zones away. Perhaps this quality in her younger brain steered her to the path of writing as an adult. Detachment. Observation. The writerly mind, at work. Misperceived as coldness. Unless the writerly mind at work is also bathed in coldness.

   I shift position. Ponder another fictional piece, based on reality. Though this later clashed with reality by coincidence. And I let it slide when I saw that I’d stepped too close. Could I discuss that now? In the next blog. A tale of a singer, the creation of characters, and life competing with art to determine which is imitating which.

   For now, I juxtapose images across the years. The time-zones. A writer-in-the-making ends her game of basketball to watch disaster unfold on television. Across the world, a writer-in-the-unmaking, about to lose a novel, comes across as just as cold as the girl being unaffected by the explosions.

   Years later, she wonders what I was so worried about. In response to that, I can’t quite form the words to say what it was that concerned me. So I talk about losing a scrap of humanity. I find difficulty in explaining how I managed to shift position so that I could blog about the unbloggable.

   History. I knew at the time that I’d never discuss yon cold moment. Recently, through contact with Kacey and Missy, I saw a way through the ice. Sometimes never means maybe later. What did I get out of this? An answer to that question about what the kids thought at the time. What do they think? How to explain? Age-old questions, predating television.

   Can you place yourself so far out in the cold that the only human response you have left is to note that you are that far out in the cold? There have been times in my life when I was there. It’s a still place. Nothing stirs. There’s no good or evil to it. No up or down. Though there is a door, behind you, that led in.

   The feedback I hunted for, at the start of this particular blog post, was actually my own. On the scale of things, I’m barely on the scale of things. I am not Primo Levi, considering the depiction of the unthinkable from the insider’s viewpoint. Levi was the participant/observer in history’s drama. I merely switched on a television, stood, watched, and thought what I thought.

   My memory of observing the destruction remains tied to the feeling of standing as the news unspooled before me. I didn’t sit. That remains a strong image. Shackled to the cold phrase about engineering. This jumble of thoughts, scenes, events, becomes a vague story surfacing in my blog.

   A young American ends her game of basketball with the guys. She approaches a television. What will we tell the children? The same sort of things mentioned in 1986. A teacher goes into space on the shuttle. That flight is televised live. The Challenger explodes. All across schools, teachers are switching off television sets and explaining the inexplicable.

   Five years before, I was thought beyond sick for writing about the inevitability of an exploding space shuttle. Gloomy, pessimistic, and – the word was used – morbid. Morbid, with special emphasis. My badge of dishonour. Simply my view of the world, filtered through all that reading I’d done on space exploration.

   Grissom, Chaffee, and White. The crew of Apollo 1. Dead on the launch-pad. I thought of those guys, when I wrote about an exploding space shuttle. Half a decade on, and my view of reality was all over the news. Parts fail. Standards improve. The phrase is uttered. Tombstone technology saves the lives of all who follow in the wake of those who died prompting its introduction. It’s never pretty. Always tastes stale and sour.

   Watching the shuttle explode, I didn’t feel cold. Writing of it was in my past. Concerning the incident related to the World Trade Centre…a fifteen-year chunk of time had rolled on by then. Time enough in which to have slices of my humanity stripped away.

   In fact, I don’t know what you were so worried about.

   Oh some indefinable thing, Missy. On a personal level. Not on a public one. Do I care what people think? I’ve had enough humanity stripped away to say no in answer to that one. These blogs were meant to be about my work. Not about the work I abandoned.

   This report from a fugitive was supposed to be rushed. Dashed off at the foot of some rain-sodden hulk of a hill. With pursuers close on my weary heels. No time for the personal. Just basic notes. No scope for catharsis. Merely an eight-line map of where I’m headed next.

   Images. I’m in New York. Standing at the site of one of two places I always harboured a secret desire to visit. I am not the sort of person to compile a bucket list – a menu of things I wish to achieve before I die. So visiting these two places is not on my lack of a bucket list.

   I want to write stories. Newsflash. I write stories. So, I have no need of a bucket list. Without telling anyone, I decide I’d like to visit the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Almost without planning, I do. The other place I’m headed, in my dreams, is the Empire State Building.

   There I am, in New York. Atop the Empire State Building. We – and that’s a huge crowd – are high up. A gaggle of American girls. Clouds. A low-flying aircraft. Rising panic in the young women. The aircraft is so low. Their thoughts turn to the destruction of skyscrapers as they make exclamations about the low aeroplane.

   My thought turns to the fact that the aircraft isn’t necessarily low. We are high up. Also, clouds play tricks with perspective. I found it impossible to travel through New York without picking up direct and indirect references to terrorist activity.

   Cops on the subway, just there for peace of mind, are at the sharp end if anything horrific goes down. Queues to get into certain buildings are queues for detectors. I have so much metal on my person that a crane magnet would easily cart me away.

   At the base of the Statue of Liberty, a man sets off a detector. That’s the sharp end. If he’s a bomber, he’s going to do the deed right here, right now. I have no time in which to react, as I am handed paper slippers when this potential breach of security occurs. This checkpoint is run briskly, and I don’t find out what, if anything, went wrong.

   Some security checks are shambolic, and not worth the effort. You want reviews? I pass through one checkpoint run by the Feds. Top-rated. Maximum points. I pass through another run by the U.S. Navy. Top-rated. Maximum points in crisper uniforms. These people know that they are not there to provide a show. Be careful, passing through checks like that. Otherwise, you might become the show for all the wrong reasons.

   There is no reading of minds at these checkpoints. Or, at least, not that I notice. La Biozarre’s point, made later, that it isn’t a crime to have a thought, strikes me as the first thought made a thought-crime when the time comes.

   Until then, I’ll think what I think. And I’ll think what I think, even when thinking becomes a crime. Will anyone be upset at what I’ve written about the World Trade Centre? I was the first shaken by the notion that I wasn’t shaken. That’s enough feedback, for me.

NEXT BLOG: THE SPOOKY COINCIDENCE DEPARTMENT.

LAMENT.

The Flowers of the Forest, that fought aye the foremost,

The prime of our land, are cauld in the clay.

Jane (or Jean) Elliot. (1727-1805.)

(If you find it hard to make it through Jeannie’s ballad in print, you’ll find it almost impossible to handle when a piper plays the piece. The Flowers of the Forest is Scottish on the page, but universal when carried across the air. Let the music haunt you. The word lament seems almost to have been coined for it. Herts o’ stane cannae cope wi’ the tune ower-lang.)

In a disturbing echo of the day I published my third book, traffic featured heavily a fortnight later. I had automated a series of blog posts on the 19^th of March 2012. My blog posts guided readers to an unbloggable thing. I blogged about that, in the end. My cold response to the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

   The day I published LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, I wandered the streets in something of a daze. I was struggling with reality. The third leg of my publishing plan went off with hitches. Writing stories was more interesting to me than pressing a button to launch those stories. I avoided being involved in a collision with a white van. Suddenly, I was no longer in a daze.

   A fortnight passed. I automated my blogs. Unless I kicked the door in later, and wiped the automatic process from Blogger, I would release my thoughts into the wild. Automating the process was a way of forcing myself to go ahead with that talk about the 11^th of September 2001.

   Again, I wandered in a daze. Contemplating what I’d just set up. I could tear it down – but I didn’t want to. That would have betrayed a newfound sense of freedom related to the issue. Authors Kacey Vanderkarr and Missy Biozarre had helped me see that I could untie the string and let the problem float away into the sky. Or sink like a rock to the seabed. The act of untying was the important item. Not the event that followed. Up or down.

   I couldn’t turn my back on those authors, having admitted that they made me see merit in turning the unbloggable into the bloggable. To abandon discussion was to walk the easy path. And if there’s an easy path on the road to being an author, I’ve yet to find it marked on any map.

   Geography. Instead of going here, I went there. And, in going there, I passed through a building. On leaving the building, I followed the woman in the red coat. She was too far ahead of me to grab. All I could do was cry out. There was time for that. Maybe.

   Ahead, and down those steps, she marched into the road. To my right, zooming along, was the vehicle. Woman and vehicle refused to stop. I was caught in that slow-motion world of data-processing in a moment of crisis. Yes, I could still yell CAR!

   I remembered the white van from almost exactly a fortnight before – even down to the very minute. A spooky feeling. Same time of day. And similar weather. Within sight of the other spot, where the white van had materialised.

   This time, with someone else in the firing line. The woman in the red coat. She belatedly looked right and paused, as I had done a fortnight before. I was in a daze from setting up my important blog. Was I to witness an accident? See this woman crumple against the front of a car and shoot off to the left – or, worse, go under the wheels…

   The car braked, and the woman noticed. I took in the raw speed and almost let fly my warning. Instead, I could tell that the collision was undone. It was another close call. Four people, locked in time. Pedestrian. Observer. Driver. Passenger.

   What to do, if she’d been hit? Be the professional witness, of course. She stepped out without looking, and there was nothing the driver could do. His options were limited. I’m glad it didn’t go down that way.

   Would I have blogged about a story that went the other way? Pending the outcome of legal action, yes. My thoughts went from traffic back to skyscrapers. Watching the World Trade Centre collapse on television was a small experience. No matter the size of the screen. You couldn’t get the scale of it from the window-on-the-world that is TV.

   Blogging prompted a search through my photo archives of New York. I spoke to firefighters when I was flitting around the city. Two museums take in the people at the sharp end – one is dedicated to firefighters and the other is all about the cops. I visited both. You experience the World Trade Centre’s destruction from similar perspectives in each museum.

   There is only one perspective worth discussing. Going to a museum isn’t the same as climbing the steps at the Winter Gardens to view the main location. A snapshot of 2009-vintage World Trade Centre reconstruction.

   Staring across at the gap, where massive toy diggers moved around, I finally took in the scope of the calamity. You may have watched it happen on the television as I did. That does not prepare you for the shape and size of the chunk cut from New York’s beating heart. Negative space. Hemmed in by buildings that had to be cleaned and refitted. Or replaced.

   I see Manhattan from all sides. From the air. On the two rivers. In the depths of man-made canyons. At the tops of tall tall tall tall buildings. Needles, poking holes in the blue. The Twin Towers leave an after-image.

   In the museum, packed with firefighting paraphernalia, I take an atmospheric photo upstairs. For me, there’s no such thing as the perfect photo. Great pictures might be blurry. Filled with too much light. Doesn’t matter.

   Technical expertise is irrelevant. It’s the atmosphere of the image that counts. My shot of old-fashioned wagons is very red. Slightly blurry. So what? I like it. The redness goes with fighting fires. In tribute to the generations who tackled the job, only a red carpet will do.

   I didn’t plan my itinerary to account for the numbers tumbling out of my camera. Phoenix. This is a piano-style pumper. From 1840. Preserved, these museum-pieces only hint at the dangers faced in fighting one of our fiercest enemies. It’s not a party, or a dance. You don’t beat fire at a game of cards. It’s a fight. And you don’t take in more than a hint of the real deal, in a museum.

   That is just as true of statistics. You can read them, but they hardly seem real. I think of 778 firefighters who died in the line of duty, fighting fires in New York City. They died during a period which ran from the end of the Civil War in 1865 through to the year 2001. Timespan. A century, plus a third of a century. And a little more.

   To that total, history added another 343* firefighters on one day.

   My atmospheric photo in the museum is taken without concern for my itinerary. Things just pan out that way. The Phoenix. A creature born of fire, and ash. This primitive horse-drawn engine was there, standing, after every fire. My atmospheric photo of it carries the electronic serial number 100_9011.

How do I feel, now that I’ve talked about the World Trade Centre? I watched thousands of people die on television. My cold thought, mentioned in the blog post of the 23^rd of April 2012, is still a cold thought. There’s no escaping that.

   I’m writing this before the word is out. Time travel, again. Weeks have elapsed since I set the words down. More weeks will pass before the story emerges. I felt burdened and unburdened in the same moment. My mind turned to events long after the day itself. Random things.

   It’s the 11^th of September. The year is 2001. I’m watching it all happen on television. Time flies. I am at the Winter Gardens, staring out at the vast hole. No towers. Machines. Men working. Blazing day. Skip around Manhattan…

   I’m standing in the street. Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9. Ahead in time, right where I stand, lies a photo-opportunity for the President of the United States. My photo-shoot is somewhat less Presidential. There are plaques to fallen firefighters. The dates go back to 1870. There’s a mention for the cops, too.

   The firemen who died on that clear blue September day are photographed. I stare at fourteen faces in colour and a fifteenth in black and white. This place is on Eighth Avenue. I’m on the way to a bus tour company located in the 700s between 47^th and 48th Street.

   Now I’m at St. Paul’s Chapel. The sign tells me that this is Manhattan’s oldest public building kept in continuous use. From 1766 until? That’s a blank your descendants will have to fill in on your behalf. I’m starved of time, and only manage to tour the outside of the building. There is scope for a return.

   I do return, on a rainy day. After chatting with a firefighter. Inside the building, I see faces on memorials. This reminds me of television shows about the Second World War. The scene repeats, across documentaries. A camera passes grave after grave, noting soldiers who died on the 6^th of June. Eerie effect. We know the occasion, based on the date.

   What prompts my thought of D-Day? It’s the 5^th of June when I’m inside the chapel. That’s all. Here, in the photos, the memorialising month is September. You can tell from the photos that these dead people illuminated the lives of the people around them. There’s a face from a documentary. Wayne A. Russo. A guy in a bow-tie. It’s the last picture I take in there.

   In the afternoon, I take photo 100_9011. Phoenix.

   Next day it is D-Day. From the side, I snap a picture of a sturdy F.D.N.Y. rig. It is an improvement on the Phoenix. This one is marked www.nyc.gov/fdny. One of the firefighters is involved in a dispute with a Native New Yorker. I snap the front of the rig, lining up on the rig’s Seagrave logo.

   So I don’t actually see the firefighter’s exasperation with the Native New Yorker until I look at the left of the photo later. The firefighter gestures at me with his hands palm-up. Whattayagonnado? The memorialised firefighters were just like this guy. They all had a sense of humour too.

   Looking closely at the photo of the rig, on the window I see the white silhouette of a firefighter wielding an axe. Through that icon, the firefighters who died are memorialised on the rig itself. There is no more fitting place for a tribute.

   It’s a long day. After many misadventures, I find myself in the air. Being piloted in a Liberty helicopter. The fatal smash involving the company happened not long after. I didn’t want to know who the pilot was, in case he was my pilot. Sometimes it’s best to let things go.

   Tramping the streets, taking the subway, hailing a yellow cab in the rain, flying over the island of Manhattan. In other circumstances, this activity would pass for research into my story about the man who wants to blow up skyscrapers. I see the scale. Get a sense of the difficulties involved.

   It’s a bloody long day. After the helicopter ride, I walk around Manhattan. Really walk. I tramp the streets, heading into the sunset. Scale. Could I have written the story about the man with the plan? Yes. Would anyone have found it believable? That’s not for me to say.

Coming up. I’ll blog about feedback next time. How the audience felt, on reading my unbloggable blog post about the destruction of the World Trade Centre.

* Of the 343, two, Robert Linnane and Ricardo Quinn, were Paramedics.

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