Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Month: October 2020

September Recap

October 25, 2020 /

September is usually quite eventful with family birthdays at the beginning and end of the month.

As I look back though, nothing really stands out as memorable. Yes, there were things that happened: we went away for a few days at the beginning of September, and I managed to get the copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine featuring my story Family Harmony ready to send back to family in England, but of course that got delayed until October!

The rest of the month just seems to be a blur, and while I’m sure Covid played a part in that, I don’t know why didn’t it affect me so much in July or August. 

One suggestion from a friend, was that having pushed to finish Thieves in the Temple by the end of August and get it to the editor I was in what they called a recharge period. It’s not that I didn’t write anything. I did, and the stories are very different from Jacob and Miriam, but maybe that’s what was meant.

For various reasons, Thieves didn’t come back from the editor until the end of September. More on that in a future post, meanwhile it’s back to tightening up the story, and making sure Thieves stands alone and isn’t dependent on having read the short stories.

Revisiting an old Friend

October 2, 2020 /

This past weekend there was a Bookbub promotion for the Jack Higgins book The Violent Enemy. I’ve been reading Jack Higgins since before the wrote The Eagle had landed, and while in recent years I haven’t followed his new books as faithfully as I used to, there’s always a comfortable feeling when I start one of his books. That same feeling you get when you sit down with an old friend after a long time since seeing them.

The Violent Enemy isn’t a recent book. If I recall, it was written in the late 1960’s, and the references to the life experiences of the characters set it in the timeline. It’s not a long novel, maybe 45,000 to 50,000 words, but I read it during the course of Sunday afternoon and evening.

Dean Wesley Smith recommends studying Stage 4 writers – those who’ve been writing for several decades, and who are still publishing best sellers today – writers like Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and John Grisham. 

I was close to the end of The Violent Enemy when the scene shifted to a coastal marsh for the final chapter. Jack Higgins used, I think two sentences to set the stage for the action to come, and in those two sentences, I was there in the damp and mist. It bears mentioning that when the coastal marsh was introduced earlier in the book, there was a more detailed description, but it took just those two sentences to pull me right back in.

Jack Higgins is right there with the other Stage 4 writers, and along with Robert Ludlum, was one of the early influencers in making me want to write.

If I’d known then, what I know now . . . But isn’t that a refrain we all have at some point in our lives.

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