They’re coming – They’re here

As a person interested in Astronomy, you’d think I’d have jumped up and down with excitement over the whole meteor falling to earth, (Ireland to beprecise), event that happened on the evening of  February 3rd. What’s more, it didn’t just decide to come to Ireland, it decided to tear across the sky as a flaming fireball, probably directly above my house and landed about thirty miles away.

Was I excited? No, I was completely ticked off actually as the first I knew about it, Twitter was going mad over sightings only 10 minutes from where I live.  This was shortly followed by my wife arriving home saying “Did you see the big fireball in the sky?? I saw it!!”, in one of those buzzing kind of ways.

After that the evening proceeded pretty much as normal until at 10pm the phone rang. It was my Mother-In-Law. She was speaking to my wife about various things when the big topic of the day came up. The Fireball that had landed in Cavan. Had we seen it? Were we out looking for it yet ?

Seemingly we had missed the Irish Gold Rush thing that had started since 6pm that evening. By now we were some 4 hours behind the drag curve as people were making their way to find the landing site of the meteor and claim what by all accounts had  a value of €500 per gram. My mood and interest in Astronomy was dipping further and quicker than anything else before.

Images went through my mind of driving the 20 min spin to the approximatelanding site and then trawling through acres of fields in the pitch dark looking for -” a shiny black rock” (according to RTE News). I wondered what the headlines would be the next day. Probably a mixture of:

• Rural Riots in Cavan
• Farmers roaming the county armed with Shot Guns
• Major run on wellies - retail recession over
• City 4×4’s find a real use

No, the whole wonderful exciting space thing had just passed be my and I wanted to go to bed and forget it! I mean it was only money, it wasn’t like it was a spaceship with small funny people inside, was it? (would they be funny?)

Although there were some concerns that little green people would arrive at our doors, but as I explained, nothing to fear, there’s still some time before a General Election will happen. That aside, how long did it take for things to happen after the capsule landed in War of The Worlds ?

The next day my laptop, twitter, Gmail and kettle started to act up. I also heard no reports of discoveries or even stories of people who had gone in search of the shiny black stone; silence.

I thought to myself, they’re coming…they’re here.

Meeting The Iron Lady

I suppose we all want to meet someone famous. Maybe a specific person, but often we’ll still be excited with the mere fact that the one we meet is well known, if not necessarily well liked by some. Of course there are things that are meant to happen, and those that are not.

In the early nineties a group of us went to England and established a Jet Engine Maintenance company alongside an existing UK Aircraft Maintenance facility. In the space of a few months we had a fully functioning business servicing jet engines. It was some achievement and attracted a lot of attention. The local MP at the time was Jonathan Aitken, Conservative. He was anxious to promote his area and pulled on a big favor to get a very special guest for our opening, his boss and leader, Margaret Thatcher.

This was quite bizarre as the current climate between Ireland & Britain was still a bit shaky, and here we had a situation where the PM was going to visit a facility run by a group of Irish men!

The weeks leading up to the opening were busy and on top of all the planning we had the visits from the “dark sunglasses” brigade every now and then to see all was ok. Surprisingly, the post visit security routines seemed very minor. Either that or they were so effective we didn’t even notice them.

Night Duty

Another story written for  The Temple Works Christmas Story Project

*********

Peter sat at the small table – not quite a desk. He glanced towards the book, just not in the mood. He felt cold, and didn’t really want to be there, his watch told him half eleven. The door behind opened and in walked the uniformed guy he had seen earlier. They nodded at each other.

“Well, all ok?”

“Seems fine,” said Peter.

“I’m James, is this your first time on the job?”

“Well here anyway, first night. Just trying to get a bit extra for Christmas.”

“8 to 8?”

“Yep, what’s the ropes?”

James walked around the table.

“It’s easy enough, the area’s fine, sometimes a few homeless try to take shelter but we can move them on easy enough. You’re due you’re outside tour now!”

Peter stood up, “Sure.”

He walked out the door, glanced from side to side and then made his way through the main entrance. It was freezing outside and dark. He felt for the torch but once he had it in his hand he just lowered it. No need to turn it on.

He slowly made his way around the side of the building and out to the front. He saw the young man standing half way between the two middle pillars, just staring at the building. He cursed and briefly put his hands to his face. He waited for a minute but when it was clear the guy wasn’t moving off he started to walk towards him. He was young enough, maybe 25, and had a small bag over his shoulder, which told Peter he was looking for some where to stay.

“All right then?” said Peter as he approached.

“Ye, sure, no problems,” replied the young man in a cheerful tone.

Peter looked out across the road. Snow had started to fall and he thought about what he had to do next.

“Well eh, everything okay then?”

“Everything’s fine, just taking a look!”

“It’s just that you can’t really stay around here, you know? You’ll just get moved on if you try and sleep.”

The young man looked at him and smiled, “I know!”

Peter waited.

One Last Christmas Job

I recently wrote some stories for The Temple Works Christmas Story Project and really enjoyed it. These relate to a building in Leeds called Temple Works and to read the story you really need to see the building. Here goes, the first story:

One Last Christmas Job

“Jayzuz, Johnnie, pull in quick!”

“What?”

“Comeon, quick pull in!”

Johnnie pulled the car over to the side of the road.

“Mick, we’re gonna be late for the flight.”

“Johnnie, we’re goin home, how much have you got?”

“Look we’ve been through this, we agreed it wasn’t worth bringing, that’s why my bleeding head is running a kango with no brakes.”

“Ye exactly, and you and I both know that when the women find out there’ll be murder.”

Johnnie looked at Mick and put his hands out as if he was raising a desperate prayer to heaven.

“Work is scarce, we’ve tried everything.”

“Save it for yer one, what if we were to bring a few hundred home?”

“And how’s that gonna happen? There’s six days to Christmas, there’s no job gonna happen now and anyway I’m in the season mood.”

“You get off that plane in Dublin with a fiver in your pocket after six months and I’ll tell you what that mood will be like.”

Johnnie looked at the steering wheel, he knew it didn’t just go straight and he felt like turning around.

“I have a solution.”

Johnnie slowly looked back at Mick.

“You, You have a solution?”

“Look, we’ve made a good bit of money out of the painting jobs right?”

“Ye, with the builders gone, the jobs still have to be finished but they’re all done now.”

Mick smiled and pointed out the window.

“What’d ye think?”

Johnnie followed his finger.

“What the hell is that?”

“Ye, exactly. A big old grey building, needs a good lift ye?”

“Look at the size of it, who’s gonna give us a job to paint that just before Christmas? The government probably own it anyway.”

“No-way, that’s one of those old wrecks of a building, the government don’t bother with that stuff anymore. They’re only into big flashy glass buildings. It’s probably some local group looking after it sure it’s in bits!”

“And how are we to find out who that is?”

Day 18 NaNoWriMo – It’s Over !!

Yes, it’s over !!!

18 days into NaNoWriMo with the challenge to write a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November and I hit the target today. The actual total at the end of today is 50252 words !! The story isn’t finished yet but not far off. My aim from the start was to get to that target and I wasn’t too concerned about the notion of going on much further. So I’ve worked to try and get my story to fit and I’d say another 2,000 max and it will be over.

It’s been a bizarre seven days. At the end of last Wednesday I had hit 33k, which probably gave me a good week ahead of schedule. But then as per my last post I missed Thursday and Friday, and Saturday / Sunday were always going to be dead days. So I faced into Monday with some concern and it felt like an age since the story was in my head.

Fear not, however, and the mother of all writing sessions kicked off resulting in the most written in one day since the start. I set myself a new target to hit 40k by Wednesday night, but the genie was out of the bottle and not only were the fingers moving faster than the brain, the ending to the story had now become clear. The fever continued through Tuesday into today and the final barrier was crossed just in time to watch Ireland and France in the world cup 2nd round playoff. Such timing. Would that the result of the soccer had returned as much joy as achieving NaNoWriMo, but it was not to be, seems my hands were not the only one’s in action!

I will finish the novel over the next few days and that will be it.

Then I will face the decision of what to do with it. Clearly it will be in no state to allow anyone to read it, so if I do ever want to let someone at it, I’ll have to read it myself and clean it up (they call that editing and proof reading I believe.) However, no matter what I do, I will always keep a copy of how it was when it was just finished.

I’ve enjoyed this and I’m really glad I did it.

Day 13 NaNoWriMo

Well, the best laid plans.

As I write this entry I ask the same as you, why isn’t he just doing the NaNoWriMo thing instead, and if you didn’t ask it, you may do by the end!

Working on the self fulfilling prophecy, as I tend to do, of the wall approaching and the stalling of the NaNoWriMo project, I had cushioned myself with a reasonable word count – giving me at least a week’s potential lost time. But the funny thing is – it wasn’t happening. While there was a ‘blip’ on one or two mornings, they were minor and were overcome with almost as much veracious attendance as this post is causing me.

But then a single event, resulting in a day away from the effort (surely allowed for) and a follow-up day to solve issues caused from that event, has thrown the invariable spanner. Surely not at this stage !! A word count of 33k out of 50k is an invitation to complete! Killer issue, the proximity of the two lost days to a weekend, which I had mentally flagged as the break (worked last week), might just finish me off.

Then I thought, maybe it’s not the lost days, maybe it’s the story itself!

In a recent forum post to the #NaNoWriMo group that represents my ‘area’ I did express a concern about part of the story that I wasn’t sure about. My story starts with a relatively clear idea, that a character you see will not survive the full story. Problem is as the story progressed, I didn’t want them to ‘not survive’, and the time was looming. I had to decide a course of action that would fulfill the original idea, or change that outcome.

I made that decision, and I am convinced that, which ever decision I made would result in the same, a complete halt to the proceedings. Maybe that’s the way it should be, I didn’t deliberately time it to coincide with a Friday 13th anniversary marking, but I’ll take it as it falls!

This is indeed a very strange world, and as I step back and consider my next step, I have a sneaky suspicion that this story will be written, read I’m not sure, but certainly written.

My best wishes to all #NaNoWriMo participants, it is an incredible experience.