Patrick Reinken's Blog: Writing to Write - Posts Tagged "thriller"

Is there something wrong with writing just to write? I mean, I'm sitting and looking at this blank box ("New Blog Post"), and I'm trying to figure out what to fill that box in with in this, my first blog post not just in this spot on Goodreads, but anywhere. And since it is that monumental a moment (assuming a blog ever can be monumental), I've supposed it should say something about me. And since it's on Goodreads, I've supposed it should also say something about writing. Which is what's interesting me right now, as well as what's interested me for the last 20 years.

So I look back and I wonder why I first wanted to write and why I started writing and why I still write, and I run through the thinking of that, and I end up with that one thing: I write to write.

I write because I like it. And so I write, simply, to write.

When I was in high school (which sometimes feels like it was sometime around 1902 but actually wasn't all that far back), a teacher pushed me into an English award competition. From the National Council of Teachers of English, I think it was. There certainly were multiple tasks to get that award, and I just as certainly have forgotten all of them save one, despite having won the award in the end. Disappointing, isn't it? I mean, you'd think I'd remember what I actually had to do, given the fact that I won. Nope. No clue anymore.

Except for that one thing, and that's the point here. There was a writing element to it, and the topic was to write an essay of X length, on why it was important to write.

I remember the essay. Sort of...

I wrote about communication and expression, exchange of thought, critical thinking, entertainment through shared experiences. I even think it may have been pretty good, and I'm sure I believed it. I still do.

All those things are reasons why I write, to be sure. But it still comes down to that thing: at a personal level, I write because I like it.

I always have, but it took on a driving form at that "20 years ago" point. Back then, I'd finished reading a bestseller (no title to be given here, but it was and still is a major author), I put it down, and I was disappointed. It was a simple story, told simply, I hadn't particularly enjoyed it, and I thought - with a startling level of naivete then and an equally startling level of pride as I look back on it now - I could do this.

I got a beer (there's no real relevance to that, but it's true), and I wrote an outline for a novel. A couple sentences for each chapter, a number of chapters for each sub-book, and somewhere around 75-80 total chapters.

Way too many by the way. No need to point it out to me. But I also sketched out characters, and there were too many of those, too.

Live and learn....

I finished it in four months, put together a query letter, synopsis, sample chapters - lots of us know that drill - and sent it to one agent. John Grisham's agent at the time. Ignorance being bliss, apparently.

Here's the twist, though - they agreed to represent me. I signed the rep agreement, they started pushing the manuscript, and - another twist - they sold it.

Judgment Day was published by Simon & Schuster in 1996, to some nice reviews. Then Hayakawa published a Japanese edition in 2000.

It was exciting. Lucky, too, given that first agent/first novel part. It may even have been more lucky than exciting, though I like to focus on the exciting part.

But the book sold only okay regionally and not great wider out. It was a legal and medical thriller at a time when thrillers were probably coming off their high point.

Even more, it was right at the time that the publishing biz was going through a dramatic time, what with the Internet and tiny profit margins and big costs and changing tastes and exponential escalation of alternative entertainments.

Looking around today, the landscape is dramatically changed. Hardcover trades are diminished despite being beloved, paperbacks are found as much in oversized trade as they are in mass market, ebooks have gotten their legs and are sprinting on them, bookstores are being challenged on all fronts, and the biggest things still selling at appreciable rates are book club (and you should read that as "/literary") books and the now-everywhere Young Adult works.

Here, I was gonna add a crack that I'd be selling books hand over fist if I were smart enough to combine something truly literary with monsters.

But too late. I mean, we can all agree on that. Right?






Yeah. We can.

Anyway, the point of all this, and of the title of the entry and even of the blog, is that I didn't stop writing. I don't have great experiences to list out beyond that one above. I do have good bits here and there, promising leads that didn't pan out, some fun in writing things and sharing them with people, a call about movie options.

I kept my day job, though, and it's a good thing I did. But I also kept writing. I'm sure I always will.

It's left me with a pile of manuscripts, some pretty good, some okay, and one or two that were, well, neither of those things. I like them all. Again, I'm sure I always will.

And that's not just because "they're my kids" or anything else that you hear people say. No, I like them all because I write to write. I write because I like it.

I will publish the manuscripts. I'll either knock out a hit and use it to carry the older ones forward, or I'll publish them myself, using the fantastic resources of e-publishing that are available now.

I did that with Glass House , because I believe in the book, I want people to have a chance to read it, and I want to know what they think. I'll do it with others.

In fact, I'll do it with others even as I work on selling my latest manuscript through a traditional agent, for traditional publishing. I expect some misery and complaints and more experiences in all that. I'm sure I'll include them in entries here now and again.

And in the end, I will keep writing, through all of it.

Because I love it.

Glass House




Patrick Reinken
99¢ in all formats

Prologue: Pressure
The Good and Solid Pink

You could smell the ocean. To the south – past Vredendal and Lambert’s Bay and Saldanha – the gray-blue waters were mixing. The cold Benguela Current on the continent’s west and the Agulhas on its east churned together at the spot the Portuguese first called the Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms, and the salt of the seas was being beaten out into the winds in the process. This near to the Cape the sharp tang of the salt and the softer, mossy smell of the ocean blew up into the desert and savannahs on the same trade winds that blew the Benguela north.

Anthony Dikembé had known the smells of this place for most of his thirty-six years. There were days when they were lighter, more of a hint. And there were days when they were heavier, with a presence that could fill him. But they were always there. Even far up and onto the karoo plateaus where he was, he could catch the smells of the ocean in the air.

Anthony breathed deeply. The surf was two miles to the west and hundreds of feet down in elevation, but the sea was strong that evening. He could almost taste it. His eyes drifted past the heights of the sorting rooms, conveyors and crushers, and the mine’s other facilities and machinery. He squinted and stared beyond the lights that decorated the buildings’ corners and tops, trying to search out some glimmer against the expanse of water in the distance, as if to prove the water was there.

He couldn’t find it. Fog on the coast was common, and a heavy bank was drifting in and hiding any reflected light from the just-vanished sun.

Anthony breathed in again, smiling faintly before returning to the papers on the clipboard in his hand. He was a supervisor at Laurentian Mines, overseeing operations on the middle shift that ran from eleven in the morning to seven at night, and he was reading over the recovery reports and making checkmarks based on staffing points that were sent in a memo the previous day.

Laurentian’s management wanted to add three dozen miners across all crews, but they wanted ten others cut before they did. Anthony’s extra notations were on worker performance – a simple mark next to someone’s name likely meant that man would be dropped from the shift and replaced.

He scanned the numbers and names again, adding an extra check next to a worker listed at the bottom, then signed a scrawl on a line at the end of the page. He clipped the pen to the top of the board and moved to a pickup truck that was idling nearby.

The truck was headed off site, and approaches by workers were typically forbidden, but Anthony’s movements brought no reaction. His position entitled him after all. As shift chief, the sign-off and pass of the log to the administrative rep were part of the routine.

As expected, the driver wasn’t there. As always, Anthony had timed it that way.

He reached into the truck’s open window and dropped the clipboard and log onto the driver’s seat. Before his arm came back out, he shot it straight, his wrist snapping against the shirt’s cuff.

The diamond – more specifically a piece of diamond rough – jumped into his hand.

The stone was a little over a half inch across, its shape a rough octahedron, an eight-sided figure with irregular triangle faces. The sides of the stone stepped across one face like stairs, and its surface was coarse and smooth at the same time, unfinished but surprisingly soft to the touch.

On the outside, a layer of sandy soil dirtied portions of it. But the cleaner areas allowed a glimpse of what was inside. There, visible under the coating of caked-on grime, the diamond seemed little more than a sizable piece of off-color, maybe smoked-out glass. But a perception like that was naïve. Uninformed. Misleading, even.

It wouldn’t look like anything to a casual observer. A thousand people could pass by and not notice diamond rough sitting on the ground, and if they saw it, they might think it no more than a chunk from a broken soda bottle. For someone who knew, though – for someone with a different eye altogether, a trained eye – a glimpse would confirm that the stone wasn’t glass, and it wasn’t simply a stone. Or even simply a diamond.

In actuality it was quite something, indeed.

The rough diamond that Anthony held was a little large for stealing, but in the end it had been too hard for him to resist. Because it was pink.

Even in the low light of the evening, Dikembé knew the rough was at least a good, solid pink. The color was uniform and deep, maybe as high as intense. It seemed to extend throughout the piece.

There was no guarantee of that, of course. The stone’s depth of color wouldn’t be known fully until a wash, cut, and polish were completed, and the color could be lost at any stage in that process. Particularly in the cut. A cutter cleaving fancy rough might make a cut in a vivid pink or green or blue diamond, the richest of colors, then pull away and find in horror that the color had gone faint. Or had changed in shade altogether.

Fancy colors in diamonds are products of impurities and contamination at an atomic level, and they change with every shift in the light that hits them. The wrong cut in colored rough, and a $250,000 stone might drop to $25,000 in the blink of an eye. But Anthony hadn’t even needed a window into the stone to tell this one would cut well, to at least that good and solid pink.

That assumed anyone would get the chance to work on it, though. And someone working on it was hardly a certainty, because the good and solid pink was also a unique pink, destined for a unique purpose.

In diamond mines, workers don’t get contact with the mined ore itself. Security concerns and automation have together achieved a separation between the actual stones and hands that might be inclined to steal them. Anthony’s position brought him access, however, and he’d used that access when the opportunity arose.

The tucked-away pocket tailored into Anthony’s shirt cuff wasn’t visible in a typical examination. Five minutes into the crew changeover that started Dikembé’s shift, he had pulled the stone from where he hid it in the mine the day before, and he slipped the diamond into the cuff pocket.

Now, beside the truck, he held it again. The stone was warm, heated by the hours of contact with his body, and he folded his fingers against his palm to conceal it. He felt its smooth surfaces and hard shape against his skin.

Anthony bent beside the truck. In the growing darkness, he ran a hand along the arch of the rear wheel well on the driver’s side. He reached under, tapping along the metal of the truck body until he found what he wanted, and then pressed the good, solid pink rough into a small carrier that was welded between the well and the truck’s back bumper. He closed the carrier’s lid.

Anthony stood quickly and stepped away, moving toward the mine’s screening and clearance rooms. The truck would be tracked, and the rough would be plucked from the hidden carrier off the grounds. But that was someone else’s responsibility, and he was glad of it.

In the changing room inside, Dikembé undressed and passed his clothes to a screener who wore the sparkling white of a cleanroom garment. The screener disappeared down a hallway off the main room.

Anthony headed to the showers, tiptoeing hurriedly on the cold tiles of the hallway. Most of the men were already gone. The procedures required to get out of the facility and to the buses were rote for them, and they had hurried through them to get home.

While Anthony showered, two more men in cleanroom garments watched, their arms crossed, their expressions bored. Neither budged as he moved to the drying room, toweled off, and passed the towel to yet another person. Still naked, Dikembé walked down the long hall that separated the shower rooms from the dressing area. A wall cutout ran the length of it, with staffers posted at regular positions.

Sometimes mine employees made it through the hallway without being singled out, and sometimes they didn’t. Anthony Dikembé wasn’t lucky today.

The screener at the end extended a white-clad arm and signaled him to step out. When he did, finding a bench at the hallway’s end, two more screeners descended, equipment in hand.

Anthony sat as still as he could manage. He breathed slowly, his hands pressed against the bench so any nervousness wouldn’t be noticed. He fixed his sight on a point on the floor, trying to look complacent while he worked to keep his eyes from jumping between the two men.

They checked inside his ears with lighted magnifiers. They lifted his tongue. They tapped his teeth with a dental probe. They palpated the tender areas of his body, feeling for anything he might have hidden in his scalp, his armpits, his groin.

The screeners checked between his fingers and toes and in his navel. When they told him to stand, Anthony rose, then immediately turned and bent, his hands flat on the bench he had been sitting on. One of the screeners clicked on a handheld light and looked for any signs of irritation around his rectum before pushing a gloved finger in, feeling for stones, and pulling it out when none were found.

Anthony moved on after that. Among those chosen for the extra examination, some at that point again would be able to step out and get on their way. Those people would be done.

Not him. Not today.

Laurentian owned four standard and two backscatter X-ray scanners, and the gesture toward another door meant imaging. There was a time when standard X-ray images were regularly taken at diamond mines, but the cancer rates started to escalate, and the radioactive screens were stepped back. Then De Beers came up with a low-dose radiographic machine, and X-rays were in vogue again. Now an employee could count on a body X-ray, either backscatter or standard, anywhere from four to six times a year.

This was one of those times for him.

Anthony pressed his chest against the screen and lifted his arms to grasp two handles mounted on the wall at shoulder level. A woman he didn’t see said, “Hold,” and the machine clicked. He waited for it to adjust to a lower angle, heard the second “Hold,” and relaxed only at the click that followed that.

Examination of the pictures took only seconds. The screeners waved him on.

He put his clothes on in the outer locker room. Each morning the bus dropped him and the other miners at the entrance just beyond that room. They would change, pour into the mine, do their work, and leave at the end of the day, filing through the company-operated screens.

At the end of any examinations, the screeners would pass back the clothes the miners took off at the beginning. By that time the clothes were hand-examined and bombarded by ultraviolet light. Short-waved light like that fluoresces any diamonds in the clothing, making them stand out like flares.

Laurentian looked in every place, and in every way, they could.

Anthony turned toward the exit. He’d get on the bus and head to the company-owned apartments, sleep through the night and into the morning, then return mid-day tomorrow.

He was almost out the door when he was stopped.

“Mr. Dikembé?”

The man at the door wore a company uniform. An administrative uniform. His name was neatly stitched onto a Laurentian Mines patch sewn over his heart.

“You’re Anthony Dikembé?”

Anthony looked puzzled. He knew seven languages. He was raised with Setswana, a Sotho language of northwestern South Africa. He learned three others – Afrikaans, English, and Dutch – growing up. And he’d picked up French and Hebrew while he was getting his Masters at Columbia in New York, then learned most of the elements of Fanagalo, the south African, pidgin language of the mines, while working at Laurentian.

But he looked puzzled anyway.

“Sir?” he said. He tried to sound uncertain, to match the look on his face.

“This way please.” The man held a clipboard of his own. He’d been taking notes, and he extended the pen he was using to point down another hallway.

“Yes, sir,” Anthony said, for no reason other than that’s what he should say.

They made it fifty feet or so before the man pointed down another hall. Another distance, then another point. Then at least two more times after that, until Anthony wasn’t sure himself where he was anymore.

The man stopped him at a door Anthony had never seen. It was steel, with thick, riveted edges that were broken only by a one-foot-square panel that could be slid open at the bottom. And it was heavy. He could tell that with a look.

The man knocked but no response came. He twisted a lever, opened the door, and ushered Anthony inside.

The room was stark and bare. There were no windows, and the little light that was there was yellow and faded, as though its color had fought and lost against a greater darkness in this place. The door Anthony just passed through was the sole exit he saw. The only things in the room were a man, a bolted-down chair on which that man sat in the center of the space, and a hose that ended at the man’s feet. A trickle of water was draining from the hose and across a beaten, wood floor.

The man stood up as Anthony came in. “Hello, Mr. Dikembé,” he said. He was smoking a bitter-smelling cigarette, and wisps of the foul smoke wafted from his mouth with each word. “Have a seat.”

As of this morning, Glass House was 2nd on Amazon's Top 100 Best Seller List for Legal Thrillers (free) and 10th on the Top 100 Best Seller List for Thrillers (free).

You can find the Legal Thriller list here: Amazon Best Seller Lists (Legal Thrillers).

And the Thriller list is here: Amazon Best Seller Lists (Thrillers).

Great day today....

Glass House has gotten as high as #12 on Amazon's Top 100 Free Kindle Best Sellers List (it's at 13 as I write this). The list is here: Amazon Top 100 Best Seller Lists.

Right now, it's also #2 on Amazon's Top 100 Best Seller List for Thrillers (free) and #1 on the Top 100 Best Seller List for Legal Thrillers (free).

You can find the Thriller list here: Amazon Top 100 Best Seller Lists (Thrillers). And the Legal Thriller list is here: Amazon Top 100 Best Seller Lists (Legal Thrillers).

I want to thank everyone at Goodreads for getting the book, or just for offering support. It a great group, with great discussions and people who are generous with their thoughts and time. I appreciate it.