Part 2 of All Excerpts from Silent Lips about a virus in New York City - just for you!

Part 2 of excerpts from my novel Silent Lips, which deals with a deadlly virus that leads to New York City being quarantined.

Click here for Part 1 of excerpts!

Post 33 - BEYOND DOUBT

Excerpt from my novel Silent Lips, which deals with a deadly virus that leads to New York City being quarantined (available as an eBook for ONLY 99 cents):

It is my considered judgement, Mr President, the general's flat voice had said softly a few minutes ago, that we are licked. If this was a declared war with another nation then I would unhesitatingly recommend that we sue for peace, at any price.

He sighed and turned back to the spare figure of the officer.

The black lined report lay on the table between them. 

"General, you are recommending an act of aggression against the Russians that amounts to an act of war without any declaration of war, something we have never done before."

The man opposite him nodded.

"If your basic assumption that the Russians have been responsible for the introduction of the disease into the country is incorrect, then your proposal would lead to a spread of the disease from our land to the rest of the world."

He bent forward, his large head shadowed, and stared sombrely at the military man.

"We would be responsible for the end of the world if it is unchecked."

"Yes, sir. I have considered that, sir. But there is a better than even chance in my mind that they did bring it to us and that they do have an antidote."

The President flipped through the report until he found the summary.

He read it again and then stared at the general. 

"You are proposing that we introduce the disease into Russia and see whether they have an antidote. If they do then we will insist on its being provided to us or we will declare war on them, using all weapons at our disposal."

General Holcroft nodded. 

"All the contingency plans are ready, sir. We have selected the Russian personnel in the jails in Europe to be used to carry the disease back into the country. Our own people are also on standby. As you know, sir, some of our troops in the city are infected. We would be using them.  Some have volunteered; they know they are going to die. We have had dry runs in the past, sir. They have all worked out. All the men we slipped into Russia came back. The routes are all planned and are all still available, despite the fact that the Russians have tightened up their security on their borders. The last team came out a few hours ago."

The President pushed his chair back and strode to the window again.

He spoke with his back to Holcroft. 

"What if we are wrong, general? What if they did not do it?" 

He turned, his eyes burning into the other man's. 

"We have not established beyond doubt that they did. If we had, then I would authorise the operation. I would have no other choice. You told me that you thought others might have gotten to the Russian monument and perhaps introduced the toxins into it, if it did come from the monument. How do we find out?"  

Holcroft smiled thinly.

"I believe we might try one last thing, sir."

He leant forward in his chair and explained his plan in some detail.

The President listened in silence, then he stood up signalling that the meeting was over. 

"It is the lesser of two evils, general. You are authorised to implement it immediately.  Just make sure it works."

Part 1 - Excerpts from my novel Silent Lips about a virus attack on New York just for you!

Part 1 - Excerpts from my novel Silent Lips, which deals with a deadly virus that leads to New York City being quarantined and a desperate search for a cure in a ParkLab laboratory set up in Central Park.

Note: First 30 posts here, next 13 in next post

Click here for Part 2.

Post 1 - NEW YORK CITY QUARANTINED

Covid19 has struck New York City and it is reeling with the impact.

The Governor is calling on the President to use laws to force manufacturers to produce medical equipment so desperately needed to treat the sick.

A few years ago I wandered through Central Park and wondered how the city would react if a virus was let loose inside it.

How would it cope?

I then wrote Silent Lips, at thriller about NYC struck by such a disease.

The President orders the city quarantined, and the Army sets up a Parklab in Central Park, where doctors from inside the city frantically try to find a cure for the spreading disease.

Other doctors fly into the city, knowing they will be unable to leave it, but coming to help.

You can read excerpts of Silent Lips at my Amazon Author Page at this site (click on the eBook Silent Lips picture to see the excerpts): https://www.amazon.com/author/glennashton

Here is the chapter describing the setting up of the Parklab.

The ParkLab, Central Park

The sweeping of Central Park started at nine at night, with the first troops driving into the middle of the Great Lawn next to the lake in jeeps and half tracks, and fanned out from this central point, pushing towards the boundaries of the Park.

They formed lines three deep and moved through the trees and bushes, their handheld lights probing every bush and behind each rock, their fixed bayonets forcing the people they found out from the Lawn, towards the edges of the Park.

Lights were spaced at regular intervals around the lawn and the edges of the Park, facing outwards.

Further back, batteries of searchlights were mounted with their beams at low angles to allow them to cover the ground.

 Behind the sweep teams, other troops unrolled the barbed wire that was to be strung along the Park's boundaries to keep the New Yorkers out of the area. 

Moveable steel barriers were erected in front of the barbed wire to keep the crowds that were expected to arrive the next day off the barbs of the wire.

By seven an area a half-mile square had been secured, and teams of sappers started throwing up the guard posts every hundred yards apart. Made of metal cylinders with firing slits cut in at three heights, they had their own independent backup generators to power their lights in case of a general power failure. Each one had a telephone link to the central command post that was situated to one side of the Great Lawn, as well as portable radio communications.

Their fields of vision overlapped so that the whole perimeter  of the Parklab was under surveillance. 

The First Review of Silent Lips – 5 stars!

Amazing how nice the feeling is when you read your first Amazon review of  your book!

I've just checked the review. Silent Lips, my thriller about a genetically modified virus that spreads in New York, leading to a frantic search for a cure, was awarded 5 stars.

Here's the review:

Reading Silent Lips by Glenn Ashton is like getting on a train heading up a long mountain. The suspense builds and builds until you reach the top and then swoops down into a very surprising ending. The level of detail involved in describing the battle against a plague-like virus attacking New York City is amazing and it feels like you are there in the laboratories and treatment rooms as well as in the highest offices in the land.

Beware that this book can keep you up well past your bedtime. The complexity almost demands a consistent dedication to finishing the book. Then you want to start over to make sure you understand the underlying science, but it's not really a necessity that you do, as it is just a very fine read.

It is definitely an amazing first book and I look forward to other books by this author.

I hope the reviewer buys Obelisk Seven, and Littletown Combo One!

Going on vacation to Europe? How to add zest with an obelisk hunt

Ever since we wrote Obelisk Seven, we have been surprised by the number of people who have raved about their first encounters with an obelisk while holidaying in Europe.

We tell them of our first encounters with these ancient pillars of red granite, and they tell us of the ones they've seen, and the ones they've missed.

Our website and blogs just for you!

When we finished our thriller, and started our quest for a publisher (check our Obelisk Seven website for more details), we also started a blog to use some of the material we had but which did not fit into the 84,000 novel.

Our novel started with an interesting tour guide from Trafalgar Tours. He was a Dutchman who left the pursuit of law to become a tour guide of major European cities. He and his wife enjoyed travelling, and he was an artist as well: whenever he had some time off from guiding tourists through London or Paris or Rome or Venice or other cities, he would sneak off and sketch street scenes and buildings.

Nefertiti - Take her a rose in Berlin

And did he know a lot about the history of these old cities, and the buildings and statues in them! He was fascinated by the past, both the politics and the people, and able to convey to us interesting snippets which made our visits to the tour sites so much more intriguing.

Creating your Adams and Eves: Our Big 3

Writing a novel gives you the chance to create your own little world, fashion your own people to inhabit it, weave events to move your plotline forward, and set up obstacles to challenge your people.

Heady stuff, but where to begin?

You could do worse than browse through a book with a title you will never forget once your read it, and take some hints from the author on what exactly a viewer of a movie (or reader of a novel) wants from the characters you are going to create for your little world.

Blake Snyder, who made millions in Hollywood selling screenplays, wrote a book every writer should read. He modestly named it Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. It's well worth dipping into Save the Cat every now and then for inspiration.

Blake had some advice for writers on the types of heroes who populate movies. He presents several archetypes, that he calls Snyderian archetypes, and dares you to put the hero of any movie you can think of into one of these categories.

Here are a few of his archetypes:

• the young man on the rise,
  
• the good girl tempted,
  
• the clever and resourceful child,
  
• the sex goddess,
  
• the hunk,
  
• the wounded soldier going back for a last redemptive mission,
  
• the troubled sexpot,
  
• the court jester,
  
• the wise grandfather,
  
• talking animals,
  
• sidekicks and misers.

According to Blake:

Jack Whyte and Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

Continuing our quest for a publisher for Obelisk Seven, our thriller, Loraine and I attended the Surrey International Writers Conference.

The conference had arranged a superb roster of presenters, and the quality was of a high order. Then on Saturday night, at the close of an interesting evening, a brooding Scot with a deep, deep voice made his way to the podium, while five hundred expectant writers and aspirant writers suddenly hushed themselves, and watched the slight figure expectantly.

Jack Whyte was born in Scotland in 1940, and migrated to Canada in 1967, where for twenty years he earned his keep as a professional singer, an actor, a musician, advertising man and an entertainer, including a one man show on Robbie Burns, which he took on tour throughout Canada.

In 1978 Whyte figured out the mystery of the sword in the river, and from that came a desire to write about King Arthur. This lead to the Knights Templar Trilogy, and more than one million books sold, just in Canada  alone!

Jack inherited his stubborness and determination from his father, who was blinded in the Second World War and told that he was only fit to weave baskets – his father disregarded this advice and wound up as a successful physiotherapist.

As for Jack, he is a disciplined writer, as Fiona Morrow wrote in a 2009 Globe & Mail article:

Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells  how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine  that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

A hint - Dan Brown's Seven Points for Writers

In 2005 Liza Rogak published The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code – An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown.

She describes the outline for Seven Powerful Tips used by Dan Brown on his website (but since scrubbed from that site).

She writes that the outline provides a revealing look at how Brown "plans and crafts the flow of his own novels."

Here, briefly, are his Seven Powerful Tips:

Setting – reveal new worlds to your readers.

In and out scene building – keep things moving.

A sole dramatic question – use a single brick for your foundation.

Tension – create it with the clock (fast passage of time to speed the novel); the crucible (apply your heat to your constrained characters); and the contract (make promises to your reader and keep them).

Research – learn the specifics you will need for your novel.

Weaving of information - dole it out in small bites.

Revision – go back and play with your first draft.

.

My Next Novel: Born in a Crowded Basement

Where do the ideas for a new book come from?

Are there Book Fairies who float around, like Tooth Fairies, circling around those seeking ideas for a new novel, and swooping down to tap them on the nose with their wands?

If there are, there must be a flock of Book Fairies living in the crowded basement of what must be one of the most wonderful bookstores on the face of the earth.

That bookstore is Macleods,  on Pender Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Macleods, Vancouver, BC, Canada

From the outside it looks rather drab, with its entrace facing a city parking lot, and its windows barely keeping the books lined up behind them from bursting out into the street.

But step inside and an organized madhouse greets you.

Set up in 1982 by owner Don Stewart, there are more than 220,000 books inside – crammed into floor to ceiling shelves, piled helter skelter in the aisles, flowing along the sides of the stairway leading down into the basement.

One day I made my way downstairs, and stood stunned.

Every shelf was full. And in the centre of the open spaces between the various groupings of bookshelves were huge piles of books, pyramids rising five or six feet high.

A book lovers dream come true. Thousands and thousands of second hand books, just waiting to be picked up.

At the bottom of the stairs I turned to the right, and ducked down to check what was on the lower shelves.

It was the section on the Second World War, and soon I was clutching a slightly battered copy of Munich: The Phony Peace, by Henri Nogueres, published in 1963.

On the bright red and white cover were four separate photographs of Hitler, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Mussolini, and the French President Daladier: each man had a pen in hand and was signing what came to be known as The Munich Agreement.

I took it home with me and was lost in it – 423 pages later I put it down with a satisfied sigh.

Diana & Unity Mitford

From knowing vaguely about Chamberlain's trips to cut a deal with Hitler in 1938, I was now more familiar with every meeting and every manufactured crisis of those desparate days.

I fell in love with the tension that crackled through the words on the pages of the book, feeling myself drawn into the incredibly strung danger of the times.

The thought was born: could I wrap a thriller around these three meetings between Hitler and Chamberlain?

I dived into some research about the times and the people involved, and when I came across a black and white photograph of two of the Mitford Sisters giving the Nazi salute, I was won over.

I had the setting, and some of the characters. Now what I needed was a plot, a hero or two, and a villain or two.

Thank you, Macleods.

The Dissection of Silent Lips by Anne Perry at the Surrey International Writers Conference

The doorway is guarded by two SiWC volunteers, and you need to show them your "passport to pitching" to get into the large hall.

Inside, agents and publishers are seated at small tables on the left and right sides, waiting for hopeful writers to make their pitches.

The writers sit at the front of the hall, in two lines, waiting for their ten minutes.

Anne Perry

At the back of the hall are the Blue Pencillers. These writers and agents are there to give you advice on the structure of whatever you have brought – a few pages of a novel, a handful of poems.

Anne Perry waved me to a seat and held up her hand to stop me passing her the few pages I had selected from an old novel, stuck in a dusty drawer for a little over a decade.

I don't read segments in these sessions, she explains. Talk to me about what your novel is about.

I launch into a discussion of The Silent Lips. Title taken from the famous poem by Emma Lazarus on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Before being shipped to New York in 1885, parts of the statue were exhibited in Paris.

The words that gave me the title for this old novel of mine are stirring:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

 

Statue of Liberty head 1885

The story in my thriller Silent Lips is set in a New York which has had a ring of steel thrown around it to stop the spread of a disease that sprang from one man's experiments to save his friend from sickle cell (using himself as a test tube, and crossing the species line by using chimpanzees).

Frantic experiments take place in the ParkLab as scientists – flying in on one-way tickets to help the stricken city – try to find a cure.

They overstep boundaries in their desperation,  lead by the military commander of the ParkLap, while B52 bombers trace lazy contrails in the sky above, waiting for the order by the President to solve the problem.

What causes you concern about your story structure, Anne asks.

The flow, I answer.

She leans forward, and talks for several minutes. Your risk is that your novel might sound like a documentary. You might want to personalize it more.

Take your lead character and see if you can make the story more about him/her, and drop any details you do not need.

I sit back, thinking.

Ten minutes with a highly skilled professional, and an uncanny insight given to me which solves a niggling problem I had – a problem which lead to The Silent Lips being thrust into the back of a drawer and hidden out of sight for so many years.

Time well spent.

I leave, and another hopeful author takes my seat at the small table. Anne Perry leans forward, waving aside the proffered pages.

Speak to me, she says ..

Jack Whyte and Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

Continuing our quest for a publisher for Obelisk Seven, our thriller, Loraine and I attended the Surrey International Writers Conference. It was our first time at this annual conference, which has been held for 18 years.

The motto of the Surrey conference is to "inspire, educate and motivate aspiring and experienced writers alike", so we expected something unusual.

And something unusual we got.

The conference had arranged a superb roster of presenters, and the quality was of a high order. Then on Saturday night, at the close of an interesting evening, a brooding Scot with a deep, deep voice made his way to the podium, while five hundred expectant writers and aspirant writers suddenly hushed themselves, and watched the slight figure expectantly.

Jack Whyte was born in Scotland in 1940, and migrated to Canada in 1967, where for twenty years he earned his keep as a professional singer, an actor, a musician, advertising man and an entertainer, including a one man show on Robbie Burns, which he took on tour throughout Canada.

In 1978 Whyte figured out the mystery of the sword in the river, and from that came a desire to write about King Arthur. This lead to the Knights Templar Trilogy, and more than one million books sold, just in Canada  alone!

Jack inherited his stubborness and determination from his father, who was blinded in the Second World War and told that he was only fit to weave baskets – his father disregarded this advice and wound up as a successful physiotherapist. Click here for Jack's own blog.

As for Jack, he is a disciplined writer, as Fiona Morrow wrote wrote in a 2009 Globe & Mail article:

He works nights – from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m. – a habit he picked up when he held
down an office job and Beverley worked the dinner-shift front-of-house at a local restaurant. He says his family, friends and business acquaintances all know not to phone him after 8 o'clock, or, he adds, rather disconcertingly, “I'll rip their face off.”

His trademark is deep research, and dollops of detail about his characters and the history of the times:

Research, for him, is paramount. “Once I have a thorough understanding in my own mind of the political, regional and international situation at the time, and I've captured the central historical characters and their interaction,” he says, “only then do I tell my story.”

His characters, he says, are everything to him, and for them he draws on his own moral centre. “They have the same family values, the same basic integrity. All that is pretty much me,” he says, before taking a deep draw of his stogie, years of practice having riven sharp creases into the skin of his jaw. “Even the villains,” he grins ...

On Saturday night we waited, along with the other five hundred writers, as Jack made himself comfortable in front of the mike, sipping from the water glass at  his elbow.

A booming voice burst out of the slight figure hunched over the mike, as Jack launched into the Hippopotamus Song.

When he sang these two lines:

The hippopotamus was no ignoramus
And sang her this sweet serenade

the audience, with one voice, joined in the rousing chorus:

Mud, mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood
So follow me follow, down to the hollow
And there let me wallow in glorious mud.

And so it went – a verse by Jack, and a joint chorus ringing out. Five hundred writers enjoying this Surrey tradition: no fat lady singing to end their conference evening, but a smallish Scot crooning about a love-smitten hippopotamus on a river bank.

No wonder hippos are reputed to be one of the strongest niche markets for Jack Whyte's novels!

Back to Jack for his views on his place in Canadian  literature: Does the lack of critical recognition bother him?

“Only when I think about it,” he responds with a half-hearted laugh, before stubbing out his cigar. “Yeah, I think it does bother me.” He starts rooting around for another smoke. “Why am I not part of the CanLit scene? I've been wondering that for years. I'm not recognized by the literary community in Canada,” he says. “Although there's not too many people dare say it to my face.”

Be that as it may, Jack Whyte stalks the halls of the Surrey conference like a true demigod of successful authorship, as well he may. If you measure success by a ripping good yarn, millions of books sold, and a following that buys book after book after book, then this man leaves countless CanadaLit heroes in his dust.

And the man can sing!