Song discovery that was 'outta time'

Coincidental surprise: a scene from the video of Oasis' I'm Outta Time

It was something I wasn't expecting - an Oasis song and video from 11 years ago that I'd never encountered.

And the surprise had a layer of coincidence as the song's title, I'm Outta Time, is remarkably close to the title of my novel in progress, Alice Out Of Time.

The song is an outlier for Oasis,  if anything in their catalogue can be described as such. It was the band's penultimate single, and only their debut release peaked at a lower position in the UK charts. It is also one of only two Oasis hits penned by Liam Gallagher, rather than his brother Noel. Liam features in the video, alone.

It is a touching, almost heartbreaking ballad, that in hindsight foreshadows the final days of the band. A year after its release in 2008, Oasis were no more.

When I say I had not previously encountered the song or video, there is a caveat. It is true I'd never seen the video before, but it turns out I must have heard the song at least once. That was at Madison Square Gardens, in December 2008, at what was the seventh and last occasion I saw Oasis in concert.

I'd followed the band's career since their first success in 1994, going to concerts - including the Maine Road and Knebworth extravaganzas of 1996. When I left the UK in 2005, I owned five of their six studio albums. It was at this point I lost touch with their new music. I was no longer plugged in to mainstream TV and radio, and remained mostly unaware of the new songs that made up what was to be their final album, Dig Out Your Soul.

However, when they toured to promote that album in late 2008, I headed out on a cold, wintery evening in New York to hear again the great songs I knew from their back catalogue.

Work in progress: the Alice novel is now at the 'white cover working edition' stage

Last weekend, on discovering the video of I'm Outta Time, and wondering how such a gem had escaped my notice for 11 years, I did an online check of the setlist for that night in New York and discovered the song had been played, sandwiched between two of Oasis' bigger hits, The Importance of Being Idle, and Wonderwall.

It had been placed in the final quarter of the set, surrounded by the searing anthems that defined Oasis' success. As such, it had been lost to me on first hearing. But now, in isolation, the beauty of its understated nature was striking, as was the dreamy imagery of the video, with nature to the fore, including a signature motif from  Alice Out Of Time. As I continue work on the novel, which is at the "printed white cover edition" stage, I feel the song makes a fitting accompaniment.

Also, listen carefully and you will spot a sprinkling of micro-musical homages to The Beatles and John Lennon. There is a final surprise at the end. The video concludes with a record playing on a turntable, and the voice of Lennon. Asked if he missed England, having lived in New York for almost a decade, Lennon says: "As Churchill said, it's an Englishman's inalienable right to live where the hell he likes ... I said, what do you think, it's going to vanish? It's not going to be there when I get back?"
It is a poignant recording; two days later Lennon was shot outside his Manhattan apartment.

• The official video to Oasis' I'm Outta Time:

Scene setting for a novel

The ragged flag in the centre of a small town that provided
inspiration for a key location in Alice Out Of Time.

A writer can create a wonderful story that is filled with dynamic characters, but if a setting doesn't ring true or is badly described it seriously distracts from all else.

The information needed to construct a believable setting can be researched through books and other literature, and from online searches.

However, there is nothing quite as rewarding as visiting a location that closely matches an imagined setting; that way the writer gets to walk the sidewalks, see the buildings, the people, the traffic - soaking up the experience and "mood" of the place.

I did this during a brief visit to a town in the US. It wasn't a big place; the hub of the town was where the main street intersected with three other streets. There was a parade of stores, all past their glory days, on either side of the quiet street. What particularly caught my eye was a large Stars and Stripes fluttering in the heart of the town. The over-sized Amercian flag, something almost ubiquitous in towns and cities across the US, had also seen better days. It flew proudly, but its ripped and ragged trailing edge prompted a feeling that this community was not overly prosperous and had yet to find the funds to replace its worn flag.

The essence of the town matched that of a place that features in Alice Out Of Time. The novel is now in the third draft stage, undergoing plot tightening and fine-tuning of descriptive passages. Therefore, it was a welcome opportunity to stroll the streets of a small town that closely resembles a key setting in novel, and imagine the characters from Alice doing the same.

Dolphin Girl and the wartime secret keeper

Book comments: Jim Humphreys' faxed letter about Dolphin Girl.

A man who knew one of the big secrets of the Second World War has died at 100.

James Humphreys Jr also wrote kind words about Dolphin Girl shortly after it first appeared in the Eating Clouds collection in 2008. He felt it should be turned into a movie and suggested who might be the perfect producer.

More on that in a moment, but first some words on Jim. He was a US Navy Lieutenant during the Second World War and was stationed in Bermuda in 1944, where he met his future wife Shirley. She was a volunteer nurse's aide and tended to patients at the US military hospital in Southampton. She was tasked with looking after a German U-boat commander, Admiral Harald Lange, who along with his submarine and crew members had been captured by the Americans.

The big secret was that the capture in 1944 had resulted in an Enigma machine and assorted codebooks falling into the hands of the Allies. While codebreakers in the UK had already cracked many of the Enigma codes, the additional resources from the captured U-boat gave further insights, including a coordinate code for locating the rendezvous locations of the submarines.

Of significant value was the capture of the submarine U-505. It was towed to Bermuda, where its acoustic homing torpedoes were analysed and tested. This gave the Allies crucial information on ways to counter the technology.

It was vital that the capture of the U-boat and its crew remained a secret - lest the Germans find out how much the Allies had learned from the codes and torpedoes. Shirley was sworn to secrecy, although she shared the secret with her beloved Jim. Together they kept the information under wraps for 50 years. The couple married and after the war lived in the US before returning to Bermuda in 1980. It was only in 1992 that the wartime secret was revealed during interviews.

Shirley died in 1999. By all accounts, Jim felt Bermuda was his home as it had played such a significant part in his life and he remained on the island for the rest of his days.
I met Jim in November 2005. He was a wartime veteran taking part in the annual Remembrance Day parade on Front Street, Hamilton. I was compiling a report for The Royal Gazette newspaper and I spoke to him and a number of the other veterans. Jim was 88, and in our brief exchange he did not mention the drama of the U-boat secret.

Three years later, the original edition of Eating Clouds was published. It contained a mixture of journalism and life stories that I had collected over the years. The second part of the book featured the short novel Dolphin Girl, which became an expanded and improved standalone novel in 2015.

An article about Eating Clouds appeared in the newspaper in December 2005, and two weeks later a fax arrived at the newspaper office from Jim. It was addressed to me, and in it Jim wrote he had enjoyed the book "especially Dolphin Girl" and added: "I recommend that you consult Michael Douglas and ask him to consider being the producer of the film, Dolphin Girl. Special effects rendition of Dolphin Girl changing from a dolphin to a gorgeous blonde as the Scottish team, led by Josh and Katrina, save her is an Academy candidate winner."

Jim also mentioned that I had interviewed him a few years earlier. I wrote back thanking him for his words, which were among the first positive feedback received regarding Eating Clouds and Dolphin Girl. I've yet to take up Jim's recommendation to approach Mr Douglas (who occasionally resides in Bermuda) regarding a Dolphin Girl film.

It was sad to hear of Jim's passing this week. However, I'm glad he lived a full and remarkable life, that our paths crossed and that he stayed happy and engaged with the world to such a grand age - as evident by an interview a colleague conducted with him last year on his 100th birthday.
This is a salute to retired US Navy Lt Jim Humphreys. Fair winds and following seas.

A Royal Gazette obituary article on Mr Humphreys: https://tinyurl.com/y7cmvd7r

'Alice' novel: the first draft

Raw story: at a rate of 500 words per day, it took just under
three months to complete the first draft of Alice Out Of Time.

The first draft of Alice Out Of Time is complete, stretching to approximately 52,000 words.

Since the beginning of June I've written 500 words each morning until the story I envisaged was fully captured.

There are probably as many different writing process as there are people in the world. I'm using this update to document my writing regime.

With Alice, the end goal is to have a final draft of 80,000 words, which is pretty much the standard-size for a novel. At this stage I'm confident that will be achieved. The first draft is the story in skeleton form - the basic scaffolding around which the deeper details will be placed.

In this raw and basic form the story pacing is super-fast. Keeping the momentum flowing through every scene is important. Other than two or three key characters, everyone else is referred to simply as "man" or "woman" or (spoiler alert) "woman in the coffee shop". Buildings are largely described as "building" and some of the towns and places have yet to be named. All those things get filled in during subsequent re-writes.

The first run-through is all about the core story and finding out if it works and delivers. I wrote every morning when I got up, straight out of bed. There was no stopping for breakfast or internet news. The first priority was to fulfill the 500 words for the day. Which usually took between 30 and 45 minutes.

And yes, it was every single day. Keeping the momentum up helped with the flow, and meant my mind was always engaged in the story and thinking of ways to express the next development. There was no stopping to correct grammar or spelling. And sometimes I would change the direction of a scene mid-stream, or write it fresh from a different angle the next day (but not deleting the first attempt - just writing the new version straight beneath).

I wrote the story out of sequence, opting to follow a single main character to the end, and then doing the same for the next main character. The exception to this rule was when it was necessary to have chief characters interacting in the same scenes.

There was no writing done on a computer. Instead, I wrote on a Neo2, a small, battery-powered word processor, which you can see in the background of the photograph. This removed distractions. The Neo2 is purely a word processor. It has no internet capabilities, so there was no temptation to check e-mails, social media, etc.

Secondly, the Neo2 screen shows only four lines of text. So that did away with the temptation of scrolling back through writing from previous days to tidy up spellings, grammar or elements of the story.

Of course, I did not start each day with no idea where the story was going. Because while the first draft was written in less than three months, it took close to eight months to work through the story idea, plot, and character arcs. Only once I was certain most of it would fit together did I begin. That provided a guide to show where the story was meant to be going each day. There was flexibility to add in ideas, providing they meshed with the end goal, and that happened. There was enough ambiguity in the penciled framework to allow for new moments of inspiration to fill the gaps as they appeared.

But the 11 months of pre-planning and writing is not the whole journey to date. Even before the lengthy framework building, the genesis of Alice and the mentally piecing together of the jigsaw puzzle to make the story work - or at least feasible enough to attempt - goes back a few years.

Alice has now crossed the first milestone. The second draft is about to get underway with a similar writing regime to the first. I will post future progress updates.

Novel 'Under 25' is gritty and delightful

BOOK REVIEW: Under 25 by Johanna Cordery

The cover of Under 25, a novel by Johanna Cordery

Starting with a forewarning of a tragic event involving a “young un”, Under 25 takes readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions and suspense as they ponder who among the main characters might become the lost soul.

The ominous foreshadowing within the opening lines masterfully sets the scene for the engaging story that follows; a tale about the intertwined lives of a number of young people growing up in Yorkshire, England, during the 1980s.

With sensitivity, Cordery tackles the subjects of teenage love, pregnancy, dysfunctional families, betrayal and the spectre of young suicide.

At times the language is powerful, pulling no punches. And be warned that the well-crafted dialogue is written to reflect the linguistic quirks, nuances and characteristics of native Yorkshire speakers. This accent on authenticity is at the heart of Under 25’s gritty realism, which is also reflected in the descriptions of the homes and surroundings of the characters.

Ashley Shuttleworth is the key protagonist, and it is mainly through him that we see events unfold. However, Cordery’s engaging style also gives multi-person viewpoints that enlighten the story and add delightful depth along the way.

Under 25 is filled with twists and turns and unexpected developments. There are moments of humour (I laughed out loud many times), and scenes of agonising sadness.

Readers should prepare to become emotionally invested in the characters who are given space to develop and come alive.

When I first started reading Under 25, I was impressed with the realism of the settings. As the story progressed it was the suspense of wondering where everything would lead and where the answers would be found that kept me deeply engaged with this well-structured, fast-paced, dialogue-driven novel.

A refreshing new author has arrived on the scene. I look forward to reading the future works of Johanna Cordery.

Under 25 is available as a Kindle e-book from Amazon.


CLICK TO PLAY: A short promotional film for Under 25

Footnote: I attended college with author Johanna Cordery in the early to mid-1990s.

Bermuda Gold is a sparkling thriller

BOOK REVIEW: Bermuda Gold by Lee Slonimsky (Moonshine Cove Publishing)

When small-time private detective J E Rexroth agrees to investigate threatening calls made to the wife of a hedge fund manager it seemed like just another job that would bring in some income and help keep the wolf from the door of his downbeat office in Manhattan. But little did he know it was far from a regular case, and that the tentacles of evil reaching out for his new client were also bearing down on his world from another direction.

Rexroth is soon caught up in a murky world where big money, murders and a terrorist plot collide. As creeping paranoia takes hold, he discovers that all he values in life is on the line as he tries to unravel a sinister scheme before it is too late.

Bermuda Gold author Lee Slonimsky has drawn upon his real-life background as a New York hedge fund manager and former educator at a criminal justice college to create a compelling detective thriller that will have readers' nerves jangling as much as those of the characters caught in a web of fear, threats and deaths.

Slonimsky expertly weaves together seemingly unconnected threads as he builds suspense and ensures the reader is with Rexroth every step of the way, from New York to Bermuda and back again, as he tries to evade shadowy, menacing adversaries.

Using his knowledge of the hedge fund industry to carve out believable scenarios that could lurk in the secret world of big money investment deals, coupled with familiarity of police procedures informed from his time at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the author has created a fast-moving and compelling detective thriller.

The vulnerabilities of the characters are well observed, as are the descriptions of the streets of Manhattan, the splendor of the greater New York environs, and the beauty of the sun-kissed island of Bermuda.

Sprinkled throughout are evocative imagery and turns of phrase worthy of a poet's mind.

There are some books that you never quite get to the end of, while others so grip you set aside extra time to read them, eager to discover how they will end. Bermuda Gold falls squarely in the latter category. It is a rewarding and thrilling read.

Bermuda Gold (Moonshine Cove Publishing) is available from Amazon