Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? My book is When Death Strikes, and I can’t begin to tell you how long it took to come up with it. This is the fourth in a series, which started with Run and Hide, followed by Seek and Destroy, then Fight To Survive. I wanted something in a similar vein, but every time I had an idea and searched for it in the Kindle store, I got multiple hits. When Death Strikes was something like my fifteenth attempt! It’s not surprising, with about a million ebooks being published each year, that unique titles are hard to come by.
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I started writing When Death Strikes in January alongside another book in a different series. When I got stuck on one, I would switch to the other. When Death Strikes just seemed to be one of those books where the ideas flowed, so I stuck with it. It is now the end of April and I expect to finish it some time in June for a September release.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? All of my writing is done at the dining table, which is such a bland place that I wouldn’t waste pixels taking a picture of it.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I like to stick to a routine every day. Wake up at six, couple of cups of coffee while I check social media and the news, then make sure the kids get off to school before doing 15 kilometres on the exercise bike. After that, it’s time to write (more coffee involved, but decaf for the rest of the day). Everything goes straight into a Word document on my laptop. At about half-ten I have breakfast (always avocado on three slices of wholemeal toast, followed by a banana) and then more writing. Sometimes I’ll have a nap in the afternoon, then after making dinner for the kids coming home from school, it’s writing until about nine at night, when I think about going to bed. There’s never any music as I find it too much of a distraction, and I have enough of those as it is.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. No page number yet as it’s a WIP:
The back door was closed, but Sonny could see a light through the frosted glass. As he got closer he spotted two silhouettes facing each other, and he saw one of them raise something to his lips. They seemed relaxed, so the alarm hadn’t been raised.
So far, so good.
Sonny knew he had to act fast. There was no telling what Eva was going through. That was, if she was still alive…
Sonny cast the thought aside. She was in there, he knew it.
He took a deep breath, then opened the door and rushed in, his silenced pistol up and ready to fire. One of the two figures he’d seen was a woman with short hair, dressed in chef’s whites. The other was a man who was trying to unsling his automatic rifle. Sonny gave this one a double-tap to the head, then turned back to the cook. She was frozen with shock. Sonny didn’t want to kill her, but he couldn’t just leave her here to raise the alarm.
‘Turn around,’ he said, using hand gestures to reinforce his instructions.
She hesitated, her eyes wide and fearful, then slowly turned to face away from Sonny.
He grabbed an iron skillet and brought it down on the back of her head, and the cook slumped to the floor. He kicked her shin, but there was no reaction, but he could see her breathing. She’d live, with hopefully nothing worse than a concussion.
Sonny put the skillet back on the stove and cracked open the door leading from the kitchen to the rest of the house. There was no movement, so he slipped out into a vast hallway.
He decided to clear the ground floor first—that was where guard quarters were most likely to be found—then check for a basement. If he hadn’t found Eva by then, he would check upstairs.
There were four doors leading off the hallway. He reckoned the staff quarters would be one of the side rooms, so he started towards a door to the left of the main entrance. He’d only gone a couple of paces when he heard a familiar sound; a safety being released. Sonny broke into a sprint and turned his head in the direction of the sound in time to see a guard swing a rifle up to his shoulder. Sonny fired on the move, but his shots went high and wide. The guard missed, too, and Sonny rolled before firing again. This time he hit his target in the shoulder, and as the man’s rifle dropped to the ground, Sonny steadied himself and put two shots in the man’s head.
The noise from the guard’s rifle would have alerted the rest of the house, so Sonny holstered the pistol and unclipped one of the assault rifles, an HK G36. No need for stealth now.
The door he’d been heading towards burst open, and two men piled out into the hallway. Sonny was waiting for them, and emptied half a magazine into them. They danced like marionettes before hitting the floor, and Sonny leaped over them and into the room they’d come from. It was empty, with no other entrances, so he retreated to the hallway. Shots peppered the door frame millimetres from his head, and he ducked back inside the room as further rounds smashed into the door where he’d been standing moments earlier.
He had to move, otherwise he was dead. It sounded like he was facing at least two weapons, but it could be more. From the angle of the attack he had a vague idea where they were, so he unclipped the flashbang and pulled the pin. The fuse was set for a five-second delay, so he let the handle fly, counted to three and lobbed it out into the hallway. Moments later, the grenade detonated, with seven million lumens flooding the hallway and a bang that registered almost two hundred decibels. Sonny had been anticipating both, but the guards had not. The moment the noise reached him, Sonny was on the move. He had around five seconds before the effect wore off, but that proved enough. He dispatched one guard on the ground floor, near the kitchen door, then swiftly turned his attention to a second at the top of the stairs. A three-round burst took him down.
Sonny deftly switched mags and shouldered his weapon once more, scanning for threats as he made his way to another ground floor door. He kicked it in, but there was no response from inside. He stuck his head around the frame for an instant, trying to draw fire, but still no shots came. He ran inside, checked every angle, then mentally marked it off as clear. The next room was also empty. As he emerged from it, a figure ran into the hallway and skidded to a stop when he saw Sonny. He raised his weapon, but was far too slow. A burst from Sonny’s HK put him on his back.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? When I write action scenes, the adrenaline starts pumping as I get into the scene. Most times I write, I put down a couple of sentences, then sit back and think of the next lines. With this scene, my mind was going so fast that my fingers couldn’t keep up!
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Again, as this is a WIP I haven’t got around to the deletions. That will come on my second read through. Generally, though, the only changes I make are to the grammar. I’m not the kind of writer who can throw down a first draft in a couple of weeks and then edit it several times. I tend to edit as I go. It takes me about 5 months to write the first draft, and my second draft is usually the final one.
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