Excerpt from Riker's Calling by Rico Lamoureux

It gives me great pleasure to be featuring author Rico Lamoureux and his crime/mystery novella Riker's Calling in an excerpt today. Stay tuned for the review in January.

Synopsis:

From school bullies to the crime-ridden streets of his hometown of Los Angeles, Jeremy Riker has always felt the need to do something about the injustice surrounding him. Just as he sets out on his journey as an urban warrior, he unknowingly gives rise to an obsessive adversary, who ends up becoming one of the most notorious serial killers the city has ever known. Dubbed by the news media as The Spyderco Killer, the methodical psychopath roots himself deep into Riker's life for the long haul, until his own madness propels everything into an intense climax.

Excerpt Riker’s Calling

I WANTED TO BE LEFT ALONE, but surrounded by others. To wander amongst a sea of people, yet not be bothered by a single one. This hustle and bustle of the masses helped distract my mind from drowning in the torment of the individual thought of having just lost all that I have ever hoped for. Balancing on the razor’s edge between grief, anger, and a numbness that can end all will, this self-medicated delusion of trying to avoid the pain kept me from taking my steps out onto one of the many intersecting tracks of the Los Angeles Union Station.

This central nervous system of the West Coast has always been a place of wonder for me, countless strangers coming from who knows where and going to places I would often imagine. Sometimes I’d look up at the arrivals and departures, the footfalls shuffling random conversations as the boards would reveal one locale after another. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland. Landmarks and cityscapes pictured in my mind’s eye. Standing in a dozen different places at once while never leaving this train hub. How one minute a platform would be flooded with travelers, the next, dead, as if every living soul had been wiped off the face of the Earth.  

And so there I was, returning to this mysterious place as a source of solace after walking the downtown streets of Los Angeles most of the night, trying to make sense of the ludicrous, unable to understand the injustice I had been dealt. From one platform to another, the terminal, the garden. How many hours I roamed, how many rounds I made, I didn’t know, and didn’t care. But then she caught my eye.  

Another lost soul, she sat out on platform six, maybe a decade to fifteen years beyond my twenty-one. At first glance she appeared as someone who just might be having a bad day. Perhaps she had been fired from her job, or had her heart broken by a boyfriend. Just another face to pass, another story to remain untold. And so I continued, on to the end of the line before stopping at its edge, looking out to the tracks that would take all those I had just passed to places far and away. 

Perched in stillness, I listened as their train came gliding in at my back, its doors giving off the sound of compressed air as they opened to receive passengers, high heels and sneakers scurrying about as if they only had a few seconds to board.

A few minutes later and last call was announced, followed by doors being sealed and engines being readied. The iron horse was then released from its gate, its awesome power creating a gust of wind that surged over me as it passed. Picking up steam, the more it roared to life the farther it got, the collage of faces departing platform six on their way to the rest of their lives. Goodbye businessman who was afraid of flying, grandmother taking her last interstate trip, lonely woman who was having a sad day.

The tracks were once again bare, as would be the platform behind me. Too quiet for my current state of mind, and so I turned to head back, to the belly of the bustle. To my surprise one person had remained, and as I got closer to the figure the image of the lonely woman reappeared. Had she been too upset to board her train? Or was she like me? Simply here to haunt those who were more alive?

Not wanting to invade her private melancholy, I just kept walking, catching another glimpse of her sorrow-stricken face as I did so. It seemed rounder this time, as if swollen with hurt, tears now falling from eyes so red in their raw emotion. I had to fight my first instinct, which was to rush over and offer my assistance, whatever that could have been. A shoulder to cry on? A reassurance that he wasn’t worth it? He who? The farther I got the more guilty I felt. Someone in that much pain was suffering far greater than having an issue with work or a relationship. And with this realization I had to stop, the single soul of a woman in need back on platform six silently calling out to me far louder than the foot traffic in the terminal.

With cautious steps I approached, then just stood there, nervously searching for the right words. Her line of sight never moved, my shoes now there for her to stare down upon. Then again, maybe she couldn’t see them through her saturation of tears, holding her shoulder bag close to her stomach.

“Ma’am? Are you alright? I…”

She looked up, wiped at her eyes to get a better look at me. She tried to speak, but in the attempt to do so began to hyperventilate.

I bent down to comfort her, to let her know it wasn’t that bad, but upon doing so I saw that it was, a zip tie tightly secured around her neck. My eyes frantically followed the lethal line of plastic around to her back, where I lifted her hair to discover the tie was fastened to one of the metal bars of this mounted bench she sat on. I immediately went for my Spyderco, a razor-sharp pocket knife that I would constantly have clipped to my pants pocket, the hollow circle at the base of the blade making it accessible in a fraction of a second with a simple flick of the thumb.

As soon as I cut the line the sound of shattering glass, like bottles popping, went off on both tracks, my head snapping up just in time to catch the sight of six figures, three on each side, jumping up out of the track well and onto our platform. With the exception of their height and weight, they were identical in appearance, all wearing pure white masquerade masks, all covered in black, from their hoodies to their sneakers, as they came at us with jagged-edged beer bottles.

Without thinking twice I yanked the stranger I had just cut loose up off the bench. “You got to get underneath it, now!” then positioned myself to guard her the best I could.

Three came at me at once, lunging forward with their broken bottles right before I sank to the ground, their shard glass stabbing nothing but air as the blade of my Spyderco sliced through an ankle of one of them, the femoral artery of another, and then pierced straight up into the crotch of the third.

On my way back up I slid behind the back of the first to take control of him, his ankle wound being the least serious and therefore making him the most likely to continue on. His hand was still wrapped around the neck of the broken bottle, so I sliced it loose by way of severing his index finger, holding him as a shield against the other three as he joined his fellow thug in screaming out in pain, both muffled by the masks they hid behind.

“I’ll fuckin’ kill her!” threatened one of the last three, rushing over to try and pull the woman out from under the bench, but only getting off a step or two before tumbling over when I threw the guy I held into him.

I used this second moment of opportunity to take another one of them, stepping forward long enough to lance his windpipe, then turning my attention back to the most aggressive as he tried to make his way back up to his feet. With a heel stump I took out one of his knee caps, following it up with a thrust of my blade to one of his lungs, the bottom portion of his white masquerade mask turning blood red as it poured from his mouth.

One left, who was now trying to grab hold of the woman beneath the bench so as to use as leverage, but she was curled up like a fetus, kicking and screaming with the same level of passion as a mama bear, and that’s when I noticed that her hands were protecting her overly-large stomach. The woman was pregnant.

No longer needing my Spyderco, I let it go, sending it off with the whip of my hand to bullet through the air and embed itself into the attacker’s spine just below his neck line. He instantly fell over like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

In less than a minute my life had changed, and I knew it couldn’t be random. Although he was bleeding out pretty fast, the only thug who could still talk was the one whose femoral artery I had sliced. I ripped off his mask, revealing a black kid that couldn’t have been that much younger than myself, teetering on the edge of losing consciousness.

I pulled off his hoodie, tied the sweatshirt around the wound, and demanded to know what was going on.

“This can’t be random… This isn’t random…

“Who sent you?”

His mouth was moving, but no words were forming. I slapped him.

“Who sent you?!”

Willing his hand to the side of his head, which I could tell he had to concentrate to do, his trembling fingertips attempted to dig at his ear, but within a few seconds he passed out.

I turned his head to the side.

It was an earpiece.

Just as I popped it out, two incoming trains pulled up to the platform, the passengers that came pouring out stunned at the scene before them.

I helped the stranger whose tears had drawn me in back up to her feet, having her take a seat back on that bench she had been zip tied to.

I then inserted the earpiece into my ear, a whisper loud enough to be heard personally directed towards me.

“You continue to inspire, Riker.”

Five words and nothing more, It could have come from any of the hundreds of people now gathered on platform six, or, more likely, someone watching from afar.

And so I would be left wondering, far longer than I could have ever anticipated.

Stay tuned for Nadaness In Motion's book review of Riker's Calling in January 2017!

About the Author:

Rico Lamoureux is a multi-genre author who has been writing for over thirty years.

His Crime Thriller Riker’s Calling is available on Amazon, as is his autobiography, Power of the Pen, a no-holds-barred look into his diverse life that has led him to where he is today. His life story, which includes nearly a hundred photos, can actually be acquired for FREE, as the author is currently offering the ebook at no charge to all followers of his new blog, The Flash Fiction Ponder, where he posts short yet thought-provoking stories every Monday and Friday. (The book is normally priced at $2.99 on Amazon.)

Connect with the author via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and his Website.

Black & White - Poem

She sees it all in black and white;

For her it’s either day or night,

No shades of grey in between,

Nor red, nor blue, nor green.

She lives in the light,

But would easily stray to the darkness,

Without a war, without a fight,

Where she’d become stone-cold and heartless!

She lives in the light,

But in its intensity, she shies away.

Her own dreams, she may blight,

Frustrating her own path-way.

She has so much potential,

But, for her, everything has a price,

Decisions are consequential,

But she doesn’t care, her heart is ice!

Would that heart of her melt?

Or would it grow thorns?

Would she forgive and forget?

Or succumb to becoming a devil with horns?

Life is not black and white,

Crystal clear or dead of night,

There is so much in between,

So much red, blue and green!

By: Nada Adel Sobhi

Written Friday 27-7-2012

An old piece. Can be a he or a she.

Your thoughts and comments are highly appreciated. (Shares too).

Joining Bloglovin

I've decided to try Bloglovin' and find out what's so cool about the site many bloggers seem to have joined.

But first thing is first, the site says I have to post a link in a new post, hence this post. (Sorry if I fill your mailboxes with weird stuff, but it's the only way for me to "claim" my blog.

Now you can Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Takhayyal #writingprompt 50: Unleash Your Creativity

Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen, Artists, Poets, Writers, Authors, Dreamers, Friends and Family; Welcome EVERYONE to Nadaness In Motion's bi-weekly picture-prompt writing challenge Takhayyal.

Can you believe we've made it to the 50th prompt in the series?!

WOW! I call that a milestone! Thank you for your support!

For this special occasion, I'm featuring a number of prompts, some that were most popular, and some that didn't get the amount of publicity they deserved.

Feel free to mix any of them, just mention which ones you've used/mixed up.


Now off to the writing promptssssss

Takhayyal Prompt 8

Takhayyal Prompt 9

Takhayyal Prompt 2

Takhayyal Prompt 13

Takhayyal Prompt 15

Takhayyal prompt 21 - Image found Online for the Blood Moon 2016

Takhayyal Prompt 23 - Image found online.

Takhayyal Prompt 26

Takhayyal 46 - Image found online

Digital Artwork by Elena Godina - Takhayal prompt 18

Artwork by Yomna El Mahany - Takhayyal 45

Arabic for Imagine, Takhayyal is a challenge for writers of all ages and genres; a place to spark creativity and explore new genres.

Your post can be in English or Arabic, prose, poetry, short story, flash fiction; you name it and write it.

Feel free to access the images in a larger view in the original posts here.

General rules:

·        No nudity, violence, and/or abuse.

·        Leave the link to your post in comments below OR post your piece as REPLY to this post

·        Your piece MUST be inspired in some way or other by the above picture

·        Multiple entries allowed

·        It is not required but it is a nice and encouraging gesture to comment on others' pieces.

·        Feel free to add your Twitter handle (@....) so I can tag you in my tweets!

Let's IMAGINE!

The Importance of a Good Editor - Guest Post by Carl Schmidt

Book: Dead Down East

Author: Carl Schmidt

Genre: Mystery, Humor

Release dates:  Kindle: 25 May, 2016; Paperback: 26 June, 2016

Length: 241 pages

ISBN:  9781533502186

ASIN:  ISBN-10: 1533502188

Synopsis:

Dead Down East, a fictional murder mystery, is both detective noir and smart screwball comedy rolled into one. Jesse Thorpe, a young private investigator operating out of Augusta, Maine, receives a mysterious phone call from a former client, Cynthia Dumais.  She begs to be rescued from an island south of Brunswick, within a mile of where William Lavoilette, the governor of Maine, was assassinated the night before. She insists that her life is in danger, but is unwilling to provide any further information. Reluctantly, Jesse goes to fetch her.

Within a week, Jesse has three separate clients, each with his, or her, own desperate need to have the murder solved. He assembles a motley team of compadres, including rock band members, a tie-dye psychic and his rousing girlfriend, Angele Boucher, to help him with the case. While the FBI and the Maine State Police investigate political motives, Jesse looks for the woman—Cherchez la Femme—as the trail draws him through the lives, and DNA, of the governor’s former mistresses.

Fresh, witty and loaded with eccentric characters, this first novel in the Jesse Thorpe Mystery Series is both clever and stylish. It’s an old-school private eye tale with inventive twists and local charm. If you enjoy a well-crafted and zesty narrative, lively banter, or take pleasure in the company of Mainers, you’ll love Dead Down East. 

The Importance of a Good Editor

Guest post by Carl Schmidt

Every seasoned novelist will tell you that there is absolutely no substitute for a good editor.

An editor doesn’t just alert you to mistakes in spelling, grammar, sentence structure and punctuation; editing goes way beyond that. Your story needs to be consistent, factually correct, clear, and succinct. This might sound obvious, but when you are dealing with a 90,000-word novel, there are plenty of ways to muck it up on every single page.

So. You’ve written your first novel, or maybe you’ve just completed a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Chances are you’ve read it several times, and it looks good to you. You’re excited about it. You’ve created a likable story or perhaps you’ve made some kind of definitive statement. Now you want to have it published.

Hold your horses, Kemosabe.

This last sentence is a perfect example of why you need an editor. I know what “Kemosabe” means, but do you? I was raised on The Lone Ranger and Tonto, but if you are considerably younger than I, you might not have a clue. And if you don’t, I may have just lost you as a reader. A good editor will bring this to your attention and make sure you use references that will be familiar to your target audience.

Every chapter in your novel needs to have a fresh beginning and a logical conclusion. The fresh beginning will keep your reader awake, and will revitalize his/her interest in your story. The logical conclusion will wrap up that particular scene and give the reader a breather. It may have taken you a week to write the chapter, and in that time you have been so wrapped up in the content of the storyline that you may have lost sight of what your reader knows at this point, and the pace of his reading experience. If your editor suggests that the chapter rambles, then clean it up and shorten it. If your editor says that something is missing or unclear, then you probably have left too much to the reader’s imagination.

Another important purpose of editing is to broaden your vocabulary so that highly descriptive words or phrases are not overused. A Thesaurus can help with this, but every author has a tendency to repeat himself in some way, either with specific words or sentence patterns. Repetition will blemish your story, and a good editor can spot it.

JanMarie Moullen edited my first three novels. She has an uncanny ability for recalling my use of unique adjectives and adverbs, and letting me know when they appear too often throughout the book. There were instances where she went back 50 pages or more in the text to find that I had used an unusually graphic word, and when it appeared for just a second time, much later in the book, it stood out to her as tiresome. And…she was right.

Overall, I took her advice about 95% of the time. I learned to trust her judgment, and it paid dividends. Several reviewers have commented on how crisp the editing is in my first novel. She deserves most of that credit.

Purchase Dead Down East via Amazon.

About the Author:

Carl Schmidt graduated from Denver University with a degree in mathematics and physics. As a Woodrow Wilson Fellow he studied mathematics at Brown University.

Carl lived and traveled widely throughout Asia for seven years, including two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines and five years in Japan, where he taught English.

Carl has spent dozens of summers in Maine, on lakes and in the woods. He chose it as the setting for this novel because he loves its rugged natural beauty and the charming idiosyncrasies of Mainers. He has also written and recorded three musical albums. This, along with his formal education, proved invaluable when molding the persona and voice of Jesse Thorpe, the narrator of Dead Down East, and endowing him with both a creative eye for detail and a sense of humor.

Dead Down East is the first novel in the Jesse Thorpe Mystery Series, which includes A Priestly Affair and Redbone.  In 2001, New Falcon Press published his non-fictional book, A Recipe for Bliss: Kriya Yoga for a New Millennium.

Currently, he is a freelance writer living in Sedona, Arizona with his lovely wife, Holly, and their faithful German shorthaired pointer, Alize.

Connect with the Author via Facebook, Goodreads, Smashwords and his Website. 

Researching for historical fiction novels & Yellow Hair - Guest Post

Today, I'm featuring a guest post by author Andre Joyce on the research of its historical fiction epic adventure Yellow Hair.

Enjoy!

My name is Andrew Joyce and I write books for a living. I would like to thank Nada for allowing me to be here today to promote my latest, Yellow Hair, which documents the injustices done to the Sioux Nation from their first treaty with the United States in 1805 through Wounded Knee in 1890. Every death, murder, battle, and outrage I write about actually took place. The historical figures that play a role in my fact-based tale of fiction were real people and I use their real names. Yellow Hair is an epic tale of adventure, family, love, and hate that spans most of the 19^th century.

Through no fault of his own, a young man is thrust into a new culture just at the time that culture is undergoing massive changes. It is losing its identity, its lands, and its dignity. He not only adapts, he perseveres and, over time, becomes a leader—and on occasion, the hand of vengeance against those who would destroy his adopted people.

Now that the commercial is out of the way, we can get down to what I really came here to talk about: the research that goes into writing an historical novel or an action/adventure novel that uses an historical event as a backdrop.

I want to say that I learned the hard way how important proper research is. But it wasn’t really that hard of a lesson. In my first book, which takes place in the last half of the 19^th century, I made two mistakes. I had the date of an event off by one year and I had my hero loading the wrong caliber cartridge into his Winchester rifle. I would have gone blissfully throughout life not knowing how I had erred if not for my astute fans. Both mistakes were quickly pointed out to me in reviews of the book. One guy said he would have given me five stars if not for the wrong caliber bullet mistake. I had to settle for only four stars. Lesson learned!

Before I get into telling you about the year-long research I did for Yellow Hair, I’d like to tell you how I researched my second and third books and describe what that research entailed.

My second book was a western and the protagonist was a woman. The research took about three months. I had to know everything from women’s undergarments of the late 19^th century to prison conditions for women in those days. (I sent my heroine to jail.) That kind of research was easy. Thank God for the internet. But then I had to do some real research. Molly (my protagonist) built up her cattle ranch to one of the largest in Montana, but she and her neighbors had nowhere to sell their beef. So Molly decided to drive her and her neighbors’ cattle to Abilene where she could get a good price. She put together the second largest herd on record (12,000 heads) and took off for Abilene.

That’s when I had to really go to work. I wanted my readers to taste the dust on the trail. I wanted them to feel the cold water at river crossing. I wanted them to know about the dangers of the trail, from rustlers to Indians to cattle stampedes.

This is how I learned about all those things and more. First of all, I found old movies that were authentic in nature. I watched them to get a feel for the trail. Then I read books by great authors who had written about cattle drives to soak up even more of the atmosphere of a cattle drive. That was all well and good, but it still did not put me in the long days of breathing dust and being always fearful of a stampede.

That’s when I went looking for diaries written by real cowboys while they were on the trail. After that, I found obscure self-published books written by those cowboys. Then it was onto newspaper articles written at the time about large cattle drives. That’s how I had Molly herd the second largest cattle drive. I discovered that the largest was 15,000 head, driven from Texas to California in 1882.

My next book took place in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. Here new elements were added such as wolves and the extreme weather as adversaries. Dogsledding was also involved. I have seen snow only three times in my life and I have never dogsledded. I knew even less about wolves. I had to learn about those things. I had no idea what it was like to travel across a wilderness on a dogsled at seventy degrees below zero. I also had to acquire knowledge about the dogs themselves, especially the lead dog. I learned about all that by doing the same things I did for my second book. The old diaries were the most helpful. As to the gold rush, there was plenty of material in the form of self-published books by some of the participants. Some were never even published, but I found copies of them in the archives of universities and historical societies. Again, newspaper stories printed at the time were very useful. Concerning wolves . . . I read everything I could get my hands on about wolves—their habits, the pack hierarchy, the alpha male, and the different jobs or tasks the males and females have while hunting.

Now we come to Yellow Hair. As I mentioned above, the book is about the Sioux Nation from 1805 to 1890. I had to know both points of view, the white man’s and the Sioux’s. Getting to know the whites’ take on things was easy. There are many, many books (non-fiction) that were written at the time. I even found a book written by Custer detailing his strategy for wiping out the Sioux entirely. That was hard reading. And, again, there were universities and historical societies whose archives were a great help.

As to the Sioux’s point of view, there are a few books that were dictated to newspapermen years later by the Indians that took part in the various battles that I weave into my story. I found a lot of material from Native American participants of the Little Big Horn, written twenty to thirty years after the fact.

But I wanted to immerse myself in the Sioux culture and I wanted to give them dignity by using their language wherever possible. I also wanted to introduce them by their Sioux names. So, I had to learn the Lakota language. And that wasn’t easy. There is a consortium that will teach you, but they wanted only serious students. You have to know a smattering of the language before they will even deign to let you in. I had to take a test to prove that I knew some Lakota. I failed the first time and had to go back to my Lakota dictionary and do some more studying. I got in on my second try.

It took six years from the start of Yellow Hair until it was published. But I wrote three books in between. All boiled down, the research took a year and the writing and editing took two years.

I’m running out of space, so I reckon I’ll wrap it up. I hope I’ve given you a little insight into the research process. It’s time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. But it is also a blast. Every new discovery is like finding the mother load.

I’d like to sign off with another commercial. The three books I alluded to above are:

·        Redemption: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer

·        Molly Lee

·        Resolution: Huck Finn’s Greatest Adventure

I would like to thank Nada once again for having me over and you good folks for tuning in.

Andrew Joyce

Connect with Andrew via Facebook and his website.

Purchase links for Yellow Hair: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo and Smashwords.

About the Author:

Andrew Joyce left high school at seventeen to hitchhike throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico. He wouldn’t return from his journey until decades later when he decided to become a writer. Joyce has written five books, including a two-volume collection of one hundred and fifty short stories comprised of his hitching adventures called BEDTIME STORIES FOR GROWN-UPS (as yet unpublished), and his latest novel, YELLOW HAIR. He now lives aboard a boat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his dog, Danny, where he is busy working on his next book, tentatively entitled, MICK REILLY.