Like a bad penny you turned up in the change

In any novel that we read or write there will most likely be a protagonist and an antagonist. You may end up with more than one protagonist, especially where there are different threads or stories throughout the novel. In Supply and Demand there are three clear protagonists.

Your antagonist may be a single person or entity. There might be one antagonist, or a group of some sort. Or your antagonist might indeed be ephemeral. In Supply and Demand it might be said that the entire human trafficking industry, or perhaps a section of it, acts as the protagonist in the story.

Then you have your secondary characters – those who act as facilitators and who add colour and context to the narrative. A question to the writers out there. What becomes of your secondary characters? Do they fade and disappear when their part in your story is done? Or do they resonate with you so strongly that they turn up later in your writing? Like a bad penny.

Tess Reitzel née Picot was one of four main characters in A Jersey Midsummer Tale. During that long, hot day four became three, then two. But when the story was done Tess kept calling to me. ‘Tell my story,’ she called. And so I did in Tess of Portelet Manor.
Similarly in A West Cork Mystery one of my protagonists started off in a Darwin (Australia) bar. There he was given a helping hand by a hard-bitten, blonde barmaid. Chantilly lasted for a chapter. But she deserved a bigger part as I pondered in this post. Finally she got what she deserved as one of my three protagonists in Supply and Demand.

Chantilly maybe?

So, to the writers, have you ever – without pre-planning – found a future role for a secondary character who you previously threw away?

Some stormy nights your memory haunts me
You won’t go away
(Rory Gallagher)

The story’s written. It’s been beta read. Edits and minor re-writes done. I’ve proofread it to death (and still finding the odd blooper on the fifth read-through). I could almost recite the 66,000 words if asked. Now to turn my Word document into a mobi file for Kindle. ‘Simple’ you cry.

So where did my page breaks go? What happened to my line spacing? I need chapters to begin on new pages. I need dialogue not to have spaces.

Yes I know. There are dozens of ‘how to’ articles out there. A child could fix it in minutes. The thing is, my brain shuts down at any onset of tricky technology. Reading ‘how to’ articles bewilders me more than ever.

Which is odd really. I was there at the dawn of office technology. A former employer proudly trumpeted that our accounts department was now computerised, as a selling point. No more Kalamazoo cards. I took to desktop computing as a duck to water, happily backing up each night onto floppy disks (when they were really floppy).

With my colleagues I watched in awe as our Mark 1 facsimile machine sent its first document to New York. It took ten minutes, and we marvelled that the recipients were able to read it right away.

It was a bit like this one.

I was there when the boss gave the secretary a thick, ribbon-bound document with instructions to email it to another office – he’d heard we’d installed this wondrous new invention that could do it.

I was there when the boss excitedly showed me something new called a spreadsheet which could add a row of figures in an instant. (Whatever happened to Supercalc?)

See, I can cope to a degree having worked in offices and seen technologies come and go. (I mean, does anyone use a fax machine any more?) I’ve used Word, Excel etc. every day of my working life – at least since they became commonplace. But at a basic level. Anything beyond basic and my brain shuts down.

So I’ll battle on with the formatting. I’ll get there eventually, by trial and error. You can expect to see Supply & Demand available in a week or two. In Kindle anyway. Formatting for print will be a further battle.

Don Bridge 1948 (credit Jerripedia)

Tess fished around and pulled out thruppence.. ‘What do I say?’ she asked.
‘Just tell him your horse’s name and the amount you want to bet.’
Taking a deep breath, Tess stepped up. ‘Lilac Morning please, thruppence.’
Smiling at her the bookie said ‘Thruppence. Lilac Morning, on the nose.’ He wrote in his book and she took the slip that he handed her. Together they made their way back to the seats to wait for the race. At 10/1 Tess calculated that she stood to win half a crown when Lilac Morning romped home. Plus her thruppence back. Maybe she liked horse racing after all!
From A Jersey Midsummer’s Tale

The present day cycle track follows the lines of the old racecourse

‘It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Hartley, The Go-Between.
‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
‘‘’Oh, sod this!’ Barry ground to a halt.’’ McCarthy, Barry.

You see? Work at it long and hard enough and pure talent will shine through. Just three words into my debut novel and there’s an exclamation mark which I now wish I’d left out. At a guess, I think I wrote that first line, that first chapter, in about 2007. It was to be several years before I embarked on Chapter 2, and started to enjoy the writing process.
That first chapter really summed up all that I wanted to say at the time. A middle-aged ex-runner gone to seed, attempting a comeback. It was at the end of that chapter that I began to realise that there was more to this writing malarkey than I might have imagined.
Then it began to dawn on me that I could write anything, that there were no boundaries. I could go off on tangents, introduce new elements, unrelated storylines which came together. New characters who were different from the somewhat one-dimensional Barry. For example, Barry’s daughters Lauren and Michelle. It was my first self-taught lesson in characterisation. Obvious now maybe, but here I found an opportunity to differentiate between two sisters. Chalk and cheese, but with common ground.
And with this gradual realisation of possibilities I began to enjoy writing, and that has continued ever since.
But a few more famous first lines:
‘Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.’ Lewis, Elmer Gantry.
‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’ Banks, The Crow Road.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
‘He looked at his watch – 7.33am.’ McCarthy, A Jersey Midsummer Tale.
They just keep coming, don’t they? Have you got a favourite first line? What is one you’ve written yourself?