Hi guys!I proud to say that I got so much wonderful guest post materials from Sam Masters.
I enjoyed very much reading it, and I hope that you guys will enjoy it too. (I didn't know what to pick from it so I put everything below)So...Thank you very very much Sam.
Title: The China DogsAuthor: Sam Master
Genre: ThrillerPublish Date: August 19, 2014Publisher: Witness Impulse an imprint of HarperCollins
~ Synopsis ~Man’s best friend is about to become America’s worst enemy...
When a sudden rash of deadly canine attacks hits the greater Miami area, Lieutenant “Ghost” Walton, Special Ops, takes little notice. Blame it on the heat, a rare disease, or the fact that people just don’t know how to take care of their pets.
But when the body count rises, and the perimeter of blood and carnage spreads wider and wider, into the farthest reaches of Miami-Dade county, Ghost has no choice but to pay attention. Doggedly, he tries to uncover the link between these lethal incidents, but he doesn’t count on falling for a sassy out-of-towner with a dark past, nor does he expect to stumble onto a plot that threatens national security.
Where to Purchase
Chapter 1
Gobi Desert, Northeastern China
The silver buses drive across the land of endless sand. Onboard are prisoners from China’s notorious Death Row. Rapists, serial murderers, and child abusers.
Twenty men about to be given an extraordinary chance to live.
To wipe the slate clean.
The long vehicles that carry them are equipped with lethal electrocution equipment, state-of-the-art technology designed to deliver on-the-spot executions. The inmates can choose to stay on board and be quickly put to death; their organs harvested there and then and sold to those needing donations.
Or—when the doors swing open—they can run for their lives. Run into one of the largest deserts in the world and take their chances with what lies out there.
Air brakes hiss, sand sprays, and the five buses come to a syn- synchronized stop in the blistering heat.
Three army copters hover in the sweltering air. Military bosses watch like circling vultures.
On cue, automated locks clunk and the big doors of the ve- hicles slide open.
Clouds of hot sand rise as the bare feet of desperate men jump and run from the vehicles.
No one remains.
Six miles away—six miles north, south, east, and west—the doors of four armored personnel carriers also open .
General Fu Zhang peers down like God. Watches life and death play out. People reduced to black dots, scattered like dung beetles. He can’t help but think it would be better for the men if they’d stayed on the buses.
Their deaths would be less painful.
The leader of China’s armed forces follows each and every fa- tality on his video monitor.
Nonchalantly, he waves a hand to the pilot to return to base.
He is pleased.
Seldom has he seen such efficient slaughter. Such economic carnage.
Project Nian is nearing completion.About the Author
SAM MASTERS is a pseudonym for an author who has written seven books, including a bestseller that has sold in more than 30 countries. This is his first novel for Witness.
I hate it when chapters just fizzle out on you. When they’re so tired of running through the story that they just give up and fall sagging to a full stop, lie breathless on a patch of clean type space and await the big number of a new chapter that heralds a fresh go at keeping your attention.Cliffhangers – it’s all about the foreplay
But what I hate more than a damp squib ending, a busted bridge into the next part of the adventure, are really weak opening lines of a story. Oh man, it’s such a disappointment. You look at the glossy cover, the great title, the snazzy graphics that enticed you in, and there, right at the start of Chapter One is the crappiest intro you’ve ever read. But the back cover blurb was smart and hooked you, so you persevere, you plod on, plough through the verbiage and you selflessly search for something gripping and scintillating.
As readers, we’ve been trained to give books a chance, to let authors warm up a little. How amazingly generous of us! It’s not something we do for chefs, is it? We don’t forgive a really poor starter and an insipid main course in the hope that the dessert will be a real humdinger, do we?
Nope.
Nor should we do the same with books.
Authors owe it to readers to excite right from the start. Okay, not full on, flat out, total drama that can’t be maintained or beaten for the next few hundred pages, but a mesmerizing, tantalizing level of excitement that promises even greater thrills.
Foreplay.
Every opening paragraph to every new chapter is a form of mental foreplay between the writer and reader. It’s the author’s job, to find the G-spot of that particular genre being read and worship it.
Here’s the opener to The China Dogs, my new thriller, in the vein (I hope!) of James Herbert, Stephen King, Randy Wayne White and James Grippando:
The silver buses drive across the land of endless sand. Onboard are prisoners from China’s notorious Death Row. Rapists, serial murderers and child abusers. Twenty men about to be given an extraordinary chance to live. To wipe the slate clean.Gobi Desert, Northeastern China
Hopefully, in that couple of hundred words, I’ve set the geographical and political scene, and a sense of the drama abut to unfold. Once main characters are introduced, openers can contain the same anticipation of drama, in much shorter form. Here’s the start of Chapter Six
Zoe wonders how her day got so shit so quickly.Miami
I went for a sharp shocking one liner because Zoe Speed is the kind of no-nonsense heroine who uses the word shit a lot, hence its inclusion. She’s at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum to the refined detective she’s about to cross paths with. Lieutenant ‘Ghost’ Walton and Miami, the city he adores, demand a much gentler opener: -
Walton parks his old Sweptwing Dodge at the corner of Twelfth and Third, closes her up and looks back with pride. It’s not a car; it’s automotive art. Just as Miami is not a city, it’s a life installation.Miami
And then, it’s back to high tension, as I introduce Zoe’s brother Danny, a character who shares his sister’s feisty and slightly unscrupulous DNA: -
There’s no alternative but to run.New York
Run until his lungs are on fire and he can’t breathe.
Then run some more.
Danny Speed has got jammed up. It’s down to a weasel called Jason Bennett who works the Internet café Bean and Bite. He just knows it is.
And then we get to the bad guys. The really bad guys: -
The leader of the largest army in the world showers in the luxuriously marbled bathroom that adjoins his spacious office.Beijing
He scrubs hard to rid himself of the smell of the women.
Of their sex. And their blood. And their crying.
The intention is that in a very short intro, before you even read his name, you get a sense of this guy’s hypocrisy and you decide right away that you don’t like him. It also does the job of any good intro, it gives you location, action and expectation in the shortest number of words possible.
Everyone writes differently (thank goodness) and that’s what makes reading so pleasurable, I just find that I tend to go for those authors who have cliffhanger intros as well as endings.
If you’re writing your first book, you can do a whole lot worse than pick up your favorite novels, check out how all those new chapters start and finish, then decide for yourself what your own style is.
Getting in the Mood
I don’t like killing people in the daytime.
I just don’t have the feel for it.
When the sun is out and the garden is alive with birds and rabbits and squirrels and pheasants, I just don’t have a fleck of evil in me.
But in the middle of the night, when my study window is blackened with the thickest of my childhood fears, when the rest of the family is fast asleep and totally unconnected to me, when the stairs creek and the wind howls at the gables and there’s a noise in the attic that I just can’t place, then I am ready to pick up a knife and look down its blade and begin to imagine all manner of things.
I’m sure many writers can conjure up whatever scene they want at whatever time of day they want it. But I can’t.
I can only write good stuff by day and bad stuff by night.
As a former journalist, I am a big believer in ‘visiting the scene’ and to me ‘the night’ is the scene of most violent crimes, so I have to take my imagination there to get it into the mood. I have to walk it through the graveyard with only a sliver of moonlight in the crumbling old tombstones. I have to leave it stranded in the broken down car out in the middle of nowhere with no houses and lights but a storm growing that is already shaking the windows.
My favorite time of writing the bad stuff is between 2am and 4am. It’s what I call the real ‘dead of night’. There are so many advantages to settling down to shape a story at this time that they are almost too numerous to mention. For a start, your can be pretty damned sure no one else is going to disturb you (if they do, then you’re in for a delicious shock!). If you have got up at 2am, then you sure as hell are not going to waste these precious minutes surfing the web or looking for distractions, you get straight down to work and graft hard. Most of all though, you can experience feelings of isolation or vulnerability that are just not possible when the day is bright, the streets are busy and the traffic loud. Open your back door and sit outside for twenty minutes in the pitch-blackness. Pretend to be your victim. Imagine yourself as the attacker. Soak up the fear and then put your fingers to the keyboard and download the darkness to your page.
If I had a cent for every time a friend or acquaintance said ‘I’d love to write a book, I just don’t have the time,’ then I’d have made a fortune. The truth is, they do have the time. They just don’t know it. Time is like spare air. It’s everywhere. You have so much of it hanging around, you can never use it all. And you can easily grab the tiny bit needed to rattle out that book you feel is lying dormant inside you.I’d Like to Write but I Don’t Have the Time . . .
Here’s what I mean.
An average book is a hundred thousand words. There are three hundred and sixty five days in a year. You need to write fewer than three hundred words a day to write a book in just one year. In case you’re wondering what three hundred words looks like, up to the end of this sentence is a hundred and seventy nine, so you have to write less than twice this amount to make your daily target.
The next thing I hear is ‘Yeah, but it will take me all day to write that amount.’
No it won’t.
Here’s an idea of how little three hundred words is. It’s less than one page of your average typeset thriller. People speak at approximately three words a second, so if you dictated three hundred words, you’d be done in a mere one minute and forty seconds. Okay, if you want to pick holes in the theory, not many non-professional typists (or dictation software) can record your words at that speed but I think the point is well made.
But let’s imagine that the idea has to be forced a little. Plotted. Planned. Developed. Maybe even researched and rewritten. Let’s imagine it takes a whole hour a day to write the three hundred words. Is that really so hard?
Strangely enough, many people say ‘Yes, it is. By the time I’ve finished work, had something to eat and out the kids to bed, I’m too tired to write for an hour.’
I get that.
It’s understandable.
So set the clock and get up an hour earlier and write. Or write at lunchtime, with a sandwich by your side. Or do twenty minutes in the morning. Twenty minutes at lunch and twenty minutes at night.
And if you can’t do any of that, then please, shut the **** up about wanting to write, because plainly you don’t!
I was in New York on business when my agent called me and told me that I had my first publishing deal. I didn’t let out the childish shriek of joy that was inside me, nor did I give in to the urge to do a lengthy knee-slide on the nearest strip of grass and shout “Yes! Yes! Yes!’Just for the Thrill of It
I just stayed calm.
I asked all the grown up questions about royalties, advances, foreign options etc. and said a big thanks to him for landing the deal and most of all for believing in me.
The truth was, I didn’t give a damn about the financials.
Like many people, I just ached to write a book that was deemed good enough to be published. And I couldn’t believe that such an immense honor was really going to be afforded to me.
I was going to be a writer. An author. And be well paid for it.
My book had just been sold in England, Italy and Germany and the advances were racing toward half-a-million pounds.
Seven more novels followed, with varying degrees of success. Some bombing and some selling in more than forty countries.
But here’s the rub.
The ones I tried hardest on – the ones I really poured my heart and soul into – they didn’t make as much money as the ones that were done quickly and left me feeling least satisfied.
And somewhere down the lines (those hundreds of thousands of lines) I lost the plot for a while. I got so hung up on sales, reviews, marketing and revenue that I completely forgot the feelings of exhilaration that came with the first book.
First off, there’s a joy to writing. It is thrilling, cathartic, creative, rewarding and fulfilling in ways that non-writers don’t understand (much in the way non-runners don’t equate with the buzz that comes from pounding out a quick mile or skin-stripping, bone-bashing marathon).
Secondly, it makes me a better person. It makes me more observant, more sensitive, more understanding. It fuels my creativity and keeps my imagination sharp and agile.
Finally, it’s what I am. It’s me as a full-blown sunflower the size of a dinner plate.
Occasionally, I have to remind myself of all the above and it’s something I’m also keen to share with people who are about to write their first book. Don’t think of the deals, the possible money, the reviews or the possible fame. They don’t matter. Do it for yourself. When you run your first marathon, you don’t think you’re about to clock up the fastest twenty-six miles ever run, you just want to finish. You want to say, ‘Damn, I did that. All the way!’ It doesn’t matter in what style you did it, how flash or raggedy some people you looked. You did it.
So go write. Write for you. For the sheer fun of it. For how good it will make you feel. And if people love your story then congratulations – and if they hate it, then it’s their loss. You did something they’ll never do, you completed your own writing marathon and in that makes you a lifetime winner.
There’s no right way to write.10 Writing Rules That Got Me Published
Almost everyone has different ways of getting from the first letter to the final punctuation mark.
I know a best selling author, who when she thinks up a great phrase or a single character or just one good idea, immediately goes into hibernation and begins to pen her next thriller.
She locks herself away, cuts herself off from family and friends and hammers out the complete first version of the novel in under a month. She barely reviews anything that she writes before she’s finished and only adds expert detail and research facts after she’s completed the first draft.
Eating, drinking, sleeping (and many other normal functions) are severely sacrificed in the all out pursuit of the completed first draft. It takes immense guts, self-believe and sacrifice to do it that way. You also have to have either an incredibly understanding family or a very solitary lifestyle, plus enough money not to be holding down a full-time 9-5 job somewhere.
I also know writers who plot every chapter from beginning to end. They write an incredibly detailed synopsis of more than 20,000 words, before they even start the book. They know every twist and turn of plot and every cough and shout of all their characters before they’ve even written down the title on the first page.
Personally, I fall between the two styles.
I like to plan, and I like to deviate.
I like to shape the characters, but once they’ve come alive in the story I let them shape a little of their own destinies.
I also find that new characters and plot twists tend to emerge organically as the story develops so I write a chapter or two on a new document before incorporating it into the main draft I’m working on.
Anyway, enough of the background blahdy blah. Here are my personal ten rules.
- Plot – Know the beginning, middle and end of your story really well before you begin and trust yourself to fill in the other parts as you go along.
- Setting – Fiction reading is escapism, so make sure that you give the escapees a sense of where they are going, what their destination looks like and of course what century and season of the year it’s all happening in.
- Research – even if you’re writing about something you know really well check your facts and look for odd and interesting detail that adds information to the entertainment that you’re serving up.
- Characters – imagine them as real people, cut out pictures of what they might look like and how they dress, write down what they believe in, what they love and hate.
- Dialogue – give your characters a voice, make sure it differs from those other players n your story, ensure they have their own vocabulary and it reflects their backgrounds and stories.
- Clothes – Don’t forget to dress your characters, such descriptions help paint the scene and give great references to your readers.
- Review – make sure you review the last thing you wrote before you start the next session so that you are in the same frame of mind when you carry on the story and you can feel the moods of the characters and the pace of the plot.
- Word Count – Resist seeing how many words you’ve written for as long as possible. A completed book is about 100,000 words. With your own revisions and rewrites, plus those from your editor you may well have to write somewhere towards a quarter of a million words. If you start clicking the Word Count button on day one you’ll find it’s like staring up to the top of a very steep hill when you are on your bike. Much better to keep your head down for as long as possible and only look up when you really, really have to.
- Emotion – the best way to bring characters to life is by sharing how they feel, by conveying their loves and hates, their hopes and fears, their passions and pains.
- Friends and Family – Unless they are successful writers, agents or publishers then don’t’ show them your work and don’t listen to their views until you’re done. What they think doesn’t matter. They’re most likely to lead you astray with too much praise or too much criticism. Remember, you started writing because you wanted to, not because of someone else’s thoughts. Finish your book on the same terms.
Man’s Best Friend. . .
There’s a day of my childhood that I’ll never forget.
It was summer, I was nine years old and I rode my bicycle a good five miles to the house of a new friend I’d made at school. I had never been there before and my eyes were more on the gates and the numbers of the homes than anything else, as I slowed down searching for the elusive number 33.
I never got there.
A few seconds after passing the hedges and lawn of a blue-painted home, a German Shepherd took me clean off my wheels.
It came out of nowhere. A massive, viscous blur of brown and black hair. It sank its’ teeth into my leg and took me down. This was back in the age before anyone wore protective headgear and I cracked my skull on the sidewalk and passed out.
Next thing I knew, I was sat up, being looked after by the owner of the dog and the blue-painted home I’d just ridden by. Cuts to my head, elbow and knee were bad enough to require a ride to the local hospital and an x ray but no stitches.
To my big surprise, there were nothing but small scratches on my ankle where the dog had caught me. My weekly soccer games left much bigger wounds.
The dog’s owner stayed around until my parents came and once I got home all the pieces of the puzzle over why I had been attacked fell into place.
The dog wasn’t a massive monster, like I’d imagined, it was actually a puppy, but as everyone knows, GS pups are still big. Its’ family had very recently moved to the house and it hadn’t yet settled in. I’d been wearing my soccer club’s tracksuit (a shocking bright red in colour). There had been a garbage truck blocking my way and sounding a back up alarm so I’d swerved off the road, up onto the sidewalk, right outside the gate to the dog’s house.
In short, the animal had been spooked.
And so had I.
From that moment, I had a fear of dogs. And for years and years to come, they seemed to know it. So much so, that whenever I was around them they would constantly jump up at me. I would never really know how to deal with them without embarrassing their owners or myself.
When I grew up, I became a journalist and one of the stories I was sent out on was a dog attack. All the emotions of my childhood incident came back to me. But a thousand times worth. The guy was not as lucky as I had been. Two pit bull terriers bit off his face. His nose, ears and chunks of cheek had to be picked up off the ground by paramedics, put into plastic bags and be taken to the ER to be sown back on.
Stats on dog attacks in the US seem to vary from source to source. The legal industry seems to hype them up, while the dog-breeding world plays them down. Taking an average of the two extremes, it seems a human is killed by a dog about every ten days, a third of a million people a year need ER treatment for dog bites, somewhere in excess of 20,000 people need reconstructive surgery and more than three quarters of a million receive a bite that needs some medical attention.
So now the scary stuff.
There are more than 80 million dogs in the USA, kept by about 50 million families.
The vast, vast majority of them wouldn’t even nip a crazy bicycling kid on his ankle.
But what if something – or someone – turned the dogs savage?
If it made them even more vicious than the pit bulls that chewed the man’s face off?
Then you’d be out in the sands of Miami when hell breaks loose, or caught in Orlando when man’s best friend becomes his worst enemy.
You’d be in the world of The China Dogs
Super Superstitions
From The China Dogs
Xian weighs up the eagerness in his colleague. A soldier ever-hungry for war. A man desperate for power. ‘There is an old superstition that if you hear a dog howl late at night then someone somewhere is dying. Today you come to me, Zhang, seeking to make a whole army of dogs howl and many, many people die. Are you certain that this is the moment for such disturbance?’
*
Old superstitions are everything in China. As much a part of modern day living, as they were ancient life. And when you look the world over, you see that we’ve incorporated many rituals and saying into our own worlds as well. Well, certainly I have.
I am a lifelong Manchester City fan, and have been since the club was penniless and a million miles away from the success it is today (for non-soccer fans they are English Premier League Champions and have just won the title for the second time in three years). As I child, I had to stand at exactly the same spot in the ground, precisely on the half-way line, right down at the front, near the player’s tunnel. I was convinced that if I didn’t get this exactly right, then the team would lose. I had to wear my lucky scarf and on no account must I be late. Oh, and one last thing, I had to shout and sing for my team so loudly I would have no voice left by the time the final whistle blew. If I did not do these things to the very best of my ability, then they would lose, and it would be my fault.
Of course the team lost. Many, many times. No matter how loudly I shouted or where I stood. But still today, I have my match day superstitions and so does my own son (a certain route to the new ground must be taken by his mom, who must drive rather than me, and there are rules on where to park and what pre-match food must be consumed).
But none of my ‘lucky habits’ compare to those in Asia. While researching The China Dogs I found endless examples of good and bad luck rituals in every day Chinese life, most of which had survived over the centuries.
The New Year is a big, big time for superstitions - first off, there’s the run up to the big day. No telling spooky stories – it only excites the spirits and evil ones are likely to come and lodge with you. Best get a bucket of firecrackers in order to scare them off on New Year’s Eve and all families need to clean house before the new year rolls in, so they can be totally sure it is clear of those evil spirits and there’s plenty of room to accommodate good luck. But you mustn’t wash your hair on New Year’s Day, as that will just rinse away all the good luck that you worked so hard to attract.
If you’ve made a good start to the year, then here are some tips to stay lucky:
Steer clear of knives and sharp objects as they can sever your good fortune. Don’t wear black, wear red. Red envelopes with cash in are given to children and even single people to bring them good luck, while black is such a funereal color you are tempting fate. Don’t give a clock as a gift, as it signifies that time is running out, but do gift a couple of mandarin oranges as it extends the sweetness of life and supports the belief that ‘good things come in pairs.’
Never hit anyone with a broom, it’s likely to bring you bad luck for the rest of your days. Certainly don’t live in a house facing north, it will bring woe to the whole family. It’s better to be clean-shaven than have a beard (especially if you’re a woman!) and don’t trim toenails at night, as this is likely to bring ghosts into the house. Incidentally, if you have a baby and it’s crying for no apparent reason, then this is a sure sign you already do have ghosts in the house.
Don’t point at the moon as it might make the tips of your ears fall off. If you’re getting married, make sure the partner is not three or six years older or younger than you are, and should you crave a pet, on no account keep a caged turtle as it would most definitely result in ruin.
Personally, I love superstition. It’s oral history and reminds me of the age before science hit TV and everyone ended up a smart ass. The China Dogs weaves a little superstition into the characters and storyline here and there but I hope it does it respectfully. If you’re reading the book, look out for the number 8. Originally the title was going to be 88888.
I’d tell you why, but that would be unlucky.
I remember playing ‘war’ as a young kid. We’d hide out in a patch of dense forest behind a hospital on the outskirts of town, make camps out of old crates and ‘shoot’ at each other with wooden guns. Sometimes we’d throw flour bombs, balloons filled with water paint or we’d fire cap pistols that would echo down the long stream that divided the bases of the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’.A War to End all Wars
Towards the end of the day, someone would shout ‘Cease-fire!’ The shouter would raise his arms high above his head and be allowed to walk away ‘unharmed’, in order to go home for dinner, bath-time and bed. Inevitably, further shouts of ‘cease-fire’ would follow, until the point that too few ‘soldiers’ remained and the whole battle would be called off.
Wars were fought at weekends, mostly on Sundays. As the following day would be Monday and we would all be at school together the great war of the weekend would be long forgotten by first recess.
Off the battlefield, goodies and baddies happily banded together to form soccer, rugby and cricket teams. We all grew up and muddled through exams, driving tests, first dates and first loves. We’d end up working and drinking together, attending friends’ marriages, sharing best man speeches and even babysitting each other’s kids.
Looking back on the childhood cries of ‘Cease-fire!’ I can see that like most people I took them (wrongly) to signify the end of war. The cessation of hostilities. The time to call the fighting off, go home and be with the family.
Apparently, in Korea, it doesn’t mean that. And probably never will.
It doesn’t even mean, what it’s supposed to mean, which is a ‘truce’, a dignified halt to battle in which both sides retire without having given away lands or conceded principles.
And it has such a different meaning because of how, more than half a century ago, The Korean War broke out and ended.
To get perspective, you have to go all the way back to the end of the second world war, when the Allies drove Japan out of Korea and the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel by the Soviet Union and the USA. Divided nations are never happy nations, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when in 1950 the North Koreans (backed by the Soviets) rolled tanks and troops across the divide and tried to create a singular Communist country. The UN stepped in and when their military presence came uncomfortably close to the Chinese border, then the Chinese also flooded the area with troops. US forces joined the South Koreans and week-by-week the violence escalated.
By 1953 almost 900,000 soldiers had lost their lives and more than two million civilians had been killed or wounded.
Finally, that ‘Cease-fire!’ was shouted and the shooting stopped. But as everyone backed off and a political border was scraped in the sand, it was clear that a truly large area around it had to be carved out to keep everyone apart. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that followed ran two-and-a-half miles across mainly mountainous land. To this day, it serves as buffer between two armies that are technically still at war and philosophically are as far apart as they ever were.
Beyond the fragile ‘Cease Fire Agreement’, neither side respects the land claims of the other and war is suspended not finished. There is no armistice. No settlement.
In fact, things seem to be getting worse rather than better.
To back its claims to take over all of Korea, the North has assembled one of the largest army in the world (1.2 million regular troops). It boasts more than nine million active, reserve and paramilitary personnel. It has rigorously developed nuclear power, frequently tested defence missiles in open displays of aggression and is reported to have an advanced biological weapons programme as well.
On the other side of the DMZ, South Korea has fewer than three-quarters of a million troops but is heavily backed by the US. If the North Koreans crossed the line then the South would be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of troops but technologically the US could restore the balance with aerial firepower.
The cease-fire has proved precarious. There have been repeated breaches of the agreement and innumerable shootings. Matters came to a head, most notably in the mid to late sixties; with a flurry of small scale-battles that resulted in more than five hundred deaths and almost a second all out war.
In short, the DMZ is a giant tinderbox.
Any superpower friction out on the 38th Parallel could well spark the war to end all wars.
It doesn’t bear thinking about – not unless you’re about to read The China Dogs – in which case, you’re about to enter the most dangerous place on earth.
I am a journalist by trade. I did my time in newspapers, radio and TV long before turning to fiction for a living. ‘Fact’, I have to tell you, is so very often stranger, more surprising and more dramatic that anything you can pull out of your head.Chinese Crackers
Take China for example.
When I decided to use it as a central theme for a book, I vowed to set it very much in the modern China that I had briefly visited while in the employ of a major American entertainment company. I wanted to steer clear of Chinese clichés, superstitions and customs and showcase the vibrant, prosperous and ruthlessly efficient China that is on the verge of becoming the dominant superpower of the 21st century. I wanted to stick to the fact that it now boasts the second largest economy in the world (behind Japan), that it has invested billions in alternative energies to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. It is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal and lies only behind the US in the table of top oil consumers.
But in researching China, you can’t help but unearth some popular factual treasures that are too good not to share.
So here they are:
You can’t, apparently, see the Great Wall (technically it should be walls plural) from a space station or space ship, though some astronauts have claimed they thought they had caught glimpses.
Archaeological studies have shown that if all the linked walls and trenches were measured they’d stretch for more than thirteen thousand miles in total, with around five thousand miles going back to Ming Dynasty times and some reportedly stretching as far back as 7BC.
Not a week goes by without there being news of modern China buying into big businesses and major property development projects across the globe, but a hundred million people (out of China’s incredible total population of 1.3 billion) are still said to be living on less than a dollar a day. Some thirty million are living in accommodation that many people would describe simply as caves (around a third of China’s land mass is mountainous).
China is known for making low cost goods and imitations. For example, one in three of every pair of socks made in the world is said to come from Datang, known as ‘Sock City’. In contrast, the country is often derided as lacking creativity and invention, which is a little unfair considering that it’s the Chinese we have to thank for silk manufacturing, the creation of paper, porcelain, printing, gunpowder and the world’s first magnetic compass.
Environmentalists are quick to condemn China as a major polluter – there are even reports that most of San Francisco’s smog comes from China. That said, the Chinese have created more than a thousand reserves for endangered plants and animals. And the giant panda (there are only about 1500 alive) lives quite naturally in the south west of China but nowhere else in the world.
Then there’s the thorny subject of human rights. China is known to execute more prisoners than anyone else in the world, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia and then the USA. The last recorded figure (for 2013) showed a year-on-year rise from 682 to 778.
In The China Dogs you’ll see a fictional passage referring to Death Buses. These things actually do exist. Mobile execution chambers that tour the country killing people as efficiently as parcel delivery or a tune’n’lube on your driveway. There are also chat and reality shows in the schedules dealing with the live executions.
The China Dogs is certainly a clash of cultures, a dramatic coming together of modern and ancient civilizations and vastly differing beliefs and attitudes. Enjoy the ride; it’s going to drag you back centuries before Christ, then catapult you forward, for a glimpse of an apocalyptic future.
Money, Money, Money.
I was brought up poor. Dirt poor. Had times when I was homeless and jobless. Slept on sofas of friends and outstayed my welcome while I prayed I’d get a break. I did. More than one. More than I deserved. And big, big thanks to one and all who helped me when they could.
The whole experience of having nothing (and noting to lose) taught me that ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ is much more than a financial experience. A transaction.
It’s an emotional experience.
Borrowing and lending money are both fraught with tensions. Especially if you’re borrowing from, or lending to, people whom you regard as special – namely your friends and family.
For me, one of the worst things in the world was asking for something. Having to borrow. Money topped that list. It killed me to take a small loan from my first wife’s parents to help buy the crappy car I needed to get to the crappy job on the other side of town. But borrow I did. And paid back, I did too. In full. With thanks and what little gifts I could afford to show my gratitude. In fact, my wife and I didn’t go out, didn’t get takeaways or even consider a holiday until the debt had been paid. Incidentally, I had to turn to the in-laws because the cold-hearted clerks at the bank wouldn’t give me a loan. More on banks later.
Anyway, somewhere, deep inside my psyche, there’s a notion that if you have to borrow, then you have to give it back and give it back as soon as possible.
Decades after taking the loan for the crappy car, my second wife and I paid off the mortgage on a not so crappy house that had five bedrooms, a lounge you could land a plane in (okay maybe a tiny radio-controlled helicopter, like kids get at Christmas) four acres of private land and even a small lake. It was an amazing feeling to think it was ours. It wasn’t owned in any part by the goddamned bank or building society. Whatever happened in life, we had somewhere nice and safe to live, which we are acutely aware is more than many people in life have. Lucky us. Very grateful us.
It seems most people think the same way. You borrow - you pay back. If you lend, then you do so with kindness and understanding. Now lending itself is tricky. You have none of the guilt of borrowing but there’s a whole different ball game going on. Doubt.
You wonder if you’re going to get your money back.
Now, if you’re a financial institution, you cover this risk with insurances and of course you charge interest and make sure that the whole deal ends up being good for you.
But not if you lend to friends or family.
In that case, quite rightly, you suck up all the risk. You’re the one with the fat wallet so you swallow down the doubt and you simply hope the ‘arrangement’ will turn out for the best. Sadly, that promise to pay you back ‘soon as possible’ often becomes a distant memory and the gaping hole in your bank account is soon in danger of becoming an irreparable hole in your relationship with the borrower. It even gets to the point when you feel guilty about bringing up the fact that you’re still owed money.
Being owed money sucks.
Being owed a little suck a lot.
Being owed big sums is enough to drive you wild with anger.
People the world over are knifed, shot, tortured and murdered every day because of money borrowed and not repaid. Welching on a debt makes it personal. Not paying up is a lack of respect. An act of dishonour. A very definite way of saying ‘Screw you.’
So what about the $1.2 trillion the US owes China.
Okay. Let’s do that again, but this time in letters, it’s somehow more graspable.
Not a million. Not a billion. Not even a trillion.
One point two, trillion dollars.
Man, there’s a lot of doubt, guilt, respect, trust, disrespect and welching go on behind that figure.
People get their asses kicked for maxing out $1,000 credit card limits or going a couple of hundred bucks overdrawn before payday.
But one point two trillion!
Folks, come on now, ‘how did you let it get that big?’
Shout and scream the question from Wall Street to the White House and you won’t get a good answer. They’ll just tell you to calm down and then blind you with banalities like ‘Calm down, it’s only 8 per cent of public national debt. Nothing to worry about.’
$1.2 trillion is nothing to worry about? Don’t people get their houses taken off them if they default on crappy mortgages sold by indecent brokers? Don’t banks bust your ass if you accidentally go overdrawn before pay day?
But $1.2 trillion is nothing to worry about.
Yep, it’s not.
They’re right. Because everyone in US finance is way, way past worrying. The government is in so deep, there ain’t no periscope long enough to pop up through the shit they’ve sunk in.
The US owes a shitload more than just a trillion to China.
They owe trillions to tons of other people (more than $14 trillion in total). Mainly to US citizens, banks and foreign governments ($4.5 trillion to foreign government). Which means that nobody is ever going to get back what they’re owed. It just can’t happen. One big pay out, say to the Chinese, would knock the bottom bricks out of not only America’s financial wall, but the whole western world’s as well. As one worried Republican remarked to the Democrats when the then Chinese President Hu Jintao raised the debt issue, ‘Hu’s your daddy?’
But the debt really is no laughing matter. What if the Chinese decided to call in the loan?
If they wanted all their money back, right now; say because their own growth was stalling (which incidentally it is). And what if the US refused to even negotiate new terms, let alone pay up in full?
Then things would be bad.
Real bad.
Maybe even as bad as The China Dogs scenario.
England’s Green and Pleasant Lands
There was a moment when China Dogs was set to have much more of an English setting.
I originally imagined a gorgeous stretch of deep green landscape upon which a brutal piece of savagery would unfold, and in doing so, remembered a place that I had visited and worked. It was a village that stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it and made me just stare in awe at its pure unadulterated beauty.
My first job in television had been with Border TV in Carlisle, a local ITV station straddling the English/Scottish border and covering some of the most spectacular countryside in Great Britain. At the heart of it is The Lake District (The Lakes) a vast tract of national parkland with stunning stretches of water, streams, rivers, hills and mountains. This is the land of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Beatrix Potter, a place of inspiration. I worked the area for two years as a young reporter, learning my trade in beauty spots such as Windermere, Keswick and Ambleside. But I never found anywhere more movingly beautiful than Coniston.
From the cool air and breathtaking views at the summit of the ‘Old Man of Coniston’ (a giant fell, more than two thousand feet high) down to the dark mysterious depths of Coniston Water, where world record speedboater Donald Campbell died in a 290 mph crash, this was truly a place of drama.
It was, I thought, the perfect place for the perfect atrocity in China Dogs. . .
Coniston, the English Lake District
In the first pale light of the new day, the picturesque village, with its walls and roofs fashioned from local slate and rock look no more than a ragged pencil sketch. Gone are the vibrant greens and blues of the surrounding hills and streams, dulled are the startling white walls of cool stone cottages.
All is grey.
Utterly grey.
There are no warm lights in the tiny window panes, not even at Gerry the Milkman’s or Sally the Baker’s. It’s still too early for the farmers, villagers or tourists to stir in their beds.
But there is movement. Vast movement.
The lairs are emptying.
Hundreds of dogs are pouring down the hillsides, massing and processing, looking for all the world like a giant fox hunt pack that’s broken free of its richly groomed horses and red-jacketed riders.
Only its isn’t foxes that will be hunted today.
The Lurchers lead the dogs down. The collies bring up the rear and herd the last of the young and hungry dogs into line as they head over the bracken-skinned fells into the outskirts of the ancient settlement.
Fifty or more Mastiffs come to settle in the trees north of Church Beck. An even greater number of Pointers halt on the edge of Guards Wood in the east. Close to a hundred Alsatians rest in the southern grounds of Campbell House and the playing fields of John Ruskin School.
The sleeping village is now surrounded from all sides.
The Coniston scene, and sadly many more set in The Lakes, was dropped after the first draft was completed. Instead of the English countryside, I introduced the more familiar landscape of Disney World and the notion of ‘tourist terrorism’. It was a necessary sacrifice because of the rest of the plot but occasionally I do miss that scary walk I took down my own memory lane.
Giveaway
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