A psychological thriller about abduction with an unexpected twist, Jessica Fraser finds herself trapped in an upstairs room held to ransom by three nasty thugs. But Jess has a secret, a secret that would have made her abductors think twice before picking her as their target.
Kidnapping Thriller
This novel tells the story of Jessica Fraser, married with a son and with plenty of money would appear to have the sort of perfect life many others crave, but her dark past soon catches up with her when she is abducted by three thugs and held in an upstairs room.
Kidnapping Thriller
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| Click to buy from Amazon |
Jess manages to catch the police’s attention in a failed attempt to get away, but the thugs retain their cover by taking on a baby to feign a family setup. With no one to find her, how does Jess while away the hours in a small room?
What to do in a Locked Room
In fact, Jess has more than enough to think about after cutting a hole in the floorboards from where she spies upon her abductor’s everyday lives below. Jess’s spying soon becomes obsessive until she finds herself playing psychological games with them. With her life in the balance, Jess discovers unsavoury truths about herself and starts to question her own sanity, least of all her growing feelings for one of her captors, Jake. The sort of book I would like to read, you might find yourself reading into the night.
Dynamics of Captive and Captor
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| Get this audiobook from Audible |
The idea manifested itself over several months and from many sources: a casual interest in psychology; Freud’s theory on Ego states; Eric Berne’s little known but brilliant book “Games People Play,” the Big Brother phenomenon, and my own life experiences. At the book's heart lies the taboo and repression.
I began to think “what if...?” the story seemed to write itself and the rest is history.
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| The Shuttered Room: a Tale of Abduction |
Psychological Thrillers in Large Print
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| If only they knew: Charles J Harwood |
I have written three other novels, A Hard Lesson, Falling Awake and Nora also available for purchase on kindle, hard copy and large print. You may also read a brief overview of all the novels written by Charles J Harwood on this blog.
Related links on my author website
The Stockholm syndrome relationship
The inner gremlins of kidnappers
What if human behavior had a voice?
Bernes' Games People Play in the Shuttered Room
OtherArticles on Writing
Related links on my author website
The Stockholm syndrome relationship
The inner gremlins of kidnappers
What if human behavior had a voice?
Bernes' Games People Play in the Shuttered Room
OtherArticles on Writing
Writing for Magazines Online offers an alternative to blogging or writing for a personal website, as the articles will often rank higher on Google search pages. This is due in part to the size of the site, as it will inevitably be larger than the humble blog or personal website. A system that most often works on revenue share, here is a list of the top ten sites to write for.
The writer, or “Xombie,” gets paid for indepth knowledge on any subject, which may be in the form of snippets, or longer articles. The revenue share is fifty/fifty. Half the time, the writer gets paid, the other half, Xomba receives the share.
It can be hard to find a film agent or production company to read a screenplay from an unknown writer, and this ma spur the writer to take desperate measures. This warrants a word of caution to always think twice before parting with too much money for the privilege of getting a screenplay read. Avoid screenwriting organisations that make big promises, or services that have not been tried and tested. I always conduct a Google search to establish if there have been issues with a particular company that may not be revealed within its own site.
The following organisations offer student drama writers to break into TV or film writing.
Writing a sitcom is perhaps the most profitable area of scriptwriting. Little wonder if the pressure is on to make an audience laugh at least 75 times an episode. If you think this is an overestimate, a standard sitcom lasts twenty five minutes and a funny line must be delivered around three to four times per minute. In terms of comedy, a minute is a long time without a laugh. How can the writer dream up funny lines on a regular basis?
Create distinction in how the characters speak in the words used, the sentence construction and the accent (to be indicated on the cue). Look for alternative words used if the line is a little flat. A thesaurus is useful for this purpose, but remember a more accurate word is not the objective, as in the case of literary fiction, but a word to make a one-liner funnier. Look at antonyms as well as synonyms.
The most crucial part of the script is the beginning for it determines whether the rest of the script will be read. However, a tedious build-up promising a compelling storyline may never come if the reader chucks the screenplay in the slush pile by page two. What is the secret to writing the ideal opening scene to a script?
A crime story is nothing without a great villain. But some crime writers may find it difficult to create a convincing baddie that moves the story forward. The reason might be that the author might have been inspired by a storyline rather than the characters. To make the story happen, the writer may “people” the plot, simply filling in gaps with fictional human entities that move from one scene to another.
An example might be how a divorce might have impacted upon the author’s ability to make friends at school. Projecting the lonely feelings this might have invoked in the writer can be projected upon the villain albeit for a different reason, which might be a childhood spent in hostels due to poverty. Having an intimate understanding of the villain’s emotional core is the key to creating a realistic villain rather than a cardboard cut-out character within the crime novel.
The novelist may find that publishing a digital novel is quite simple, as free publishing tools on Amazon, Smashwords or LuLu make sharing a novel with the world possible. However, with so much competition out there, the enovel could well be buried beneath millions of other enovels.
It is never too late to change the title if the author has misgivings. Avoid hackneyed or generalised phrases that does not evoke an image, or those that remind the reader of another book. Original use of words will make the book title memorable or whet the potential reader’s appetite, ask questions or wonder what the book is about. A thesaurus is invaluable for this purpose.