The Adventure of a Love Investigator by Barbara Silkstone

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CHAPTER SEVEN

“Most men struggle terribly with the whole idea of sharing.”
~ Ben, 54, married

Case 288 / Ben

My right heel sticks in the snow bank. I yank my foot free and sprint for the safety of the heated reception room. Inside, a blinding glare of bright colored carpeting, white walls and framed photos of men in jerseys accepting trophies from men in suits hits me. Sunblind, I squint to take in a litter of chairs. A ring of metal racks circling the room, proffer pamphlets on Christian lifestyles.

I’ve come to the corporate offices of one of the hottest sports teams in the country to interview their general manager.

“Hi!” Ben greets me with practiced enthusiasm.

At fifty-four, Ben has the kind of energy that sets me on edge. This sports guru wears a navy blazer with gold buttons, tan slacks and a light blue pin stripe shirt. I can’t make out the detail of his shoes, he walks too fast. He herds me double-time into his office. The room is light and bright with very few personal photos and a clean desk top. Oh boy, a clean desk. A bad sign.

Ben opens up the interview by talking about his career. I keep easing the subject back to love and marriage. On my third try, it takes.

He settles into his chair, leaning on his elbows. “From the time my wife was a little girl she had these wonderful visions on how marriage would be.” His gaze moves from my face to my neck and downward. Despite the glass wall extending the length of the room, I feel a little uneasy.

“I sandwiched our wedding in between the games. I was trying to make three trades the night before the ceremony and then get the team on the road.”

He thinks I’m impressed and smiles a photo-op smile. “Once the rings were exchanged and the marriage had taken place, I was relieved. That little piece of the jigsaw puzzle was in place.”

I feel sorry for the pretty woman whose picture sits on the credenza behind his desk.

“For the first ten years of our life, I thought everything was wonderful. Then my wife started to send out these little signals. I would try to deal with it, maybe an evening out or maybe some flowers or a box of candy . . . anything to try and keep the noise down.”

He swings into defensive mode.

“It’s very tough to run a team if there’s a lot of squeaking in the background.” He studies my face to see if I’m with him. “I learned to lubricate the wheels, calm it down and go on.”

This must be the opposite of love. “You’ve been married for twenty one years?”

He nods and shrugs it off – a bent puzzle piece.

“One Sunday afternoon, Patty told me that she didn’t care anymore. She tried everything she could think of and that she was quitting. She didn’t say that she was leaving, but she did say that she didn’t have anything left to give. She said she had died emotionally.”

I begin to shiver.

“You have how many children?”

“Nine.” He answers, proudly. “I had hoped children would give Patty the emotional food she craved. After we had our three, we adopted six more kids.”

What would the world think of this man, this team manager if they really knew? Ben wined Patty and dined her and wooed her like a player he was trading up for. He placed her on his team and then ignored her. When she felt emotionally hungry, he would fetch another child to fill her void.

After a long pause, he continues. “A woman has a hard time understanding. She wants her man totally engulfed in her. And the guy may be, but he has a hard time demonstrating that. A man comes home and she’s there like a little puppy dog. He can’t respond to her and she feels totally crushed.”

This is the first interviewee I have wanted to punch. It would feel so good. With no apparent love in his heart for either his wife or his children he burdens her while making himself look like a benefactor. I consider the possibility that I’m cracking up.

He focuses south of my face again. Is it my imagination?

The phone bleeps and Ben excuses himself. I spend a minute making eye contact with the picture of his wife. What a crappy deal she cut.

Ben returns from his phone call with all the verve of a game show M.C. “I’m convinced that most guys create little islands for themselves and get encamped on those islands. Men dig a moat around their island and fill it with water. There they sit. It’s a device designed for self-protection. If they can stay within the safety of those walls they avoid risk taking and getting hurt or exposing themselves.”

I open a mental image of my second ‘ex’ in his walled-up island. I would ask him how his day went and he would freeze with anger. The water must have been cold.

Ben shuffles the few papers on his desk and realigns the pens in a straight line like little team players.

“A wife will do anything to get over her husband’s walls and get down where her man is. The thing is… he doesn’t want her there.”

There is no point in asking if he would die for the woman he loved – he’s never loved a woman . . . of this I am sure. Two years and four months of interviews have taught me to read men. A man like Ben is incapable of loving anyone but himself. I stand to leave.

“Give me your cell phone number, just in case I think of anything else,” he asks.

“Sure.” I jot my number on a piece of paper and hand it back to him.

Ben continues talking, “I went into marriage thinking I would do what comes naturally. Well if you do what comes naturally, you’re basically going to do the self-centered thing.”

~~~~~

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Crafting a Page-Turning Plot with Ezra Barany

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First and foremost I want to thank the brilliant Tami for allowing me to ramble on her website.
My name is Ezra Barany, has been for as long as I can remember, but it’ll change by the end of this blog post. I just released my first suspense novel, The Torah Codes, and here’s what people are saying about it:
“The story held my attention…. In fact, I had to force myself to stop reading last night.” –Mackenzie Jones, Amazon customer
“This book has a compelling story line and was actually hard to put down.” –Troy B. Stengel, Amazon customer
“My husband and I read this out loud before bed for about a week. It was so exciting that we read two hours each night instead of our usual one hour.” –June Safran, Amazon customer
“This book is a page-turner that I found very difficult to put down.” –A.R. Cook, The Book Review
As you can see, creating a page-turner is a strength of mine.
Now, many authors think crafting a page-turning plot is a challenging task, but actually a good plot can be created using a few time-tested, proven methods. And if you just follow a few of these tips, your fiction is bound to be hard to put down.
·       Line the Cover with Glue
Though not the most common method, this is a sure-fire way to make your book hard to put down.
·       Have a Time-Lock
Incorporate a reason for why the protagonist needs to do something within a certain – preferably short – period of time.
Imagine a girl in high school being dared to tell the handsome boy in her English class that she likes him. That’s somewhat interesting, but there’s no sense of urgency. She can tell him whenever the moment is right, which may be never.
Add a time-lock and see what the result is: If she doesn’t tell him by the end of the day, her “friends” will tell the boy that she likes him and that she’s too chicken to tell him herself. Not only does it create a sense of urgency, but it also creates a sense of dread, especially since there will probably never be a “right time” to tell him, so whatever the circumstances are, there’s risk of humiliation, rejection, and even worse, what if he says he likes her, too? What will she have to sacrifice to be in a loving relationship with him? There’s a certain comfort we take in not knowing, right? Because as long as we don’t know, the possibility of getting what we want is always there.
But I digress…
·       Present a Deluge of Obstacles
For using this method of creating a page-turning plot, first determine the protagonist’s main external goal. Maybe it’s finding the sunken treasure (before the competitors set out to do so next week), maybe it’s finding the killer (before he kills again tomorrow). I stress that the goal must be an external one, because any internal goal is typically a character arc and has next to nothing to do with plot. Overcoming one’s insecurity over committing to love is an internal goal and can be just as compelling, but my focus here is plot. This brings up the point that completing an external goal doesn’t necessarily solve the internal goal, right? Just because the girl and boy reveal their love for each other doesn’t necessarily mean the girl has overcome her feelings of loneliness. But that’s another blog post.
Once you know the external goal, create a list of obstacles that could get in the way of achieving that goal. Perhaps the treasure-seeker has a sinking ship, a severe virus spreads among the crew, a traitor is on board, all of these are obstacles. The best obstacles to have not only depend on the goal, but also depend on the genre. For thrillers, the common obstacles are anything that threatens the life and safety of the protagonist or of the protagonist’s loved ones. Though I don’t write romance, I imagine the external obstacles would be more along the lines of succumbing to temptation, public humiliation due to reputation, experiencing rejection, or physical distance separating loved ones. I may be completely wrong about that, but the point is that the primary obstacle of the general romance genre (not counting romantic suspense, for example) is not focused on threats to the protagonist’s life as thrillers are.
Now that you have your list of obstacles, either come up with creative ways or have the protagonist come up with creative ways to overcome each one. It could be that a resolution is found by not directly overcoming the obstacle. For example, the treasure-seeker resolves the sinking ship problem by, oddly enough, failing to stop the ship from sinking. He dives to his sunken ship to save the photo of his loved one, in the process discovers that the ship has coincidently sunk directly on top of the ancient treasure he set off to find.
·       Consider Using a Cliff-Hanger
I understand that it may not be appropriate in every genre, but cliff-hangers always keep the reader turning pages. The simplest way to create a cliff-hanger is to simply restructure the format of the chapter. Often the chapter format is: a) the protagonist gets faced with an obstacle, b) the protagonist overcomes the obstacle. For cliffhangers, have the chapter format be: a) the protagonist overcomes an obstacle from the previous chapter, b) the protagonist gets faced with an even bigger obstacle. The reader will want to start the next chapter to see how the situation gets resolved.
·       Consider the Antagonist’s Obstacles and Resolutions
In my thrillers, I like to have a see-saw effect of giving obstacles back and forth between my protagonist and antagonist. The difference is that the antagonist is faced with and overcomes his/her obstacle within the chapter. The protagonist overcomes each obstacle in a later chapter. Often, the way the antagonist resolves their obstacle creates the new obstacle for the protagonist. See the excerpt from my book The Torah Codes below as an example. Notice how the protagonist’s girlfriend, Sophia, reacts when she realizes she’s been having an intimate dialogue with the enemy, Luke McCourt. Here, Luke McCourt is sitting next to Sophia on a San Francisco subway system with the intention of kidnapping Sophia. The chapter starts with Sophia managing to escape his grasp, Sophia’s problem is resolved creating a new problem for Luke. The end of the chapter shows how Luke manages to find a way to solve his problem, creating a new one for Sophia.
 Sophia twisted her hand out of Luke Mc­Court’s, grabbed her backpack purse, and ran to the opposite end of the train car. She had to get off this train as soon as possible. But the train had just left Embarcadero station, San Francisco’s last stop before coursing through the Transbay Tube under the water to get to Oakland. Getting to the next stop was going to take some time.
The double sliding doors that led out from one car to the other had high resistance to opening. Sophia used her adrenaline and her whole body to open the first pair of sliding doors.
When the doors opened, the loud sound of the train cutting through the tunnel on its tracks clacked and sighed and squeaked and groaned. Sophia moved into the thin space between the cars and heaved her body into opening the second set of sliding doors.
The train car she entered had a few passengers who looked up at her. When the sliding doors closed be­hind her, the clacketing sound of the train muted, and the passengers returned to their reading and sleeping and chatting.
Sophia looked behind her. McCourt had stood up and was coming for her. She raced down to the next set of doors and pushed through those, and on to the next car, and on to the next. Each time, she got closer to the front of the train and each time, she noticed that McCourt was further back.
She made it to the front car and looked behind her. McCourt wasn’t visible. He was probably a few doors down.
“You look like you’re trying to get away from some­one.” A big grunt of a man looked up at her from his seat.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Sophia said.
“Tell you what.” He removed his large, down jacket. “Sit beside me, hide under my jacket, and he’ll get off the next station thinking that’s what you did.”
Sophia checked behind her. There was no sign of McCourt just yet. She stepped over the man’s legs to get to the window seat next to him. He handed her the jacket, and she easily hid her entire body beneath it.
The jacket smelled of sweat and smoke and dirt and body odor. Her breathing made the area underneath heat up. She fought the urge to see where Luke was because she knew she’d be able to hear him. If sud­denly the sound of the train got louder, that meant the sliding doors were opening and it meant someone was entering the train car.
But before that inevitable sound came, Sophia felt the train slow down.
“Oakland West,” the driver announced over the PA.
The train came to a stop. Sophia heard the doors open.
She waited. The wait lasted five seconds, then ten, then fifteen.
“Doors are closing,” the driver said. “Doors are closing.”
She heard the ping sound of the automatic warn­ing for the closing of the doors, and at last the doors closed.
Sophia peaked out from under the man’s jacket. She didn’t see McCourt on the train or in the next car over. She looked outside the window as the train pulled away from the station and saw McCourt on the plat­form looking left and right.
“Yes!” Sophia cried out. “Yes! Yes!” She turned to the man, “Thank you so much.”
His phone was ringing. “No problem.” He answered the phone while easing out a handgun and pressed the gun against her hip.
“Yeah, I got her,” he said into the phone. “She came to the front of the train just like you said.”
***
So we covered several tips on how to make a page-turner, but I’m sure I left out quite a few. Please comment below about how you make your fiction hard to put down. I’d love to learn from you!
Oops! I was wrong. My name’s still Ezra Barany. To read more of THE TORAH CODES free, go to http://www.facebook.com/TheTorahCodes.
BIO
Ezra Barany has been fascinated by codes and puzzles ever since he was a little tot. He started writing suspense and thriller stories in college and got seriously interested in the Bible codes while attending Aish HaTorah’s Discovery seminar in Jerusalem. The Torah Codes is Ezra’s first novel. Ezra has been a high school physics teacher, fiction writing teacher, songwriting teacher, ESL teacher to French children and pop performer. In his free time, he writes mushy love songs inspired by his wife and book coach Beth Barany.
Ezra now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is working on his next book. He is available for presentations and select readings. To inquire about an appearance, please contact Ezra[at]TheTorahCodes[dot]com