The Thomas Carter Chronicles

Okay, so let me explain this slightly pretentious sounding title.

I've been writing this thing on and off for over 13 years now. As inspiration has taken me and time has allowed I have bursts of creativity where I progress the plot or flesh out the characters a little.

As a result I now have pages and pages of stuff written at various stages of my life, informed by the experiences up to that point.

As an example, one scene was written very vaguely and was a chase scene. My experience of life at that point was fairly limited so I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it in any detail. It just stood as a chase scene, that demonstrated two things, the title character's furtiveness and paranoia and also establishing doubt as to whether he was running from something real or imagined.

Some years later, I took a job in London and stayed a lot in various cheap hotels around Kings Cross. After being there for some time and again picking up my previous notes to occupy me on a quiet evening, I re-wrote this chase scene, now using Kings Cross as a character too, the environment now interacting with Thomas. The scene instantly became more alive as he ran the back streets and took refuge in the kind of hotel I stayed in.

So now, with time on my hands once more, I am revisiting my previous notes. This time though these drafts are being made public via the blog to invite comment and feedback.

I would say that the whole story takes in such a wide range of influences that its difficult to say which it takes on more than most. Especially as it yet has to be written, or read, with a cohesive narrative. There are still a number of gaps that need to be filled in my notes so these first drafts will actually get published straight away without me having done re-writes. If you come across these inelegant pieces please forgive me for any weaknesses displayed there as they exist at that stage only to bridge gaps between more established pieces.

There is one bias that will be displayed here and that is I will be re-tooling my initial stories for publishing on the blog. That means they will, in effect be scenes or vignettes that may be from any character's viewpoint or none at all. Of course, should the dream happen and someone decides to pay me to turn it into a novel or something else then I will probably have to bring a halt to this type of publication and go back and re-shape it all again!

I believe the story will have many twists and turns to keep you coming back and whilst it will have elements of fantasy about it I have attempted to ground it as much as possible in depictions of real people, with genuine emotions and reactions. One of my hopes is that you will grow attached to the characters and want to find out what has gone on in their lives. Only your feedback can tell me how successful I've been though, so please leave comments.

If you have any questions you'd like to ask me I would be honoured to answer them and will do my best to inform you of anything related to the story, but without giving away too much of future developments.

I thank you for visiting and reading.

Chris

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