CONCENTRIC

New Year's Resolutions 2011

2010-12-18T18:40:00.005+08:00

The year is almost over, and as usual, it looks like it went by too fast and I wrote too little.
What did I do in 2010?
I took part in ScriptFrenzy in April, wrote a 100-page script, did the same later in summer, and wrote 57,000 words for National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo in November. I continued writing after that to finish the first draft of that novel, a thriller mostly set in China, at about 72,000 words. Right now, I'm in the process of editing and rewriting that story. From the summer until NaNo started, I also worked on another novel, again a thriller, this one set among people vacationing on a Mediterranean island. I haven't finished it yet, but I intend to do so later next year.
So here comes 2011.
One other big thing happened in my life over the past few months: I lost my job. Instead of complaining and/or going to look for another job right now, I'm using this great opportunity to set myself new challenges. The main challenge has become my New Year's Resolution (upper case, please): write four books in 2011.
Now that I have the time, I need to be writing. I've carved up the next year in neat 3-month blocks, one block for each book.
I already have the main ideas of what kind of books I will write:
1/January-March: a thriller with an Asian theme, set in China, Taiwan and the United States;
2/April-June: a historical novel - a new genre for me - set either in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, about historical figures little known outside of some European countries;
3/July-September: a 'guru' book, yes, the only planned book that is not a novel, not fiction, but pure - well - fact and advice;
4/October-December: still so far away I have time to come to a decision about what I want to write, but candidates are a thriller closely related to actual European politics (think The Ghost by Robert Harris which was the base for the movie The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski), the thriller about the island which I started this year but didn't finish, or another thriller set on a ship.
Add to that a vacation in Asia in January, the British Crime Writers' Association Debut Daggers in February, ScriptFrenzy in April, a European holiday after that, and the next NaNoWriMo, and I might have a hard time living up to those resolutions.
Anyway, 2011 is now or never. If I want a career in writing, if I want to get published, now is the time, now is the year to work hard. Wish me luck!

After NaNoWriMo 2010

2010-12-02T18:10:00.005+08:00

National Novel Writing Month 2010 is over, and I won.

That means I wrote more than 50,000 words - 57,812 words to be precise. Is it a novel, as it should be according to the rules? No, but at least it's part of it. The thriller with the working title "Tour de Force" needs 80,000 words, like any real novel. That's why I am now continuing work on the same story, and also trying to maintain the same pace of 2,000 words a day.

The main reason why I didn't participate in NaNoWriMo 2009 was that the two previous years, I suffered from a post-NaNo backlash. I wrote 72,000 and 101,000 words respectively, but then virtually nothing at all for at least one month afterward. That's why this year, I maintained a slower pace.

That tempo not only should take me through December to finish Tour de Force, but also beyond and all the way through 2011. As far as the 2,000-word-a-day habit goes, I want the whole of 2011 to be National Novel Writing Year, for my own person at least.

Today, I've been celebrating the end of NaNo by watching the movie The Next Three Days - a remake of the French movie Pour Elle which I haven't seen but would like to. I also went to the book store in the hope of buying something, but as usual I want to read online reviews first. Some of the books that caught my attention were The Gordian Knot by Bernhard Schlink, Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell, Death in Seville by David Hewson, and The Soul Collectors by Chris Mooney. After reading the Amazon reviews, I might go for the Cornwell one, definitely not Mooney, and maybe not Schlink. Hewson's novel is actually a reissue of his first novel, Semana Santa, which got criticized for being too Italian. I might want to find another Hewson novel instead.

2011 should be the year I try to write four books: among my choices for the time being are a political thriller involving France and the Netherlands, a historical novel set either in the Roman era or in the Middle Ages, another thriller which could be either Mediterranean or Asian, and what I call my 'guru book.' I'll be working out the plots as I complete Tour de Force and make my choices for the novels by the end of this month. I'll tell you when I get there. In the meantime, keep warm and keep busy.

NaNoWriMo 2010

2010-11-15T22:21:00.005+08:00

National Novel Writing Month. Writing 50,000 words in one month with no other reward than being able to say you did it - you wrote that much in one month.

I did it first in 2007 - actually, I came up with 72,000 words, on the one hand because I was worried whether I really could make it to 50,000, and on the other hand, because I wanted something closer to real-novel length. That's always the problem: 50,000 words is a lot of wordage for one month, but it's only near half a novel, so a lot of work is left for later.

In 2008, I took a different approach and wrote two stories of just above 50,000 words each. One was half of a valid novel, the other was a piece of fanfiction which I had wanted to post on a fanfiction site but which disappeared off my computer before I had the occasion to do so. I see that NaNoWriMo have introduced a 'novel backup day' which is an absolute must.

The biggest problem I had on both occasions was the post-NaNo momentum. Overwriting during one month made me slow down to virtually complete writer's block level for at least one month after that.

That post-NaNo depression was the reason I did not participate in the event last year. Instead I focused my attention in November on just getting on with my Work In Progress at the time. I also switched to participating in a NaNoWriMo-related event, namely ScriptFrenzy, writing a 100-page script in April. That target is much more realistic and at the end, before rewrites, you actually have a completed work, not one that's half-finished.

So what about 2010? The attraction was too strong to resist. But to counter a recurrence of the post-NaNoWriMo blues, this time I decided to go slow. 50,000 words will really be enough this time. I'm sticking to a realistic rhythm, one slightly higher than the normal average of 1,667 words per day in order to account for any lost days on the way. I already had two of those because I needed to fly from Europe to Asia earlier this month.

Right now, I'm on target and I intend to stay there. Because I'm not exaggerating, I hope I will be able to keep up the tempo throughout December and finish a whole novel by the end of the year. The rewrites and second and third drafts will come early next year.

For 2011, I plan to keep up the same tempo, i.e. write and rewrite one book every three months. I already have more ideas than I can write books about in two years. They include action thrillers involving European and Asian politics, historical novels centering on the Middle Ages and on the Roman and Egyptian eras, and a book based on a separate blog I'm setting up.

In the mean time, let's get this NaNoWriMo baby rolling. By December, I will be able to post the NaNoWriMo 2010 Winner logo on this site. And be looking forward to completing that novel, a thriller about young Americans wandering through China.

Beyond ScriptFrenzy

2010-04-30T20:25:00.003+08:00

So I won ScriptFrenzy.

The competition is the screenplay sister to the amazing National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, which invites you to write 50,000 words in just one month, November.

With the scripts, it's 100 pages in April. I took part in NaNoWriMo in 2007 and 2008, wrote one story - 72,000 words - the first time around, and two stories - for a total of 101,000 words the second time around. However, I also found that the tough tempo during November led to a backlash in December. I hardly wrote anything worthwhile for more than a month after NaNo, as it's commonly called.

Luckily, ScriptFrenzy is more relaxed. I found that out last year, when I first 'won' the competition with a screenplay that was, to say the least, a bit average. I did like the tempo of having to write just an average of 3.3 pages a day, especially if you know the way properly formatted scripts look - there's hardly anything on a page. It all comes down to knowing and feeling your story, and being able to take it to its logical conclusion after about 100 pages, in my case this year, 109 pages.

I was thinking of doing a more modernized version of an old tale - I considered historical figures from Cleopatra to Napoleon's wife, and finally settled on that semi-mythical English person who had Belgian chocolates named after her, Lady Godiva. I let her lead her life in the Middle Ages but I added other elements to spice up the story.

So I won ScriptFrenzy. All you need to do to win is write the 100 pages and have the website's counter count or 'validate' your number of pages. The end result is that you get to show off logos like the one at the top of this blog post.

Now that ScriptFrenzy is over, I don't feel a backlash at all. Quite the contrary. I'm playing with ideas for three stories, and none of them look like scripts.

The first one is a classic action thriller, which if it were made into a TV series, would look somewhat like 24 but with more exotic and international connections, if that's possible. But as said, it's not a TV or not even a movie script, but a novel. Which means it needs up to 100,000 words.

You know what those script sites say about TV scripts: no violence, no gore, no nudity, because it's TV. Well, my second idea for a novel would not make it as a TV script. The problem is not the violence, there will only be a little bit, not the gore, I don't plan any horror, but if it were TV, it would have to have a lot of nudity. Which does not mean it's all about sex or eroticism. It might have some Sex and the City elements but they will not dominate. I'll explain it later, but I can tell you now the novel will be an intrigue about strangers with mysterious pasts coming together.

Both previous projects are more than just ideas, since over the past month I worked out their outlines, wrote about the main characters and the direction the intrigues are supposed to take.

The third and final idea is really that: just an idea, no outline, and no plan to start writing straight away. It might be something for later this year, or next, once the two other projects are finished.

The story idea combines elements from LOST - but without the strong supernatural and time-jumping tones - with The Da Vinci Code - but no churches and biblical plots nor medieval conspiracies. Strange things will happen, and the hero will race against the time to save the world from a dangerous threat. Yes, it's a thriller again.

All three stories could be categorized as thrillers, because that is what I love to read and watch. But the three stories will definitely have individual tones: the first one is an international action thriller, the second one almost a single-location mystery with holiday elements, and the third one a thriller with supernatural and futuristic elements.

Tomorrow is Day One of 2010 Post ScriptFrenzy.

Plans for 2010

2010-03-10T09:44:00.007+08:00

Will there be a second season of Concentric in 2010?
To be absolutely honest, there should be, but I haven't made up my mind yet. Looking back over the past few months since finishing the first season, I made an adaptation of Concentric into a pilot script for US television, and I made a British version entitled Kin for the BBC. The day I finished the first draft of Kin, I found that the BBC no longer accepted scripts from people based outside Great Britain and Ireland unless they were planning to move to those areas soon. Even British writers living in Paris or Amsterdam - a short flight away from London - were no longer accepted. So I still have the first draft of Kin, but there won't be a second one at present.
After that, I still wrote a couple of action movie scripts. I skipped NaNoWriMo for the first time in three years, but I turned my attention to Britain's Crime Writers Association's Debut Daggers contest. All they want are the first chapter and a synopsis of a thriller or mystery story. So I sent them two of each.
After the Debut Daggers deadline passed, I noticed early March was a deadline for two Hollywood-based script competitions: ScriptP.I.M.P. and Scriptapalooza. I sent the same original TV pilot script to both.
What's up next?
April is ScriptFrenzy time, the scenario equivalent to NaNoWriMo. I first took part last year and I found writing about 3 pages a day to reach 100 by the end of the month a breeze. The work I 'won' with last year wasn't really good, so this year, I'll try and write a movie script that can be redrafted into a potential promotional script later.
Since my wife is traveling abroad for 3 months soon, I will take the opportunity of having a simple and undisturbed home life to write the first draft of a thriller during that period, April to June.
What kind of scripts and thrillers?
Over the past week, I read about a duo who sold reworked scripts of the classic stories of Moses, Moby Dick and Marco Polo. It sounds a bit like Guy Ritchie's rethinking of Sherlock Holmes, so I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? Of course, I have to be careful to stick to figures that have no copyright tying them down.
So I came up first with Sir Walter Scott's Quentin Durward. There were movies and a TV series in 1955 and 1971, but I thought, if I don't watch them and stick to the original novel, or on the contrary, completely rethink the character, there should be no problem.
Other characters I am interested in rethinking are: Ivanhoe, Cleopatra (definitely not the Elizabeth Taylor version) , Queen Nefertiti, Napoleon's wife Josephine de Beauharnais, the Chinese navigator Zheng He, the Chinese 'pirate' Koxinga, etc.
Those are all possibilities for ScriptFrenzy, as is my idea of a light horror thriller entitled 'Sand.'
As to the thriller to write during my wife's absence, I also have ideas enough. I'll tell you about them later.
Keep writing.

Season One, Episode Thirty: The Concentric

2009-09-12T21:33:00.003+08:00

‘Where is Charlo’?’
Riot didn’t speak, but the door opened behind the vehicle.
‘Sorry, Bent.’
‘Don’t call me Bent. Ever. Again.’
Charlo’ left the door wide open.
‘It’s time to continue our journey,’ Riot said, while signaling Markus to move across to the passenger’s seat, while keeping his hands up against the ceiling.
Charlo’ took place behind the steering wheel while Riot occupied the rear left seat, his gun still trained on Markus.
‘You leave me no choice but to take you to my boss,’ Riot said while taking the box out of Bentley’s hands and the gun out of his belt. ‘Only then will you realize we are your allies, not your enemies.’
Charlo’ drove back to the main coastal road and turned left, away from the Garden of Temerity.
‘Do I know your boss?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘What do you want with the box?’
‘This is what we wanted you to find all along, because it contains the clue to everything that is happening around us now,’ Riot said.
‘My father is in there. It’s family stuff. What could you possibly want with it?’
‘Patience, Markus, and everything will be clear.’
Markus looked at Charlo’ as a police patrol car passed them.
‘What will you do if I grab the steering wheel out of your hands and send the ute slamming against the cop car?’
Charlo’ looked at the police cruiser.
‘You try anything like that and I knock you out,’ Riot said. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said for Charlo’s benefit.
She stopped the car by the side of the road, overlooking the ocean. Riot stepped out and took position in front of the car, his eyes on Markus as he made the call.
‘So where are we going?’ Bentley asked when Riot was back inside and they drove off.
‘To a brand new shopping mall. So new, it hasn’t been opened yet.’
‘Will you kill me after I meet your boss?’
‘No. Nobody will kill anyone unless you force us to,’ Riot said. ‘Now stop talking until we arrive.’
Into the city they went, taking care to respect the traffic code. On the northside of town, several projects were under construction. Including a shopping mall, now surrounded by plates covered in Art Nouveau drawings of handsome women. Charlo’ drove the ute straight past the gate until they were hidden by the aluminum plating, then stepped back to close the gate behind them, and stopped the car inside the marble building. The first floor was completely empty but for the elevator block. Charlo’ switched off the engine and they sat waiting for two minutes. Riot’s cell phone beeped once.
‘Let’s get out and meet your destiny,’ he said, guiding them to the other side of the elevators.
A woman in a business suit stood with her back to them.

A naked man was lying face down blooded on the concrete floor. Harsh sunlight came in from the right, where two men stood watching. Camry and his driver. The latter was holding something. A brick. Because of the sun, you could hardly discern whether red was its natural color or the professor’s blood.
‘You’re still alive because I value your talents,’ Camry said. ‘You complete your work within less than two months where and when I want you, and you’ll survive. If not, the world will be one great scientist short. Unfortunately, he will never appear in the obituaries because nobody will ever find him.’
The professor kept his eyes closed as the blood dried on his face. Camry approached and pressed his right heel into his back.
‘I do not appreciate failure, I do not appreciate cowardice, I do not appreciate dereliction of duty.’
Camry pressed harder, until the professor shrieked.
‘Repeat after me, professor.’
The professor did, barely audible to the driver grinning at him.

Markus had a knot in his stomach. The long blond hair, the stance of the legs.
Nobody said a word.
The woman turned around.
Markus cried.
‘You?’
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said as they rushed each other and fell into each other’s arms.
‘His sister,’ Riot grimaced at Charlo’.
‘He lied to me, he told me you were dead,’ Markus said, shaking his fist at Riot.
‘We all had to, because I wanted to protect you. Riot is a colleague, the only one I trust,’ she said.
‘What kind of game are you playing?’ Markus took one step back to observe his sister.
‘This is not a game, Markus. If I had stayed, I would have been killed. He warned me, and we escaped together. We had to pretend I had been killed, otherwise they would have been after us.’
‘Who, and why?’
‘Let’s get in the car first,’ Bentley’s sister said.
When they turned back, she grabbed Markus by the arm.
‘My car, not yours. It might have been compromised.’
They walked out the other side of the building. A rusty van stood in front of a shaky brick wall. Bentley’s sister guided them around the wall to rip away a dusty plastic cover. Inside was an Audi A8. Riot and Charlo’ took the back seat, Markus the front passenger seat. Charlo’ left again to swing open the gate. Bentley’s sister drove at a speedy tempo, Markus was praying they wouldn’t get the cops after them.
‘What has dad to do with all of this?’
‘I’m glad to see you finally found the box. It’s all in there. Dad’s secrets is all they want.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘My previous employers. I found out they were up to no good, so Riot and I decided to bid them goodbye. But we needed you to get out and find the box. They only know one aspect of the technology, but they don’t know the rest and I didn’t want to be the one to tell them.’
‘What’s dad got to do with this?’
‘He was one of the inventors of the technology.’
‘What kind of technology are we talking about?’
'You see that up there?'
She pointed at the sky. Markus leaned over to the window and saw a cloud showing the colors of the descending sun.
‘Did you read about Operation Cirrus?' his sister continued.
‘It’s in the box. Clouds and the weather.’
‘Dad was part of a select group working on Operation Cirrus.’
‘You mean, him and the other elders?’
‘Hu died, Veramus disappeared, and I have reason to believe Lassiter is a traitor.’
‘Why didn’t you warn us before we went to Taiwan?’
‘I didn’t have enough information then, and not enough advance notice that you were going to look so far.’
Bentley’s sister braked to stop before a yellow light.
‘What role does Camry play in all of this?’
‘He’s a thug. He works as a freelancer, but he has his own agenda. One point on there was to use you to get rid of that Russian, Osyunov or Osyenko or something.’
‘He convinced me that Russian was responsible for killing you,’ Markus said.
‘You’d do anything for me, wouldn’t you?’ She looked at him.
Riot waved to turn her attention to the traffic light, which had turned green. Off they went.
‘So what’s next? How can I help you now?’ Markus asked.
‘We take the fight to the Concentric.’
‘The what?’
‘My previous employers, Camry’s temporary ones,’ she said.
‘How do we do that and why?’
‘I thought you were always the proactive one in the family, Markus,’ his sister said. ‘The Concentric wanted to kill both of us, and they succeeded in killing our dad.’

NEXT: Season Two of “Concentric” will be here in 2010.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Nine: Operation Cirrus

2009-08-28T10:41:00.003+08:00

Markus first measured up the notes with his nose. No funny smells. He turned the box around, and tried to make the dollar notes slide sideward. No such luck. He rattled the box around. He heard the distant noise of an engine. A quick look through the gaps in the wooden barn door showed him a farmer driving some kind of tractor contraption. Markus kept his eyes on the machine as it approached his hiding place. Instead of turning on to the space in front of the barn, the farmer kept to the road.
Markus didn’t look at the box again until the noise had gone. He crouched and pulled the top layer of the box off. The dollar notes were glued to the top. Underneath Markus found notebooks and newspaper and magazine clippings.
Some of the articles were dated 1956 and 1958. Markus went back into the car and switched on the overhead lights to read. Almost without exception, the articles came from the science pages of the newspapers. They dealt with clouds, warfare and the Soviet threat. A bunch of scientists had done tests in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, the Philippines. Markus didn’t understand what all the mumbo jumbo was about so he first looked at the pictures. None of them were press photos of the year. Just portraits of men standing around in front of planes, buildings, tables full of test tubes.
The jungle picture was interesting. It showed four men in tropical outfits, shorts, Australian-type cowboy hats but without the corks, standing in front of a bunch of palm trees. Touristy really. But according to the caption, these people had risked their lives and limbs to study cloud formation and rain deep inside the jungles of present-day Malaysia, as part of Operation Cirrus. The caption named them as, from left to right, Lassiter, Hu, Bentley and Veramus. The Three Elders plus one.
Markus stared at his father’s picture. He leaned backward and switched off the light.

The wind was blowing hard around the tall buildings. Like most plazas, this one had a fancy piece of art smack in the middle. They were blocks of colored glass, set up like walls where the public could pass between as if inside narrow alleys.
The professor clutched his briefcase to his chest as he took position in one of the colored alleys. Just as he was throwing a look at his watch, Camry came up in front. As the professor stepped back, he noticed Camry’s driver was standing behind him, blocking his only other exit.
‘Beautiful, this Lego stuff, isn’t it?’ Camry sneered. ‘Why don’t you come in the car with me and explain what you’re doing here and not in your lab?’

Markus switched the light back on to read the article. The British and U.S. governments had sent in the scientists to collect information about the weather in the Malay jungles. Rain, monsoon, clouds and cloud patterns, anything that touched on the weather was to be collected and to be passed on to their governments. The aim was to influence the weather so as to make it more amenable to the cultivation of profitable plants. Markus was halfway the newspaper article when he thought he heard a scraping sound.
He looked up and stared right into Riot’s eyes. The man stood next to the car with a gun pointing at his head.

NEXT: Markus finds out the truth in the final episode of Season One before September 15.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Eight: 120 Dollars

2009-08-14T11:02:00.004+08:00

‘I want to roast the little fella.’
Camry was sitting in the back of his 700 car. Looking sternly at his driver.
‘When you catch him, give him a neat shake before you leave him in my hands.’
‘He’s never gonna walk out on us again,’ said the driver.
‘Where will you find him?’
‘He’s a professor. He’s only got a couple of predictable places to run to.’

Four men at a table in an expensive hotel suite. The Brother Hotel? Maybe. Throwing down the cards. A guy with long ratty hair and scary tattoos. A biker without a bike. A Chinese man in a velvety suite with a wallet in obvious big Italian brand logo leather lying in front of him. A stylish white guy in a silk suit, like Pierce Brosnan but with a long wave of white hair over his head. And a bulky African-American guy, also in a suit. Inspector Mondeo.
‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’ the biker asked.
Mondeo grinned.
‘You’re a cop, right?’
Mondeo shrugged like he was saying ‘What’s the matter with this guy?’ but he kept his mouth shut.
Pierce was the one who spoke instead. ‘He’s here to play the beautiful game with us. Stay relaxed and you’ll win.’
The biker calmed down.
The Chinese man called the game. He won. Mondeo took advantage of the break to walk off to the window and make a call.
‘No kidding. You’ve lost them. Again.’
He kept his facial expression hidden from his card partners.
‘What about our friend in the fancy car?’
‘Great. At least, one guy you didn’t lose today. Keep him in your sights and he’ll lead you to the professor. He’s the guy that counts.’
Mondeo put the phone away and brightened up his expression.
‘Gentlemen, are we ready for the next round?’
Pierce and the Chinese man nodded, the biker sneered.

‘You heard what I said. Stop the car,’ Markus Bentley repeated.
‘Sorry, Bent, but we need to move on if we want to get out of the hands of those people,’ Riot said, driving faster.
‘Who are they?’
‘They work for an enemy organization,’ Riot replied.
‘That’s convenient. But I don’t think you understood me. Stop the car.’
Markus produced a gun, which he directed at Riot but kept far enough from his head to be able to fire at Charlo’ in the passenger seat if needed.
‘Don’t leave us, Markus,’ she said.
‘So it’s Markus now and not Bent,’ he snapped back.
Riot parked the car by the side of the road.
‘Now what do you want here, Markus? There’s nothing here but the ocean and the mountains. I bet the next car passing here is those guys looking to hurt you.’
‘You misunderstood my message. I’m not leaving you. You are leaving me.’
Markus waved the gun at them.
‘Get out. Both of you.’
‘Markus,’ Charlo’ said. ‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘Not anymore. Out.’
Riot and Charlo’ got out, and so did Markus, standing on the left of the vehicle, keeping the gun on Riot.
‘Keep walking ahead, where I can see you.’
Markus got into the driver’s seat and roared away, leaving the two looking angry and abandoned.
‘Don’t worry, he left us our phones,’ Riot said, waiting until Markus rounded the bend before placing a call.
Markus drove for half an hour until he reached an intersection with a road going inland. He took that road and followed it alongside dry grass fields, patches of dry rock, and general abandonment. Until he came to a wooden structure that looked abandoned. He drove the car right into the building, obviously an old barn. Switched the engine off, and returned to the back seat, where he picked the box off the floor. The box from the Garden of Temerity.
He fiddled with the key for a minute before succeeding in opening the box. Inside sat two crisp brand new fifty-dollar notes and two equally clean ten-dollar notes.

NEXT: Markus discovers the secrets of the box in Episode Twenty-Nine before August 31.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Seven: To Hell With Public Health

2009-07-31T11:31:00.002+08:00

A hotel room bathtub filled with water.
The professor was leaning over it as if he was about to vomit. Sweat on his forehead. He peered into the tub, then leaned back and turned around.
Beneath the mirror, an array of cups, bottles and test tubes was lined up as if for an exhibition.
The professor took a tube out of his lab coat pocket. It was filled with an orange dust. He took a blue plastic cup, scooped up water from the tub and added some dust from the tube before setting the cup back in its original place. Then he again leaned over the water, watching it smooth over.
He almost fell in when he heard the buzz from behind. His cell phone, vibrating next to the cup of water with the orange dust. The phone was pushing against the cup.
The professor grabbed the phone and looked at its screen, letting it buzz five times before it went dead. With one look over his shoulder at the tub, he walked out of the bathroom and into a non-descript hotel room. Television set, desk, bed. The desk was covered in documents, which he swept together in a file. He put the file into the attaché case he pulled from behind the TV.
The professor walked back into the bathroom, holding the cell phone in his left hand. As he was about to cross the threshold, the phone buzzed again. This time, after checking the number on the screen again, he took the call.
‘He’s giving me two months,’ he said without introduction.
He listened to the reply.
‘Immediately? I’m in the middle of a test,’ he said, throwing a look into the bathroom.’
‘Pack your bags and be outta there right now. Disappear,’ the man’s voice on the other side said.
‘What do you know that I don’t know?’ the professor asked.
‘A lot of bad stuff. Get your test tubes or whatever you’re using, stuff them in a bag and run. And I mean run,’ the man said.
The professor shut the cell down and rushed into the bathroom, knocking over a few empty test tubes and plastic bottles. He pulled the curtain shut to hide the bathtub from view and took the cup with the water and the orange powder. It still looked the same. He looked around holding the cup, swore and emptied its content into the sink.
‘To hell with safety and public health.’
The professor ran out of the bathroom, pulled a bag from under the bed, and headed for the door carrying both the bag and the attaché case. Just as he was about to open the door, the phone rang. Not his cell phone, but the hotel phone. The professor stared for a second and ripped the door open. Out he went.

Two bulky men and a sturdy woman were crowding the hotel elevator.
‘Room 713,’ the woman said. Nobody replied. The trio was all wearing dark clothes, a bit too heavy for the time of year.
‘This is the seventh,’ the woman said.
They ran straight out of the elevator to look at a list of the hotel room numbers.
‘713 is to the left,’ one of the men said. To the left they ran.

‘Don’t touch that stuff,’ the woman told one of the man as he ripped the curtain aside and saw the tub filled with water.
‘Do we need to analyze it?’
‘They’ll come here to do the dirty work,’ she said.
The woman rushed back into the main room to make a call.
‘The professor has gone, but he left a bathtub full of water,’ she said into the phone.

The tall guy was standing on a rooftop, watching the professor boarding a cab five floors down.
‘Don’t touch anything, I’ll have the water analyzed. We’ll get the professor later,’ the man said into his cell phone.
He pocketed the phone and grinned at the cab driving away from the hotel across the street.
‘Two months, dear professor,’ Inspector Mondeo said with a grin.

‘The Garden of Truth,’ Markus repeated.
He leaned forward while keeping one hand on the box they had dug up inside the Garden of Temerity.
‘What is the truth and can I count on you to tell it?’ he asked.
‘We are your friends,’ Riot said while steering the ute on to the main road.
‘Who is we?’
‘I am we,’ Charlo’ said.
Both Markus and Riot turned their heads toward her.
‘I accompanied you to Taiwan because he told me to do so,’ she said, pointing at Riot. ‘He wanted me to guard you, to watch over your safety.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that story. You came with me to spy on me and to make sure I got the key,’ Markus said. ‘I never saw you as a traitor, by the way.’
‘I am not a traitor. I helped you, remember.’
‘So that’s how Riot knew he could phone Trick’s house and find me there.’
‘I told you, Bentley, we are the good guys,’ Riot said.
‘How do you two know each other?’
‘Riot is one of the investors in my shooting range,’ Charlo’ said.
‘Your appearance at the night club that first night was not a coincidence,’ Markus said.
‘Nothing ever is, Markus,’ Riot said.
‘Who are you working for, Riot? Why did you kill my sister?’
‘I didn’t kill your sister. You killed the Russians who did that, remember?’
‘Stop the car,’ Markus said.

NEXT: Markus Bentley tries to find a way out in Episode Twenty-Eight before August 16.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Six: The Garden of Truth

2009-07-15T09:54:00.003+08:00

‘They’re all screwed up about the Russian.’
Camry was sitting in the back of the Mercedes 700, talking to his driver.
‘What are you gonna do?’
‘Let the steam dissipate. Anyway, we’ve got more important rabbits to catch. What about our professor?’
‘I’ll call him.’
The driver holds the cell in his right, the steering wheel in his left. Barely two seconds later, he sees flashing lights in his mirror.
‘Why did you have to do it like that?’ said Camry.
Inspector Mondeo’s lowers his big head to look into the car as the driver slides down the window.
‘Driving and holding a cell is off limits in this city,’ Mondeo said with a smirk on his face. His eyes were cold.
‘My driver is new to this city, officer,’ Camry said.
‘What happened to the previous one? And it’s inspector, not officer, for you,’ Mondeo said.
‘I promise you, it won’t happen again, inspector.’
‘What about you, can’t you speak?’ Mondeo said to the driver.
‘It won’t happen again, inspector,’ the driver said.
Mondeo waved at Camry and walked back to his car.
‘What was that about?’ the driver asked Camry while driving off.
‘A not-so-subtle warning. I think he’s got bugs inside this car.’

Markus and Charlo’ faced the garden wall from the inside. The hole was too small to crawl through and was filled with a grate. Behind them, they heard voices growing louder, shouting orders.
‘Wait for a sec,’ Markus told her.
Holding the safe box in his right hand, he stepped back and jumped to place his foot on the sill beneath the hole. Charlo’ did all she could to push him up. He grabbed the decorative Chinese roof at the top of the wall, put the box on top and pushed it with all his might. It worked. He managed to shove it off to the other side, where it fell off the wall with a dry thump.
‘You’re next,’ he whispered.
He pulled himself on top of the roof and watched over his shoulder as Charlo’ imitated his earlier move and got her feet on the sill. He held on to the top of the wall with his right and pulled her up with his left.
‘They’re coming,’ she grimaced.
They were. Three men in bulky suits brandishing guns.
‘Don’t kill them,’ one of them shouted as they started firing around their targets.
‘That’s nice,’ Markus said as he pulled Charlo’ on top and over the wall.
Two of the men rushed for the hole in the wall to fire their guns through it. Their chief didn’t like it.
‘Back out through the gate. Catch them.’

Outside, Markus grabbed the box in one hand and Charlo’s hand in the other. She wanted to run for the car park but he went to the right, in the direction of the ocean.
‘What are you going to do there?’ she asked.
‘No time for explanations,’ he breathed hard.
They heard a shot behind them.
Charlo’ turned back to see Riot firing a gun with a silencer.
‘Riot is there. He can help us.’
She broke free from Bentley’s grip.
‘He’s no help. We can’t trust him.’
She ran off to join Riot. Markus realized the ocean was not a way out. He followed them with the box.
Long dry grasses ahead. They ran through it to find Riot’s ute. Markus and Charlo’ clambered on to the back seat as he fired up the engine.
‘Lucky I followed you,’ Riot said.
‘What do you want?’
‘That box you two found there. I’d love to have a look through it once we reach a quiet spot.’
‘Don’t believe I’ll let you get away with it,’ Markus said.
‘He really doesn’t trust me, does he?’ Riot told Charlo’.
She didn’t speak.
‘What is it with you two?’ Markus asked.
Riot looked at Markus with a wan smile.
‘The time has come for me to reveal some painful truths. The Garden of Temerity might just be the Garden of Truth.’

NEXT: Riot reveals part of the truth to Markus Bentley in Episode Twenty-Seven before August 1.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Five: The Coral Tree

2009-06-30T10:17:00.003+08:00

‘Sounds cool. Like something from a kungfu movie. The Garden of Temerity. What are we supposed to look for?’ Charlo’ asked as they left the Italian car under the trees.
The Garden of Temerity had a whitewashed wall with openings in various geometric shapes all around it, and a plaque on its main gate listing its name in English and Chinese.
Standing in the gateway, Markus Bentley and Charlo’ saw dense vegetation on the left, low shrubs and a pond on the right, and a sandy path going straight down the middle, leading to the back of the gardens. Not a soul in sight.
Markus produced a gun from under his T-shirt.
‘What is it with you and guns?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘Said the girl running a shooting range,’ he replied.
‘I leave my guns at work.’
They proceeded carefully, Markus keeping the gun to the right, ready to hide it but also ready to use it. Charlo’ walked to his right.
‘See that flower there?’
Markus looks in the direction Charlo’ is pointing.
‘Nice and red,’ he says.
Most of the plants have a small plaque giving name and origins. Charlo’ steps over a few bushes to read the explanation on the red flower dangling from a tree.
‘Coral flower,’ she reads. ‘Prevalent in Asia.’
‘What else does it say?’ asked Markus. He was still standing in the path, looking left and right for signs of life in the garden.
‘Latin names. Areas where it can be found, names of benefactors who gave the plant to the garden. Hey, your name is in here.’
‘Markus Bentley?’
‘Frederick Bentley. Is that one of your ancestors?’
‘My father.’
Markus walks into the green and joins Charlo’ in front of the coral plant to read the plaque.
‘You know what?’ he asks. ‘We need to do some digging.’

Camry was loosening up his tie.
‘What’s your problem?’ his interrogator asked.
‘I’m not used to spending my time sitting in dark rooms wearing a suit.’
‘If it depends on me, you might spend a lot more of your time sitting in dark rooms wearing a suit. Is that what you’d like?’
‘I need more money.’
‘Don’t we all.’
Camry was through another cup of water, only this time he didn’t ask for permission before walking over for a refill.
‘Thanks for the buffet,’ he said without looking at the man at the other side of the table.
‘What do you know about the police?’
The question froze Camry in his tracks. He turned around to face his interlocutor.
‘What should I know about the police?’
‘Don’t reply to my questions with another question. There was that murder at a restaurant recently. It has come to my attention that there might be a link with you.’
Camry sat down and drank some water before answering.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I haven’t had any police visits lately. They don’t know I exist.’
‘You better make sure they don’t find out about the professor.’
‘I’m not letting him out of my sight. Unless he gets a fine for speeding, the cops will never find him.’
‘Do you know any police officers personally?’
‘I don’t get any further than watching The Wire.’
‘Fine, keep them in Baltimore.’

‘Did you hear that?’
Markus and Charlo’ were digging at the foot of the coral tree.
‘An engine. A car. People coming. We need to get out of here,’ he said.
‘They might just be visitors.’
‘I don’t believe in coincidence. Even if they’re just visitors, we’ll look awkward digging here. They’ll remember us.’
Markus speeded up the digging.
‘I’ve got something here,’ Charlo’ said.
‘Quick, get it out and let’s move.’
The contours of a metal safe box appeared. The thing was square, used to be green in a previous life. Markus tried to open it, but it was locked and there was no key. He pulled it out of the earth with one big pull and headed into the vegetation, taking Charlo’ by the hand.
Voices sounded from the garden entrance.
‘Fast, we need to get out,’ Markus told her.
Just before they reached the outer wall, the first bullet whizzed past their ears. Charlo’ ducked but Markus pulled her along.
‘Why don’t you shoot back?’ she said.
They reached a window in the wall. Too small to let them through.

NEXT: Markus and Charlo' try to escape from the Garden of Temerity in Episode Twenty-Six before July 16.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Four: The Garden of Temerity

2009-06-17T09:46:00.004+08:00

The room was way dark compared with the sunny day outside. The curtains had been completely drawn, only a handful of small spotlights had been switched on, showing the ominous dark paintings on the wall.
Camry sat with his back to the polished oak door. The table in front of him was wide enough for eight people to take part in a medieval banquet, but right now there was no food, and there was only one person in the room in addition to Camry.
‘You’re going to tell me about the Russian,’ the other man said.
Camry looked so surprised he even stopped fidgeting with his tie for a second.
‘What Russian?’
‘Don’t even pretend you don’t understand me,’ the man said. ‘I’m talking about the man with the initials V.O. and you have been stalking him for a long time.’
‘He’s of no harm to me anymore,’ Camry said. ‘Can I get something to drink in here?’
The man pointed at a water dispenser in a corner of the room. Camry went over and got himself a paper cup full of the stuff. Back at the table, he inspected the water before taking a sip.
‘You don’t trust our water supply?’

Camry’s driver was kicking the tires of the Mercedes 700 and kicking the ash off his cigarette. He was standing with his back to the villa, so he couldn’t see the slight move in the curtain on the second floor.
‘He’s of no harm to me anymore,’ a voice came from behind Inspector Mondeo’s back in the room. ‘Can I get something to drink in here?’
Mondeo turned away from the window and the driver and looked at the laptop showing the image of Camry walking across the room below to get some water.
Mondeo smirked as he watched the man inspect the paper cup.
‘Scared of the water, you’d better be,’ Mondeo said to himself.

The expensive Italian car was driving at a speed just below the official limit on the main coastal road.
‘Fascinating story, but do you believe it?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘About the water? I think he has something else up his sleeve. But I wasn’t in a position to ask,’ Markus said.
‘Turn left, eight miles ahead,’ the GPS voice told them.
‘I wish I could turn this thing off, it gives me a headache.’
‘Will this be our final destination, or will we find another key?’
‘It can’t be. I don’t know what we’ll find, but two things it won’t be. A key and an ambush,’ he said.
‘I was aching for an ambush. We haven’t been shot at since Taiwan, remember?’
‘Turn left, six miles ahead.’

‘We agreed on two months,’ Camry said, finishing his water. He held the cup up in a gesture asking for more. The man at the other side of the table waved his agreement, so Camry stood up and walked away.
‘Tighten the screws,’ Mondeo whispered in his microphone on the second floor.
‘He can do it in less, he’s just stalling us for more money,’ Camry heard the man at the table say.
‘I can be very persuasive if I want to, but less than two months? That’s going to be a stretch,’ Camry said walking back with a new cup of water.
‘Then stretch.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Camry said.
‘You’ll do what we want you do.’
‘No need to go all Mister Nasty over me.’
‘Then stay away from the Russians and persuade your professor to work faster. We need the technology.’
‘He’s your professor too. Which reminds me I need some more money from you if I am to convince him to bring up the schedule,’ Camry said, standing up as if he wanted to leave the room.
‘Money, that’s all what you people think about.’
‘Water doesn’t come cheap in my part of the world.’
Mondeo turned away from the screen and looked out the window. Camry’s driver had moved under the trees to seek respite from the sunlight.
‘I’ll be Mister Nasty all over you sooner than you expect,’ Mondeo mumbled to himself as the computer screen behind him went blank.

‘Turn left.’
Markus was driving up the intersection at 40 miles an hour. Instead of braking, he just pulled a hard left and cut off the cyclists coming in the other direction. The move earned him loud angry words and a couple of obscene gestures.
The car was now barreling down a dusty road, throwing up a huge cloud.
‘Can’t you take it down a few notches?’ Charlo’ said.
Markus slowed down enough for them to see the scenery. Long, wild, dry grasses, olive trees, and beyond, the blue horizon of the ocean.
‘Turn right at next intersection.’
They weren’t expecting any intersection on a dust road, but there was. Markus turned right as the voice said, and one mile of meandering country driving further, the voice gave its final instruction.
‘You have reached the Garden of Temerity.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley and Charlo’ enter the Garden of Temerity in Episode Twenty-Five before July 1.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Three: Dead Lines

2009-06-03T09:44:00.003+08:00

‘That’s what deadlines are. Dead lines. You cross the line and you’re dead.’
The expensive suit jacket was hanging over the rickety chair, the black tie folded neatly on the seat. Even in the flickering neon light, you could still tell these were expensive clothes, not the kind one wears to an ordinary daily office grind.
The professor had his hands tied behind his back on the other chair. He was wearing his white lab coat, but the cloth looked soiled, raspy, as if it had been scraped along a rough and dirty pavement.
Sweat covered his face as he looked up at the man leaning over him. Camry looked even more devilish up close, with his white shirt unbuttoned half way down.
‘You’re lucky I have an important meeting scheduled, so I can’t use this tie to explain to you what a deadline is. But the people I am meeting are very serious about deadlines, and so should you.’
‘It’s a chemical process,’ the professor said in a voice laden with suppressed agony. ‘If it’s three months, it’s three months. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing the brightest chemist or engineer in the world could do about it.’
Camry spat in his face.
‘I’m paying you to work. Not to find excuses for not working.’
‘Working with water is a complicated process. I need to get the balance right.’
‘You need to get the balance right,’ Camry said slowly. ‘The balance you need to get right is the one between obeying my orders and receiving a mighty bit of punishment. Do you understand that?’
Before the professor had a chance to reply, Camry smashed a fist in his face, causing his head to pop back like a basketball in some game.
‘Two months,’ Camry said. ‘Do you know what that is?’
He pointed at a table in one corner, away from the neon light. The professor strained his bloodied head to look in the direction.
‘A jug filled with your three-month water,’ Camry answered his own question. ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic if I asked you to drink it, or if I poured it over you?’
The professor shuddered and looked down.
‘Please. Let me work to develop it.’
‘Two months.’
‘Two months.’

‘It was a three because I was not in shape.’
Camry was relaxing in the rear seat of the Mercedes 700 with a glass of French Cognac. They were driving through a high-class residential neighborhood, mansions, trees, lawns with signs telling you you could get shot if you tread on the grass.
‘Our professor is going to work harder but he’ll need an extra set of eyes watching him just in case his feet get itchy.’
‘I’ll take care of him,’ the driver said.
‘That’s where we’re going.’ Camry pointed at a Spanish-style mansion, yellowish walls, red roof tiles, a round tower at one end. The wrought-iron gate turned open without them even saying or doing anything. Camry put his glass down on the fold-out table surface.
‘I’ll put a word in for our friendly professor. Such a nice and hard-working man.’

‘Camry’s the most dangerous man this side of the ocean,’ Riot said. He was leaning against the expensive Italian car as Markus Bentley and Charlo’ were standing in front of him. ‘I can only assume it was him who had the video recording on the laptop delivered to your place. He focused your attention on the guard, and you went running after the Russian.’
‘Wasn’t the Russian the man who killed my sister?’
Riot looked away over the ocean.
‘Let’s just say we shouldn’t feel sorry about this Russian passing on to another life. If there’s any justice, he will suffer miserably. The problem is, you took the bag I gave you and you drew the wrong conclusions.’
Bentley looked at the objects displayed on the roof of the car.
‘You saw the Three Elders, so you rushed off to Taiwan,’ Riot continued.
‘How do you know about Taiwan?’
‘Remember, I was your sister’s friend and colleague.’
‘I still don’t believe too much of that.’
‘You saw the red doll, and you traveled to Macau. Wrong again.’
‘So what are you saying, what should I have focused on?’ Markus asked.
Riot grabbed the bottle of water from the roof and held it upside down.
‘This magic baby.’

NEXT: Camry meets some Very Important People in Episode Twenty-Four before June 18.

Season One, Episode Twenty-Two: The Water

2009-05-15T14:12:00.002+08:00

‘If it’s another key, I’ll kill you with my bare hands,’ Charlo’ said.
Markus was driving her car along the coast, away from the city.
‘How do you know where to find the car?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Once you have the car, where are you going to take it?’
‘It will tell me.’
‘I followed you half way around the world and I still can’t figure you out.’
‘That’s the beauty of me,’ Markus said.
‘You got away with killing your sister’s killer, what more do you want?’
‘She left me those messages from beyond her death.’
‘The Three Elders?’
Markus nodded as he steered the car round a sharp bend.
‘Leaving me the three elders told me I had to go to their source, Taiwan. There I found the one surviving elder, Lass, and the son of the other, Trick. The red doll then told me to travel to Macau, to find the key.’
‘But where is the end of the journey? Or isn’t there one?’
‘There it is.’
Markus pointed at an empty space to the left of the road, above the ocean. A dark blue car was parked under the trees. He braked hard and swung the car across the main road on to a dusty track.
‘What is it?’
‘An Italian luxury car.’
‘What’s so special about that?’
‘It’s rare, so it’s easy to find. And it’s preprogrammed to take us to our destination.’
Markus parked their car right next to their target. The Italian car was obviously brand new, but it had gained a layer of dust standing here exposed to the wind from the sea.
‘You’ll think Riot will find us?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘If he does, we’ll be ready.’
Markus flashed the key at the car and the doors popped open. He took the driver’s seat, crammed his bag behind his feet, and turned his attention to the screen at the center of the leathery dashboard.
‘You know what a GPS is, right?’ he asked her.
‘It’s not because I don’t need one that I don’t know what it is.’
An intricate web of streets flashed up on the screen.
‘This baby will tell us where our destination is.’
‘I hope it’s somewhere closer than Macau.’
‘Stop.’
A heavy sports ute screeched to a halt right behind the car, blocking their exit. The car they had come in was to their left, trees to their right, and the ocean straight ahead.
Markus saw a man walk up to his side of the car. The face that leaned down against the window was Riot’s.
Markus rolled down the window.
‘So I finally caught up with you,’ Riot said, without a look at Charlo’. ‘Are you shock-resistant?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? First, you do your dying-man routine, give me my sister’s things. How do I know you didn’t kill her and this is all a conspiracy to use me to get at your enemies?’
‘What did you tell Mondeo?’
‘Who?’
‘The black cop.’
‘How do you know?’ Markus asked.
‘I had friends at the airport.’
‘Show me what I gave you,’ Riot said.
Markus pulled the bag from behind his feet and put it across the mid-section, out of Riot’s reach. He started taking his things out of the bag. His sister’s things. He pulled out the red faceless doll, the Three Elders, the bottle of water.
‘Did you drink from this?’ Riot asked.
Markus shook his head.
‘Just like we thought. You’re very conscientious …’
‘Who is we?’ Markus asked.
Riot grinned. ‘You’re smart. My friends and I.’
‘Do I get to meet them?’
Riot’s grin vanished.
‘Do you know a man named Camry?’ he asked.

NEXT: Riot tells Markus Bentley about Camry in Episode Twenty-Three before June 3.

Season One, Episode Twenty-One: The Second Tile

2009-05-01T14:32:00.002+08:00

Markus and Charlo’ were stepping across a campus. Palm trees, camphor trees, parks, stately buildings not old enough to be historic, but imposing nonetheless.
‘Have you ever thought that maybe he just wanted to talk to you?’
‘The Riot character?’
‘He didn’t look that threatening to me.’
‘You’ve got a character coming at you who knows where you are even if you’ve never told him, you better get moving.’
‘You know the meaning of the word paranoia?’
‘I never studied French.’
Charlo’ giggled.
Markus took her by the arm and led her into the garden. A large square garden enclosed on all sides by a covered walkway. He pulled her under the roof.
‘Anything looks familiar?’
She looks around, up at the ceiling, down at the walls beneath the pillars. At regular intervals, tiles showing buildings are mixed with regular colored ones.
‘How did you know?’
‘Family secrets.’
‘Those three elders again, right? Did your father tell you to find all this after your sister’s death?’
Markus frowned.
‘This is my own destiny. Let’s find the tile.’
He walked rapidly along the pillars and tiles, looking at them one by one.
‘Which one are you looking for? Let’s split up and each take half the area,’ Charlo’ suggested.
Markus shook his head.
‘I know where to look.’
He pointed at the first corner.
‘Round that way, it’s close.’
A tile showing the Montmartre basilica in Paris. The next one showed medieval European buildings in white and brown.
‘Where is that?’
‘It doesn’t matter, all I care about is what’s behind it.’
He pulled a knife out of a pocket in his cargo pants and hit at the cement surrounding the tile. Charlo’ looked around, expecting scandalized teachers to shout abuse at them. They were the only people around. In the distance, she saw a young man play guitar under a tree in the park.
Markus ripped the tile out and laid it out on the floor, face up. He reached his hand inside the cavity and pulled out a red cloth, similar to the one they found in Macau.
‘Surprise, surprise, what’s the mystery object this time?’
Charlo’ crouched by Bentley’s side, but he waved her away.
‘Keep a look out. We don’t want to be jumped on.’
She stood back up and looked around. The young man with the guitar had gone. She watched Markus untie the cloth, and carefully deposit an object in his left hand.
‘Another key? Boy, this is getting predictable. So now, we have a second key, and no doubt, we now have to look for a third key hidden behind another tile somewhere.’
Markus didn’t smile.
‘Let’s leave,’ he said.
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘We have what we want, let’s go to the next stage.’
‘Ever considered I might be getting tired of following you around the world and not getting any answers? Someone killed your sister, you killed them, but now you’re still hopping around. What is your aim?’
‘I’ll tell you when we find the car.’
‘What car?’
Markus waves the key in front of her face.
‘This is a car key. You’re driving us to find that car.’
‘You’re not as charming as you used to be.’
‘Believe me, if Riot is on to us, we’re better off completing this as fast as we can.’

Three blocks away, along a tree-lined avenue, a BMW X7X moved into a shaded parking slot.
Riot cut off the engine and took a PDA-like device from the breast pocket of his jacket. He touched the screen with his right index three times.
‘So that’s where you are, my dear friend. Playtime is almost over now.’
Riot immediately started the engine up again and drove off.

NEXT: Markus Bentley runs riot in Episode Twenty-Two before May 15.

Season One, Episode Twenty: Riot Runs

2009-04-14T10:30:00.002+08:00

Markus walked out of the airport toward the taxi rank. He saw Charlo’ hanging around but he gave her a stern look. She took the first cab up. He boarded the next one and told the driver to follow her.
After she left her cab in a neighborhood he wasn’t familiar with, he told his driver to continue for one block, got out and walked back. From a distance, he saw her enter a renovated building. He brushed past the old lady with all the paper bags stepping out into the street.
There were four floors and he hadn’t seen one familiar name on the bell list of residents. He was about to ring the bell on the third floor with the name C. Gabal on it when he heard a whisper above him. Charlo’ was leaning over the balustrade while waving at him.
‘I live up here,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I had told you the fourth floor.’
‘That was way back, before we went traveling,’ he said.
Inside her apartment, they crashed. He held her and kissed her, ferociously.
‘They let you go,’ she said. A statement of fact.
He didn’t reply but accompanied her to the bed. They fell on the top while extricating themselves from their clothes.

‘What do you think?’ Riot asked as he was observing the blue plastic cup filled with water. He took it and went into the bathroom, putting it next to a tile from Holland that had been worked into the wall.
‘About what?’ the woman asked from the dinner room, where she was eating a raspberry waffle.
‘Our precious guy. I think it’s time I paid him another visit.’ Riot looked at the water from different angles.
‘You won’t betray me, will you?’
‘We’re not there yet. First I want to know what he got out of Asia and what he’s planning on doing about it. I also want to know how far Mondeo has come in understanding all of this.’
He walked up to her and tore a piece off her waffle.

Markus and Charlo’ were resting. In bed. Naked. They didn’t know how long they had been here. The flight from Asia took 12 hours. The interrogation by the black cop. Markus was the first to budge. He took a quick shower, then she joined him.
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing.’
‘They fell for that?’
‘My sister is dead and they blame me because I’m the only link they can find.’
‘They haven’t found out about the Russian you killed at the Brother Hotel, then?’
They went back to bed for another round of horizontal passion.
Two hours later, Markus walked over to the window for a look at the street.
‘Bloody screaming murder.’
‘What?’ She immediately sat up in bed.
‘The guy I told you about, Riot? He’s crossing the street and coming here right now. Get your clothes on, we’re moving out.’
Charlo’ pulled her jeans on.
‘You think he knows this place.’
‘He must have had me followed from the airport.’
‘What does he want?’ she asked as she pulled a yellow T-shirt over her head.
‘I don’t want to be here to find out.’
Markus picked up a sports bag, threw all the stuff in he deemed necessary, and grabbed her hand.
‘You have the car keys?’
She ran back into the bathroom and plucked the keys off the washbasin.
‘What a funny place to keep keys,’ he said.
On the way out, he noticed the name next to her doorbell. Ch. Whiggs.
‘Not there, let’s go out the back.’ He went for the rusty structure outside the hall’s back window. The fire escape. Just as they clambered out the window, he heard doors slam downstairs. Riot was probably on his way up. Markus led the way, but kept Charlo’ close behind him. On the second floor, he heard movement, so he stepped back and pressed her against the wall next to the window. Inside, Riot was on his way up. He looked at the rear window but didn’t stop.
Markus counted to five and continued the run down.
‘Where is your car?’ he whispered at her when they had reached street level.
She didn’t utter a word but pointed at the other side of the street, away from the building. They crossed the street, and that’s when Riot saw them.
‘I just missed the bleeding hearts,’ he told the woman on his cell from the fourth-floor window.
‘Follow them and see where they hang out,’ she said. ‘Don’t show yourself until Markus shows us what he has.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley uses the key from Macau in Episode Twenty-One before May 2.

Season One, Episode Nineteen: Mondeo

2009-03-27T13:56:00.002+08:00

Markus and Charlo’ split up again on arrival, just in case some nasties were lying in wait, he said. They didn’t have much luggage so passing through customs was easy, though Markus had some trouble with officers staring at his bare feet. He told them some story about losing a bet with a Chinese fellow passenger on his way to Vegas.
He was finding his way to the parking garage when he noticed the tall black guy staring at him. He came up on him so fast there was no time to avoid him.
‘Welcome home, Mister Bentley,’ the man said. He had cop written all over him.
‘This is not about my shoes, is it?’ Markus asked.
The black guy flashed a badge because he had to, but Markus had no time to read what was on it. The man guided him into a small, bare room. On the wall were the portrait of the new president, hanging slightly askew, and a leftover piece of Christmas decoration nobody had bothered to remove.
‘Merry Christmas,’ said Markus.
The black guy didn’t reply but immediately adjusted the portrait’s angle and sat down at the end of the table in front of the two objects. He pointed out the chair in front of him and waved at a uniformed cop entering the doorway.
‘Give this man a pair of shoes.’
‘Inspector,’ Markus said.
The big black man raised his eyebrows.
‘What is your name?’ Markus asked.
‘Asking for names is my job, not yours.’
‘Shall I call you Larry Fishburne then?’
The big man broke out in a loud laugh.
‘You’re funny for a suspect under investigation for the disappearance of his sister,’ he said.
‘You must be joking,’ Markus said.
‘Crime and jokes don’t go together well. Your sister vanishes. Naturally, we think the suspect must be the boyfriend or the husband or something. But there is no boyfriend or husband. There is only a brother. You. And you vanish to Taiwan or some other pretty distant island. Taking the money to safety?’
‘Taiwan isn’t the Caymans. There is no money. I hadn’t met my sister for ages.’
‘Gambling it all away in Macau because it’s safer than Vegas?’
‘I told you, I don’t have any money. And I’m not a gambling man.’
‘That’s not the information we have. What if we searched you? I mean, really strip searched you?’
‘So what, I have nothing to hide.’
‘Nothing is not what I came here for.’
‘Why do you keep saying my sister disappeared? She was murdered, so you should be looking for her murderers.’
‘If you’re so sure she was murdered, why don’t you show us where the body is, Mister Bentley?’
‘Wasn’t she murdered in the parking lot of her office?’
‘You seem to know a lot about the alleged murder of your sister, Mister Bentley.’
The uniformed officer interrupted the conversation by bringing in a pair of sneakers.
‘Don’t worry, Mister Bentley, we didn’t take it from the airport morgue,’ the inspector grinned.

Charlo’ phoned Riot.
‘They’ve got him,’ she said.
‘Who? Camry?’ Riot asked.
‘A tall African-American guy in a suit. Am I supposed to know him?’
Riot looked over his shoulder. The woman shook her head.
‘Don’t worry, but stay away from him. And let us know what happens to Bentley. If he leaves, follow him but don’t approach him until you’re sure he’s not being followed.’
‘I’ll keep hanging out around the airport, then,’ Charlo’ said.
‘You do that,’ Riot replied before ending the connection and turning round to face the woman. ‘Mondeo’s got him,’ he said.
‘Is he working on his own or for the …,’ she asked.
Riot put his finger on her lips.
‘Is doesn’t matter. It looks like Markus has been compromised. Can we allow him to meet you?’

NEXT: Riot is looking for Markus Bentley in Episode Twenty before April 15.

Season One, Episode Eighteen: The Tile

2009-03-13T14:49:00.002+08:00

Markus dropped the knife as his hands were shaking.
‘What’s the matter with you? You want me to continue?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘Just remain silent and watch out for any intruders.’
Charlo’ pursed her lips and turned her back to Bentley.
He doubled his effort, hacking and chipping away at the cement. The tile was coming loose. When Charlo’ heard him stop, she turned around again to watch him rip the tile off the wall. There was a narrow vertical empty space behind it. Or not so empty after all. A reddish, dusty pouch was stuffed inside.
Markus opened it and a key fell into his hands.
‘This is what you came all the way to Macau for?’ Charlo’ asked.
A door creaked below. He put the key in his pocket and pushed the pouch back into the hole in the wall, forcing the tile back in place. Nobody taking more than a cursory glance would be fooled.
‘Let’s go to the back,’ he said, pulling her by the arm.
‘Maybe it’s just the man in the white underwear returning home from the shop,’ she said.
‘Don’t count on it.’
Markus pulled her away, out of the hall, through the back window, on to a rusty emergency stairway stacked full with carton boxes and plastic kid bikes. When Markus found out his shoes made a loud clanging sound on the metal floor, he ditched them.
‘At least, I’ll be quicker through the airport security checks,’ he said.
Charlo’ wasn’t laughing. She was panting. They were just about to pass one window when they saw movement inside. Markus pressed her against the wall to keep her out of view. It worked. They ran and jumped all the way down to the street level.
‘Stick close to the wall,’ he whispered at her as they ran down the street.
A man shouted something short in Cantonese from one of the highest floors. Markus didn’t look back but pulled Charlo’ along with her.
Back on main street, they plunged into the crowds of tourists without apologizing for the bumps and elbows. On the nearest street, they jumped in front of a cab and prevented an old Chinese lady from taking it.
‘To the airport,’ Markus ordered.

Camry watched a news report on TV about a man found dead at a restaurant. He made sure the machine was recording the footage.
‘How much?’ he asked to the man sitting in the couch behind him. ‘A three or a four?’
‘Out of ten?’
‘If I get away with it, it’s a five.’
The cell phone on the coffee table buzzed.
‘So the question is not whether they’re coming back, but what are they bringing back with them?’ Camry asked.
He changed channels when the news about the dead man ended.
‘So they’re still on the wrong track.’
Camry grinned.
‘They don’t have a clue.’

Not wearing any shoes had not speeded up the airport checks. Instead, the Macau customs wanted to check passenger Markus Bentley’s breath for alcohol. They did, and he passed with flying colors.
‘It’s been nice flying out with you. I’ve never traveled around the world with a stranger before. So my mom was right,’ Charlo’ said.
‘About what?’
‘Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.’
He ordered a glass of white wine.
‘So what’s the key for?’ she asked.
He first drank half the glass.
‘There is a place back home where I need to go to, and there I will find the next step.’
‘So you will again wait to tell me what’s going on until after we get there,’ she said.
She took the glass of wine out of his hands and emptied it.
‘I don’t know myself what I will find there. All I know is the location, not what I’ll find there.’
‘Shouldn’t that be ‘what we’ll find there’ or are you going to dump me as soon as we arrive?’
‘I thought you would want to take a rest after all the emotion of our trip.’
She surfed through the movie channels.
‘You saw for yourself that I’m working on a dangerous task,’ he said.
‘Even in Taiwan and in Macau, people are hunting you. Wouldn’t it be safer to stay away, travel to Europe or to some other place where they don’t know you? Retire to some Greek island like the woman in The Bourne Identity?’
‘They’ll find me anywhere.’
‘Because you killed the man by the pool?’
‘Because they killed my sister and now they want to kill me.’
Charlo’ settled on a movie showing a bunch of white men traveling through India by train.
‘I want to know where you came from,’ she said without her eyes leaving the screen. ‘What do you want?’
‘Marzipan and a good life, and right now I’m short of both.’
She grinned.
‘Don’t tell me stories, I’m not a kid waiting to sleep.’
‘You want to know what I want. It’s been pretty obvious from the start. I want to avenge my sister, because she was the only one I had left. My father died years ago in Taiwan, my mother is long gone, so I was raised by nannies.’
‘How far are you prepared to go?’
‘All the way. I still have to find the guy who gave me my sister’s objects, and the guy who brought me the laptop.’
‘What laptop?’
‘Before the Riot guy showed up, there was another one, who just dumped a laptop at my front door. It had a recording of my sister’s murder.’
‘Gross. Sound and pictures? What did he tell you?’
‘He just dumped the computer and left, never said a word, I never got a chance to talk to him.’
‘Are you sure you’re not being manipulated?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘Everything was real. My sister’s death. I tried to call her. The guard I interviewed.’
‘While you had me staying outside.’
‘Was rather convincing,’ Markus finished his sentence.
‘Can we have another one?’ Charlo’ pointed out the empty wine glass to a passing flight attendant.

Camry was overlooking a swimming pool. The professor was leaning over the water with a vial in his hand, while a naked man was standing in the pool with his back toward them, the water up to his shoulders.
‘How long is he staying in there before we see something happen?’ Camry asked the professor.
‘I would expect results within half an hour.’
‘Make him walk around in the pool,’ Camry told the professor, as if the man in the water couldn’t hear him.

NEXT: Markus Bentley is welcomed by an unpleasant surprise in Episode Nineteen before March 31.

Season One, Episode Seventeen: Macau

2009-03-03T08:44:00.003+08:00

Camry sat pulling at the collar of his suit shirt on the back seat of the S-class.
‘Drop me off around the next corner and go keep yourself busy until you get my signal,’ he told the driver.
He left the suit jacket inside the car and walked the block back, hoping he wouldn’t be conspicuous among the salary slaves out for lunch.
As he had expected, the restaurant was crowded and he didn’t draw any undue attention sitting down in the middle of the room on his own. He ordered a set meal, soup, main dish, but no dessert.
Halfway through the meal, he noticed a man in a dark suit heading for the restrooms. Just a minute later, a man in his fifties wearing a pink – sorry, salmon – polo shirt also left his place. Camry counted until five and followed them.
Inside, he first brushed water through his hair. When the man in the dark suit left, a dark pall moved over his face. The water rumbled behind the closed door, third from the entrance. The lock was pushed open with a metallic clang. Just as the guy in the polo shirt was putting his foot out, Camry pushed him back in, grabbing him by the throat to drown out the sound. He stabbed his knife through the salmon polo shirt until his target was reclining on the can with blood dripping, Camry came out, softly pulled the door shut so it wouldn’t reopen of its own accord, and went to clean the knife in the sink.
He returned to his meal, slowly finishing the lamb roast with his knife and fork. No rush, no haste. He politely declined coffee, paid cash and walked over to the next block before calling for his driver.

Charlo’ watched as the wet patches of rice fields vanished behind the low clouds. Markus sat next to her on the Air Macau flight from Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport. She turned to him.
‘Glad to be out of that place. So, are you finally ready to give me an explanation? Are the Three Elders history now?’
‘The first one was Lassiter, the second one was Trick’s father. And the third one was my father.’
‘What was their connection?’
‘They all did business together here in Asia at one time.’
‘That’s what Trick told me. What kind of business were they in?’
‘International trade.’
The ‘fasten your seat belts’ sign flooped off and the pilot made an announcement about altitudes and temperatures.
‘Why did his parents choose the name Trick?’
‘They didn’t. He did. Taiwanese only receive a Chinese name at birth. They later pick their own foreign names if they want one. Even then, you get lots of crazy names. Like Apple and Medicare.’
‘Medicare?’ she grinned.
‘Don’t ask. I once met a doctor with that name.’
The flight assistant came round with the headphones. Markus stuffed his in the back of the seat in front of him, Charlo’ unwrapped hers.
‘I thought you wanted to hear my story,’ he said.
‘I was losing hope you would ever get to it,’ she replied. She put the headphones on her lap.
‘This man, Riot, claimed to be a colleague of my sister. I’ve been out of touch with her for years, so I didn’t know whether he was telling the truth. Yet he had my address and he had those things that only I knew my sister had. All presents from our father. The Three Elders told me I had to go back to Taiwan, because that’s where my father had them made. That is where the Three Elders, the real three, lived.’
‘But only one of them is still alive, and he didn’t tell you much, did he?’
‘That’s when Riot’s phone call came in. I don’t know how he could know I was at Trick’s place, but he did, and he told me I was on the wrong track.’
‘So you believe him?’
An elderly Chinese lady stood up behind Charlo’ and pulled hard at her seat. Charlo’ shot her an annoyed look.
‘The only other possibility was this.’
Markus pulled the red faceless doll from his sports bag stowed under the seat in front. He had given the flight attendant who advised him to jam it into the overhead compartment a convincing shake of the head.
‘My father gave this doll to my sister during a vacation in Macau. He had just returned from a trip to Japan, where he bought this thing.’
‘Because he gave it to her in Macau, that’s why we’re going there?’
Markus nodded.
‘You’ll understand when we get there. It’s a clue, a sign.’
‘International man of mystery. Traveling with you is certainly an adventure. Will we be doing a spot of gambling? You know, Vegas of the East, casinos?’
Markus shook his head.
‘That’s not what we’re here for. I want to go in quickly and leave quickly.’
‘Why not enjoy it while we’re here?’
‘I thought you were the one complaining about me taking you everywhere,’ Markus said.
‘Let me think. The doll is from Japan, so that’s where we’ll be heading next.’
‘What’s the matter, don’t you like the jetset life?’
‘It’s just that I don’t like drifting around the world without being told what it is all about.’
Markus tapped his finger on her headphones.
‘Our next destination is home,’ he whispered.
‘Can we get marzipan on this flight?’ she asked.
‘No, and no moaji either.’
The flight attendants came up with the meals. The flight only lasted a mere 90 minutes, so bread, simple combinations of pre-packaged vegetables and fruits, and a miniature pot of yoghurt was all there was. Markus asked for white wine.
‘Will I have to speak Portuguese?’ she asked.
‘Most people here speak Cantonese. The Portuguese is just inscriptions on buildings. So don’t worry. I don’t speak Cantonese either, but we’ll get by in English.’

In Macau, Markus and Charlo’ were following the flow of tourists, heading down Main Street with its Portuguese-era baroque churches and buildings, with ugly casinos looming behind as so many threats of brash modernity against cultured history.
Markus took a sordid alley to the right at the end of the street. A stocky man in boxer shorts and white underwear came out of the doorway, Markus rushed to take the open door from him. He signaled at Charlo’ to follow him inside. A finger across his mouth told her not to speak.
They followed the creaky staircase up to the third floor. Under the stairs leading to the fourth, Markus opened a low door. Inside, a wall covered in tiles. Tiny grey tiles, but also one big blue one, showing a city scene. A church at the end of a crowded narrow street with laundry hanging from the balconies. The words ‘Alfama - Lisboa’ written at the bottom. The tile didn’t really fit in with the rest of the wall.
‘Go get me a knife in there.’ Markus pointed Charlo’ at an open doorway at the end of the hall. ‘It’s a communal kitchen. They won’t eat you.’
He took the knife from her and started hacking at the cement around the blue tile.
‘Why are you damaging that nice wall?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘Once I have what’s in that nice wall of yours, we can all go home.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley uncovers what is behind the tile in Episode Eighteen before March 15.

Season One, Episode Sixteen: Moaji

2009-02-20T09:50:00.004+08:00

Markus walked over to the other room to pick up the phone, while Trick poured Charlo' another cup of green tea.
‘Do you know moaji?’ the Taiwanese man asked her.
‘Never heard of her,’ Charlo' smiled.
‘Do you like sweets?’
‘He does,’ Charlo' said with a wave in the direction of the other room. ‘He always has marzipan on him.’
Trick smiled.
‘He learned that here. He was bored with life, so he went about making things himself. Painting, at first. When the galleries weren't interested, he turned to food.’
‘Interesting. So what kind of food were you mentioning there?’
‘Moaji. The aboriginals here in Taiwan make them. Rice stamped into a sweet ball, with peanut or sesame inside and outside. I'll get some for you to taste.’
Charlo' wondered whether he was going somewhere to listen in to Bentley's conversation. But Trick was back in seconds. Carrying a tray with four peanut-colored balls. He offered her a pair of chopsticks.
‘How did you meet Markus?’ she asked.
They reclined, munching on the moaji.
‘Our fathers knew each other. His was stationed here for a long time, and obviously, my father was Taiwanese.’
‘You say his father was stationed here, you mean like a military man?’
‘Something like that. I was young, I don't know too much about that. Markus and I went to the same school and grew up together until he left for the States.’
‘With his dad.’
‘His dad stayed here,’ Trick said.
Charlo' detected a finality.

Markus picked up the phone.
‘Lose the girl,’ said a gruff voice.
‘What? What are you saying, and how did you find me?’
‘Don't ask me questions I don't want to answer,’ Riot said. ‘You're busy in a completely wrong way. Get rid of the girl.’
‘I need her to watch my back. Did you have anything to do with those thugs who attacked me?’
‘So why do you say they attacked just you and not the girl as well? Lose her, you don't need her. And you shouldn't have gone all the way to Taiwan. There is nothing for you there.’
‘Remember who told me to do this for my sister? You did,’ Markus said.
‘I didn't tell you anything. I just gave you some of her belongings, because she wanted you to have them,’ Riot said.
Markus thought back to Riot's impromptu visit and to his sister's objects. Was he wrong about the Three Elders?
‘Do you mean the Three Elders were not the important object in there?’
‘I expected you to be smart enough to figure that out on your own, smart heart.’
‘Hold on. Did you just say smart heart?’ Markus said.
‘Remember, I worked with your sister, she told me what she called you, only I'm beginning to wonder why. As I said, lose the girl and get your act together,’ Riot said. ‘I'll find you for our next talk.’
He cut the connection, leaving Markus staring at a silent phone.

‘He's so predictable, it's beyond sick,’ Riot said to the woman standing behind him eating an apple.
‘Do you think he will get rid of her?’ she asked.
‘Charlo' is not the kind of woman you get rid of after a phone call, I know her too well for that.’

‘You need to return home,’ Markus said as he sat down next to Charlo' and took a pair of chopsticks Trick handed him.
‘Do you really know what you're doing? Running all the way here, dragging me along? You get me shot at by a bunch of roughnecks and now you send me away like I'm a piece of dirt?’
Markus put the chopsticks down.
‘I feel it will be safer for you if you're not with me.’
‘Who was that talking to you?’
‘His name is Riot. He's the man who gave me my sister's belongings after her death.’
‘How do you know he's not her killer?’
‘He's a colleague of hers. If he had killed her, would he have bothered to show me his face and give me her things? Is that your logic?’
Charlo' gave him a look that killed while Trick concentrated on his moaji.
‘I am doing for my sister now what I couldn't when she was alive.’
‘You killed her murderer. What more can you do?’
‘My sister gave me those things. They're a message from the grave, she wants me to do this.’
‘This creep, Riot you call him, how do you know he’s not fooling you?’
‘I know those objects were in my sister's possession, he didn't fool me, they were hers.’
She grabbed another moaji ball.
‘You're not getting rid of me this easily.’
Silence fell as the three digested the moaji.
‘We need to go to Macau,’ Markus said as Trick nodded in agreement.

NEXT: Markus Bentley and Charlo' head for Macau in Episode Seventeen before March 3.

Season One, Episode Fifteen: The Second Elder

2009-02-10T09:28:00.004+08:00

Markus and Charlo' had to press themselves against the parked motorcycles as a small blue van squirmed through the alley.
‘What is it with your father?’ Charlo' asked.
A loud bang went off above their heads, on the second floor of the place they were passing. Charlo' ducked, but Markus stayed composed.
‘What the hell was that?’
‘Someone changing a gas bottle,’ Markus said.
The black BMW closed in but did not pass them.
‘Your father?’ she asked again.
Markus looked behind them.
‘What is it?’
‘The new BMW 5. No, let's go, now.’
He grabbed hold of her right arm and pulled her along, running out of the alley. Behind them, the doors of the car opened and three men in black shirts and dyed hair stepped out and ran after them.
One of the men produced a Beretta.
At the end of the alley, Markus turned left, dragging Charlo' with him. They heard the men shout. When they rounded the corner, a shot went off and planted itself in the rear window of the SUV they were just running by.
‘We'll never keep this up,’ Charlo' hissed as they scrambled into the next side alley, past parked motorcycles and a stand selling smelly stuff.
‘We have to,’ Markus hissed back.
Another bullet whizzed past their heads to end up lost somewhere with a clang.
An elderly man on a motorcycle ran into them as they veered left and the cyclist went right. The three pursuers appeared again, and this time the bullet missed Markus Bentley's left arm by an inch.
The next crossroads was easy to take. A noisy bustling street market on the right. Stands selling exotic foods in the center of the road, shoes and T-shirts spread out on plastic sheets on the sides. Markus pulled Charlo' over and together they dived into the crowd, jostling some of the onlookers and sightseers, but that was alright, they didn't seem to mind.
‘Keep your head low,’ he told her.
They kept bumping into people, but there was a system to it. The Taiwanese saw these two crazed foreigners come at them, they just gave way. Once that happened too late, when Charlo’ crashed into a young woman eating a squid on a stick, but she mumbled an apology as Markus pulled her away.
Once he felt they had created some distance, Markus dove into a dark gap between two shoe stores and ran hunched toward a metal box at the end. He crouched behind the box and told Charlo' to do the same.
They watched as almost a minute later, one of the pursuers in black passed by without looking at them. The two others followed just seconds behind, each on a different side of the road, no gun in sight.
Markus waited another five seconds, tapped his companion's shoulder, and off they went, further into the darkness until they reached another non-descript alley, the same motorcycles parked everywhere. Markus made sure there was no dark BMW looming around before he chose the direction.
‘Who were they?’ Charlo' asked.
‘I don't know, but I sure didn't want to wait for them to introduce themselves.’
‘Do you think Lassiter sent them?’
‘It's not important what I think. All I know is, we cannot go back to the Brother Hotel.’
‘Where are we heading then?’
Markus signaled her to keep silent. They reached the main road and hailed a cab, a yellow one like all the others. The cabbie didn't understand English but Markus knew the address in Chinese, or that's what Charlo' assumed anyway.
‘Are we going to look up the second elder?’ she asked as the car passed the last subway station and went uphill out of the urban jungle and into the green.
‘We're going to visit an old friend of mine.’
‘Is he as trustworthy as the last one?’
‘Stop questioning me. You get a free trip to Taiwan and all you do is moan.’
‘I didn't ask for this trip, remember. If I stay away too long, my job will be gone.’
The car turned into a dark tree-lined alley, where the houses stood away from the road, hidden from view behind walls topped with shards of glass. Markus waited until the cab had vanished from their sight before moving away. They had alighted in front of the third doorway in the alley, but Markus now crossed the road and marched deeper away from the main road.
‘What if there's nobody home?’ Charlo' asked.
‘We'll either have to scale the wall or spend the night in the bushes.’
‘You must be kidding. Aren't you? Are you?’
Markus checked the number on the next door. A shiny metal door set in a long wall which had once been white but now only showed off the humidity of the environment in black streaks all over.
There was a bell, no name. Markus rang, counted to six, and rang again.
‘Nobody home,’ Charlo' said.
Just when even Markus began to believe that, a light went on above the doorway.
A buzz and a click, and a youngish Taiwanese man with a crew cut stood grinning at them.
‘Hi, Trick,’ Markus said.
They didn't shake hands, but the Taiwanese man signaled them inside. Markus introduced Charlo' as a friend, and Trick gave her the same grin and the same silent welcome.
The trio walked across a dark grass lawn to reach a house that looked like something out of a fifties movie.
Inside, Charlo' had expected to find Chinese furniture and antiques, but instead all she saw were shag carpets, leather couches and garish plastic chairs, black-and-white pictures of Paris and London on the walls.
Trick offered them hot bitter tea in small green enamel cups.
Markus was the first to speak.
‘I want to show you this,’ he said as he produced the three elders out of his bag.
‘So you still hold on to the past,’ Trick said. ‘The furniture in this house is fifties, sixties, and seventies, but I'm a 21st century man. You should try it sometime, it feels a lot better.’
That was the longest time Trick had been speaking since they entered the house, Charlo' thought.
‘What else can I do for you?’ Trick asked.
‘Our hotel reservation has been canceled,’ Markus said, without irony.
‘My house is your house.’
He filled up their tea cups. A phone rang in an adjacent room, with a loud metallic sound like a dial model from decades ago. Trick walked off.
When he returned, the smile had vanished.
‘Someone in the States named Riot wants to have a word with you about your sister,’ Trick said.

NEXT: Markus Bentley talks to Riot in Episode Sixteen before February 23.

Season One, Episode Fourteen: The First Elder

2009-02-01T08:41:00.004+08:00

Charlo' returned to their room at the Brother Hotel at 9 p.m. She found Markus changing, preparing to go out.
‘How was Taipei 101?’
‘Awesome. The tallest building in the world. The mall was too expensive for me though. I thought everything in Taiwan was cheap.’
He let that one go.
‘There is one in Dubai that's taller. It's called the Burj Dubai, 160 floors high. But since it's not completed yet, this one is still officially the tallest one.’
‘I see you've done your research. Anything else while I was away?’
She picked up the book from the sofa. American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
‘So are you going somewhere?’ she asked as he was rifling through his bag. ‘Without me?’
He picked out the statuette of the three Chinese men, the thing he called the Three Elders.
‘We're going somewhere, so get ready,’ he said.
‘I only just got back. Can't I get some rest for a change.’
‘Later. We've got an appointment.’

Markus marched around the Renai Circle, looking into a side alley for a pub he used to know, but it was no longer around. Fancy French bakeries and Japanese design stores were the new standards around here. The circle was a major traffic intersection on Taipei's tony east side. Charlo' walked behind him, as if they were on separate trips. She had had no time to change, so she felt sweaty and self-conscious in her pink T-shirt and jeans. She wasn't dressed for an important visit, but maybe the target of their visit wouldn't mind.
Markus kept looking left and right, as if lost. Asian cities changed much faster than American ones, and Markus Bentley had been away from Taiwan for at least five years. He looked foolish, but then Charlo' couldn't know.
He stepped into an alley where local couples were leaving a restaurant through a garish red gate. Charlo' didn't read Chinese characters, and she wondered whether Markus could.
He turned right, she followed. He turned left, she followed. Several times, she had to press herself against parked motorcycles as some black limousine worked its way through the narrow alleys built for, well, motorcycles.
It was 10 o'clock sharp when she saw Markus stop outside the doorway to a five-floor apartment building and press the bell. She couldn't hear what he was saying, but she slowed down, as he had told her to. The buzzer rang, he went in, and turned around, motioning at her.
‘I'm in?’ she asked.
‘You're in. But don't say too much. Don't say anything about what we did back home together.’
A concierge in the marble and gilt lobby gave them a magnetic card that allowed them to take the elevator up to the fourth.
The welcome was warm. A bulky man in a Hawaiian shirt, about sixty, long gray hair and a beard covering his smile. He embraced Markus in the doorway and then let them in.
‘I am Lassiter, so you can call me Lass,’ he told Charlo' as he shook her hand.
The apartment had bright white walls, but dark wooden furniture, most of it Chinese, giving the place the appearance of an antiques store. Lassiter signaled them to sit down on a cream leather couch, while he disappeared out of view for a minute before coming back with three bowls filled with a dark brew.
‘Red bean soup, the best sweet in the world. Watch it, it's hot,’ he told Charlo' with a smile.
The conversation was thin, the brew wasn't. Lassiter and Bentley obviously were aficionados, Charlo' was the newcomer to Chinese food, the odd one out.
‘We have something in common,’ Markus said when the two men were reaching the bottom of their bowls.
He pulled the statuette out of his bag and put it in the middle of the table. Lassiter stared at it with an expressionless face and turned back into an adjacent room. He returned with what looked like a precise copy of the same Three Elders.
‘Where did you get yours from?’ Lass asked.
‘My sister gave it to me before she died.’
Lass looked taken aback but didn't say a word.
‘Your sister died, my condolences,’ he said, as an afterthought. ‘Who told you?’
‘A man came to my house one morning with a laptop showing what happened.’
‘You mean like on YouTube? What did he look like? Who was he?’
Markus gave the story of the man in the car who deposited the computer at his place, and continued with the visit later that morning.
‘He was really messed up. Blood all over, falling, moaning. He called himself Riot. Never seen him since.’
Lassiter didn't register any reaction.
‘So you think I can help you?’
‘My sister had this guy bring me the Three Elders. That must have been her way of telling me the solution lies here,’ Markus said.
‘Did this Riot guy pass on anything else?’
‘Nothing significant,’ Markus said.
‘Where are you staying? Just in case I can reach you with new information.’
‘At the Brother Hotel,’ Charlo' cut in, just too hastily. Bentley shot her a look of why don't you shut up you were doing so well.
Lassiter refilled their red bean soup. The conversation turned to memories of old Taipei from there on. Charlo' was fascinated.
‘The man looks like the pilot from Lost,’ she told Bentley after they had left the building.
Markus pulled out the Three Elders and pointed at the one wearing yellow.
‘That's Lassiter?’
‘That's Lass.’
‘Where are the others?’
‘We need to find one more,’ Markus said.
A dark BMW turned into the alley, careful not to scrape against the parked motorcycles.
‘What about the third one?’ Charlo' asked.
‘He's my father.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley looks for the second elder in Taiwan in Season One, Episode Fifteen before February 13.

Season One, Episode Thirteen: Taipei 101

2009-01-20T09:02:00.003+08:00

‘What's that building there?’ Charlo' asked.
‘Taipei 101. The tallest building in the world.’
‘What's the view like?’
‘I don't know. The last time I was here, they were still building it. Some cranes fell off it during an earthquake. People got killed. It was Easter, I remember. I was in church.’
‘You don't strike me as the religious type.’
‘I must be getting old.’
‘Are you going to take me up there?’
‘Unlikely. Remember our deal. I only go out at night, you take care of the rest, you can go out as much as you like, day or night, unless I need you,’ Markus Bentley said.
They were staying at a Brother Hotel on the eastside of Taipei. Just like home. They had sat separately on the 12-hour flight. Wandered separately around Osaka Airport during the stopover. Gone separately through customs, but sat on the same bus into town. He had told her beforehand what to ask for.
The cab ride from the bus stop to the hotel had been quite an eye opener for her. She had never seen swarms of motorcycles fighting it out with yellow cabs and buses for the space closest to the traffic light.
‘That's funny,’ she had said of the green numbers counting down the seconds left to the red light for the pedestrians.
Charlo' had picked up some brochures at the airport, so she now had a vague idea of where to spend her days.
‘Are you going to creep out while I'm sightseeing?’ she asked, her back turned toward him as she contemplated Taipei 101.
‘Not a chance. I don't want to bump into someone I know.’
‘You must be a charmer, so many enemies in so many places.’
‘I need to stay in during the day. That's why you're with me. To represent me outdoors during daylight hours. We're fortunate things get dark early round here, at five o'clock,’ Markus said.
‘Anything else? Do you need me to do your laundry as well?’
He motioned her to go out.
She pursed her lips and looked away.
‘Sorry, I didn't mean it like that,’ he said as she passed by. Out she went.
He waited another twenty minutes before putting aside the Cormac McCarthy novel he had brought.
‘Am I going to be safe coming to your place?’ he asked on the cell phone he had picked up on the way into the hotel.
‘You know you'll always be welcome, as the son of your father,’ a gruff man's voice said on the other end.’
‘Would 9 o'clock be alright, in that spirit?’ Markus asked as he was wandering around his room.
‘Any time, any spirit,’ the man said.
Markus went to fetch his bag and produced the statuette of the three elders.
‘So here you are,’ he told the inanimate object.

Charlo' was strolling past the much too expensive fashion houses inside the mall at the foot of Taipei 101. She wasn't really focusing on the French and Italian brand names, but was juggling a green tea doughnut with a Blackberry. It worked in Taiwan, she was happy to find out.
‘Can you guess where I'm calling from?’
She didn't wait for the reply.
‘From Taiwan. He took me here, he's paying for everything, so he really trusts me.’
She stopped at Prada.
‘What do you mean I shouldn't be taking any measures against him? Of course, not, I'm just following him. I'm just worried he'll do something behind my back, but I can't stay with him all day long without him getting suspicious.’
A crumb fell from the doughnut on to the polished marble floor. She felt guilty not picking it up.
‘He says he's doing it for his sister. We'll see whether he ends up where we think he will,’ Charlo' said.
She giggled.
‘I'd better go up Taipei 101 because he will quiz me about the view. He's like that.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley meets the first elder in Taiwan in Season One, Episode Fourteen before February 3.

Season One, Episode Twelve: Made in Taiwan

2009-01-10T16:57:00.003+08:00

Charlo' had parked her car on the top of a multistory parking lot in the financial district. Markus had put a cheap pair of dark jeans over his swimming trunks. He was leaning against the hood of her car, Charlo' standing next to him, her hands in the pockets of her jeans.
The sun was softer than usual, even if Markus was sweating.
‘Do you need a maid to do your dirty work in Taiwan just like you wanted me to here?’
‘It's not like that. I just need someone to watch my back.’
‘Nice. Who's paying for all of this, for the tickets, the hotel?’
He offered her a piece of marzipan.
‘I've got enough money for both of us. Taiwan isn't that expensive.’
‘How long are you planning to stay? Remember the shooting range. I've got a job here. If I don't show up in a week's time, they'll find some other good-looking chick like me.’
‘No, they won't. Two weeks is all I need. If after one week, you don't like what you see, you can come back. I won't hold you back,’ Markus said.
‘Isn't it going to be as dangerous as our dip into the pool?’
‘Admit it, you had some fun.’
‘Fun being used as a shield while you shoot people and dive into a pool? No thanks, I don't call that fun.’
Markus Bentley bit off a piece of marzipan.
‘Whom are you going to kill in Taiwan?’ she asked.
‘Nobody if I can avoid it,’ he said, looking down at the car's front bumper.
‘You did I don't know what to that guard in his home, you killed a whole battalion by the pool, and now you're off to kill people overseas. How many people killed your sister?’
Markus wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
‘The man in the hotel told me where to go and how to find what I'm looking for.’
‘The man you killed after he gave you the gun?’
‘I didn't kill him. The people in the helicopter did.’
‘Explain one thing to me. With all the carnage that's been going on around you, how come the police still haven't found you?’
Markus shrugged.
‘They don't know me, I'm not on their radar.’
‘What about your sister's funeral?’
He sighed.
‘It's too dangerous for me now. Her friends and colleagues will take care of that.’
They remained silent for a few seconds.
‘One more practical thing, Markus. Your sister was killed, you killed her killer. What does that make you? A fugitive from the law at best, a murderer at worst. How do you think you're going to get through customs onto your flight to Taiwan?’
‘If you're afraid, we'll travel separately. We'll have seats together, but we'll check in as if we're strangers, if that's what bothering you.’
Now it was her turn to sigh.
‘What's bothering me is that you expect a woman you're not familiar with to travel with you half the way around the world on what might be another murderous outing. I don't want to be sitting on your lap when they fire up the electric chair.’
‘I need a smart woman to babysit me.’
‘Filthy sexist pig.’
‘Now we're talking.’
They both bended double laughing.
‘What is there to see in Taiwan?’ she asked.
He turned away from her and delved into his bag on the back seat of the car. Out he came with the Chinese statuette of the three old men.
‘Charlo', meet the Three Elders.’
‘So this is your way of telling me we are going to Taiwan because of some cheap souvenirs?’

NEXT: Markus Bentley and Charlo' arrive in Taiwan in Season One, Episode Thirteen before January 22.

Season One, Episode Eleven: Goodbye Speedokiniland

2008-12-30T08:59:00.006+08:00

‘Look, professor, I want you to see something down there that's more fun watching than your water.’
Camry was standing inside the window in room 615. Wearing a suit, tugging at the shirt collar. The professor was a thirtyish sandy-haired man wearing a white lab coat. He came out of the bathroom looking miffed.
Camry waved outside.
‘Down there, by the pool.’
The professor looked taken aback, but Camry grinned.
‘The guy down there, with his brain splattered all over the lounge chair, is Moskvitch. A nasty bugger if there ever was one, professor.’
Camry's smile faded to threat mode.

A man fired a handgun at the surface of the pool, kicked a woman out of the way, nearly tripped over one of his own dead colleagues.
Under water, Markus Bentley held Charlo' tighter as he saw a bullet pierce its way to the bottom of the pool. He shot another thug swimming toward him like a shark approaching its prey.
Charlo' surfaced first, looking right into the bodyguard's gun barrel. She screamed. Bentley was next, his hand with the Glock in front of him, firing. The man fired back, but missed.
‘Run out of here, but not with me,’ Bentley shouted at Charlo' as they climbed out of the pool, which was gradually coloring red with the blood of the dead swimmer.
Bentley didn't look back but ran away between the palms. On bare feet, the Glock and his swimming trunks his only possessions.
He tripped over a root. Landed with his face in the grass. Looked around him. The barman from the pool was behind him. Bentley could outrun him, so he wouldn’t have to kill anybody anymore.
He was approaching the front of the hotel. He came round the corner, saw the valet handling the car keys.

‘So there they go. Another exciting day at the Brother Hotel, don't you think, professor?’
The professor mumbled something and returned to the bathroom, while Camry picked a brandy from the refrigerator.
‘Seeing blood and water makes me thirsty,’ he said to no one in particular.

Markus rammed the valet and grabbed a set of keys at random. They showed the blue and white squares of the Bavarian flag. He ran around the parking lot pushing the remote. The lights flashed. On an X7X, a heavy dark SUV. Behind him, the barman also picked up some keys from the pavement.
Bentley screeched out of the parking lot, into the two-lane street in front of the hotel. Heading north like he'd planned.
As he was passing the intersection, he saw the car behind him. A Chevrolet Ganache. The women's version of the Corvette. Low, sexy, red, convertible. Top down, a good target if he wanted to have a go at his pursuer. The barman.
Markus felt silly driving a heavy vehicle wearing nothing but a pair of downsized swimming trunks, but hey, this situation was out of the ordinary. The barman wasn't exactly dressed for a hot pursuit either.
Bentley saw the guy swerving to the left and coming past him as they careened across an intersection. Bad idea. Bentley went left himself, hitting the sports car. The barman slowed down but stuck close.
Markus looked at the Glock on his dashboard, but thought it would be a bad idea to handle it while driving. Don't Glock and drive.
Instead, he tensed and watched the road ahead. There it was, the pedestrian crossing from the hotel zone to the beach.
Just as the lights turned red, he braked, turned the car left and went right on to the beachfront walk amid screams from the tourists. The barman was still chasing him.
Bentley turned on his headlights and honked like it was snowing in hell. The tourists dispersed alright, but not all of them as fast as he had expected. Scared parents pulled their kids into the sand, skaters went right into the boardwalk café and rammed the waiters, sending the hamburger and pizza plates shattering around.
Markus suddenly braked, forcing his pursuer into a maze of fruit stalls, paintings, fitness equipment and musical instruments left behind by buskers on the run.
The stuff was flying around, but Bentley wasn't watching, he was hurrying to get some distance between the barman in the red convertible and him.
The next pedestrian crossing over the main road was coming up. Markus picked up speed and saw the surprise on the face of the truck driver who was going parallel with him on the main road.
Bentley honked at the family ready to cross the beach path. They moved into the sand, good for them. He pulled the SUV to the right, left the path with just inches left, saw a bus coming but drove across the road to put himself short in front of the truck.
The barman followed him but he wasn't fast enough. The truck smashed him in the side. He careened back across the road and hit the bus. The red convertible was propelled onto the beach, but the barman was already flying through the air with the life out of him. Not wearing seat belts in a convertible. Bad idea.
Markus saw the wreckage in his rearview mirror. He would do anything to avenge his sister. Even shoot a thug like Moskvitch in a crowded swimming pool. Camry was right about that. But now he had to do things for himself.
‘Charlo', are you safe?’
‘As safe as things go.’
‘Are you still with me on Taiwan?’

NEXT: Markus Bentley recovers from the kill in Season One, Episode Twelve before January 12.

Season One, Episode Ten: The Kill

2008-12-23T08:53:00.003+08:00

‘Taiwan? Why would you want me to go there?’
Markus and Charlo' were sitting on a bench in the oceanside park.
‘Forget it, it's just something that guy said.’
‘That guy you killed at the hotel?’
‘I didn't kill him, remember? They shot him from a helicopter.’
‘From a helicopter? Are you serious?’
Markus nodded. He offered her a ball of marzipan before he dropped one in his mouth himself.
‘Why did you run away then? If the guy got shot from a helicopter, they'll know it wasn't you who did him,’ Charlo' said.
‘Still, I don't want to be around when someone gets shot. And I might have been the next one.’
‘Who are you?’ Charlo' asked in a lower tone of voice.
‘They killed my sister.’
Markus looked at the ground. She touched his arm.
‘I'm sorry to hear that. Who did it?’
‘Does the name Moskvitch mean anything to you?’
‘Sounds like Russian to me.’
‘I still don't understand all the details, but I know he's the one responsible for her death. I have to do something about it.’
‘Why don't you go to the police?’
Markus looked at the two male joggers passing by.
‘This is a problem the police cannot solve. Unless I do it myself, it will never get solved.’
Charlo' looked at the ground.
‘Can I call you Bent?’
‘I don't really like that, though you can call me anything you like.’
A panhandler was approaching, but Bentley's stare made sure he changed his itinerary.
‘Do you have any reason why you would to return to the Brother Hotel?’ he asked.
‘I've got friends who go there for the weekly Wednesday brunch and hang around the pool and the beach and the bar, anywhere young people hang.’
Markus nodded.
‘Wednesday. That's tomorrow.’
‘What are you planning?’ she asked.
‘I want to avenge my sister,’ he said.

Markus Bentley left his clothes in the car two miles away, at a safe distance from today's event, so it wouldn't be located as a suspect vehicle once the deed was done. He was only wearing tiny swimming trunks and carrying a towel and a bottle of suntan lotion. He walked over along the beach, lied down on the towel for half an hour. When he left without picking up the lotion, a gray-haired man with a straw hat shouted after him to complain. Markus pulled up his shoulders and picked up the plastic bottle only to deposit it further on a low wall between the path to the pool and the palm trees.
He wound his way through the palm trees. The deep house music told him which direction the pool was in. The mood was very different from his previous visit.
Bentley saw the young women on the left of the pool, but pretended not to notice. He let his eyes drift to the company across the water, on the right, a bunch of dark tan men with women swooning around them. Two retired couples at the far end of the pool, obviously trying to stay away as far as possible from the deep house drifting out of the pool bar, on his right before he hit the pool. Always put the pool bar at the front, so you get first choice of the arriving customers. Two middle-aged men were waiting for their orders right now.
Markus stuck to the left edge of the pool and the obviously predictable happened.
‘Hi, Bent,’ Charlo' called out from the bunch of young women.
‘Ola, chica.’
He wished she had remembered not to mention names. With a bit of luck, the sound of his name was drowned out by the house music and nobody would remember after the panic.
‘Bent.’
There, she did it again. He wanted to show off that little finger as a friendly warning, but he was worried he would drop that thing he was holding under the towel.
Bentley crouched next to the three young ladies and one young man in the group. He nodded vigorously at the end of a question. One of the women started talking. Bentley smiled at her and looked at the pool bar. One customer was staying on, the other one was wading across to this side. Not good. Bentley smiled back at the speaker and looked again. The guy with the pinacolada or whatever was sticking to the side of the pool like a jellyfish. Not good.
‘Bent, do you think they'll make a good couple?’
Charlo' was pointing at the young dude and the brunette sitting on his chair. Bentley nodded.
‘You're beautiful people. Sure.’
A brutally loud laugh resounded from behind them, from the other side of the pool. A perfect excuse for Bentley to turn his body half around and look at the source of the commotion.
The guy with the dark mustache and the gold-framed shades was having the time of his life, slapping the bikini babes and the shady guys crowded around him like shoppers around a market stall. Moskvitch. He was recognizable from the picture the Chinese man had given him in room 714.
Bentley counted three bodyguards around the man. One guy swimming down there in the pool could also be a member of their entourage. But Markus had no time to wait. Moskvitch was fondling one of his lady friends, gross.
Bentley turned to Charlo'.
‘Too bad but this is where my vacation ends, now I have to start working.’
He took hold of her, gently but convincingly. As he turned her around to face the opposite side of the pool, the towel slipped out of his hands. To reveal the Glock he had been holding awkwardly underneath.
The young people in his group screamed as they saw what he was doing. But he had no time for them.
He raised his arms around Charlo', pointing the gun straight at Moskvitch across the water. Fired as he stood still for a long second. Then pushed her forward. Fired some more as he saw the bodyguards around Moskvitch reach for the towels on their chairs. Where they had been hiding their own firepower.
Bentley pushed Charlo' forward as he kept firing at the men. Only the men, not the women, please. Those men treated them as decoration, so he didn't want to harm them. Around the pool, pinacoladas and other pseudotropical juice clattered against the ground.
Bentley held on to Charlo' while they jumped into the pool, still firing at Moskvitch and his men.

NEXT: Markus Bentley finishes off the kill in Season One, Episode Eleven before January 2, 2009

Season One, Episode Nine: Room 714

2008-12-13T10:17:00.004+08:00

The Chinese man picked up his chopsticks and brought a white dumpling to his mouth without his eyes leaving Bentley's face.
‘Is that what he told you? That I would have a name for you?’ the man said in fluent English, without any trace of an Asian accent.
Markus nodded.
‘I have a lot more than that.’
‘What's your name?’
‘Didn't he tell you you're not supposed to ask that? You can call me Cadillac, for all I care. But I wouldn't drive any of the bleeding wrecks.’
He drank a cup of green tea.
Markus noticed the table had several plates on it. One with half a dozen of dumplings and soy sauce, one with a tuna sandwich and two with pieces of fruit. Pineapple, apple, watermelon. Fresh and symmetrical.
He walked over to the table.
‘Can I get some of your fruit?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac,’ as he called himself, shrugged his shoulders. ‘Do whatever you please.’
Markus used a toothpick to stab at a piece of pineapple. There were two cups of green tea.
‘Were you expecting me?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac’ looked out the window, at the beach.
‘Do you own a gun?’
‘You have one for me?’ asked Markus.
The Chinese man looked around before stepping to a corner chair below which a thick envelope was lying.
‘Everything you need to know is in here,’ he said while handing him the envelope.
It felt really heavy, but Markus didn't want to look inside in this man's presence.
‘Cadillac’ kept his eyes darting around, making him feel uncomfortable.

Riot left room 725 and walked toward the elevator, away from room 714. He went down to the underground car park and walked around looking for the vehicle. He drew a deep breath when he saw the dark BMW X7X.
‘I'm glad you made it out on time,’ he said to the woman behind the wheel.

‘Do you have the three elders?’ the Chinese man asked.
‘My sister gave them to me.’
‘You know the answer is in Taiwan,’ the man said.
‘But what is the question?’ Markus asked.
‘Cadillac’ paced near the window.
Markus recognized the noise, the vibration of the windows.
A helicopter flew past the hotel, doors sliding open. A man in a jumpsuit and goggles appeared, aiming a machinegun. At room 714.
Markus didn't remember who was the first to shout ‘Down,’ but the glass was already flying. He clutched the envelope and ran off into the hallway. The elevator was ten floors below. Markus rushed for the emergency exit, running down the stairway like there was a monster on his heels.
It took him a while to realize the sound was his cell ringing.
‘I'll meet you at the shopping mall downstairs,’ he told Charlo'.
‘Fine. There's a reception desk with some kind of silver Christmas tree on. I'll be waiting,’ she said.
He wiped the sweat off his face just before pushing open the door to the underground mall. He didn't want to look too flustered, just in case.
He found the silver tree but she was nowhere in sight. The tap on his shoulder made him jump. The envelope fell to the floor with a heavy thump.
‘What's wrong with you?’ Charlo’ asked.
‘I met a contact up there and he got himself killed.’
‘You killed him?’
‘No, of course not, but they might think I did, so we need to get out of here yesterday.’
He pulled her away by the arm.
‘Let's find your car, Charlo'. Are you up for a trip to Taiwan?’

NEXT: Markus Bentley goes for the kill in Episode Ten before December 25.

Season One, Episode Eight: Room Service

2008-12-01T08:36:00.002+08:00

Markus Bentley first walked over to the beach like a customer worried about the temperature of the sea water. He just stopped from dipping his toe in the water.
He wandered around the gardens before entering the lobby. There wasn't much movement here that early, but still he hoped he wouldn't be noticed too much.
He descended to the underground shopping mall, had a look through the windows of the upscale boutiques selling bags from Fendi and Prada, watches, jewelry. Most of them weren't even open yet at his hour. There was warm lighting and cream white sofas inviting him to stay longer. This was not his environment.
Purely on a hunch, he took the elevator up. You needed an electronic room card to give the thing a destination, but he was in with a Japanese couple up to the eighth floor. He mumbled something about also having a room on the 8th and they smiled. He let them out first and turned in the opposite direction. They went left so he turned right. Luckily the hotel didn't have the system from communist countries like China and the Soviet Union where you had a babushka on every floor checking the comings and goings, Markus thought.
He didn't really care about the 8th floor. He just wanted to understand the lay of the land. At the end of the hall was the emergency exit. Markus pulled the door open with some difficulty and peered inside. Hardly any lighting in there, a good place to hide or to move about relatively unnoticed.
The 7th floor, the guard at his sister's office building had said. Markus let the door bang shut behind him and hoped there was a way out one floor lower.
There was. He shoved the door from the inside with some difficulty, but it worked. He was in the hallway of the seventh. Straight ahead, he saw the cart the room service people used to take breakfast to the rooms. He hadn't counted on that. He had thought about the cleaning crew going round the rooms to do the sheets, but that would happen much later, once the guests had been expected to complete breakfast and go out to whatever they were staying here for, meet local business people or lounge out at the pool or beach. Markus wasn't expecting anybody out in the hallways at this time.
His eyes were jumping from door to door. This was room 738 but he was looking for 714.
The breakfast cart was standing five rooms away from him when he heard the voice saying ‘You're welcome, sir.’ He jumped aside into a doorway just as the waiter came out into the hall to push his cart away. Markus pressed himself flat against the door of room 728.
The room service guy, a young Asian man, continued to what had to be room 724, Markus estimated. He looked out from his hiding place in short bursts, but didn't dare to move until the hotel employee had rung the bell at a door and moved inside with the mushroom omelet.
He advanced to 726, but he couldn't well move beyond the breakfast cart without getting himself noticed.
Fact is, he already was. Across the hallway, inside room 725, a man was watching him. Riot stepped back to what he saw as a safe distance from the door to make his phone call without Markus Bentley hearing him.
‘He's approaching your room. Get out of there, now.’
The room service guy was on the move again. Judging from his cart, he had about three more rooms to service.
Each time he entered a room, Markus slid a few doorways forward.
Room 714 had ordered breakfast too.
Saves me from having to knock, Markus thought. He waited until he heard the end of the conversation and rushed forward. With a smile, he brushed his way past the waiter and entered the room.
A middle-aged Chinese man who was losing his hair fast stood in the middle of the room with luggage at the ready. He looked queasy when he saw the intruder.
‘Do you have a name for me?’ Markus asked.

NEXT: Markus Bentley continues his quest for his sister's killers in Episode Nine, online before December 14.

Season One, Episode Seven: The Brother Hotel

2008-11-15T16:01:00.003+08:00

Markus Bentley was munching the marzipan he had brought with him in the bag. He was lying in bed, Charlo' by his side.
‘What do you know about the Brother Hotel?’ he asked.
‘That's the place we met, remember? The Q bar? The hotel was just across the road.’
‘Right.’
He was reflecting.
‘You're not awake yet, are you?’ she asked.
‘You didn't answer my question. What do you know about the Brother Hotel?’
‘I know it's expensive. I know I have out-of-town friends who can actually afford to stay there once a year. I know they have a restaurant that's supposed to have quite a reputation.’
‘What about the people there? Do you know any of them?’
‘I used to have an aunt there who cleaned the rooms. Who ironed clothes for guests. She died five years ago. What is it, are you going to rob the hotel, like Ocean's Eleven?’
‘I just want to know who works there. Who stays there a lot.’
‘Was it something that guy said you just visited?’
Markus took another bite out of the marzipan.
‘He said I should be looking at the hotel.’
‘Looking for what? You've got issues, haven't you?’
She looked away from him and reached out for the Chinese statuette of the three old men.
‘Don't touch that,’ Markus said.
‘What is it? I'm not going to break it, they're cute,’ Charlo' said while she lifted the object off the night table.
‘Put that back,’ he ordered. ‘It's not a plaything. It's not a toy. It's the only thing my sister left me.’
‘Your sister? What happened to her?’
She put back the statuette, he stopped eating.
‘She was killed.’
Charlo' touched his arm.
‘Why? By whom?’
‘That's what I'm trying to find out,’ he mumbled. ‘Let's head back to the Brother Hotel.’
‘I need to go and put that gun back at the range or they'll start asking annoying questions,’ she said.
‘You go to the range, I'll go to the hotel.’
‘Can't it wait? It's like five in the morning, the hotel will be dead, even the party animals will have gone to bed.’
Markus sat upright in bed, his head between his hands.
‘This is something I have to do, do you understand. It's like a woman having to give birth at the end of her pregnancy. It has to happen, so please, don't stop me.’
Charlo' mumbled something but she let him prepare first. He waited for her and they left the motel together before splitting up.

Markus had been sitting outside the Brother Hotel for an hour before the sun rose. The cleaners, gardeners and breakfast waiters had arrived already, some of them by bus, some in cheap and second-hand, sorry, pre-owned, cars. None of them had paid a lot of attention to this man with scruffy blonde hair sitting on a bench under a palm tree on the street. They often had partygoers sleeping off the alcohol here before heading for cooler climes.
Markus looked up at the hotel. The only thing memorable about it was the flat panel fixed to the side of its top floor with a whole in the middle. Markus felt like he didn't want to stand underneath when an earthquake hit.
Otherwise the hotel was just another modern building. A concrete box with glass windows. Nothing more. And yet it held the secret to his sister's death. He needed to visit it on his own. Without Charlo' breathing down his neck. He'd better do so before she returned from the shooting range.
He had left the bag in the car, afraid a man with a bag walking in would attract too much attention, especially from hotel staff looking for tips.
Markus walked behind the hotel, in the direction of the pool. A couple of workers were fishing leaves out of the water, while a woman was rearranging the lounge chairs. None of them nodded a greeting to him, he guessed because he looked too cheap to be a guest at the Brother Hotel.

NEXT: Markus Bentley enters the Brother Hotel in Episode Eight, on this blog before December 2.

Season One, Episode Six: The Killer

2008-10-30T08:29:00.004+08:00

Markus drove with the windows down. The airco wasn't working as it should be and it was a hot night.
Charlo' looked at his arms.
‘Who's been scratching you?’
‘I had a bad encounter at a store on my way here.’
‘A drunk?’
Markus hesitated ten seconds.
‘You could say so. It was certainly a deranged person.’
He told her everything except the bit how he had killed him. He said the Moses freak had saved him by pointing the gun at the assailant.
‘The guy we're going to see is a lot more dangerous,’ Markus said without looking at her.
‘So? You don't want me to share in the fun?’
‘We only just met, and I don't have the habit of putting beautiful strangers in jeopardy.’
‘So, are you going to lock me up in the trunk while you get all the action?’
Markus grinned.
‘There is something you can do for me.’

He turned right at the next intersection, following a road which took them out of downtown and into a tacky industrial area.
‘You're not going to kill him, are you?’ she asked.
‘I just need something to bolster my confidence.’
‘So you think he might try and kill you.’
‘You never know. This thing is about money and people will do anything for money,’ he lied.
He switched off the headlights before they arrived at the shooting range, and parked the car opposite the building, away from the surveillance cameras. Charlo' went in with the keys and came back with a gun hidden under her blouse.
‘Is this what you were thinking of?’
‘Looks good enough to me. Let's ride.’
He smiled at her. ‘A woman's got to be prepared for everything.’
She slapped him on the cheek.
‘You're absolutely right. You're learning fast.’

Markus and Charlo' drove past a bunch of trees decorated with blue lights as if it were Christmas. A brandnew tall apartment building greeted them in a street full of lower buildings and Chinese restaurants.
He parked the Honda in a rare free space and cut off the engine.
‘You think he's in there? Looks like a posh place for a security guard.’
‘I don't know him that well, but he must have lots of projects on the side,’ Charlo' said.
‘You stay in the car, I'll go to get to know him better,’ Markus said.
She touched his sleeve. And leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.
‘Come back alive from this war.’
He took the bag from the trunk and went for the building's lobby.

Markus pushed five buttons, careful not to hit the one for the fifth-floor apartment where Charlo' said the guard actually lived.
He went up the stairs carefully, keeping the gun close to his chest so he could make a half-hearted attempt at hiding it should an innocent person show up in the hallway.
He should visit that shooting range more often so he would get more practice and get to know Charlo' better.

He climbed up the staircase, better not to wake up people with the cling-clang of the elevator. He found the room, opened it up with gear from his bag, but there was nobody inside.
Five minutes later, the guard came home from a round of drinking and cards at one of the neighbors. He found a laptop on his dinner table.
The laptop Bentley received from the man in the car, playing the final scenes from his sister's life.
Markus stepped out of the bathroom with the gun pointing at the guard's chest.
‘Do you recognize your work on there?’
‘I didn't do nothing wrong.’
‘Keep your voice down.’
The man put his hands in the air like an experienced victim and went two steps back in the direction of the kitchen.
‘Don't you move and I won't say it twice,’ Bentley said while he put out a chair for the guard to sit on, in front of the computer.
Markus didn't like what he was going to do, but he had no choice. He watched the screen and saw his sister's fear and innocence. It helped.

Charlo' was still waiting in the car.
‘How did he take it?’
‘Not well.’
‘Did you shoot him?’
‘If I had, the whole block would've been standing here by now. I used a more subtle approach.’
She inspected him for signs of blood. There weren't any.
‘I need some marzipan,’ he said, as if she was his supplier.
‘Wow, you got me there, I forgot to pack any. What else do you want, antelope steak?’
They laughed.

My place, your place. They ended up at a motel away from the places they had frequented earlier that night.
Markus told her the guard had not taken things too well, so he might be looking for him. He didn't want to endanger Charlo', he said.
‘Shouldn't I be taking the gun back?’ she asked.
‘First thing tomorrow. If they trust you with the keys, they can trust you with the guns.’
When Markus was sleeping, she walked into the bathroom for a shower. As the water ran, she had a look through his toiletries but that's not where a man like Markus kept his secrets. She found the rolls of marzipan, sniffed at it but it wasn't a familiar kind of drug.
Back in the room, Markus had put the statuette of the three elders next to his cell phone and the alarm clock. He had shoved the bag under the bed.
Charlo' returned to the bathroom, but instead of stepping into the shower, she kept the water running and flipped open her cell phone.
‘He thinks his sister is dead,’ Charlo' said. ‘And yes, he found the clues.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley looks beyond the murder of his sister for his next target in Episode Seven of Concentric before November 15.

Season One, Episode Five: Charlo'

2008-10-18T19:10:00.002+08:00

The man who emerged from the car was obviously wearing reinforcement under his cheap suit. He had a motorcycle helmet on, as if he had taken the wrong vehicle. The gear made him look fatter, heavier and slower than he actually was. His arms hung straight along his body.
Instead of heading for the desk and demanding the cash, he paid no attention to the clerk who thought better not to complain about the damage.
‘Moses, man.’
Markus felt the man's gaze on him. The driver came right for him, he knew it.
Markus needed a weapon now. A gun. This wasn't O.J. coming to get his memorabilia back.
The man wasn't brandishing a gun, he was one of those Marine types with big fists. He was obviously unaware of Markus Bentley's past. If he thought he could tackle Markus with his bare hands, he was wrong.
Bentley ran backward as he saw the driver approach. He looked behind him, but there was no exit at the back.
He grabbed one of the big, yellow, plastic-coated flashlights. His pursuer didn't grin, but kept pressing on without running.
Markus didn't want to run either. Look composed, even when you know you're staring death in its grubby face. At the back end of the store, he turned right. The gardening section. He pulled a bag of organic chicken feed or whatever into the middle of the walkway behind him.
His pursuer stepped over it like he would've done over pigeon shit. And a lot faster.
Markus began to lose it. He started grabbing objects off the shelves and throwing them at the hulk. Cans of pet food, wooden bird cages, plastic flower pots made in China. What a waste of good material. Markus dove for an outsize pair of scissors which looked good to trim the hedge, if he had any. Markus turned back and decided he had the weapon to fight the enemy.
The driver of the destructive car finally moved his arms, and it was to stop Markus Bentley's brazen attack in its tracks. He took the scissors sideways with his left arm and pulled them away to the left, out of Bentley's control. Markus put up his leg to kick his assailant in the groin, but the man swung sideways, ripping the scissors out of his hands and out of his reach.
‘Who the hell are you and what do you want from me?’ Markus finally found the courage to ask his pursuer the question he didnt understand.
The hulk remained silent and grabbed Markus by the pulses, flinging him around with his head in the middle of the flower pots. Just as the driver was about to get hold of his legs for some more nasty gymnastics, Markus leaped forward like a frog, taking half the rack down with him. He swung around, keeping his back against the floor, and kicked both legs into the oncoming attacker. That was tough. He felt like he was pushing up a truck with his legs. But he managed to stop the man's trajectory and then change it around, kicking him back onto the walkway.
Markus retraced his steps and nearly tripped over the feed bag.
‘You called the police yet?’ he shouted out to the store clerk or to whoever had the misfortune of still hanging around inside.
He heard a vague grunt which sounded like it belonged to the Moses freak. Not that Bentley wanted the police to become aware of his existence, especially with what he was about to do.
If the cops didn't come, there was only one solution left. The row of glass cases at the back of the store. The shock at the front when the car rammed the store hadn't damaged them.
Markus stood defiantly in front of the frozen fish as if they were worth defending with his life.
His pursuer came around the corner from the gardening section. Carrying a fresh pair of scissors. So that's why it had taken him so long. The man snapped the scissors as if to show Markus and himself they were working.
The hulk pulled his right arm back and then struck the scissors forward as if he wanted to knock a bull off its feet. But the bull ran. Markus jumped away to one side and the arm with the scissors landed in the freezer window instead. The glass shattered and showered both men. The driver was the least affected, he dropped the scissors but just turned around and grabbed Markus by his shirt and pulled him toward the glass.
Precisely at that moment, when the two men approached each other in front of the freezer, Markus launched both his fists and pulled the helmet over his pursuer's eyes. He then rammed his elbow into the man's stomach. Not a brilliant idea, because he had pads under his suit protecting that vital part of his anatomy.
The man took Bentley's right arm in his left and pulled it toward the freezer. Some shards of glass were still left in the window frame. The man was tugging Bentley's hand ever closer to the glass, as if he wanted him to pick up a coin from the floor. Markus licked his lips. He could do with some marzipan. He was sweating. His attacker was staring him right in the eyes from under his helmet.
‘Moses,’ Markus shouted out.
He didn't know why. He heard a grunt. His hand was touching the glass. Five more seconds and it would be cutting into his body.
They both heard the gun's safety. The man looked away and that was what Bentley didn't do. Instead he kicked his pursuer in the shins, rammed his knee up between the guy's legs, and worked his left arm free from his grip.
Markus pulled off the guy's helmet completely, revealing a bald-shaved head and the tattoo of a dragon in his neck. The vulnerable part. As the man was getting himself together again and pressing Bentley's arm against the glass, Markus was going for the jugular, literally. With his left hand, he grabbed the man's throat and pushed it back. Back against the frame, against the glass. With his final residue of power, Markus pulled back. Reculer pour mieux sauter, as the French saying goes. Take one step back so you can leap further forward. Markus applied all of his power to pushing the guy's thick neck back into the shards of glass, in one go. The man screamed. Markus nearly let go but he knew he couldn't. He bumped the man repeatedly into the glass until the blood streamed off the back of his head. Markus hoped this was the last time he would ever have to do something like this.
He stood up and turned around to see the clerk standing with the gun pointing at the floor.
‘Sorry for the mess,’ Markus said. ‘Was that gun loaded?’
‘Moses, man.’ The clerk shook his head. ‘It's just to scare people like him.’
Bentley went for his Honda and drove off without bothering to put a clean shirt on. He looked for a motel or a restaurant on the way where he could change into something fresh, but he still needed to hit the Q before midnight.

Markus didn't exactly fit in with the line of mostly young, wealthy-looking females on their night out, but this was the place Riot had mentioned to him. The Q bar across the street from the Brother Hotel before midnight.
He looked up at the hole in the middle of the roof structure, like the country bumpkin he had pretended to be for the past two months would've done.
Inside the place was a lot smaller than he had expected. A bar with one row of stools, most of them occupied. A wide dance floor and booths on the outside and on a second floor. He would be an easy target if there were a hitman in the house, he thought. The house was pulsating with funky house or with whatever they called disco nowadays. The public was mostly young, 60 percent female, half Caucasians, one third Hispanic and the rest African American. Bentley wasn't here to do an ethnic profile study.
He found himself the only free barstool, between a Hispanic couple in a lovey-dovey mood, and two women engaging in an enthusiastic conversation. He ordered a cider because he wanted to start the evening on a low key. The Long Island ice tea was for later, if he ever got there.
‘I got a four out of five this morning.’
Markus didn't have a clue what the woman on his right was talking about, but he was interested. She wasn't tall, but had a slender body and long dark hair. She looked slightly Hispanic but not markedly so.
‘Wow, you're getting better,’ the other woman, a truly American blonde, replied.
‘Drag racing?’ Markus ventured.
The two ladies turned around as if a deadly insult had been fired off. But they relaxed when they saw Bentley's smile. His oldest trick.
‘Guns,’ the darker woman said. ‘A woman's got to be prepared for everything.’
‘Markus Bentley,’ he introduced himself.
‘Bentley, like the car?’ the blonde asked.
Markus nodded. The conversation started, swung around the place and the latest city news, until it got more personal.
‘By the way, I've been rude. My friends call me Charlo' and you can too,’ the dark woman said.
‘Charlowhat?’
‘Charlotte, but it sounds too French, too medieval, too guillotine,’ she told him.
The other woman was called Ingrid but she left another ten minutes into the night.
‘To be honest with you, I'm here looking for someone who owes me money,’ Markus whispered into Charlotte's ears.
‘That's funny. I think he's more the type who thinks others owe him everything.’
‘Where can I find him?’
‘You can't. Not without me.’
‘You know him so well,’ Markus said, smiling his magic smile.
‘He's got something with women. We all know where he lives, but none of us has ever been inside,’ Charlo' said.
‘Why don't you point out to me where he lives, so I know where to find him if he doesn't pay.’
‘You wouldn't hurt him, would you?’ she asked.
‘Do I look like the hurtin' kind?’
She smiled, they finished their drinks and went for the exit. As they left the club, Charlo’ touched his shoulder.
‘Wait for me outside, I need to go back.’
She walked off to the ladies' restrooms, found a free booth, locked the door, sat down and flipped open her cell.
‘We're on our way to the kill.’

NEXT: Markus Bentley looks for his sister's killer in Episode Six of Concentric before November 1.

Season One, Episode Four: Riot

2008-10-08T08:28:00.004+08:00

Bentley reached for a knife, pulled the door open, grabbed the surprised man by the collar of his shirt and pulled him inside, forcing him down on his knees on the carpet.
‘Who are you? And what are you doing with this?’
‘Your sister.’
The man coughed.
‘Where is she? What did you do to her? Are you her murderer?’
‘She told me to give you this.’
He held the figurine of the three elderly men out for Markus to see. Bentley ripped it out of his hands and put it on the table without letting his visitor out of his sight.
‘Who are you?’
The man coughed and spitted blood while whispering a word.
‘Rye what? Say again.’
Bentley pulled him up by his collar and threatened to smash him into the table. The man nearly choked.
‘Riot.’
He spat blood on the carpet.
‘A riot? Where? What's that got to do with me?’
Markus pulled the man's head up by his hair while pointing the knife at his throat.
‘Riot. It's my name,’ the man uttered in a hoarse voice before closing his eyes. ‘Let me go. All she wanted me to do, was to give you this object.’
Markus let him kneel on the carpet. Riot or whatever his name was, had a hard time capturing his breath. Riot. Were there really people named like that?
‘Riot. Your sister never told you about me?’
‘If you knew her so well, what can you tell me about her killer?’
‘The guard did it.’
‘What's his name?’
‘I know where you can find him.’

‘How did you get here? I didn't see your car.’
Riot waved at the window.
‘I parked it way out of sight. Your sister told me not to approach you by car.’
Right she was.
‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about my sister.’
Markus was still holding the knife as he helped Riot to the door. The man spat more blood on his carpet.
‘You go get a doctor to look at you,’ Markus shouted as the man stumbled his way off the property.
He locked the door and inspected the figurine of the three elders. It wasn't damaged. He looked at the bottom, not in the hope of finding a secret compartment, he knew the object too well for that, but maybe his sister had taped or written a message on its bottom. No such luck. She hadn't had the time. Markus slapped his fist on the table.
Two total strangers had found the way to his house in just one morning. This place was cursed. Markus had to get out of here. He rushed upstairs and packed his luggage. Clothes and weapons. He packed his knife.
He hadn't counted on leaving again so soon.
He took a quick stride around the kitchen. Ripped open the refrigerator. A plastic pot with four balls of marzipan inside. That would get him through the day. He shoved it into his bag.
Markus went to the back of the house, into the garage which housed an eight-year-old Honda hatchback. The car was anonymous enough not to draw any attention, not too luxurious for the countryside, not too cheap for the city. The perfect vehicle for a man like Markus Bentley.
He was not a countryside man, but this location had helped him keep his distance from the city, from the people he hated seeing again.
He didn't need to tell the farmer about his departure.

Two villages away, where he wouldn't bump into the farmer or any other vague acquaintances, Markus Bentley stopped at a store. It had the wide top-to-bottom glass windows of a convenience store, but what it sold were the knickknacks of country living. Handy goods for handymen and handywomen. Knives and scissors in dozens of shapes and sizes. Fifty-five ways to cut up something. Anything.
There were about five rugged men shopping around, none of them acquaintances. Markus went to the back where the flashlights were. Past the cooking utensils and the batteries. He was weighing a big yellow torch in his hand when he heard the clerk at the desk sputter.
‘Moses, man,’ he heard the clerk shout.
The next second he saw, heard, and felt the car plow its way into the store, through the windows, rocking the whole structure before coming to a full stop just before the cash register. Markus kept his head low. He saw the driver's door swing open, sending more shards of glass across the clerk's desk.

NEXT: Markus Bentley meets Charlo' in Episode Five of Concentric before October 20.

Season One, Episode Three: Camry

2008-09-27T18:14:00.004+08:00

'Hitchcock it ain't, but it will do,' said the man.
He looked at the fading image of the woman looking up at the camera in the parking lot, and then clapped the laptop shut.
He was sitting in the back of the Mercedes F700, only barely acknowledging the presence of the bulky man in the front passenger seat who was trying to face him.
'Do you know how to get this to him?' he asked.
'The old-fashioned way, Mr. Camry.’
Camry disliked strangers using his name. Or using names anywhere, for that matter. Camry looked away to the chauffeur's neck, then to the passing cityscape outside. Five-lane highways.
He was wearing a nice Italian suit, but he still looked like the scrawny Eastside punk he grew up as. He'd rather be lounging around the house in shorts and Hawaiian shirt at his private pool, but today it just wasn't possible. There was work to do. The Brother Hotel wouldn't take types like him in half underwear.
'Make sure it's clean ten out of ten,' he said as he reached across the car to hand the laptop to the passenger.
The fat guy mumbled something. In another place, Camry would've slapped him for being disrespectful, if not worse. But he needed his suit to be immaculate for the meeting. So all he allowed himself was a look of disdain. Make the guy feel like he's shit, Camry thought.
He waved so the chauffeur caught the gesture. The car left the highway and stopped at the next intersection. Out stepped the passenger, clutching the laptop as if it were a treasure. It was.

Markus Bentley was reaching for a stick of marzipan on the plate next to his laptop. He was going through one of those forums for whining and homesick expats in an Asian country. He had never liked the word expat, it made him think of spoiled brats in suits, living in luxury apartments with swimming pool and chauffeur-driven cars paid for by the company back home. If they had kids, they sent them to astronomically expensive schools where they grew into the perfect copy of the spoiled brat their father was. Bentley had never been an expat of this type, and he didn't miss the life. He just wanted to stay aware of what was happening on his former home turf.
The sound of the car penetrated his spatial awareness like a fly suddenly turns up in your peripheral sight. You know there's something there, but it's only later you notice what it is and you know you don't like it. He looked up at the window on his right, even though you couldn't see the road from there.
Dry fields with lines of dry knob trees stretching between them, providing his place with a false sense of privacy. That was the reason he had chosen this place. Fortunately, he was not the one who had to get up early and toil in those fields all day long. That was the task of the farmer who lived across the road and who owned this place.
The farmer drove a truck and a couple of nasty-looking vehicles farmers drive on the fields. None of those machines produced the type of rhythm he was hearing now.
Bentley folded the laptop screen and stood up while munching on the marzipan.
At the end of the lane he could spot the mailbox. The farmer's house was hidden by apple trees and brushwork, a natural screen to stop curious looks in both directions.

'Here comes Mister Paranoia,' Markus said to noone in particular.
The dark red car drove up to his mailbox. With the engine still running, a fat guy in a suit stepped out, carrying a rectangular black object. Markus kept himself in the background, so the guy couldn't spot him. Even from inside, he could tell the guy was carrying a laptop or something like it. The fat man seemed to be checking the number on the mailbox, and then deposited the object at its foot. Before Markus had the chance to recover from his surprise, the man turned around and drove off.
Markus waited until the car had vanished and counted to ten. Then he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and walked out, digesting the last of his marzipan.
He approached the mailbox like it was a snarling mountain lion. With one more look in the direction of the empty road, he crouched on the dusty ground and looked at the object. It was a laptop alright, without a bag. Just sitting there in the dust. What kind of freak dumped a laptop like this on a stranger's front step, in the middle of the countryside? He must have driven here especially for him, otherwise he just could have dumped in a river or in the sea, or somewhere behind the bushes. Markus looked around once more and did the human thing. He picked up the thing, turned it around to see if it wasn't boobytrapped, and took the thing home. The battery had been taken out, so he had to plug it in.
While the thing warmed up, he went for another stick of marzipan in the fridge. If this were a movie, the laptop would blow up and smash his house into a fireball. Instead, it went on forever loading up. No password requested, but it ended with the arrow of the forward sign for a video recording. Was this guy going to share his exploits on YouTube?
Markus took another bite and risked it. He clicked the arrow.
Bentley swore and sat down. His appetite for marzipan was taking a break.
What was she doing, and what was that fat guy showing him this? Was this a new way of delivering a ransom note for a kidnap victim? He watched as the woman walked around the office and started packing up everything in sight. Markus had never been to her office. In fact, he hadn't met up with her in years. A phone call here and there, around Christmas if he remembered, because that was the old way of doing things.
One thing was certain. The laptop wouldn't blow up, not before the ending anyway. The fat guy in the car wanted him to see all of this.
Just like the guard at the office block had done before him, Markus peered at the screen trying to discern the objects the woman was taking away with her. Office equipment, pictures, but then there were the knickknacks to think about. Bentley leaned closer.
He froze when he saw the guard in his room watching the woman on camera. He tried to memorize his face, but there was not that much to go on.
He recognized the small porcelain effigy of the three men which the woman put in her cloth bag. He didn't recognize the faceless red doll. Was that a cat, or a red snowman, or what other creature. The thing wore Chinese characters on its chest.
He saw the guard reach for his gun. The woman in the elevator. Not getting out through the front door. The woman alone in the parking lot. The camera turned away.
Markus pushed his chair backward and slammed his fist on the table next to the laptop. The screen returned to the arrow. He could watch it all again if he wanted to.

A low buzz reached him from under the table. He had installed the sensors in the middle of the night, to avoid attracting his only neighbor's attention. Country folks could be nosy. The sensors didn't cover the mailbox and the side of the street, only the immediate vicinity of the house.
Markus stood up and pressed himself against the wall, near the same window from where he had watched the fat guy dump the laptop. Was he coming to take back his prized possession?
Bentley moved ever so slightly forward. The door bell rang. It sounded like a waterfall compared to the whisper of the alarm buzzer. Why hadn't hear the car approaching?
Markus edged closer to the window. Until he saw his uninvited visitor. Definitely not the fat guy with the laptop. A wiry thin guy, shaking, holding an object in his left hand. The porcelain figurine of the three men Bentley had seen his sister remove from her office.

NEXT: A Riot comes down in Episode Four of Concentric before October 12.

Season One, Episode Two: Four Weeks Earlier

2008-09-18T09:51:00.004+08:00

The woman was young, on the eve of her thirties, but she didn't show it. No visible tattoos, no shiny studs in any visible parts of her anatomy. Not that you'd see much, she was wearing the power suit reserved for female managers and executives. A small Louis Vuitton Damier Azur bag was resting against the back of her chair.
Her office was the only one on that floor still showing activity, her colleagues had left their offices and turned the lights out. She unbuttoned the top end of her blouse, an impulsive consequence of management's decision to use less air conditioning in order to reduce carbon emissions.
The woman looked out of the window, at the flow of traffic on the boulevard five stories below. She logged out of her computer and waited until the screen went dark with a floop.
She pulled a cloth shopping bag out of her desk and started putting in everything that was on her desk. First the files she had last been working on, then the computer USB sticks. Slowly, methodically, like it was something she did every night before heading home.
Writing implements, a ruler, a block of yellow adhesive notes. When her desk was bare, she stood up, left the bag on her chair, and walked up to the window to glance outside. Traffic was thick, as it should be when people leave work, head home, or head for pleasure.
The woman went to the closets behind her desk, where she had used a flat cut-out space in the middle to put some knickknacks.
She looked up to the camera in the corner next to the door as if seeing it for the first time.

The guard put down his corn soup. His hand hovered over his cream bagel, then over the cell phone on the table beside it. Did he have to call this one in?
They had had some really cracking customers at this company, and he didn't want to overplay his hand and sound more paranoid than management were.
If he called this one in, he'd better have a good reason. More than just a woman dusting off her own place. Maybe she was taking a vacation, and felt unsure about leaving her stuff unattended for so long. Damn right she was, that smart lady.

The young woman looked at the objects in the space in front of her. A portrait of her with a young man against a Rocky Mountain kind of backdrop. She let her hand stay a bit too long on its frame before shoving the picture into the cloth bag.
She handled the exotic stuff next. A porcelain white cat, something which looked like a small red animal with Chinese writing on it, a small porcelain effigy of three people, a piece of brown colored glass with a plant in it.

The guard took another sip from his corn soup and a bite from his bagel before he put his face closer to the screen. He couldn't figure out what kind of stuff she was putting into her bag.
He knew he had to use his cell for this kind of thing. They would give him another one tomorrow.
'We've got one subject moving,' he whispered into his cell as if she could hear him.
'The neat lady on the fifth.’
He put down the cell without a word and reached for the gun in his holster.

The woman went round the room, putting almost anything that could move into her shopping bag. An expensive pen. A bottle of water from the cool black dresser on the other side of the office. Even a bottle of water?
When she was done pulling stuff off the furniture, she checked her bag for a bulge. Nothing. All her stuff was small so it wouldn't attract attention as she walked by any acquaintances on her way down.
She started wiping fingerprints off furniture and door knobs with a handkerchief. Then she left the office, putting one step back into the room to turn off the light. A stupid mistake.
She hit the button to call an elevator. One was on the first floor, the other on the tenth. The one on the tenth was coming down.

The guard's hand hovered over the elevator controls. He watched the woman on another screen. The gun was lying next to the empty soup bowl. As soon as he saw the woman enter the elevator, he pushed a couple of buttons on the console under the screens. Several lights turned from green to red. He watched the screen showing the lobby on the first floor.
The woman exited the elevator with her cloth bag and the small brand-name bag which was too small to hide anything in. She headed for the front door, as the guard had expected. He grinned as she tried to pull it open and failed.
She looked around her, wondering why the main guard had left the front desk. She went to the back, round the elevator block, to a long narrow hallway with a heavy steel door at the end.
The guard turned the camera showing the parking lot away from the cars, in the direction of the ceiling. He hit a button, turning the light from red to green, took his gun and left the room.

The woman held the two bags pressed against her side as she pushed the steel door open. At least it wasn't locked. She sighed once she was outside. The covered parking lot was in front of her. The exit to the alley behind the office complex was somewhere straight ahead, right at the other end of all the cars. Considering the hour, there were still a lot of cars around.
Instead of following a straight line, she went round the back of the second row of cars. She looked around and saw nobody. She looked at the pillars but nobody seemed to be hiding. She looked up at the ceiling.
She saw the camera turned upward and knew what it meant.

NEXT: Find out about Camry and reconnect with Markus Bentley in the next episode of Concentric before September 30.

Season One, Episode One: Speedokiniland

2008-09-08T10:24:00.003+08:00

Markus Bentley was sweating. Admittedly, it was hot. Sun shining, brewing hot. But he was only wearing tiny swimming trunks and carrying a towel. Like most people here outside the Brother Hotel. Welcome to Speedokiniland.
He stayed on the path winding its way through the palm trees and the other subtropical vegetation he knew nothing about. Smiled cheesily at the couple of young girls drifting by in the opposite direction.
The deep house music told him which direction the pool was in. The mood was very different from his previous visit.
Bentley saw the young women on the left of the pool, but pretended not to notice. He let his eyes drift to the company across the water, on the right, a bunch of dark tan men with women swooning around them. Two retired couples at the far end of the pool, obviously trying to stay away as far as possible from the deep house drifting out of the pool bar, on his right before he hit the pool. Always put the pool bar at the front, so you get first choice of the arriving customers. Two middle-aged men were waiting for their orders right now. Markus didn’t recognize the barman.
He stuck to the left edge of the pool and the obviously predictable happened.
'Hi, Bent.’
'Ola, chica.’
He wished she had remembered not to mention names. With a bit of luck, the sound of his name was drowned out by the house music and nobody would remember after the panic. He looked back at the other guests, she thought he was checking out the ladies. He preferred Markus or Bentley, but the stupid abbreviation had stuck.
'Bent.’
There, she did it again. He thought about showing off that little finger as a friendly warning, but that would have meant revealing what he was holding under the towel.
Bentley crouched next to the three young ladies and one young man in the group. Joking and bantering, that’s what he was here for. So they had to think. She introduced her friends but he forgot their names as soon as he was letting his eyes wander away from them. They were gorgeous people, but that was not what he was here for.
He nodded vigorously at the end of a question. One of the women started talking. Bentley smiled at her and looked at the pool bar. One customer was staying on, the other one was wading across to this side. Not good. Bentley smiled back at the speaker and looked again. The guy with the pinacolada or whatever was sticking to the side of the pool like a jellyfish. Not good.
'Bent, do you think they’ll make a good couple?’
Fortunately, the woman speaking was pointing at the young dude and the brunette sitting on his chair. Bentley nodded.
'You’re beautiful people. Sure.’
A brutally loud laugh resounded from behind them, from the other side of the pool. A perfect excuse for Bentley to turn his body half around and look at the source of the commotion.
The guy with the dark mustache and the gold-framed shades was having the time of his life, slapping the bikini babes and the shady guys crowded around him like shoppers around a market stall.
Bentley counted three bodyguards around the man. One guy swimming down there in the pool could also be a member of their entourage. But Markus had no time to wait. The loud laugher was fondling one of his lady friends, gross.
Bentley shot another look at the pool bar. An elderly woman was inquiring for the specialty of the day.
Bentley turned to the young woman closest to him.
'Too bad but this is where my vacation ends, now I have to start working.’
He took hold of the woman, gently but convincingly. As he turned her around to face the opposite side of the pool, the towel slipped out of his hands. To reveal the Glock he had been holding awkwardly underneath.
The young people in his group screamed as they saw what he was doing. But he had no time for them.
He raised his arms around the woman, pointing the gun straight at the loud bozo across the water. Fired as he stood still for a long second. Then pushed the woman forward. Fired some more as he saw the bodyguards around the man reach for the towels on their chairs. Where they had been hiding their own firepower.
Bentley pushed the woman forward as he kept firing at the men. Only the men, not the women, please. Those men treated them as decoration, so he didn’t want to harm them.
Around the pool, pinacoladas and other pseudotropical juice clattered against the ground.
The guy who had gotten his drink from the pool bar just minutes ago dropped the glass into the pool and clambered out, slipping back in again.
Bentley didn’t pay him any attention. He held on to the woman, whispered something into her ear, and together they jumped into the pool, still firing at the men.
Just in time, because one of the bodyguards had finally gotten hold of his 9 millimeter, and was firing it at the surface of the pool, where Bentley and his companion had been just seconds before.
The guy kicked a woman out of the way, nearly tripped over the blood of one of his colleagues, and fired into the pool.
Under water, Bentley held his lady friend tighter as he saw the bullet pierce its way to the bottom of the pool.
The swimmer looked at them and saw the gun. Instead of being scared to death, the guy headed straight for Bentley. Keeping low, trying to place the woman between them.
Markus let go of his friend, fired the gun at the approaching shark. To his amazement, things worked like they had told him. The bullet found its target, and blood started leaking out of the man’s head into the water.
Bentley turned his attention up and fired a couple more rounds out of the pool.
When there was no reaction, he took the woman’s hand and made a sign to go up. Enough water for today. The woman surfaced first, gagged, and saw the remaining bodyguard point his gun at her head. She screamed.
Bentley was next, his hand with the Glock in front of him, firing. The man fired a bullet into the side of the pool, millimeters clean over the woman’s head. Bentley’s bullet didn’t miss. The bodyguard joined his colleagues.

'Run out of here, but not with me,’ Bentley shouted at the woman as they climbed out of the pool, which was gradually coloring red with the blood of the dead swimmer.
Bentley didn’t look back but ran away between the palms. On bare feet, the Glock and his swimming trunks his only possessions.
He tripped over a root. Landed with his face in the grass. Looked around him. The barman from the pool was behind him.
How could he have been so stupid. That’s why he hadn’t recognized him. It wasn’t the regular barman. At least, the guy didn’t look like he was armed.
Bentley could outrun him, so he wouldn’t have to kill anybody anymore.
He was approaching the front of the hotel. He came round the corner, saw the valet handling the keys.
Bentley rammed the guy, sending him against the pavement and his keys all over the place. He grabbed a key straight blind, hoping it wouldn’t be a Smart. Nope. The keys had the blue and white squares from the Bavarian flag.
He ran under the straw roof protecting the cars from the sun. he flashed the remote around, trying to find the right car as the barman arrived at the front door.
The lights flashed. On an X7X, a heavy dark SUV. Thank God for that. From the corner of his eyes as he climbed into the vehicle, he saw the barman grab a set of keys from the pavement.
Bentley screeched out of the parking lot, into the two-lane street in front of the hotel. Heading north like he’d planned.
As he was passing the intersection, he saw the car behind him. A Chevrolet Ganache. The women’s version of the Corvette. Low, sexy, red, convertible. Top down, a good target if he wanted to have a go at his pursuer. The barman.
The SUV was an automatic, that was fine with Markus. Less time needed to be spent on shaking around. Keep your eyes on the road and on your pursuer.
He felt silly driving a heavy vehicle wearing nothing but a pair of downsized swimming trunks, but hey, this situation was out of the ordinary. The barman wasn’t exactly dressed for a hot pursuit either.
Bentley saw the guy swerving to the left and coming past him as they careened across an intersection. Bad idea. Bentley went left himself, hitting the sports car. The barman slowed down but stuck close.
Markus looked at the Glock on his dashboard, but thought it would be a bad idea to handle it while driving. Don’t Glock and drive.
Instead, he tensed and watched the road ahead. There it was, the pedestrian crossing from the hotel zone to the beach.
Just as the lights turned red, he braked, turned the car left and went right on to the beachfront walk amid screams from the tourists. The barman was still following him.
Bentley turned on his headlights and honked like it was snowing in hell. The tourists dispersed alright, but not all of them as fast as Markus had expected. Scared parents pulled their kids into the sand, skaters went right into the boardwalk café and rammed the waiters, sending the hamburger and pizza plates shattering around.
As he was guiding the car around a fountain, his swimming trunks were emitting an electronic noise. He grabbed into his crotch and pulled out a cell phone.
'I did what you told me to, how you told me to. What more do you want?’
His lips tightened. He threw the cell on the passenger seat. The barman was still following.
Bentley suddenly braked, forcing his pursuer into a maze of fruit stalls, paintings, fitness equipment and musical instruments left behind by buskers who had seen him coming.
The stuff was flying around, but Bentley wasn’t watching, he was hurrying to get some distance between the barman in the red convertible and him.
The next pedestrian crossing over the main road was coming up. Markus picked up speed and saw the surprise on the face of the truck driver who was going parallel with him on the main road.
Bentley honked at the family ready to cross the road. They moved into the sand, good for them. He pulled the SUV to the right, left the beach path with just inches left, saw a bus coming but drove across the road to put himself short in front of the truck.
The barman followed him but he wasn’t fast enough. The truck hit him with a full broadside. He careened back across the road and hit the bus. The red convertible was propelled onto the beach, but the barman was already flying through the air with the life out of him. Not wearing seat belts in a convertible. Bad idea.
Bentley saw the wreckage in his rearview mirror. He shook his head.
He would do anything for his sister. Even shoot a thug in a crowded swimming pool. Camry thought he would. He was right. But now he had to do things for himself.

NEXT: Find out what happened Four Weeks Earlier in the next episode of Concentric before September 20.

The Friday Writer

2008-09-03T10:10:00.003+08:00

So I'm busy with the final preparations to launch my action thriller series on this blog.
The changes included a new name - "Rio" Moss instead of Sean Moss. The three-letter word is short, as pseudonyms are supposed to be, it's easily pronounceable, it's Spanish for 'river' and therefore a bit exotic which I like, and it's not completely off the charts because there's a famous British football player called Rio Ferdinand.
I also changed the story title from 'Hermetic' to 'Concentric.' First of all, because the former word featured already in blog and website names. Secondly, you'll have to wait and find out when you read the story.
I also have my final design ready for the structure of the story. It's still going to be freeflow, so part of it I will make up as I go along. That's the fun of it, writing one bit each week. So that's what it's going to be. Like a TV series, but on the computer screen, on a blog. One episode each week. An action thriller, with inspiration from everything from Snatch to Die Hard to Prison Break, 24, and maybe even Lost, though I'll try to keep the supernatural out of it.
I have the first episode pretty much completed in my mind, the second episode as well, the third one is taking shape. I had hoped to promote my undertaking on MySpace and Facebook, but I doubt those are really the right tools for that. There are still the forums, though many ban links to blogs. So I'll have to make up my promotion campaign as I go along as well.
Friday will be my first day of writing, though I can't promise the first episode will be on there by Friday night. I hope to reserve each Friday for writing 'Concentric,' finishing one neat episode each week and putting it on the blog either by Friday night or at least Saturday.
The rest of the week will be dedicated to my day job and to my 'real' thriller, i.e. a book I want to get published and therefore cannot reveal anything about on this blog. It's a real 100,000-word book that I hope to finish and send around to publishers in a European country by the end of the year. The subject is topical, the style is - I hope - Lee Child and Daniel Silva, but in a different setting.
See you later this week for 'Concentric,' Season One, Episode One: Speedokiniland.

By Rio Moss.

Changing Names? Yes, We Can!

2008-08-29T08:15:00.002+08:00

Yes, I have given the green light to Sean Moss to convert this blog into his writing paradise.
But you can already tell from the new title and the background color change. However, there might be another name change straight ahead.
We started out as Taiwan Fashionista in the days when I let myself be enthused by a newspaper report about a Frenchman working as a 'cool hunter' in Japan, taking pictures of stylish young women on the streets of Tokyo and then trying to sell his expertise of Japanese style and fashions to anyone interested. I was dreaming of doing the same thing in Taiwan, but Taiwan is not the style capital of the world - it follows Tokyo and Hong Kong more than anything else - and I didn't have the time anyway. So Taiwan Fashionista the blog became a loose collection of remarks about new shops opening, new and old shops closing, and the occasional style-related event or book review. Those items will still be there for view on the new blog.
Then along came S2S, Senses to Senses, an attempt at expanding the style idea to include everything that appeals to the senses, from traveling to cars and ads. For that purpose, I recruited two new writers, Shadrilla Kems, mostly for fashion, and Sean Moss, for travel and cars. And writing.
Sean soon talked me into a new overhaul: he wanted to write an action series on the Internet and could he have this blog to do it. I first balked at the idea, because this is my blog and his idea is so different. But he's very persuasive, I saw some of his writings and ideas both on and off this blog, so in the end I agreed. This is going to be the blog by Sean Moss. Shadrilla Kems has lots of other projects going, so don't you worry about her.
However, we unexpectedly bumped into another problem. Should we keep the slightly misleading URL taiwanfashionista to change into something new? First of all, we found out that both Hermetic - the title of Sean's story - and seanmoss were already taken as blogspot URL names. The latter is only a phantom blog with the letters JJJJ as its title, but still, we can't use it anymore.
Then we went looking for ways to promote the new blog, you know, social networks and the like. But there again, we found out that our Sean Moss is not the only one in the world, he already has namesakes on MySpace and Facebook and the like. They might not be thriller writers, but still. We want to avoid confusion. If Sienna Miller writes to Sean Moss, the message better arrive at our Sean Moss.
So what did we do? We changed names. Again. Too bad, but I told Sean to take a pen name. It's similar, but different. Short, because some wise people on the Internet think writers should have short four- or five-letter names so they can be printed really large on the book cover.
But we're not revealing the new name for Sean Moss and for his blog and work quite yet. We'll first do all the registering so we're sure we control the names. It'll be the final name change. Honestly. We're still evaluating whether to stay at the taiwanfashionista URL or take a new one. If it's the new one, we'll change all the references to the blog in our signatures on forums and the like. Too bad some forums, like the ones on the Fox TV services, don't even allow links to blogs. One way less of attracting interested people to Sean's stories.
That's life. As Taiwan Fashionista and S2S are about to enter a completely new life, I bid you 'arrivederci' but not farewell. If Sean Moss is generous, I might still pop in for a comment on his writing or so. Keep watching this space.

Grazie,
Enzo Ciancia.

Just an Idea

2008-08-20T09:04:00.002+08:00

As a beginning thriller writer, I've been thinking of ways to promote my writing. Of course, my main activity is still writing the books. My first one went out to the publishers, I have four rejections so far, and three replies still expected. Like any eager writer, I have followed up my first book by starting work on my second. I'm still hopeful for the first one, but by the time all publishers have replied to my first query, I want to have the second book ready to go.
Yet, writing is a lonely job. That's why I now have an idea to change that. What do I want to do now?
Write a book on a blog. I hear you say, that's not original, lots of people have published Internet books. What I want to do is this: write a thriller chapter by chapter, and put each chapter up on my blog as I finish them. I'm shooting for one episode a week, to keep reader interest going. I won't be writing the book first, and then putting up a finished, polished work on the Web.
I want to write free style, write one chapter with the content I think up on the spot. Once the chapter is finished, I post it on the blog immediately, with only minor reviews for typos and grammar.
Episode after episode, chapter after chapter, week after week.
There are some minus points about this, of course. First of all, you will say I'm throwing my writing out there for everyone, including the sharks who don't care about copyright and might steal my ideas and my words. Fair enough, but it's still going to be fun.
The second danger is that I run out of ideas after five or ten chapters, and the whole structure comes creaking down on me. Or I'll write myself into a corner, not knowing where to take the story next and falling into rambling and rumbling. At least, I have to give it a try.
Then there's the question of where. Of course, I would like to put my writings right up here. But for that, I'll have to consult my host Enzo Ciancia and see if his generosity matches my appetite for self-promotion. Enzo founded this blog with fashion in mind, and that's what he and the lovely Shadrilla Kems want to be writing about. If I get the green light, I would also like to change the layout of the blog, because pink and my thriller writings just don't match, sorry, Enzo.
Or should I start up a separate blog, or even a completely new web site for my writings?
Over the next week, I shall continue to refine my ideas and consult with you guys on the Internet, on forums and blogs, to see how you do it, and how feasible or ludicrous my idea is. As you know, I write for fun, and what could be more fun than writing on and on on the Internet?
As far as style is concerned, I'm thinking of my blog story in television terms, it's like a series with weekly episodes you look forward to. As to content, I feel inspiration from action TV series like Prison Break, 24, Lost, The X-Files, but maybe with more action elements, more Asian influence - Asia is after all where I live - and more sunshine. My ideas are already here on paper, I just need to find ways to put them on the World Wide Web and make them attractive enough so that other people will want to read them. I need to do what a good writer does. I need to go there and do my research. See you soon.

By Sean Moss for S2S.

Write What You Know

2008-08-18T09:58:00.002+08:00

Every writer will hear those words: write what you know.

If I took that literally, I wouldn't be writing very much, thank you. Maybe I'd be a travel writer, because I like traveling in all its aspects, from the bus ride through interesting scenery, to the walk around 2,000-year-old ruins, to the thing in the picture: lazying around in a paradise-like environment.

But you don't have to take it literally. You don't have to have an expensive law degree like John Grisham to write about treacherous lawyers. I agree, it does help, and it did help him to turn his books into megabestsellers, but to me, those four words mean something else.

First of all, if you're a writer, you do more than writing, you read. And you probably like writing what you like to read. The same genre, that is. If you've been reading thrillers for decades, like me, you probably feel at home in that genre, you know the tricks of the trade. Maybe you can't list them all right away, but you can tell where they are. You know the thriller. So if you have to write what you know ... there it is. Write a thriller.

But unless you're really extremely smart, you probably can't know everything. Does that mean you have to refrain from writing certain things? If you're lazy like everyone sometimes is, then yes. Don't write about a gun firing off 9 rounds if you don't know whether it's the model that can. In the old days, when I was young, I loved browsing through encyclopedias. But today's people have it far easier. The most beautiful invention of all times in my eyes is the Internet. You can find anything on the Internet. Even how guns work. So there is no excuse anymore. If you don't want to sound stupid to those who know more than you on a certain topic, go and do your research. Write what you know. What you might not know today, you certainly could know tomorrow.

I write what I love at home, and I write what I know at home and at work, even though they are completely different things. And next, I have an idea to do something more with this blog. But first, I have to go and ask the blogmeister, Enzo Ciancia, and see what he thinks about me taking up more of his space. I let you know more later this week. See you!

By Sean Moss for S2S.

The New Harry Potter

2008-08-13T22:15:00.003+08:00

There's always a craze which has to be followed.
Right now, the competition is hot for who can call himself or herself the new J.K.Rowling with the new Harry Potter.
The winner for the time being seems to be Stephenie Meyer, who had a full article devoted to her work and her online marketing campaign in a recent Business Week. She also seems to have taken over, if not the world, then certainly the Amazon Top 10.
What is she writing about? Vampires and children. Who is the target audience? Children, or, well, teenagers.
Maybe another contender would be Neil Gaiman. His tales also mix fantasy, children, gods, and other magical elements. And he sells. I don't know how much, but he does.
So should I also be writing fantasy for children or teenagers - or YA (Young Adults) - the politically correct expression for the easily offendible?
My first question is: aren't most societies graying, with children, teachers and pregnant women becoming a rare sight?
My second question is: aren't doomsayers telling us that kids don't read anymore because they're too busy with their Wii, MP3, online games, Facebook and MySpace?
Well, maybe, but at least, the world is a large place, and not all children have given up on the printed word yet. And their parents have more spending power, at least until the recent price rises, so books will still find buyers.
So should I write for young people?
My answer is still no. Because there are already many people out there doing a fine job of writing for children, even if they haven't reached J.K. Rowling status yet. No because I want to enjoy myself, and I do that writing thrillers and action stories, not fantasy for young minds. No because I'm not a crass commercial mind, targeting my writing at certain focus groups just to make money.
I want to enjoy myself, I want to write what I feel. And that brings us to the saying every writer hears: write what you know.
But that's for my next entry in this blog.

By Sean Moss for S2S.

Web Comics

2008-08-08T08:50:00.002+08:00

I told you how seeing the movie 'Wanted' with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman - I wish him a speedy recovery after his accident - got me interested in cartoons, anime, manga, animation, comics, and all these other things I can't tell apart.

My interest took me to buy the book 'Webcomics' by Steve Withrow and John Barber at Page One at the not inconsiderable cost of more than 1,000 NT dollars.

I now also finished reading the book, and I've learned two main things: you have to learn a lot of software before you can present comics online, and making money out of comics is even more difficult than doing it writing thrillers, which is what I want to do.

The book presents a ream of comic artists from the United States, Great Britain and Canada. The top name I learned about is Scott McCloud. He's supposed to be the guru of web comics, not just drawing some of its finest examples, but also published books on its theoretical underpinnings. What I'm interested in, is the practice, not the theory, but fortunately, this book also shows each artist featured going through the process of writing a comic from the pencil sketches and screenplays right up to the moment the finished work appears on the Internet.

It's not simple. There's all kinds of software involved, mostly Illustrator and Photoshop and Flash, but also more obscure stuff like Poser and the Wacom tablet. Professional graphic artists surely think all this is really simple, but I would face an uphill learning curve. And need a strong budget to afford all that software.

All in all, I'm still glad I read that book. It also told me that you have free web sites, mostly owned by individual artists who try to make a living off the merchandise, and sites where you have to register and pay. Some of those are collectives offering a wide range of comics from different artists. The names of sites I remembered the most are Modern Tales, Komikwerks and Keenspot.

Anyway, I think I'll stick to writing thrillers for the time being. Even though I need to get to 300-400 pages and 100,000 words, making a web comic of the same story seems like double the work to me: you still have to write the story, the plot, the dialogue, the characters, but when that is over, you still have to draw the whole story in pages of attractive drawings. And get the whole thing to look right on a computer screen.

Reading the book, I felt I was learning a lot, and I'll keep looking out for good comics sites, books and news about the art.

By Sean Moss for S2S.

Angelina Jolie drives a Lada

2008-08-01T09:03:00.003+08:00

Yes, she does. At least in the movie 'Wanted' which I went to see with mixed feelings.
I'm an old-fashioned guy, so I didn't know if the violence and brutality was going to be over the top. I can tell you right now: it was, sometimes, and I certainly didn't appreciate the furry animals, but the fact is, the brutality was offset by the visual excitement.
I'm not going to tell you what Angelina Jolie did with her Lada - you probably saw the trailers with her doing tricks with a Dodge Viper, but not the Lada chase - so I don't want to spoil your enjoyment.
The movie actually reminded me of Guy Ritchie's 'Snatch.' Violence, swear words, brutality, thuggishness you only want to see in films, but also visual flair. The bullets, the jumps, the cars, the train. This movie rocks and you want to know why?
Two words: graphic novel. Hollywood has fallen in love with cartoons, animation, manga, and the graphic novel. And that means we get too many of those movies, with only a small minority worth watching.
I'm an old-fashioned guy - I already told you - so I grew up with the adventures of Tintin, the Belgian journalist traveling around the world with his coterie of weird friends and his cute doggie. Then there were Asterix and Obelix, the Gaul villagers who singlehandedly defended their home against the armies of Julius Caesar while also traveling around the world, including a visit to the Olympics in Greece. Then there was Alex, the young kid living in the Antiquity, dealing with Romans, Greeks, Egyptians.
All pretty civilized stuff, often funny, but always enriching. So now we're in 2008. Graphic novels are known for their darkness, ominousness - is that a word? - violence, brutality, and sometimes cruelty and misogyny verging on pornography. The graphic novel version of 'Wanted' is a lot more violent and crude than what director Timur Bukmambetov put on the screen. But that's because they're written and drawn for adults, not for the children who read Tintin, Asterix and Alex. I hope they still do, anyway.
The fire and brimstone of 'Wanted' has had one result. I bought myself an expensive copy of 'Webcomics' by Steven Withrow and John Barber. You can look it up on Amazon or other sites, it gives you an overview of what's going on with online graphic stories.
Will I start writing a graphic novel? Unlikely, it looks like double the work of a written novel. I already spent months writing a 300-page thriller, printing it, sending it off to publishers, and waiting for a response - so far, 4 negative, and 3 no-shows, if you have to know. I do what all writers do: while waiting for something miraculous to happen with the first novel, start writing a second one. I won't deviate from that plan, certainly not for a gigantic enterprise like dozens of pages of drawings and text balloons.
But it's well worth some research. And I like watching Angelina Jolie drive a Lada.

By Sean Moss for S2S.

Blogs, Time, and Money

2008-07-29T08:32:00.003+08:00

It seems like you need time and money to be able to say you have a successful blog. The problem is, I've got neither. OK, I know you can put ads up on your blog, but you still need a decent amount of visitors to make that pay. Also, my kind of blogs don't lend themselves much to advertising.

It's not that I'm in the blogs game to make money, though it would be fun. Don't you dream sometimes of becoming famous through your blog, or even better, through your web site you're selling off to Google or to another megawebmogul for millions of dollars?

The Enzo Ciancia slash S2S venture began when I read a newspaper article about a French guy in Japan who made money by, listen guys, visiting clothing stores and taking pictures of young Japanese ladies in the street. Yes, it was all about fashion and spotting fashion trends. I dreamt of doing the same thing in Taiwan, only, Taiwan isn't one of the world's hottest fashion capitals, and local newspapers are already doing the same thing. But that was the gist of my first blog, Taiwan Fashionista, now renamed as S2S.

From clothes the Enzo Ciancia brand went to no clothes. In Mediterranean climes, it feels much more comfortable not to be wearing any clothes, especially for swimming and sunbathing. So a blog started to make the idea of naturism more popular in Taiwan, http://asianaturist.blogspot.com. This one might earn the warning notice NSFW - not suitable for work, but then maybe any blog would have to warn you about this, because if you're working, you're not supposed to be looking at any blogs.

I also admire the people who can crawl into the skin of a famous person and pretend they are him or her writing a blog. But hey, even Fake Steve is now giving it up. He was pretending to be Steve Jobs at http://fakesteve.blogspot.com. You have to sound realistic, all the while keeping it funny and colorful. I don't think a fake Alan Greenspan blog would work, but a fake Richard Branson might. Belgian politicians seem to be favorite targets, former Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene had his fake blog in Dutch at http://jeanlucdehaene.blogspot.com, but it died a quick death. Another example is the Enzo Ciancia-related http://jeanmariededecker.blogspot.com.

A more unwieldy and expensive way of making a name in the blogosphere or money on the web is of course opening up a real full-blown web site, not just a blog, but a site with a dotcom name that you choose, and with your own pictures, designs, forums, and the whole shebang. But that needs even more time and more money to develop, and as I mentioned, I'm short of both. The Enzo Ciancia brand controls two domain names that haven't been developed yet.

One is a fan site for Taiwanese actress Judy Hu or Hu Ting-ting at www.tingtinghu.com. Hu is a young actress who's spending most of her time in Britain, and therefore has managed to obtain small parts in movies like "Around the World in 80 Days" with Jackie Chan and "Breaking and Entering" with Jude Law. She is also known in Taiwan as the daughter of a prominent politician. But should such a site be launched in English or in Chinese? Or maybe bilingual, but then you get all kinds of issues, only half the site accessible to half the people, etcetera.

Another potential jewel in the Enzo Ciancia crown is www.hsiehshuwei.com, a fan site for one of Taiwan's class of rising female tennis stars. The problem is, I need to watch more sports and follow tennis from a closer distance, which means, yes, I need more time. Maybe it would work better as a blog, in Chinese for a Taiwanese audience, who are all over these stars anyway.

So, while I munch and mumble over whether I should be impersonating Richard Branson or reading and writing about Taiwanese tennis stars, you are probably already writing your successful blog, attracting thousands of readers because unlike me, you write more than twice a month on only one blog, about popular Hollywood teenage stars or already near-the-summit football giants. Anyway, whatever happens to the Enzo Ciancia brand, I wish you good luck.

Marks & Spencer: We Told You So

2008-07-10T10:23:00.002+08:00

Is it already 14 months since British superbrand Marks & Spencer entered Taiwan, opening one store in Kaohsiung and two in expensive parts of Taipei?
It must be, because then there was still no S2S team and this blog was known as Taiwan Fashionista and run by one person, Enzo Ciancia.
And he had it right when he voiced doubts at the time that Marks & Spencer could make it in Taiwan. Too many clothing chains already, Enzo said. Not outstanding and special enough, he said. Has an old-fashioned image in Europe, he said. Food's great but too expensive and not well-known enough for Taiwan, he said.
So look now: Marks & Spencer, a classic brand in Britain, a well-known name in Europe - even though it received a battering when it closed down its stores in most of the continent - has decided to give it up and leave Taiwan.
A huge loss of face and an admission of defeat. A classic brand that can't make it in consumerist Taiwan. Also a sorry affair for its omnipresent Taiwanese business partner, the President group of 7-11, Starbucks, Mister Donut, Cosmed and other fame.
All we can do now is rush the stores and buy up the lot, as many shoppers seem to have already done. Goodbye, Marks & Spencer, maybe one day ...

By Shadrilla Kems for S2S.

From Bags to Riches (3): Doing It For Yourself

2008-07-01T19:43:00.004+08:00

Yes, I finished the book quite a while ago but I've been slow in adding my conclusion to this blog, so here it is: Michael Tonello's 'Bringing Home the Birkin' is to fashion and brands what Peter Mayle's 'A Year in Provence' is to foreigners wanting to move to the Mediterranean and buying an old house there.

You'll read about it in a very quick tempo and then want to start doing it yourself.

And that's the whole point of this post: could I start buying up Birkins myself and selling them at a profit?

First of all, as Michael writes in his book, Hermes now has a web site, which makes it easier for its fans to get their hands on those classic products.

Then there's also the three standard factors 'location, location, location' to consider: isn't Taiwan the wrong place to be doing this sort of thing? Most European and American luxury products seem to be cheaper in their country of origin, despite the obvious higher standard of living there. Blame most Asian governments for taxing luxury products at a high rate. Which is probably why Michael bumped into Asian resellers here and there.

So if I buy, say, Birkins, in Taiwan, will I be able to resell them at a profit on the Internet or to other resellers, such as the Createurs de Luxe Michael mentioned in his book? Traveling to Europe to get my hands on cheaper Birkins than in Asia isn't likely to work, especially with the rising price of oil making air travel more expensive. If I stick to Taipei, there won't be much choice, the store under the Grand Formosa Regent pictured in my previous posting, or the one on the ground level of the 'green giant' Sogo BR4 department store.

Should I turn my attention to other products? Say, Balenciaga's Motorcycle Bag? Or Louis Vuitton's - I should really say, Takashi Murakami's - new line of bags known as Monogramouflage?

Maybe I need to brainstorm for a little bit longer, or send an e-mail to Michael himself to ask the man for advice. After all, he was so kind to write a comment on my first post about his book. You can find more info about him at http://www.bringinghomethebirkin.com/, which also includes a blog listing his appearances.

From Bags to Riches (2)

2008-06-13T14:41:00.002+08:00

So I'm more than halfway through Michael Tonello's book 'Bringing Home the Birkin' and I'm enjoying the ride.

Michael describes his evolution from a top Hermes scarf reseller to his discovery of the Birkin handbag.

I still don't understand how he manages to make a profit on this: he buys the extraordinarily expensive bags at official Hermes stores all over Europe, and then puts them on the Internet for sale, where they often get picked up before he even gets to the auction phase. Are there really that many people who don't mind paying inflated prices - i.e. more than the store price Michael got?

But then, the author himself was amazed at the buying power and hunger for Birkin bags he found with some of his customers. One of them had a reselling web site of her own at www.createursdeluxe.com. So she had to pay Michael's high prices and then add her own profit margin to that again, and still find buyers. Crazy, isn't it?

The writer also presents a list with drawings of the main types of Hermes shop employees, helping you to find out if you too can circumvent what Michael calls the fictional waiting list for Birkins.

To get deeper into the mood of the book, I went to visit a couple of Hermes stores in Taiwan. The biggest one must be the shop at the front of the new Sogo BR4, which has lots of orange scarves, bags, clothes, beach apparel and many small objects. I also passed by the other Taipei Hermes, in the basement of the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel, where I took the snap you see above. Top department stores in the cities of Taichung and Kaohsiung also host Hermes shops.

By the way: I didn't buy anything, because right now, I don't have a budget that allows for investment in the French company's products. And before I plunge into the career of a reseller, I'll have to research more about the opportunities. And maybe ask Michael Tonello for advice first.

From Bags to Riches

2008-06-09T17:27:00.002+08:00

You're a U.S. hairdresser and you arrive in Spain without a work permit. So what do you do? Of course, you go online and start selling things.

That's the story within the pages of one of the few books I saw and became enthusiastic about without having read anything about it before hand.

The author is Michael Tonello and the long title of his book is "Bringing Home the Birkin: My life in hot pursuit of the world's most coveted handbag."

After finding it at Page One inside the world's tallest building, I first returned home to read reviews as well as take a look at the author's web site, www.bringinghomethebirkin.com. Unlike him, I know what a Birkin is: an outrageously expensive handbag from French fashion house Hermes.

There's supposed to be a waiting list to buy the things. Not so, says Michael Tonello. With big charm and big spending, he managed to unearth Birkin bags in stores all over the place. In fact, what makes the book so exciting is that he turned this shopping habit into a fulltime profitable job. When a customer on eBay requested a Birkin bag, he would go all over the place to find one, bring it back, and make a nice profit. That's what I don't understand: if he managed to buy a bag and then sell it at a markup, how come his clients couldn't?

To know that, I guess you have to read the book, which I will be doing over the next few days. By the way, when I returned to Page One today, there was only one copy of the book left. And I bought it. So maybe I can start a business reselling Michael Tonello books for profit on the Internet!

Sense and Sensuality

2008-06-05T09:52:00.004+08:00

Would this kind of picture be possible in a Taiwanese magazine?

I don't think so, because the authorities in most Asian countries confuse naked women with sex. In Asia, the beauty of the human form is still too readily confused with sex and pornography. Unfortunately, that is also the case with advertising. Here in Taiwan, you often find scantily clad ladies in full ads for motels, suggesting sex, lust and extramarital affairs.

Not so in Europe, where this picture is from. It was published in the May edition of the Belgian women's magazine Feeling, which includes reports on predictable topics like cuisine, fashion and design. The picture on the right is one in a series on how to change the size of a woman's breasts, belly and legs without relying on surgery.

All in all, a healthy topic. Nothing to do with sex. That is the practice in Europe. If you're talking about the human body, about cosmetics, baths and spas, then there's nothing wrong with showing off the body. The same magazine also featured an ad for that well-known brand of cosmetics, Dove, showing off a middle-aged - some would say elderly - woman in the nude. Again, nothing wrong in Europe, but highly unlikely in Asia and Taiwan.

I wish we would grow up and stop treating the human body as something dirty that has to be hidden, but let it be and see it as one of the world's greatest creations. More sense and sensuality please.

By Shadrilla Kems for S2S

Shu Qi Conquers Europe

2008-05-28T14:48:00.003+08:00

Shu Qi has conquered Europe. Well, by way of speaking anyway.

This picture shows a cosmetics advertisement spread inside a popular women's monthly for sale in Belgium and the Netherlands last month, but Shu Qi's face had a much higher visibility.

The ad for Kenzo with her picture was all over bus stops in Belgium, as far as I could gather. By early May, when I wanted to snap a bus stop, it had already been replaced, but still, it's quite a feat for a Taiwanese or Asian star to be on view so prominently.

I don't have any illusions about her name recognition, though. I'm sure if you asked passersby about the identity of the woman in the ad, you would receive more questions than answers. A lonely soul might have answered Zhang Ziyi because that's the only Asian star they know, and Shu Qi is hardly a household name in Europe. Her only European movie so far was 'The Transporter' with British action hardface Jason Statham, and that was hardly a hit.

But while we continue to hope for a breakthrough for Asian stars and in particular for talent from Taiwan, it's still worth a positive rating that Shu made it this far. And her name begins with an S, so she belongs right here on this blog.

Europe, 9 p.m.

2008-05-22T13:05:00.002+08:00

I just spent a month in Europe, and yes, that's the reason why you didn't find any new posts here over the past few weeks.

One of the things in Europe that keeps surprising me is how long the evenings are. Here in Taiwan, it gets dark at six, so you never go home from work and still get to enjoy long evenings doing the things you like in the daylight.

Yet, Europe is completely different. To prove it: this picture taken in a Western European garden at 9 p.m. last month.

Yes, on those rare occasions when the weather is fine, you get home when the sun is still shining. So you get out in the garden and do for hours what you like doing: reading the newspaper in a chair on the lawn, tending the garden, listening to the birds or watching the frogs in the pond, swimming if you have a pool, and even dining the Italian way, alfresco, even if you're nowhere near Italy.

Long evenings in spring, summer, and autumn are part of the European way of life, and it's too bad we don't have them in Taiwan. They'd make life a whole lot more pleasant, and would cut down on the hours of TV I'm watching. Instead of sitting inside, I'd rather spend the evening walking along the Tamshui River if it were still light at 9 p.m.

Other pleasures I've had during my stay in Europe were driving cars on roads that do not include motorcycles zapping around you - even if the speed restrictions can get ludicrously draconic in some places - and eating fine European cuisine. Even plain wheat bread with cheese - any French, Swiss or Dutch cheese - felt like a dining experience worthy of a luxury restaurant. Never mind the steak with parsley butter, steak with anchovies butter, and lemon chickens I had. Simple, but delicious.

Europe may not be perfect - it can get too quiet for someone used to the hustle and bustle of the Asian megalopolis - but it sure has a lot going for it in the 'quality of life' category, and I hope to share more in my next postings.

Home

2008-04-21T08:51:00.002+08:00

Home is an apartment in a highrise building with a view of a river and a beautiful mountain.

But my real spiritual home is the place where I grew up in Europe. A 1920s brick house with a huge garden, not too far from the coast.

And those are two of the defining values in my life.

The garden gave me a love of the outdoors, nature, and fresh fruit, especially berries, of which we had a large variety in our garden. I am still a strong admirer of the Italian way of alfresco or outdoors dining, even though at my home, we only managed that on rare hot summer evenings.

The presence of the coast about 20 kilometers away gave me my love for the sea and the beach. Mind you, I dislike sitting on boats for hours, and I'm not much of a swimmer, but watching the sea, visiting islands, spending days on the beach, not lying around, but walking, hiking, or just reading a book. That's what summers are for.

Unfortunately, those things are what I miss the most while living in Taiwan. No real beach culture, and no place for gardens. That's why I'll be taking a break from the busy and noisy Taiwanese life and opting for a month of Europe. See you in late May. Ciao!

The Final Draft

2008-03-31T12:31:00.002+08:00

I used or abused this blog to let you know about the latest progress in my writings. Well, my first book is about to be wrapped up. No, you won't find it anywhere at a bookstore near you, not in many months yet.
What I'm talking about, is that I am about to complete the final draft of this 100,000-word book. Is it a masterpiece? No way. But it's as good as I can get it now.
Before I sent it out to publishers, I still have to write three other pieces. The query letter to the publisher, which is where I get a chance to make my work interesting to them. In other words, I have to convince them that enough people will want to read my book that they - the publishers - can make money out of it.
Then I have to write a synopsis, so that the publishers actually feel like plodding through the whole hundreds of pages. The synopsis is often a writer's nightmare, because he has to condense all of those 300 or 400 pages into maybe just one page. Sounds simple, but it isn't. What do you leave out but still manage to keep the whole page exciting?
The third element I still have to write, is my biography. That should be simple. You mention the things that are relevant to your work. If you have written a thriller - like I have - you probably won't be mentioning in your biography that you have a unique collection of conch shells. Unless conch shells play a crucial part in your book. If the thriller is set in Morocco, and you've spent the past five or twelve years living there, then mention that, absolutely.
The next stage I will have to face, beginning next week, is how to get the whole thing out of my computer and into the publisher's hands.
But that is for the next episode in my writing adventure.
Sean Moss for S2S.

S for Second Draft

2008-03-16T12:20:00.003+08:00

Writing is fun. I've been doing it for almost 40 years.

First writing down things I saw on television, later reinterpreting reality, news, events, and 'translating' it for a wider audience. Rewriting events to spread them around.

But after a while, all that reality gets boring, so I switched to writing fiction. It's great fun thinking out things and writing them down day after day, with nobody telling you you're wrong or this isn't possible in real life. Well, that's why it's fiction.

But after finishing up a story, what you need to do is ... looking at it again from a different perspective and writing it again. I took part in last November's National Novel Writing Month event and that was great fun.

But once you have those 100,000 words which are supposed to go into a novel, you have to think about what first the editors and publishers want, and second the readers. That's the second draft, and believe me, that's no such fun.

You look back at your first draft, and you find all kinds of things wrong with it. In chapter two, your main character (or MC, to use the professional writers' lingo) had gray hair, but in chapter five, he's suddenly gone dark. In chapter three, he was driving a Cadillac, but in chapter seven, he jumps behind the wheel of a Corvette. And his way of speaking has changed. Or his way of speaking is too similar to that of about five other characters.

That's why you need a second draft. And then a third, and probably even more. Because no writer is so perfect that a complete book just flows out of his pen or his keyboard the first time around. I have been working on my second draft of my first thriller for three months now, and I'm hoping to complete it by the end of March. Queries to publishers should go out in early April, with replies expected by late May.

Yes, I'm an optimist. Sometime I will make it. I don't know if what you'll get to read will be the third or the seventh draft, but it'll be a finished story.

Keep writing is the message if you want to be a published writer.

Sean Moss for S2S.

Wow Friendly People

2008-03-03T17:24:00.002+08:00

I just returned from the Philippines and I can tell you one thing: its people are the friendliest in Asia.

No, I didn't get paid by the local tourism authority. Yes, the country has a terrible crime rate and lots of guns and probably lots of bad people, but I didn't meet any of those. Yes, there are hawkers trying to sell you guitars or trips in their tuktuk.

But overall, the experience with the people has been positive. Apart from the surprising prevalence of English - which people speak in addition to Tagalog and their local Cebuano or Boholano - they are very polite, smile at tourists, say hello, or just wave at tourists passing by in their buses.

My visit was limited to the central area of Cebu island - practically the capital Cebu City and the adjoining island of Mactan where its airport is located - and to the island of Bohol with appended Panglao Island.

It is Bohol which left the most positive impression: the diminutive Tarsier monkeys sleeping in the trees, the shapely Chocolate Hills and the similarly shaped Peanut Kisses, the statue of the Spaniards and the local leader on the coast, the old church at Baclayon, the white sand beaches of Panglao.

All of that mixed in with the assorted sweets made from peanuts or coconuts, the coconut milk, the tasty bananas and pineapple, the capcap or cassava tacos with fruit, the edible flower petals and the honey drink at the bee farm in Panglao, the touristy river cruise on the Loboc with the varied food, and back in Cebu finally the impressive buffet on the 20th floor of a building on Cebu City's main road.

The however limited piece of the Philippines I succeeded in seeing during this four-day trip was well worth it, and the view from the plane heading back to Taiwan showed me there is a lot more waiting to be discovered.

And if you're wondering who the beautiful people are on my picture, they are students from a tourism school on a visit to Cebu City's main Chinese taoist temple.

If you are a beach and ocean person, or a scenery person, then the Philippines should be on your agenda. Forming part of a tour, my task was made easier because I didn't have to look for public transport, restaurants, or hotels to spend the night in. Everything was arranged beforehand, was relatively low cost but still high class.

Sean Moss for S2S in Cebu and Bohol, the Philippines. Wow!

S2S : Senses To Senses

2008-02-26T13:27:00.002+08:00

The day after Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for the Best Actress in a leading role is just a day as good as any to explain more about what is behind this blog's recent name and concept change.

S2S means Senses to Senses and red is our theme color - because red symbolizes passion and sensuality.

The new blog is taking on events, objects, people, and phenomena that work positively on our senses. That's why we told you we will be writing here about all kinds of things we like, from movies and TV shows to fashions, food, cars and travel.

The two prerequisites are these: we like it - so you won't find much negative talk and whining on here - and it's sensual - so not much about violence, wars, brutality, dirt and filth. But then, we don't like those things anyway.

The Edith Piaf movie 'La Mome' - known in many countries as 'La Vie en Rose' - is symbolic for the type of movie we might be discussing on this blog. It's a very human story of talent, passion, but also intense misfortune and unhappiness, and that's why we believe it spoke to so many people worldwide. It's more than a biopic about a singer, it's more than just another French movie, it's really a universal story.

Other sensual themes that have caught our attention the past weeks include preparations for the next Burning Man, an avantgarde arts festival held yearly on a desolate plateau in the Nevada desert. The latest edition is still about seven months away, but it has fired our enthusiasm.

The movie about Edith Piaf also fired up ideas for similar epic movies about other real-life figures. As far as senses and sensuality go, there is nobody more likely to embody those ideas than another French woman, actress Brigitte Bardot. She went from ballet student to model to superstar actress, becoming a sensual dream icon and a representative of France. Later in life she turned to animal protection and radical rightwing politics, but she will always been known for her youth. A great story for another book, screenplay, and movie, we thought.

S2S : Senses to Senses will accompany you on a subjective, roundabout, zigzagging journey through sensuality. Be sure to come around again next week, when you will find a report about a visit to the Philippines.

Heroes

2008-02-20T16:01:00.003+08:00

"Yes, Ando. Tonight, we will attack."

Not the most sizzling of dialogue lines, but actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura is one of the main reasons why American TV series "Heroes" is such a hit.

I never loved science fiction, and I barely like the supernatural. But I've been a complete fan of "Lost" - the story of those mysterious people crashed on that mysterious island, now in its 4th season on US television.

"Heroes" has some things in common with "Lost" - the large range of characters and the supernatural - though it takes a bit too far. The second season, now on view on Star TV in Taiwan each Tuesday evening at 9, breaks open a whole tin of new characters from Japan to Ireland, with more people showing off more extreme powers. Think leaking black eyes that can kill and hands that shoot off bolts of lightning, in addition to all the flying and thought reading.

It just gets a little bit too intensive and too farfetched for me, though its sensuality rating still shoots high sometimes because of its nicer characters. The frontrunners in that 'nice' league must be cheerleader Hayden Panettiere, Japanese wouldbe warrior Masi Oka, and "I can do anything that's on TV" Monica Dawson, played by Dana Davis. Actress Dania Ramirez also promises a major element of beauty on the show as the runaway from Central America, so I'll keep watching and hope humanity prevails over magic tricks and science-fiction hankypanky.

By Shadrilla Kems for S2S.

Team S2S

2008-02-18T14:24:00.002+08:00

We've got ourselves a new title, now we have a new layout which can still be improved upon. Next, let me introduce the new team.
As I'm still the official webmeister of this blog, you will still see my name - Enzo Ciancia - around a lot, but otherwise I now have a team standing by depending on the subjects up for discussion. Blog items about fashion, food, cars - limited though they might be - will still come from my hand, but other subjects will have other authors.
First let me introduce to you Sean Moss, who will take over my duties regarding the worlds of writing and travel. Just like me, Sean loves writing. He hopes to become a published thriller author later this year, and just like me, he has been dabbling in online competitions to while away the time and improve his writing chops. He is also a more frequent traveler than I am, so he will be giving you more pictures and general travel impressions than I have been able to. Sean's first foreign destination is rumored to be the Philippines later this month, so I'd look out for his comments on this blog in early March.
A third member of Team S2S is Shadrilla Kems, and her favorite topics for discussion on this blog might be anything from fashion to hotels to beaches to shopping, with movies and music thrown in.
So much for Team S2S, in our next posts we will be revealing more about what S2S really stands for and what this blog aims to be doing.

Happy Valentine

2008-02-14T16:41:00.002+08:00

Happy Valentine!

What a perfect day for the pre-launch of our new concept.

You've noticed that the official name of this blog has now been changed into "S2S" and you're probably wondering what that means.

We're going to leave you guessing a little bit longer as we finetune our new concept and decide what to do with this blog.

You already know that we moved from the occasional report about the opening of new luxury stores in Taipei, Taiwan to writing about ... well, writing. Our scope is about to expand to include an even wider range of subjects, though they will all have one thing in common: S2S.

Our team will do its best to rev up the post count by providing more information but especially personal opinions about a host of topics, all of them things which are drawing our interest across the world, not just in Taiwan. That's why we dropped the name Taiwan in the title, though we hope our postings will still bear relevance to this place. Despite the removal of the word Fashionista from the title, fashion is still one of the topics up for comment. And as you can tell, our URL remains the same.

A happy Valentine from Enzo Ciancia and the S2S team, and more about our concept in the near future as we transform this blog into a new experience.

First Offender

2008-02-04T16:21:00.000+08:00

I did it! I sent in my first entry in Britain's Crime Writers' Association's Debut Dagger competition.
There must be hundreds and maybe even thousands of others like me, so my hopes of winning are still realistic, but still I'm very happy I made it.
As you know, they only want a first chapter of 3,000 words, a synopsis of 1,000 words, and 20 pounds. There is no need for you to write the whole story - which would take 100,000 words and quite some time.
It's only after you actually know you've won something - and that might take several months after the February 15 deadline - that you have to start worrying about producing a coherent, publishable story.
My first try is a pretty straightforward gangster vs. police story, with British characters - mindful of the country the jury is from - but set against the background of a Mediterranean country just because I like the sunshine.
I now still have 10 days left until the deadline. I'll be filling those with writing the first chapter and synopsis of a second story - with fewer characters, and set in a bleak British town - and maybe even a third. In my previous posting, I told you about the Cloverfield effect, well, my third story will be loosely inspired by that movie, though of course it won't involve monsters attacking New York.
If I want to reach my aim of competing with three different stories - which is actually completely by the rules - then I'll have to spend every morning and afternoon working on either story number two or three for the next few days, including the Chinese New Year holidays.
I'll let you know what I'm doing, and in the meantime, enjoy the start of the Year of the Rat.

Some Thing Has Found Me

2008-02-03T15:35:00.000+08:00

Call it the Cloverfield effect.
I don't like movies about monsters, whether King Kong, Godzilla or Alien. I don't really like science-fiction movies, and I hate Star Trek and Star Wars in equal measure.
So what happened last Friday? Because of all the hype, and because of all the people on the Internet saying they became nauseous watching it, I just had to see Cloverfield.
You know, the 238th-something movie about something nasty attacking New York. The gimmick this time around of course, was that it was all supposed to be an amateur video shot by some immature young dude.
Well - it worked. I thought the film was great fun to watch. Despite the shaking around which, by the way, didn't make me nauseous at all. I guess only old white men who never lived through MTV and YouTube culture would get a headache out of watching this. It was also fun despite the lack of an apparent Hollywood happy ending. Despite the silly looks of the monster. Yes, that won't change, I still dislike monsters. And despite all the inconsistencies you can read about on any Internet forum.
Call it the Cloverfield effect.
The whole premise, the whole concept of the amateur video was so well realized that it got me thinking about writing a story with a similar concept. Well, not about a monster attacking New York nor about amateur video tapes, but about something equally original.
What comes first, comes first. February 15 is the deadline for the British Crime Writers' Association's Debut Daggers competition. As I wrote before, this needs a first chapter of up to 3,000 words and a synopsis of up to 1,000. I'm almost ready with my first piece for the competition, but I was also planning for a second.
Now Cloverfield is affecting my work for the competition. No, I'm not going to give up on my two stories. But what I'd love to do, once I've sent in my first story - probably tomorrow - is to work on my second, and write a third as well. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, every single day leading up to the February 15 deadline.
Blame my enthusiasm on Cloverfield, on director Matt Reeves, on writer Drew Goddard, on Lost mastermind JJ Abrams, and on gorgeous Canadian actress Jessica Lucas. But not on that silly monster.

The Web Imperialist: Fan Sites and Domain Names

2008-01-29T15:26:00.000+08:00

One of the ways to gain higher visibility on the Internet is to register domain names and establish fan sites where you can put up a forum for comments.
The major problem you will find however, is tracking down a subject whose domain name has not been taken yet. I tried recently with a host of lesser-known gods and goddesses, and miserably failed.
Would you believe there are already domain names taken for people like Odette Yustman and Jessica Lucas, two minor and young Hollywood actresses whose foray into fame is just beginning thanks to the gimmicky monster movie Cloverfield?
Or try Stana Katic, a beautiful Canadian actress of obviously Croatian origin, who had minor parts in the fifth season of '24' and the first season of 'Heroes.' You will find, not only is her domain name gone, but she herself has set up quite an attractive website. Same counts for Dania Ramirez, an actress whom I first learned about when watching the first episode of the second season of 'Heroes.'
Maybe one way out of this quandary is to go foreign, to try and find a name that's hardly common yet on Main Street USA or Chungshan Road Taiwan. Well, there again, you'd be amazed what you find. There are already fan sites for Marion Cotillard, the Oscar nominee for the Edith Piaf movie. There are already fan sites for Eriko Tamura, the woman you saw in that first episode of the second season of 'Heroes,' again. But then she's already a star in her native Japan, so what did you expect? I didn't even bother to search for Olga Kurylenko or any other of the newest batch of Bond girls, or for British singers Leona Lewis and Kate Nash.
And guess what? Even French fraudmeister Jerome Kerviel now has a website dedicated to him, even I'm sure he's not the guy running it.
So where's the solution? Maybe stick close to home, Taiwan in my case. There's a whole batch of supermodels here, new tennis players, and minor actors and actresses. The hope that any of them is ever going to hit the big time in Hollywood or at Wimbledon might be idle though, but maybe it's worth a try.
I tried my luck with actress Judy Hu Ting-ting and tennis star Hsieh Shu-wei. Let's see what happens. With Taiwanese subjects of course, you still have to get lucky with the way they spell their name, because your interpretation of pinyin or other romanization systems might not be theirs.

Fan Fiction : Waste of Time or Good Exercise?

2008-01-25T15:20:00.000+08:00

With the second season of the US TV series 'Heroes' shown here in Asia and the name of the next James Bond movie announced - 'Quantum of Solace' - fan fiction will get another shot in the arm.
What is fan fiction? It's basically new writers writing a piece in the style of their favorite movie or TV show.
The debate has gone on for ages about the usefulness of such work. Some people spend as much as a year out of their lives writing a fan fiction story. You can find examples at http://www.ranefiction.com/ for the TV series '24,' and at http://www.mi6.co.uk/ for James Bond. Those are just two of the most popular sources of inspiration for fan fiction writers, along with the hot TV series of the moment, such as 'Lost,' 'House,' and the aforementioned 'Heroes.'
Yet fiction like that is unlikely to be published, because the copyright to those shows and characters of course belong to the authors, most likely the major movie and TV companies in Hollywood. So you cannot approach a publisher and hope he will pay you to publish the thing you worked on for the past year.
The only positive use for a fan fiction is when you want to get a job writing for US television. Because ironically, the best way to prove you're a talented TV writer is to write one episode of a popular existing show, just to show that you can catch the spirit of that program.
Others have said writing a fan fiction can help train you for a real writing job, by teaching you how to master pace, structure, plot, dialogue, characterization, and the other necessary elements of good writing. But I'm just wondering: can't you really do that by creating your own original characters, set in their own world, rather than ripping off or imitating the creations of others?
Of course, I enjoy thinking about what kind of James Bond movie I could write, or what adventures I would like to put Jack Bauer or Sawyer and Kate through, but I just don't have the time to spend months on them. They are somebody else's babies, I have to take care of my own.

1,000

2008-01-17T10:24:00.001+08:00

My writing career took another small step forward this morning.

I sent in a 1,000-word story to a Dutch competition. Alright, I hear you thinking, not another one of those competitions like NaNoWriMo where you write whatever you want just to make the total amount of words.

This one is different. It has to be a tense story, and from the examples on the website I gathered they prefer something with a limited number of characters and locations, like a cheap horror movie.

My story isn't horror, but it's creepy. It's very loosely inspired by Patricia Highsmith's 'Strangers on a Train,' even though there are no trains involved. It's a story written in the first person, about a man who visits a certain location and does something really terrible which he thinks is not terrible at all. Through short flashbacks we learn that this is not his first exploit. I can't tell you more, but I'll let you know once the awards are handed out.

The awards? Well, only one story can win. It will be published at www.duizendwoorden.nl and will be read on a national Dutch radio station. There's also a possibility, but not a guarantee, that the story will be published in one of the Netherlands' main national daily newspapers, the NRC Handelsblad. I will let you know how I fare, but it might take another two months before I know. In the meantime, I'll continue work on a 100,000-word thriller and on two stories for another competition, a British one this time.

Taiwan's Got Game

2008-01-07T16:47:00.000+08:00

Think Taiwanese elections are as boring as this picture here?
Well, think again. At least, that is, if I find a publisher for a little game I've been thinking on.
It's a board game, and it takes as its main topic the upcoming March presidential elections in Taiwan and Taiwanese politics in general.
I know it, you're fed up with the sound trucks, the firecrackers exploding when a candidate passes by, the speeches on TV, etc.
But politics can also be fun if you don't take it seriously.
And that's what I did with this game of mine. It's a board game, as I said, so it bears a slight resemblance to Monopoly, as do most board games.
You need a couple of dice, the board, some special cards, and at least two players, though more are welcome.
At this point, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you because for copyright reasons I'm not allowed to reveal more at the moment.
All I can say is, that it's 90 percent ready, it's in Chinese - sorry for those of you who don't read the language - and it's being prepared for presentation to possible publishers.
One of the problems is copyright - I am worried about somebody seeing the game, turning it down, and then going to produce it on his own - and timing - with the presidential election being only two months away, I don't know if there is still time to print it and market it properly.
Anyway, you'll here more about it as I proceed with my plans, and in the meantime - "enjoy" this Saturday's legislative elections.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-25T08:48:00.001+08:00

Merry Christmas 2007 and Happy New Year 2008 to all fashionista followers and aspiring writers in Taiwan and everywhere in the world.

I just returned from Singapore with a lot of good memories and a strong airconditioning-created cold, but still the trip was worth it.

The picture shows the Christmas mood at the classic Raffles Hotel. It may be 29 degrees outside, inside the Christmas mood is still present.

Heading for a Life of Crime

2007-12-19T17:06:00.000+08:00

After completing the National Novel Writing Month competition, I've now found another contest to target my efforts at. Britain's Crime Writers Association holds a yearly event for unpublished writers known as the Debut Daggers.
The good thing about it is that you don't have to write the whole novel to enter the competition. All you need is the first chapter of your story, 3,000 words long, and that's about 8 or 9 pages as I learned during NaNoWriMo, and a 1,000-word synopsis. But you also have to pay about 1,000 NT dollars for the privilege of participating. However, that shouldn't be a barrier for any serious writer, since the prize include attendance at the awards ceremony next summer in London, 5,000 pounds or about 30,000 NT dollars, and a night for two at a London hotel.
It also needs mentioning that you don't have to be living in Britain or hold a UK passport to take part, writing in English is enough.
Publication of your novel - which of course might not have been completely written by the time of the awards' ceremony - is not included in the prizes, but the CWA web site says several previous winners and contenders have indeed moved on to published author status. And for those, there are other competitions altogether.
So I've decided on two story ideas to work into first chapters and synopses by the submission deadline of February 15, 2008. Even though my favorite writing genre is the international spy thriller, crime fiction also appeals to me, having read most Agatha Christie novels during my high-school period, and also favoring stories from P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, and more modern offerings such as Michael Connelly.
While I am continue working on my Work In Progress, a spy thriller for publication in continental Europe, the two stories for the CWA Debut Daggers will also hold my attention over the next two months. A life of crime writing might be on the cards!

70,000

2007-12-04T09:26:00.001+08:00

National Novel Writing Month is over.

You know, that's the U.S.-based competition where all you have to do is to write 50,000 words to 'win.' All the winner gets is the right to post the kind of logo you see on the left on his website or blog, like I'm doing right now.

Those 50,000 words don't even have to be a coherent story, and noone will find it on the Internet to read. Those were the main drawbacks when I considered competing more than a month ago.

In the end, I decided to go for it, and I started a novel, on November 1 precisely. After a while, it became great fun. Since unlike many other competitors, I don't have a fulltime job and I don't have children to take care of, I had lots of time to sit behind my laptop and write, write, write. At the end of the day, I would go to the NaNoWriMo website to get an official count on my new words total. This showed that each day, I was adding somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 words to the story.

The thing to do to advance to that 50,000 goal is not to look back, to refrain from editing and changing earlier chapters, and just continue forging ahead, damn the torpedoes. Of course I didn't want to write nonsense, and just reach 50,000 because that's the only rule. I wrote a relatively coherent thriller, a readable story.

I reached 50,000 on November 22, but instead of dropping everything, just like anyone might have done who only cared about getting a logo, I continued the story until the end, and I just managed to end it on the final day of the competition, November 30, reaching just over 70,000 words.

Is that a novel? Yes, because it is a long story. Is that a publishable novel? No, because books these days have to be around 100,000 words long. So what now? The obvious reply is to go back and remove the incoherent bits, the dangling story lines, the characters that appear but don't reappear, add details about technical processes and descriptions of the environment, make it logical.

The main thing I learned from NaNoWriMo is that I can write 70,000 words in one month if I maintain a certain rhythm, 2,000 to 4,000 words a day, while still taking the weekends off. If I continue this positive habit, I can really write publishable novels in two months, then do the necessary editing and work on second and third drafts before sending it off to publishers.

So, while many outsiders might reject NaNoWriMo as a competition about nothing with no use at all, I see it as a stepping stone to better writing habits. And yes, I hope to be back next year, in November, for my second NaNoWriMo.

For information about National Novel Writing Month and their other activities, visit www.nanowrimo.org.

Takashi Murakami, Rock Star

2007-12-03T10:22:00.001+08:00

Takashi Murakami, artist, designer, painter, rock star.

He certainly looked like a rock star when he descended those stairs at the Taipei Arena last Friday night. For most of his two-hour performance, he had strobe lights focused on him, and they changed from blue to purple to green during the evening.

His audience numbered hundreds, if not thousands. Taiwanese love manga and Japanese cartoon culture, so for a star who uses the otaku culture as his base, it's not a surprise. Taiwanese also love Louis Vuitton and other Western luxury logo brands, so for a star whose LV bags are as famous as his art, it's not a surprise.

We didn't learn too much new about Murakami during his two-hour speech - which included translation from Japanese into Chinese by an interpreter, but not simultaneously. He talked about his views on money and art, already well known from his book, and gave the audience an overview of his career.

The most exciting parts came when he presented his cartoon movies, three in all. The first one was the famous Louis Vuitton ad, where a little girl waiting outside a Vuitton store is swallowed up by a monster creature and travels through a land full of logos to the sound of a catchy dance beat. The other shorts had a similar imagery, 'The Creatures from Planet 66' and Kaikai & Kiki, named after his company, and featuring watermelons and manure.

Instead of lots of Louis Vuitton, the omnipresent sponsors of the event were Mercedes, which had its new C-class bedecked with Murakami-style flowers outside and inside the arena, and Motorola, which had the artist mention his free phone.

The weirdest surprise was the present each member of the public received: a free ticket for the Murakami exhibition at the MOCA in ... Los Angeles, just ten hours flying from Taipei. Thank you, Takashi!

In the meantime, I think I'll stick closer to home, to the exhibition of plastic vinyl from Japan's Kaiyodo at the Museum of Fine Arts, right here in Taipei.

Sundown for Sunrise

2007-11-29T13:09:00.000+08:00

Not that I really ever did a lot of shopping in that place.
But the Sunrise Department Store on Fuhsing North Road in Taipei is no more after 22 years of service. It's one of Taiwan's traditional department stores, one of the big names when there were not really any modern stores of international stature in the capital. Remember the Rebar Department Store and the old Far Eastern, both of them near Hsimenting? The latter was completely refurbished.
Sunrise also tried that road by going all the way upmarket with brandname boutiques. I never went before, because I thought there was nothing worth buying, and I never went later because their new products were not affordable and similar to what you find at the new malls, Sogos and Mitsukoshis all over town.
I can't help but thinking that the Breeze Center slightly down the road from the Sunrise had something to do with its demise. Wider, airy, with names from the top of the line, and slightly closer to the new and the old Sogo.
Anyway, the word on the grapevine says that this weekend will see the last rush on the Sunrise before the thing closes. With a cloud still hanging over the future of Idee and another breakin at Louis Vuitton's Taichung store, the week looks bleak for the Taiwan shopping scene.
Good news: Fendi opened its new outlet at Taipei 101. Some close down, some open up.

50,000

2007-11-23T16:05:00.000+08:00

I made it.

I told you I was going to participate in this crazy competition about writing a novel of 50,000 words between November 1 and 30.

Well, I crossed the 50,000 mark yesterday. Does that mean I will stop now? No way, because I want to finish the story. That will happen by the end of the month I hope, and I will probably have a total of between 60,000 and 70,000 words.

However, if you know about books, then you'll know that publishers want to have about 100,000 words in a novel. So I will have to continue until I reach that magic number, not just by adding words, but especially by improving what I have, regardless of numbers.

As I said before, I really want to turn novel writing into a career. If writing 100,000 words and editing it for months is what it takes, then that is what I will do. Remember, life is a puzzle.

When I started out in the National Novel Writing Month competition - fans call it NaNoWriMo - I was skeptical about it, fearing it was just a waste of time, because nobody would see my novel on the website, and the organizers say it doesn't matter whether your story is nonsense or not.

But I learned one important thing: rhythm! I've been writing between 2,000 and 3,000 words each day, and that's been great. If there is one thing I want to keep from NaNoWriMo, that is it: the rhythm, the speed. If I can keep that up, then I can write much more than I was before November. Quality and quantity, both should be possible together.

When I finish my WIP - 'work in progress' for those of you who do not frequent writers' forums - I hope I will find a publisher for it. And then I can set up a real website where I promote my book.

But until then, I will be writing about my budding career, and anything else I fancy, on this very blog. See you!

Missoni's Back

2007-11-13T16:12:00.000+08:00

My wife's favorite Italian design house, Missoni, seems to be turning around years of decline in Taiwan into a comeback at Taipei 101.
There used to be a Missoni outlet on Kuangfu South Road in Taipei, but that closed a couple of years ago.
When the Taipei 101 mall first opened, there was a Missoni Sports outlet on the second floor, but that closed several months ago, leaving the shop next to the Grand Formosa Regent as the brand's only representative in Taipei.
With the poster on the bottom picture - 'comming soon' with typo and all - the Italian family business famous for its bright colors and cool knits looks like it's trying to recapture the island.

The Taipei 101 also recently welcomed a new Fendi store - see the picture at the top - with brightly colored handbags and glitzy dresses. Fendi is no stranger to Taipei, with outlets at a nearby Shin Kong Mitsukoshi and in the basement of the aforementioned Grand Formosa Regent, among others.
There's always place in Taipei for another Italian.

Life is a Puzzle

2007-10-29T16:45:00.000+08:00

Life is a puzzle indeed. When I first started up this blog, I was planning to attend fashion shows and boutique openings, interview fashion mavens and especially designers, and do something for Taiwanese design.

But as you've noticed, instead I've been stuck in a creative hole, reporting now and then on minor fashion events and new stores.

The main reason is my overwhelming range of interests. Fashion has never been my number one, even though it has come close at times.

Apart from style and design, I'm also interested in travel, movies, writing screenplays and thrillers, international politics, reading, surfing the Internet, cars, taking courses in subjects ranging from software to food and arts. You name it and there's a high probability that at least, I might want to read up on the subject.

My priorities right now have shifted from blogging and looking out for fashion away to writing about totally unrelated subjects. My latest project - which is likely to take up all my time in November - is taking part in NaNoWriMo. That odd name stands for National Novel Writing Month. It's no longer national though, and it attracts thousands of writers and wannabes worldwide who want to write 50,000 words within one month.

Some people are just satisfied with picking quantity over quality - but I'm not. I want to write a real story, not a lot of rubbish just to show off the NaNoWriMo logo on my site if and when I reach 50,000 words. There is no quality control in that competition, and no real prizes, so for many people it will just be a complete waste of time. Since I have no time to waste, I will write a story - and edit it afterward in the hope of finding a publisher for it.

November will also see me take a class in Illustrator software - I told you I'm interested in almost anything - and of course attend the lecture by Takashi Murakami I mentioned in my post about his book. See you in November!

The Coming of Murakami

2007-10-16T16:24:00.000+08:00

Louis Vuitton bags with the logo in garish colors on a white or black background? Or with drawings of cherries superimposed? Of course, you remember them, and they were the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.
The Chinese translation of his book about the business of art and creativity has now hit the book stores, and by spending the 300 New Taiwan dollars for it at Eslite I also received a free ticket for a lecture by the man himself, at the Taipei Arena on November 30.
The book - "Yishu Chuangyelun" in Mandarin - has a couple of pictures of his works of art inspired by the Japanese manga culture. Murakami is unashamedly in favor of commercialism and of making money with art. An opinion controversial with artists, if not so much in the fashion world.
Over the coming month I'll read his book to prepare for his lecture, which I hope will not be a dry repeat of his main ideas. As far as I'm aware, no English translation is in the works yet.

Dolce e Gabbana 101

2007-10-12T17:29:00.001+08:00

Italian glamour boys Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have reworked their presence inside the world's until-now tallest building, and the result is holding its official opening today (second picture).
Just like the brand name, I can use two words for the new store as well: black and white. The shop on the third floor feels narrower than its predecessor because of all the black building blocks used in its design. But then the clothes and accessories on show are also dominated by the same colors. Black glamour suits with thin ties for the gents, black dresses for the ladies.
Is that a Miss Pocket in the window? The Taipei 101 sales booklet promises the designer duo's glitzy Miss Pocket bag will be on sale. Recommended price: between 100,000 and 150,000 New Taiwan dollars.

While you're at Taipei 101, you should also bother to go one floor higher to look up a British design exhibition (first picture). Admittedly, it's not really all that much about clothes, but it has a lot worthwhile on offer. From architecture by Zaha Hadad, to a Honda bike, to the image campaign for the Gorillaz, the game Grand Theft Auto, the clever logo designs for Channel 4 TV, and the clothes of Top Shop, it's all there.

Make Your Own T-shirt

2007-10-11T16:33:00.000+08:00

There's so much choice out there, but sometimes it's still not enough. You have a certain design, a new logo, a funky image or text in your head but you also want to get it out and see it on a piece of clothing.
Thanks to the democratization of design caused by the Internet, you can now create your own designs online, then print them and transfer them to bags, T-shirts, stickers and so on.
You know the transfer method with an iron and special paper, and the screen printing method. Both are quite common, with the latter resulting in better quality. You don't want the image to fade after washing the item a couple of times.
I recently tried a wilder and much more uncertain way - folks, do not try this at home. I just used acrylic paint - easily available at art supply stores, which in Taipei you find on Hoping East Road Section 1 around National Taiwan Normal University - on a bland white polo shirt I bought for 299 New Taiwan dollars at the sales at Net.
Two problems here: first, I'm not a good painter, as you will be able to see once I get my camera back from my wife, and second, I would not put this thing into the washing machine. Now that the Double Ten logo is old hat, I'll remove it with water and replace it with something I hope less political and more fashionable. And I'll improve my artistic skills along the way.
And now for something completely different: Dolce & Gabbana are reopening their boutique at Taipei 101 tomorrow. More about that later.

Sales Season

2007-09-20T17:07:00.000+08:00

Another sales season is arriving upon us in Taiwan this month. The starting date is different for each department store or shopping mall, but the promises are all the same.

If you spend so many thousands of New Taiwan dollars on one brand, you'll get about 10 percent free. There are also the 'exclusive' items only available in limited quantities on certain days, say 5 particular bags of one brand only available on October 9. They're hoping to provoke a talking point, to have you line up at 3 in the morning or hit your fellow consumers in the face so the product can make the 24-hour news channel.

Using certain credit cards can also get you discounts, but you have to watch out, because the right bank is not enough, it also has to be the right color - preferably platinum - and the right card issuer - Visa or MasterCard etc. But whatever you want, a jazzy T-shirt, a bling-bling bag, it has to be somewhere out there. Happy shopping!

The pages above are from the Breeze Center's latest publication. That's also a fixed element of these sales, a glossy booklet listing all the discounts and exclusive products. As you can just see, you can blow a cool 400,000 NT dollars on a Ralph Lauren crocodile bag, while Yves Saint Laurent dazzles with his ostrich skin bags.

What's different from previous Autumn sales, are the length of the sales period - down from two to just one month - and the amounts of money you have to spend to get something extra - those are higher than before. So when everything from food to taxi fares is getting more expensive, department store sales are no different from the rest.

As to today Thursday September 20, Marks & Spencer opened its second Taipei outlet, taking up the whole third floor at New York New York, and yes, it features exactly the same products as the other one, including the biscuits and wines. Good to see the men's shirts are at least not made in China, but in Mauritius, Morocco, Turkey and so on.

Also opened today a store of the Swiss brand Bally on the first floor at Taipei 101, while Giorgio Armani Cosmetics is putting on a show between those three Mitsukoshi department stores across the road.

Yawn

2007-09-15T13:30:00.000+08:00

So I went to the opening of the first Marks & Spencer in Taipei this morning.
I must admit, the clothes are nice. Colorful shirts for men, blouses for women, dresses for the older women, underwear, children's clothing, all reasonably priced at 2,000 to 3,000 New Taiwan dollars apiece, in a bright and airy environment.
I'm still skeptical whether the shop will stand up against all the other chains already present in Taiwan, but you already know that from previous postings on this blog.
The opening ceremony - not that anyone will judge a shop from its opening activities, but I was there, so why not write about it - was anything but impressive. A bunch of people scaled down from the top of the building with the letters forming the name Marks & Spencer on their backs. If it hadn't been for the Chariots of Fire theme music blasting across the street, nobody would have noticed. So I didn't even bother to take a picture, though that's also because an MRT station exit is blocking the view.
As for my interest in clothing items, while I was waiting for the opening, I cruised around the neighborhood. I saw much more interesting garb at the Armani Exchange and Diesel sales inside the Breeze 2 nearby, while a Giordano Concepts store has also opened on the other side.
The Marks & Spencer also has a food store, I'm glad to say, but it offers far less than what I remember from Europe. No Indian foods, and mostly biscuits and chocolates, overpriced and not English or original enough.
Will I still be visiting Marks & Spencer in Taipei? Probably, once the opening period is over we'll see whether they really master the local fashion scene. In the meantime, their second Taipei store will be opening at New York New York on the 20th, next Thursday.

Will Marks have the Sparks?

2007-09-13T14:37:00.001+08:00

The new era is upon us, or so Marks and Spencer would have us believe. As reported before, the venerable British brand is finally opening its first Taipei store this coming Saturday on Chunghsiao East Road section 4. The event will be followed by the launch of a second store at New York New York shopping mall next Thursday.

Once the mainstay of every British main street, the chain expanded to Europe but got into trouble there, not in the least because its rather old-fashioned, conservative image could not measure up to the Zara's and H&M's of this world.

In Taiwan, of course, there are no official H&M or Zara stores - yet - so that kind of competition will not be feared. But I'm still skeptical that Marks and Sparks, as the brand is commonly known, has it to make it on this island. Looking at the advertising, like this photo from the pages of the latest Taiwan edition of GQ, I see the same kind of men's gear you find at G2000, to name but one local chain. And the women's clothes you can find on their web site are not that different from what you can find at dozens of other chain stores.

Look for yourself at http://www.marksandspencer.com.tw/ if the company will become a household name in Taiwan or go the way of that other great British institution, Boots.

Harper's Empty Bazaar

2007-09-10T22:15:00.000+08:00

Harper's Bazaar magazine is celebrating its 140th anniversary. Quite a feat, so a special book has been published and even translated into Chinese for readers here in Taiwan.
The magazine also launched an 'exhibition' to attract crowds. Unfortunately, judging from the situation this afternoon, those crowds are unlikely to materialize.
I was the only person in the plaza on the 4th floor of Taipei 101 to bother looking at the exhibits: a very old Mercedes from when cars still looked like bicycles with four wheels, two old pieces of luggage from Louis Vuitton, a piece of crystal from Lalique, and two Issey Miyake dresses. The rest: just old pictures, magazine covers and the like.
Absolutely nothing worth writing home about. The only reason why I write about it here is to save you the effort of wasting your time trekking out to Taipei 101 to see it. Just read the magazine. And the others, Elle, Vogue, Madame Figaro.
There was a tent down outside the Taipei 101 shopping mall for its fashion month, though. My feeling is it would be far more interesting if you could get your hands on an invitation for those events. Where you are sure to see fashion in action.

Taiwan In Style Open

2007-09-01T19:09:00.001+08:00

You know what it's like with exhibitions in Taipei. You go there expecting to see lots of interesting things to look over, but you leave before you've seen half of them because it's just too crowded.
You can’t look at anything quietly because there are people standing in front of you waving with free booklets, or 'hot babes' dancing around who have nothing to do with the product on show whatsoever.
Well, nothing of all that this morning at Taipei In Style at the World Trade Center. Maybe it was because I arrived within half an hour after the opening, but I think a more reasonable explanation is just that there's not much on show. If you were hoping to find the who's who of Taiwanese designers at the show, you were completely wrong. There's more Taiwan to be seen during a stroll through the Idee department store.
Charin Yeh had a stand with tasteful black dresses as you can see on the picture top left. Men's brand Carnival was also there, the only problem was: where were its clothes? The company, which was saved from obscurity by car tycoon Kenneth Yen, used its space at the show for anything but its clothes. Gioia Pan was the other big name present.
You can click on the picture at bottom left to see it better, but you're still going to see the same: a dress on the left, a dress in the middle, and a picture on the right. No personnel, no explanations, and certainly no Gioia Pan herself. You can see more of her designs at the nearby Taipei 101.
Taipei In Style also had a bunch of lesser known makers of hats, underwear, yoga gear and sports outfits, but my interest in those wasn't too high. There was an aboriginal corner, well worth checking out for its exoticism factor.
But the most enjoyable section of the show for me was the students' corner, with original and sometimes unwearable things, but still, at least they were worth looking at. You can see one of their designs in the picture on the right. The students came from three universities in Taipei and Kaohsiung.
So all in all a rather disappointing morning, but maybe I shouldn't have expected so much from a show where the entrance is free and where the generous organizers give you a free bottle of tea.
You can still check it out for yourself until Sunday evening if you're in the neighborhood. I wouldn't do so unless I had to be in the Taipei 101 area anyway.
The next event on my fashion calendar: the opening of the first Marks & Spencer in Taipei on September 15 in the former Tongling Department Store on Chunghsiao East Road section 4, that's the building housing the California Fitness and the Luxy.

Taipei In Style

2007-08-29T19:36:00.000+08:00

The Taiwanese government's main annual promotion event for local fashions is upon us. Taipei In Style is opening tomorrow at the World Trade Center with fashion shows and stands from major designers and labels, featuring everything from sunglasses and gloves to watches and underwear.
The first two days, the event will only be open to professionals, so ordinary fashionistas like me will have to wait until Saturday morning 10:30 before having a look at the show. Taipei In Style closes Sunday evening.
On Saturday, I hope to be one of the first outsiders visiting the event, and I hope to be bright enough to take my camera to snap pictures which should appear on this blog early next week.
Earlier today, I saw Taiwan television stations showing the island's supermodels parading the latest dresses, with a special feature about the native aboriginals' colorful clothing, dominated by blue and red. The question remains to be seen how much of this heritage will be used by the island's mainly urban and cosmopolitan designers.
See you here next week for a look at my pictures.

The Jamei Chen Show

2007-07-27T13:03:00.000+08:00

Not enough time. Today, tomorrow.
That's all the time you have to see an exhibition of 20 years' work by one of Taiwan's top fashion designers, Jamei Chen.
No idea why what could be the fashion exhibition of the year is being handled like an emergency, but that's the way it is. Pieces from two decades of the designer's career are being shown off in an art context, and all in all, it looks good. Today's United Daily News even turned the whole show into an excuse to do a two-page spread about 'fashion and art,' mentioning past collaborations between designers and artists, such as Stephen Sprouse's Louis Vuitton bags, and the Prada T-shirts. But we've all seen this before, so what we really need, are more smart exhibitions about local fashion and style, and preferably on show for a couple of months, not just two days.
Anyway, here the details for those of you quick enough to catch up:
The place: the Huashan Art Center at No.1, Bade Road, Section 1, in Taipei. That's where Bade Road sprouts out of Chunghsiao East Road.
The time: July 27 and 28, only two days, as I said, much too short.
The designer's web site: www.jamei-chen.com.tw

Greed Bag

2007-07-17T18:50:00.000+08:00

I just returned from a one-month stay in Europe to find Taiwanese and other Asian fashion fans going all mad over a bag claiming to be environmentally friendly.
You know it, you saw it on TV happening in Taipei, Tainan and Hong Kong: people breaking queues, shoving other people to the floor, shouting and screaming, all for what? To get their hands on a dull brown bag with the text 'I'm not a plastic bag.' And the designer wasn't even a huge celebrity, like Karl Lagerfeld or Tom Ford, and the brand wasn't one of the icons, like Louis Vuitton or Gucci, no, it was just Anya Hindmarch. Until recently, most Asians would certainly have exclaimed 'Anya Who?'
From a name recognition viewpoint, Anya certainly has it made now. Everybody knows her now, maybe even better than Paul Smith and other British designers. But she's also paying the price as a symbol of incompetence - with her stores unable to set up workable lines to get bags to customers on time and in an orderly manner - and greed. Is a bag really worth fighting for? Even more of a joke was the environmental element. I don't know whether Anya herself is a true environmentalist or just a brazen bandwagon jumper, but her customers certainly seem to belong to the latter category. The sales of the bag were followed by loads of trash left by those spending hours in lines. They could've at least dumped the rubbish in the bins, or maybe even in their new environmental bags. But hey, don't expect that from people who jump queues and wrestle each other to the ground.
The department stores gave out some extra bags this week, apparently without too much trouble, but the next bag craze is on the way.
Marc Jacobs has designed a remarkably similar bag with his name on it instead of some outrageous claim, and the thing will go on sale in Taipei next month. Let's wait and see.

2007 - The Next Three Months

2007-05-15T10:25:00.000+08:00

Fashion is continuing even when this blog slumbers into the summer of 2007.
Louis Vuitton has opened at Taipei's Breeze Center with a member of the family in attendance, Japan's Hankyu Department Store is conquering Kaohsiung as fears grow that Taiwan really can't afford that many luxury malls, and Britain's Marks and Spencer has arrived courtesy of the omnipresent President Group.
In the meantime, small-time retailing still flourishes, with Johnny and Lucy still opening their suitcases on the sidewalks to sell baubles and colorful T-shirts. The Campo designers' market puts up its stalls at least once a month outside a museum or fancy bookstore, turning a haphazard event into a landmark of Taiwan's urban culture.
And my role in all of this? Well, getting smaller. I still visit the department stores, read the glossy monthly magazines, stroll through the Campo market. But above all, I want to create things myself.
My instrument of choice so far is the laptop keyboard, and the content is not this blog, but a text unseen by you and in a language most of you don't understand. My first idea was to write a high-octane international thriller centered on the Beijing Olympics, but writers' Internet forums tell you the timing for that is completely wrong. The Games are only 15 months away, and any book takes 18 months, not to write, but merely to be prepared for publication. And that's in the event you already have an agent - which I don't and which is reportedly extremely difficult and time-consuming to get.
So I took the easy way out. I decided to write a high-octane international thriller - but not about the Beijing Olympics and not in English, but in my native European language. Because in that language, I won't need an agent, I can go straight to the publisher and ask if she wants it or not. And I surely will make my utmost she does.
Apart from the thriller project - I have 50 pages of what should be a 300-page book - I am still mulling other creative ideas, from producing mass consumer art, to printing T-shirts, to setting up a web site about one particular Asian entertainer. Those are all commercial ideas, with the end target of making me some money and some fame.
Until then, I will be taking a short vacation in Europe and look out for new ideas and for the feasibility of old ones.

Marks and Spencer arrive

2007-04-24T14:07:00.000+08:00

Veteran British clothes retailer Marks and Spencer are planning to open their first store in Taiwan in the southern harbor city of Kaohsiung, but what are they hoping to offer that Taiwanese shoppers cannot find already?
Marks and Spencer are a classic British symbol, as much as the Mini and the Rolls Royce - now both owned by BMW - and as Boots, which closed down its Taiwan stores after quite a short-term presence a couple of years ago.
I remember Marks and Spencer from London shopping trips years ago, and frankly, to be polite, their clothes all looked very conservative, designed for and targeted at old British ladies of Miss Marple stature.
On the European continent, the chain won some fans not with its clothes, but by offering typically British food products, such as scones and muffins. While British food on the whole enjoys a rather dubious reputation, it must be said that the best of British food is really worthwhile, and Marks and Sparks, as they're sometimes known, was really good at providing the best.
Unfortunately, that didn't last, because the company got mired in financial troubles and decided to close down most of its stores on the European mainland in order to remedy that situation.
I guess that worked because now the company is targeting that paradise of consumerism and rising spending power, Asia.
As my opening sentence reveals, I am more than doubtful that this will succeed. What can they offer Taiwanese consumers that they can't find already at any Net, G2000, Iroo Moderato, Kuda, MOMA, Esprit, Mexx and Mango?
Shoppers who want the British spirit already have Burberry, Mulberry, Dunhill, Paul Smith, Anya Hindmarch and Aquascutum.
If I had to think of a foreign retail chain that hasn't appeared in Taiwan yet and that could make a success of it, I would say 'Zara' first. Marks and Spencer is absolutely not on my list, but hey, let's give them a chance. Let's see what they come up with, and how long they stay.

Louis is Back, but Where is Paul?

2007-03-08T15:58:00.000+08:00

Good news for Louis Vuitton in Taiwan this week. Police arrested the gang who broke into the French brand's flagship store in the central city of Taichung last year, stealing dozens of valuable bags. The theft hasn't stopped LV from expanding its presence on the island, since passing by the Breeze Center in Taipei yesterday, I noticed there's another large Louis Vuitton store waiting to open in May, just steps away from the Breeze's Gucci boutique.
What is troubling me however, is the seeming disappearance of some smaller if not less worthy brands. The Breeze's Louis Vuitton will take the place of Prada's MiuMiu boutique. And deeper into the shopping complex, I see Paul Smith ... or rather I don't see Paul. His colorful shirts and bags have vanished, and so has his name. Where is Paul, I ask you. Did he follow the fate of Belgium's Dries Van Noten, who slipped out of the Breeze earlier.
Is it just me or am I noticing a reduction of the mid-tier fashion brands? The names that are not as famous as LV, Gucci, Dior, Chanel, but still worthy of our respect and attention? Are the main logos dominating the market now, and will the lesser gods disappear off Taiwan's streets?
Even Louis Vuitton's chief designer, Marc Jacobs, seems to have trouble keeping his name up in Taipei. His store next to the Grand Formosa Regent was replaced by a Samsonite luggage outlet, then it reappeared inside the hotel lobby, now to disappear again as Harry Winston prepares a boutique. Marc is still present at the basement of the Breeze though, but for how long?

Happy Year of the Pig

2007-02-27T16:29:00.000+08:00

The Year of the Pig has arrived and this gives me yet another opportunity to discuss my hopes, plans and dreams for the coming year and for this blog.
Since it's difficult for me to catch up with everything that's happening in fashionland in Taiwan on my own, and having no time to go to news conferences and shows all the time, I will probably be converting this blog into a base to promote my new endeavors soon.
Some of those endeavors are:
-plans for a board game on Taiwanese politics;
-plans for a Chinese-language book about a phenomenon that hasn't been written about yet in Taiwan;
-I'm very close to finishing a piece of fan fiction for a British Web site; by the way, fan fiction is a piece of 'literature' - in the loosest possible sense of the word - written in the style of an existing book, play or movie;
-I am also close - but not close enough - to completing a thriller.
All those projects have a time table of their own, and occupy me to varying degrees. The fan fiction is now about 60 pages long in Word and should be finished by mid-March. When it gets published basically depends on how the Web site operates.
The board game is also virtually finished, but I still have to go out and present it to possible publishers, and I have no idea how cold or warm their response will be. In any way, it should reach stores and news media way before next year's Taiwan presidential elections.
The Chinese-language book is something else, because first of all Mandarin is not my native lingo, and I still have to gauge what kind of interest local publishers will have for the topic, which is rather offbeat for an Asian country. However, personally, I feel that that is precisely what should make the book attractive to publishers: offbeat equals newsworthy equals easy to promote.
My 'masterpiece' if you will, is that thriller of course. I have 160 pages down in Word, but that is not enough. Once I finish it, there's editing and rewriting to be done, and there's also the slow process of finding an agent and a publisher. Even when that goes smoothly - and for most new writers it doesn't - I still have to look at some 18 months before it actually reaches the book stores, so you can see what I'm up against.
And until that happens, I still need other sources of income. That's why I'm scouting the Internet for business ideas and quirky innovations. My plans for small-scale business include food and the edge of fashion and design, but of course, all that planning needs time as well. What will make money? How much do I need to invest before I can start up production? Where do I sell my stuff, and will there be anybody interested? If I sell it over the Internet, how do I reach customers, how do I package the product so that it arrives looking good? Lots of questions, and over the following months I'll be hard at work pondering those, and writing, and wondering where my next income will come from.
2007 will be quite a year, pig or not!

Trends 2007 - The Wall Street View

2007-02-02T22:34:00.000+08:00

The Wall Street Journal Asia is an unlikely place to go to read about fashion, but today I just have to mention their current weekend edition.
Despite being 80 percent devoted to the business world and 10 percent to food, sometimes the paper also turns its focus on fashions. Of course it counts among its writers the famous Teri Agins, the author of "The End of Fashion," a must-have book about designers.
But in one article, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan looks at how trends from the 1960s mod era are returning to the catwalk and the streets in 2007.
One of the trends she mentions comes as a surprise: metallic bags, clothes and shoes. Anyone walking around in Taipei over the past year must have seen all the dozens if not hundreds of handbags covered in gold, silver and platinum colors. Hardly a new trend for 2007, in my mind, just a continuation of what's already established. Balenciaga's Nicolas Ghesquiere - you know, the inventor of the motorcycle bag - apparently went one further by launching metal-plated leggings, so there.
Another 2007 trend is the appearance of oversized printed patterns in loud colors on dresses. The geometric patterns come in pink, yellow, blue, orange, and bright red. Tan also gives the opposition a voice, saying the patterns are overwhelming and makes it look like the dresses are wearing the women, instead of the other way round.
Tan also sees a resurgence of Yves Saint Laurent-era trapeze dresses and their less extreme A-line counterparts. Lanvin and, again, Balenciaga were the groundbreakers here late last year, but the trend has now expanded to hit New York as well, Tan writes.
Shoes have never caught a lot of my interest, but to be complete, I'll mention that transparent plastic is the way to go here. Even Louis Vuitton has launched shoes with heels in extravagant shapes or partly made out of plastic - let's call it Lucite. Again, Tan mentions a critic saying the plastic looks trashy and cheap.
We'll have to wait and see which of these trends make it to the streets of Taipei later this year.

2007

2007-01-09T22:23:00.000+08:00

A belated Happy New Year 2007 to all fashionistas in Taiwan and elsewhere.
The last moments of 2006 saw the opening of Sogo's BR4 Fuhsing store, Brand Magazine's publishing of the top 10 handbag brands for the past year, and another trip for me to Bangkok's glittering malls which was unfortunately disrupted by the bombings there. No, I didn't see any of the violence, but I was shoved out of one mall that shall remain unnamed because of security precautions on New Year's Eve.
2007 will also be a year of changes for myself and this blog, and I hope also a year of improvements. Honestly, I'm thinking what to do about this blog. If it wants to be a more active participant in and recorder of the Taiwanese fashion scene, I need to go out more, snap pictures, get the latest trends, sales and prices, and move everything in here.
The problem is, my day job has been a major hindrance to all my projects. So what's my New Year resolution for 2007? Chuck my job! Yes seriously, I will be leaving my fulltime job and take some months of breathing time, during which I will be writing book projects of my own, as well as developing a board game and working on other ideas to prepare for life after my gap from work. It's too soon to tell whether fashion and this blog will be part of that life, but in the meantime, I will still give it what I got.
Wishing you all a better life in 2007!

BR4 On the Move

2006-12-27T21:44:00.000+08:00

Just as the high-speed rail trains look like they're about to get moving, look what's happening. The new Sogo BR4 on top of the Chunghsiao-Fuhsing MRT station in Taipei is holding its first open "test" day this coming Friday, December 29, just in time for the long New Year weekend.
They waited so late that many clothing items will immediately go into sales, with discounts of up to 50 percent. For some brands, it doesn't matter the department store took such a long time to get off the ground. Chanel and Hermes won't open their boutiques until March, though the latter will do that with the launch of a Birkin bag with diamonds.
More down-to-earth brands at the new green giant Sogo - the United Daily News writes it's 50 bigger than the old white one - include Burberry, Versace, Martin Margiela, Dolce & Gabbana, and Hogan, part of the Tod's group. Yohji Yamamoto will sell two types of exclusive T-shirts at 6,280 NT dollars each, and there are only 50 of each available, the newspaper says. So you know from my little adventure at the Breeze Center's Marc Jacobs store what that means, don't you.
And I won't be there for the Sogo's glorious first day, because I'm off to another Southeast Asian shopping paradise: Bangkok. Guess what the inspiration was for the new Sogo, according to the United Daily News? The Siam Paragon.

Leaving Black Behind

2006-12-06T23:10:00.000+08:00

Those of you who have been passing Prada shopwindows in Taipei recently will have noticed a fundamental philosophical shift. The Milan fashion house once known for putting black first and everywhere has betrayed its main principle.
To be honest, they've been abandoning black for a while, introducing lighter colors and a more classic logo than the upside down triangle. But now, you can't help but notice they've gone completely in the other direction.
And guess what? I'm not complaining, because it works. The Prada shopwindows at Taipei 101 and in the Regent Galleria are a riot of colors. Prada now sells handbags in orange, green, white, blue, pink, you name an outrageous color, and they seem to have it, all in one window together. The bags have the name Prada, the place of origin Milano, and the date 'dal 1913' - which simply means 'from 1913.' And with the bags, there are smaller purses and shoes to match. Those shoes are taking things even further, with not just one color per shoe, but two. The light green shoe will have slightly darker green tips, and so on.
I researched the web site to get more information about the new philosophy and the new products, but to no avail. Either my browser is acting up, or the site is really as lame as the new bags are enthusiastic.
Anyway, Prada has exploded. Into color. I'm all for it.

Stealing Stephen

2006-11-28T22:34:00.000+08:00

Coming soon to a Web site, a second-hand store or a sidewalk near you: 96 Louis Vuitton bags in mint condition!
That's the likely outcome of the spectacular two-minute raid on the French designer's main store in Taichung yesterday. The thieves got away with some of the latest in Louis Vuitton bags, include a Stephen with the typical monogram, leopard design and a chain, worth a cool 155,000 New Taiwan dollars, or about 5,000 US dollars. Several bags in the new light cream colored version of the Damier series also vanished, as did lesser known but still stylish bags like the Stillwood Vertical and the Zippy Organizer.
Police told the United Evening News they expect the objects to show up on the Internet or at second-hand stores in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan at 85 percent of their original value. They also suspect the robbers must have visited the store earlier on to check up on its contents. The Taichung store is one of Louis Vuitton's newest in Taiwan, and hosted the launch on the island of the Monogram Perfo series.
The heist immediately invited parallels with that now infamous breakin at Gucci's Chungshan North Road store in Taipei, which as far as I recall, was never solved. So much for the logo craze.

BR4 (Part 2)

2006-11-17T22:48:00.000+08:00

The new Sogo BR4 at the Chunghsiao-Fuhsing MRT station in Taipei is roaring ahead like a Taiwanese high-speed rail train. That is to say, they keep announcing new dates for its opening, and they keep missing their deadlines.
By traveling to Bangkok last weekend, I thought I was missing the opening of the green giant across the street from the old white Sogo, but oh no, they postponed everything again, possibly until the middle of next month.
Not so important, I hear you say, since we still have the old Sogo, the Dunhua Sogo, the Breeze Center, Taipei 101, the Takashimaya, and a dozen or so Mitsukoshis. For me, that's ok as well, but there are fashion brands out there that have landed in an uneasy situation.
Belgian design house Martin Margiela was selling its clothes out of a store near Warner Village until last month, when it closed down to prepare for the move to Sogo BR4. The result is now that they don't have a store, and threaten to miss out on both the 'anniversary sales' craze and the winter season. If the situation continues, the Apple Daily says, they'll be opening up just as the year-end sales begin, having to mark down clothes that were never available at normal prices. Not an attractive situation for a business, so what Margiela did was invite VIPs and frequent customers over to their offices to choose clothes there.
Apple says a couple of other brands are in a similar bind. Versace was looking forward to opening its largest outlet in Taiwan inside the new Sogo, while Italy's leather goods brand Hogan - part of the Tod's fashion group - was going to have its only store for all of the country right inside the BR4.
The race is on now for which will operate first - the high-speed rail system or the new Sogo.

The Bangkok Bag

2006-11-15T23:00:00.000+08:00

The most important product of my weekend trip to the Thai capital was making the acquaintance of 'the Bangkok bag.'
Let me explain. My wife was asked by a colleague to bring her a dark blue bag from Thailand. The brand she mentioned was Nantita, but when we started looking around in Bangkok, we soon found out that that company was apparently imitating a far more popular brand known as NaRaYa.
Its trademark 'Bangkok Bag' - known as such by its Taiwanese fans - has already achieved quite some popularity here in Taipei, and I know I've seen it around a lot, even though I didn't know it was imported from Thailand.
The NaRaYa bags are made of cloth, not leather, and have a big butterfly knot. They come in various colors, from dark blue over shiny sky blue to wine red, and even pink and grass green. Unfortunately, the model my wife's colleague wanted was no longer available. Another thing about the bags: they cost next to nothing. No 20,000 to 50,000 baht Gucci-style prices here, but only a bare 175 baht and up. Yes, that's 5 US dollars or about 150 New Taiwan dollars and up.
The two NaRaYa stores we found were located on the corner of Sukhumvit Road Soi 24 behind the Emporium (Phrom Phong Skytrain station), and inside the Central World shopping mall (between Siam and Chitlom stations).
By the way, the Central World mall shows a seemingly typical Bangkok phenomenon: the mall is officially opened to the public way before construction work is finished. The side close to Sukhumvit still looked like a construction site, so much so that they put up boards telling you that, yes, Central World is open. But even inside the half that is finished, lots of stores are still boarded up and waiting for their occupants. That'll be something for my next visit.
I did find two expensive - by Thai standards - shirts for myself at the Siam Center mall, at a place called 'Dapper.' The shirts cost more than 1,000 baht each, one has white and blue stripes with a flowery design down below, while the other one fades from harsh red at the top, over pink to near white at the bottom. Both shirts have short sleeves, which is the only kind of sleeve you want in Thailand.
Remember: if you buy sufficient items in Thailand, you can get a VAT (Value Added Tax) refund at the airport. There are several conditions though. You have to get a PP10 form from the shops where you bought the goods - and not all stores are in on the VAT scheme - my 'Dapper' shirt store wasn't - and you have to spend at least 2,000 baht at each store for a total of at least 5,000 baht.
And at the airport you have to remember to have the forms stamped after you check in your luggage but before you pass the customs check. Finally, after the customs check, you can get your refunds. In our case, the normal refund desk was closed and we had to rush over to an office at departure gate D1. The last surprise was that they take a 100 baht handling fee from your refund, so if your total VAT sum was only around 100 baht, just don't bother with the whole procedure. All in all, Bangkok is still a great shopping destination for both clothing, cultural artifacts, and design.

Thai Weekend or Sogo Weekend

2006-11-08T22:16:00.000+08:00

The new giant green Sogo BR4 above the Chunghsiao-Fuhsing MRT station in Taipei is scheduled to open this coming weekend, as far as I know. I haven't been anywhere near it recently, so I can't tell whether it's ready to open, but since it's probably less complicated than a high-speed rail line ...
I'll have to miss the opening though, because my significant other scheduled a guerrilla-style one-and-a-half-day trip to Bangkok for me. Nothing directly related to fashion, we'll be visiting a floating market and taking in the sights, but the latest shopping malls will also be on the agenda.
Last Christmas, we visited the brandnew, luxurious Siam Paragon mall. There were luxury cars spread over the building, fancy fountains, lots of interesting Thai brands, but many of the international stores were still under construction. Not that I cared much, since for taxation reasons, major brand products are not expected to be much cheaper in Bangkok than in other Asian capitals. Since then though, yet another shopping center has opened next door, run by the Central chain, until now noted for its rather old-fashioned department stores - think Rebar or Far Eastern department stores near Hsimenting ten years ago.
Bangkok is still good value for money for its many local brands, which are getting more and more international exposure. Taiwan's most recent issue of CommonWealth magazine features a piece about Thai design which mentions Propaganda, a must-see for visitors to Thailand, even though it's not about clothing but about knick-knacks and trinkets. Then there is Bangkok's design center, which you'll find at the top of the Emporium shopping mall near Phrom Pong Skytrain station.
Anyway, I might not make it to the new Sogo before you do, but Bangkok is a fun alternative.

Taipei Fashion House

2006-10-19T22:10:00.000+08:00

Next Tuesday, Taipei's rather downmarket district of Wanhua will be enriched with a new museum: the Taipei House of Clothing Culture, or whatever official name the city will come up with.
The baroque house, which spent many years as an empty shell in the Dali neighborhood, is not so much a museum as an art and exhibition space, which will be rented out for fashion shows, lectures, art performances and the like.
Opening day, October 24, will feature a virtual fitting room, a 100 years of history of Taiwan's fashion, and in the evening a public fashion show which includes Italian brand Missoni.
If all that sounds rather abstract, it is because so far I have found only limited reports about the place and the event in the local press.
I won't be there on opening day, but I guess it'll be worthwhile to visit one of the weekends after. Will this place be a focus for fashionistas with an emphasis on local designer culture, or will it turn into just another performance hall? I'll have to go and check it out for myself. To be continued, with more practical information about how to reach this place.

No Nudes

2006-10-16T22:19:00.000+08:00

For those of you about to run out to the Breeze Center for your Marc Jacobs T-shirt, I can tell you, stay home! They're sold out!
This is the second time I write you this story, because through some marvel of technology, I couldn't post the first version on the blog, and it got completely lost. Thank you, blogger, for wasting my time.
On Sunday morning, I was waiting outside the Breeze Center before opening time with another half a dozen people. As soon as the doors opened, we all ran in, and about half of us went straight downstairs because that's where the Marc by Marc Jacobs boutique is.
But guess what? Some others had been smarter and found another entrance to the mall, so there was already a line from the store past two adjacent shops. We all got handed a red ticket with a number, mine was 250-something, so you can already guess what happened with the 80 T-shirts on offer.
Exactly, they were sold out before I even entered the shop. As consolation prize, people received a small box of facial cream, which my wife was happy with, at least. But my dreams of Naomi Campbell in orange, Winona Ryder in pink, and Hilary Swank in white vanished into history.
I guess I should've known. Here in Taiwan, even seemingly uninterested things attract the masses to line up if the marketing is done right.
I want to apologize to you if reading my blog caused any of you to hurry to the Breeze Center and waste your time. The next time I'll have to put up a disclaimer of some sort.

No Nudes

2006-10-16T22:06:00.000+08:00

Nude Design : Correction

2006-10-04T22:29:00.001+08:00

Hold on, Marc Jacobs fans!
Did I mention this coming Sunday as the day to buy your T-shirts with nude stars at the 'Marc by Marc Jacobs' inside the Breeze Center?
Wrong!
The first day is Sunday October 15, so you still have to wait more than a week, until after the Mid-Autumn and Double Ten holiday, before you can buy your copies of the shirts.
And so will I. I have more or less made up my mind to buy three of them. At least the Naomi Campbell, and then two other ones, possibly Hilary Swank and Winona Ryder, at least if they are available in Taipei.
I won't be wearing them, at least not on the MRT, but I'll keep them in a safe, dry place, a bit like a stamp collector keeps a rare 1863 stamp from the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Nude Design

2006-10-04T22:29:00.000+08:00

Marc Jacobs is the man who turned the handbag into a must-have for thousands, no, millions of Asian women. And now, he is turning his attention to T-shirts. For some reason though, I think he's not going to be so successful at it.
Jacobs has two brands of his own: 'Marc Jacobs,' which you can find in the alley running south along the Grand Formosa Regent in Taipei for example, and 'Marc by Marc Jacobs,' which now has a store on the first floor at the Breeze Center.
And it's at the Breeze place you have to be this coming Sunday if you want to fork out 1,000 NT dollars (about 32 US$) for Marc's latest creations. The T-shirts have texts like 'Protect Your Largest Organ' printed over the picture of a famous person. The persons available include Naomi Campbell, Winona Ryder, and Marc Jacobs himself.
Oh yes, and why do I think they're not going to sell as well as Marc's LV bags? The stars posed nude. A frontal nude on the front, a rear view on the back of the T-shirt, with the naughty bits not really showing, of course. As usual with nude pictures, it's all for a good cause, in this case skin cancer research at a New York university. One word of warning: only 8 out of the 12 original versions will be available in Taipei.
I can't see young Taiwanese women walking along Chunghsiao East Road or sitting on the MRT showing off a nude picture of Marc Jacobs, but I'd certainly want a Naomi Campbell one as a collector's item. Please.