Title:
A WANTED MAN
Author: Robert Parker
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Pages: 307
Genre: Crime Thriller
It’s down to
fathers and fatherhood.
Ben Bracken, ex-soldier, has just got out of
Strangeways.
Not by the front door.
With him, he has his ‘insurance policy’ – a bag
of evidence that will guarantee his freedom, provided he can keep it safe – and
he has money, carefully looked after by a friend, Jack Brooker.
Rejected by the army, disowned by his father,
and any hopes of parenthood long since shattered, Ben has no anchors in his
life.
No one to keep him steady.
No one to stop his cause…
The plan: to wreak justice on the man who had
put him in prison in the first place.
Terry ‘The Turn-Up’ Masters, a nasty piece of
work, whose crime organisation is based in London.
But before Ben can get started on his mission,
another matter is brought to his attention: Jack’s father has been murdered and
he will not rest until the killers are found.
Suddenly, Ben finds himself drawn in to helping
Jack in his quest for revenge.
In the process, he descends into the fold of Manchester’s most
notorious crime organisation – the Berg – the very people he wants to bring
down…
This action-packed and fast-paced story will
keep you turning the pages. Manchester
is vividly portrayed as Ben races around the city seeking vengeance.
ORDER YOUR COPY:
Writing
from your gut
by Robert Parker
You need
to have guts to be a writer, even right from the start. When you first sit down
to write a story, it can be quite daunting. There are millions of books out
there, telling you exactly how you should do it, ranging from how you should
lay things out, to what pens you should be using, to what word processor is the
best. You end up with a bucket-full of decisions to make before you even get to
the actual important bit – the story.
But then
comes more decisions, more and more books about what story decisions to make,
what structures your story should adhere to, what direction your character
needs to go. You can be so bogged down in the whole fear of the thing that you
can forget the sheer joy of what you are doing. You are creating. You
are making something. You are letting your mind build something that
only you can decide how it will end.
But how
can you make the right decisions and just enjoy the moment? Well, chances are,
you’ve already got a fair idea.
Every
single day we inhale fiction of some kind, whether it be in the books we love
so dearly, the TV shows we binge on Netflix, or even that daft little story
behind Candy Crush Saga. And the end result of this is, whether we like it or
not, that we get a sort of schooling in drama, in terms of what works and what
doesn’t. We develop an ear for it, just through immersing ourselves in it.
So, when
you sit down to write your story, just go for it. Don’t be bound by
formula or fear of doing something different. Write what feels right to you,
and more often than not, if it feels right it usually is right.
I used to
get so hung up on whether my characters and situations were too hokey, too
contrived, too silly. I used to worry about making decisions for my characters,
and whether their dialogue was corny. But then I learned to trust my gut and
see what came out at the other end.
When I
sit to write, I have the barest skeleton of where I’m going, but absolutely no
roadmap. I set up a scenario, and usually have an idea for a scene I want to
get to – but no initial thought of how to bridge the two. Then I start writing,
let the words flow and the characters develop, and before long the story is
making decisions for me, the characters are deciding what they should be doing
organically, and you’re away. So much of the time, if you write from your heart
and gut, I’m convinced that:
1) you
will have a great time.
2) you
will write something that in some sense works.
The
important thing is to do it. Just let the shackles go, trust your instincts,
write your story and go for it.
Forget
fear.
Once
you’ve got those words on the page, those chapters all done, nobody can take
that from you. You did it! Chances are, it won’t be perfect - but you’ve still
got your story. You can change things any time you like, but what you can’t
change is a story that doesn’t exist. You can’t polish something that just
plain isn’t there. But you do have something you can work with.
It’s OK
to have a detailed plan, but’s also OK to not have one, and it’s OK to wing it.
But whatever way you approach it, just go for it. Write, have fun, enjoy the
sheer happiness of creating something and be proud of what you’ve achieved when
you’ve written it. And when you look back at what you did, I bet you sit there
and say ‘you know, some of this ain’t half bad’. And that’s a start. You can
work with that.
Trust
yourself. Deep down, even though you might not feel it, you’ve got a fair idea
of what you’re doing. Those guts you showed to write in the first place? Listen
to them.
Robert Parker is a new exciting
voice, a married father of two, who lives in a village close to Manchester, UK. He has both a law degree and a
degree in film and media production, and has worked in numerous employment
positions, ranging from solicitor’s agent (essentially a courtroom gun for
hire), to a van driver, to a warehouse order picker, to a commercial video
director. He currently writes full time, while also making time to encourage new
young readers and authors through readings and workshops at local schools and
bookstores. In his spare time he adores pretty much all sport, boxing regularly
for charity, loves fiction across all mediums, and his glass is always half
full.
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