Drama in an Engineering Firm

With The Reckless Engineer I wanted to create an engineering hero and a series about an engineering firm. The only hero in fiction I can think of who is an engineer is Barney from the Mission Impossible TV series. There is Q from the Bond series, but he is an old and geeky supporting character working from a bunker. There are so many legal and medical dramas, but where are the dramas centred on engineering firms?  I wanted to bring an engineering drama to life, treated for an audience not familiar with the profession the same way that legal and medical dramas are.

The environment of an engineering firm in reality is just like in the book, so much so that this could be non-fiction but for the murder set in the middle of it.  The characters are very realistic. Jack Connor, for instance, is of a somewhat smaller physique and tries to over-compensate for it by going after glamorous women. Women are somehow attracted to his brilliance and confidence at his work and well as the security and the respectability society assigns him because of his profession. Then there are people like Alan, Jack and Jeremy's boss at Marine Electronics, who make it to management positions because they have more people skills, are extrovert, and are better looking. Jeremy's character is still coming into its own and is in transition through the book and the series. He is emerging as a manager and a leader from the subordinate position he has been in so far. And then you have the super rich owners of these engineering businesses like the McAllens. There is also the occasional female engineer like Sally who is very introverted, outmanoeuvred at every opportunity by the much more glamorous and outgoing Michelle. These characters are a cross section of people you would get in an engineering firm in reality.

One important reason I wanted to create a hero like Jeremy was to attract youngsters to the field.  I have deemed this particular story to be for an 18+ audience because it deals with infidelity in the plot. The future books in the series, however, will be very YA friendly. I want young adults to know how entertaining, satisfying, powerful, and glamorous the engineering field is so that they will be attracted to the profession.

An engineer would make a very strong amateur detective. They have brilliant, sharp, and analytical minds that are trained to absorb minute details in the environment. They are strong problem solvers and solution creators; solution creation to difficult problems is what engineers do in their day to day work. If you put a problem or a question before an engineer his mind will switch into solution seeking gear and the question will bug him until he can find an answer, until he comes up with a solution that will surprise those around him. An electronics engineer also has the means and the skills to build gadgets like hidden miniature cameras, miniature microphones, and other electronics surveillance equipment. They are mechanically good with their hands and can, for example, work mechanical locks as well as electronic ones. They have the capacity to hack into anything via software. This is why Jeremy is going to be a super amateur sleuth.

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My Winter & Travel Buddy in Bed

As an an electronics engineer and a published author I travel quite a bit on book tours and for work. I also like to go on holiday to exotic locations––to small island destinations and on rough safari adventures.

Away from the comfort of my own bed and with my body clock confused by daylight and time differences, sleep was getting to be a real problem. I used to turn up for book signings and meetings late or sleep deprived and feeling like a zombie; and I have wasted parts of my holidays too tired for the activities.

That was before I discovered my old trusty hot water bottle with its fluffy brown cover. I get a sturdy one ever since and like to fill it up fully with boiling water. I like to get a cover made of fleece or brushed cotton that is soft on my feet.

You do not have to wear tight uncomfortable socks in cold weather or with the inadequate covering you get in some hotels. It warms your feet while allowing the rest of your body to stay cooler and puts you into a very deep sleep very fast. It stays warm for over 8 hours and you wake up from a deep sleep feeling fresh and ready to take on the world wherever you are.

People who have been long-suffering insomniacs have told me that it is the cheapest and most effective sleep aid they have had. They love it because it does not have the nasty side effects of sleeping pills that damage your health and at times leave you feeling like a zombie. It is easy to carry; you empty it and pack it flat between your clothes. There is always a source of hot water wherever you travel and it takes just minutes to fill it up and slip it under the covers.

It has had the same effect on my family and friends I have shared this tip with, so much so that as winter approaches it has become a great holiday gift idea for the cold months.  I present people who don't already have one with a hot water bottle and fluffy covers of various patterns and colours appealing to the person's age and sex. Often I fill the cover up with surprise gifts, like one would do with a holiday sock.

It is a great travel companion and a holiday gift idea everybody will love.

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My Four Cornerstones of Fiction Writing

The deck outside The Mermaid on a misty day.

For me there are four cornerstones that hold up good fiction.

• The Characters
• The Plot
• The World Building
• Literary Prose & Narrative

I take great care with each of the four aspects in the stories I write, which comes to me naturally, for sacrificing even one aspect makes the story weak and diminishes its value––it makes the story stumble. 

The core of the plot and the main characters usually come to me inextricably interwoven together in a moment of inspiration like a segment of a film or a disjointed dream. For example, I woke up late on a warm summer day this June with an image of a fugitive escaping and running away from an overturned van transporting him to court from prison that had met with an accident. Prisoners wear normal clothing in England, not orange jumpsuits, and they are not in chains.  He runs into the crowds and a bus parked behind a mall to hide among the people only to find that it is a film set.  The actor playing a main character of the movie and the director are having a fight. The actor suddenly punches the director in the face who falls backward. My protagonist fugitive hiding among the supporting film crew catches him and breaks the fall.  The director gets up, wipes the blood off his nose, fires the main actor loudly, and asks him to get out of his movie set.  He turns to my protagonist and asks: ‘You there, what’s your name?’  ‘Art Miller,’ he gives a fake name.  ‘Art, you are playing Michael Fallon. His trailer is yours now. Go with my crew and get dressed.’  And there I have the plot, the main characters, and the first chapter of my standalone book, In Plain Sight.

At this point, the most important aspect is the characters. I am a firm believer if Virgnia Woolf's Bloomsbury school of writing. I give each one of my characters a particular psychology and then keep them true to this psychology through the story. I got interested in Freudian and Jungian schools of psychology during Stanford's Liberal Arts education program and have kept up the study of it over the years. Sometimes my writing is almost a close psychoanalysis of a character or two. I keep my characters true to their particular psychology through the story, and hence they may do a mix of things that are good or bad. However, they always remain true to their particular psychology though they sometimes struggle against it due to the demands from those around them or from their own conscience.

After I have the main plot idea and my main characters I build a world for them, although the world that I build is a little corner of contemporary Britain that we live in.  For me it is very important to do justice to the place that I set the story in (in The Reckless Engineer, that is Portsmouth, London, and Aberdeen, Scotland). My writing will always evoke a strong sense of the towns––its sceneries, industries, architecture, and the general atmosphere––painting these for the reader like with a brushstroke. Character and world building go hand in hand for characters cannot exist in a vacuum and must have a world they inhabit and the writer must paint the full picture of the characters in their little corner of the world, bringing the whole scene to life, in the mind of the reader.

One author who excels at world building in very poetic language in his crime fiction is Benjamin Black.  Ian Rankin is also known to favour such literary writing where no aspect is ignored or sacrificed.

I then put my characters with their individual psychologies in the world I build for them and let them drive the story forward. The plot progresses and emerges naturally from the actions of the characters who remain true to their psychology throughout.

For the writing I draw a lot from my training in classic poetry and drama. I tend to use a good amount of imagery and phonetically appealing phrasing to enhance the ambience.  I set most of the scenes as if I were writing a stage drama or a film setting. In fact each novel is a series of 50 or more dramatic scenes.

There are aspects or techniques in addition to the Four Cornerstones above that I engage in my writing. There may be socio-political, ethical, and philosophical commentary interspersed in the narrative. They enhance the structure of the story as well as character building. For example, economic stressrors in the years the story is set in will impact on how the characters act.  

Sacrificing even one of the Four Cornerstones is something I do not do. One must treat all four aspects with respect. It is silly to sacrifice one or the other because the story topples and leans in the direction of the weak cornerstone. I therefore build my stories on my Four Cornerstones of fiction writing––Characters, Plot, World Building, and Literary Prose & Narrative.

The Mermaid in Port Solent, Portsmouth

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How I Get Over The Writer's Block

I write in spells.  At times I might write a dozen hours a day for over a week, and then I might not write anything again for several weeks.  Sometimes I might write for a few hours a day for weeks.  I find I cannot force myself to write when I feel the block. If I do, the writing comes out contrived and not feeling right. Inspiration has to come to me naturally.  I just have to leave the manuscript aside and do something else until the words and ideas start to flow again.

I hit the dreaded block several times during the course of writing The Reckless Engineer.

I do a couple of things when I hit the Writer's Block.  The first thing I try is setting the manuscript aside and reading a good book.  I hit a very difficult spot just before the scene in Chapter 15 of The Reckless Engineer.  I felt that the part of chapter 15 I had written was dull and was slowing down the pace of the plot. Try as I might I could not think of a way to maneuver the plot to pick up the pace again.  At this point I decided to put the writing aside and read a book.  I read two Agatha Christie books, At Bertram’s Hotel and Cards on the Table, at this point.  Then, when I returned to my writing about a week later, I decided it was time to bring the character Jack Connor home.  I had kept him in custody until that point.  I then deleted the part of that chapter I had previously written and started writing in this new direction.  Everything came easily to me after that insight into how I should progress the plot which had to occur to me in a moment of inspiration in its own time.

I reached a second nasty block when I needed to write the scenes with Jeremy at a Portsmouth seaside hotel, The Royal Atlantic.  This time I knew the plot, but the prose was not coming out right.  I had moved out of Portsmouth by then, but I decided to take three days off and check into The Royal Beach Hotel in Southsea, Portsmouth to see if I could get the words flowing again.  I did the same again, volunteering at a back-stage to help a friend at the Gielgud theatre, to write the scene set in the London West End.

I do not write while I am at the scene.  I just immerse myself in the environment and absorb the people, the sense of the surroundings, the sounds, and the views. I interact with the people and I might take some photographs.  I come out of the scene and do something entirely different for about a week, letting the ideas and the images work their magic at the back of my mind. Then when I sit down to write again the words just flow naturally.

These two techniques – reading a good book or two and immersing myself in the scenery I want to write about – have always helped me out of brief spells of the Writer's Block.  They have never failed to get me writing again.

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The Reckless Engineer

The Reckless Engineer is the first in author Jac Wright's series of literary suspense, mystery, and legal drama.

Jack Connor's lives an idyllic life by the Portsmouth seaside married to Caitlin McAllen, a stunning billionaire heiress, and working at his two jobs as the Head of Radar Engineering at Marine Electronics and as the Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold, his powerful father-in-law Douglas McAllen's company in extreme engineering in Oil & Gas.  He loves his two sons from his first marriage and is amicably divorced from his beautiful first wife Marianne Connor.  Their idyllic lives are shattered when the sexy and alluring Michelle Williams, with whom Jack is having a secret affair and who is pregnant with his child, is found dead and Jack is arrested on suspicion for the murder.

Jeremy Stone brings in London's top defence attorney, Harry Stavers, to handle his best friend's defence.

Who is the bald man with the tattoo of a skull seen entering the victim's house? Who is "KC" who Caitlin makes secret calls to from a disposable mobile? Has the powerful Douglas McAllen already killed his daughter's first partner, and is he capable of killing again? Is Caitlin's brother Ronnie McAllen's power struggle with Jack for the control of McAllen Industries so intense that he is prepared to kill and frame him? Is the divorce from his first wife as amicable on her part as they believe it to be? Are his sons prepared to kill for their inheritance? Who are the ghosts from Caitlin's past in Aberdeen, Scotland haunting the marriage? What is the involvement of Jack's manager at Marine Electronics?

The cast of characters is made more colorful by the supporting entourage: the big bald Scott Skull and his gang Hose and Heineken, Douglas McAllen’s bumbling solicitors McKinley and Magnus Laird, the cigar smoking private investigators Cossack and Levent, and the gay black actor working in the London West End, Otter.

While Jack is charged and his murder trial proceeds in the Crown Court under Harry’s expert care, Jeremy runs a race against time to find the real killer and save his friend, if he is in fact innocent, in a lurid saga of love, desire, power, and ambition.

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Christmas Alone

A few years ago I had to spend Christmas alone. I say “I had to,” but I mean that a series of events within and out of my control conspired in such a way that it came about I was spending Christmas alone.

I had just started a new engineering contract in a northern city in England far from home, home being the shores of Portsmouth on the southern sea front of England at the time. My new contract was as an electronic engineer with a manufacturer of medical devices such as MRI scanners, ultrasound scanners, and life support machines such as ventilators and heart-lung monitors. Our company not only designed, manufactured, and installed the machines, but also provided second-line support. Given the nature of their use, at least one engineer had to be in the labs or on call at all times to provide support and troubleshoot the devices should a problem arise at a client site. Being new to the company, I wanted to impress my very good looking boss. Also being Buddhist and having no kids I thought it would be a great Christmas gift to give my Christian colleagues to let them go home to their kids on Christmas Eve.

I was also about a year into my current relationship. I had tactfully avoided going to my boyfriend’s house for Christmas the year before by telling him it was too early to meet the parents, but it was getting difficult to do that again this year. The poor guy had missed spending the previous holidays with his family to stay and celebrate Christmas with me. This was the only excuse I had to send him home for Christmas on his own. It wasn’t so much the parents, but the sisters, man. Parents were adorable, but I was terrified of sisters-in-law. I was highly skeptical of Steig Larsson’s interpretation in his books (The Millennium Trilogy) of some fathers as daughter killers for I think fathers are dear creatures who, even when they were rapists and serial killers of other women, when it came to their own daughters they were driven by the same protective instincts as mother hens. However, there was something definitely Freudian and incestuous about sisters-in-law’s relationships with one’s boyfriend or husband. I vividly remembered how the two sisters-in-law had tortured me in my first relationship. I was a “gold digger” who had stolen their brothers’ monthly pay that had rightfully come to them as presents. I had stolen his time which he had been spending babysitting their little ones. I had cooked wrong, hadn’t cleaned enough, had folded the bathroom towels wrong, and so went my list of errors. I had been deemed a bad engineer for having to go to a third interview to meet the MD to secure a job, having already completed technical, phone, and first face-to-face interviews. (Multi stage interviews like this were a common practice in Engineering by the way.) All this had led to fights in the bedroom with my then husband.

Experiences with subsequent boyfriends’ sisters after the divorce had been almost as bad, and this one had three. So you could say I jumped at the chance of sending my cutie home for Christmas alone, explaining that my boss had asked me to work over Christmas.

Christmas day in the lab was itself uneventful and I came home at six in the evening to a microwave dinner in my new flat. It was a crisp clear night at 10ºC (50ºF) and I decided I was going to take the 25 minute walk into the city to stretch my legs and see if anything interesting was going on. I only had to have my phone with me to be on call and I took my laptop with mobile broadband in a backpack, just to be prepared in case an urgent support call were to come through. As I was taking the brisk walk into town, it occurred to me that I had never been in a city at Christmas; I had always been at home around a warm fire or at a nice big party surrounded by friends and relatives. This was going to be a novel experience, which was a good thing, I told myself.

I could not understand how the city could be so deserted at 7 in the evening. With shops normally open till 9 this place was always buzzing like a beehive as far as I knew. Not a soul was in sight; not a shop open for sales. It felt surreal. I had grabbed a couple of bottles of beer on my way out of the flat which I proceeded to enjoy all alone on my favourite bench in front of the mall, watching the stars. I walked the deserted, but well lit streets and pavements for a while before the beers started to take effect and I desperately needed the loo.

I walked over to the public toilets which, to my alarm, were closed and locked! I walked over to some of the familiar pubs, and I walked the crowded market street in the desperate hope of finding some place open, to no avail. Then it occurred to me that I was all alone and no one was there to see me if I were to choose one of the many islands of bushes. I contemplated the big patch of bushes separating the cinema from the car park, complaining of God’s sex discrimination at how badly designed we were for this. The city that seemed so deserted suddenly felt like it was thronging with crowds. I knew this was irrational, but the city was a place where millions of people roamed, and I felt that now that they were safe and happy in nice warm homes, their guardian angels were roaming the city all alone just like me.

I headed over to the park where there were several overgrown patches of land out of the immediate site of any roaming guardian angels and carefully picked a patch of overgrown bushes with an enclave nicely hidden away. After a minute or two, I was happily on my way once again to enjoy the city centre without discomfort.

Not so soon. No sooner I had made my way out of the bushes than I felt a stinging sensation. With my hand I could feel my back patched with stinging, itchy, swollen spots. I had had contact with poison ivy or stinging nettle, or I had been stung by some creature whose lazy nest of winter hibernation I had rudely disturbed. Soon my back was covered with patches of swollen blotches which were spreading gradually but surely. It was time to panic because I was someone who was allergic to many unpredictable things. Some years ago I had suddenly broken out in a rash of blotches in my gym. The rash had spread fast all over my body and in the end I had been taken to the A&E with my tongue swollen and wheezing from the respiratory tract being blocked by the swelling. It had turned out that I had been having an allergic reaction to Olbas oil that the friend I was working out with had released into the steam in the sauna; and the oil had accidentally spilled onto the clothes I had worn after the workout. The blotches were spreading over my back and upper thighs now. The situation could get serious very rapidly.

I quickly dialled several taxi companies, intending to take a taxi to the nearest Accident and Emergency ward, picking the numbers from the yellow pages app on my iPhone. I had made about 10 calls, all of which went unanswered, before I realized that none of the taxi companies were working on Christmas Eve either. The blotches were spreading up my back and down my legs now. I called 911 and the operator put me through to someone who advised me to describe clearly where I was and then to remain there and wait for them.

I sat on the park bench and waited, swollen and itching all over, for what seemed like an eon. I had never had to call the emergency services before and I suddenly realized that the emergency number in England was 999; I had remembered 911 from the 9-11 disaster in New York. I thought 999 was much more appropriate because 9 was the unluckiest number possible and it suitably represented a situation of maximum possible bad luck that one would have to be in, as I was, to call it. Number 1 was my lucky number (having been born on the 19th of the month which added up to 1) and the two 1’s diminished the bad luck representation of the leading 9. Anyway, it turned out, as I learned by chance, that 911 is also redirected to 999 in England in order to accommodate the accidental use of the American convention.

I had to go through the humiliating experience of explaining my misadventure while being examined and treated by the paramedics. They had in fact arrived within 7 minutes of my call though it had seemed much longer to me. I was later taken to the A&E where I was monitored until the blotches and swelling went down. The next morning I was able to take a taxi home to my flat.

The moral of the story is that, just as the City never sleeps, it is also never empty, even on Christmas Eve. If you do wrong things in it there are City Elves who will make you suffer.  Also your sisters-in-law will always get you somehow.


For stories of life and love in the world of high tech engineering look out for Jac Wright's upcoming series The Reckless Engineer.

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Review: Deconstructing Harry

Spoiler alert:  This post contains spoilers on the film Deconstructing Harry by Woody Allen.

I am not one to buy films or TV programs as DVD’s or CD’s.  While I meticulously buy the books I read in paperback format, having decided to eliminate the expense of ever buying a hardcover if a paperback is available and being very reluctant to commit myself to electronic format that robs me of the pleasures of the feel of the cover and pages and also tires my sight, I have not extended the habit to proceed to acquiring film media.  I like to view my films either in a cinema, and those that I miss or omit as not deserving a visit to the big screen I borrow, preferably by mail order.  As of this writing I own a single series of TV programs – the full eight “Monk” series – in digital format on iTunes, and I own a single DVD of a somewhat obscure Woody Allen film titled “Deconstructing Harry” and I own it for the reason that, however obscure, it resonates with me so intensely.

I love Woody Allen movies with such vehemence that I do not hesitate to augment the old adage commonly used to describe his works, that “you either love them or hate them,” with my own addendum “if you hate them you are a tasteless fool,” at least with respect to his top ten ranked films amongst which Deconstructing Harry falls.  It is the main storyline that moves me so much.  The story is about a man who is does not function well in real life situations and who has ended up alone with a life that is somewhat of a mess.  One of his main failures is that he is a serial philanderer who is so weak that he ruins his relationships in deplorable ways, at times by resorting to prostitutes.  We also know that he has been thrown out of his university for some unknown mess up.  He messes up the relationship with his son also by inappropriate misguidance that he gives and by being a horrible role model that his mother is not willing to let him have contact with him.  The protagonist Harry Block, played by Woody Allen himself, is a writer and he uses his writing to express the anxieties and situation he experiences in real life, often conversing with the characters that actually come to life for him.  Woody Allen forms an allegory of his inability to function well in social situations and in real life, and his failures in relationships and social situations by the creation of the character of “the man who is out of focus” played adorably by Robin Williams.  He literally slides out of focus and cannot be seen clearly by his family, friends, or colleagues, and his children have to be fitted with glasses purely to see their dad.

We know, however, that the one thing he does well is writing.  He has won awards for his writing and his old university who kicked him out is now preparing to honour him with an honorary degree.  The main storyline is that he is preparing to go to his award ceremony, but he has no one to take with him.  He is desperate to take his son to the honorary ceremony that marks the one thing that he is proud of and is a success at, but his pleadings with his bitter ex-wife fail.

On his way home alone he runs into an acquaintance, Richard, who also strikes a chord in one because of his loneliness in the big city of New York.  Richard is so alone that he has no one who will come with him to hospital to check up on his heart which he is worried about, although what is so dysfunctional about him that he is so alone is not extrapolated.  He asks Harry to come with him to the health examination, and afterwards Harry invites him to accompany him to the award ceremony, which invitation Richard declines at the time.

Harry goes home alone and resorts to his old vice by hiring a prostitute, Cookie, and ends up inviting her to stay the night at his house and accompany him to the award ceremony the next day.

The next day, as they set off for the event, Richard turns up and wants to come although one is left to wonder whether this is because of gratitude or loneliness with a definite bias towards loneliness.  Cookie is dressed in a revealing pink two piece number that screams she is a prostitute with a definite bias towards loneliness.  On the way they decide to stop by Harry’s son’s school and forcibly take him from the woman picking up the child.  Harry turns up at the award ceremony with the police after him for kidnapping the child, with Richard dead in his back seat, and a prostitute dressed in pink work gear.  He literally slides out of focus in a panic at how badly he has handled the situation of a ceremony so important to him by “turning up with a dead body and a hooker”, and it is Cookie who takes charge and talks him into focus by returning his attention to the award he is about to receive for the writing he loves and is so good at.  The movie ends on the note of the man who is literally “out of focus” except when he is doing his work as a writer, the one thing he is successful at in his life.

This work resonates so intensely with me because I feel out of focus except when I am writing or working on my electronics as an engineer.  I should hasten to add I do not draw a parallel to Harry Block literally – i.e. I do not resort to prostitutes and such likes; but I feel socially anxious often and I function best through my work.


Posted on behalf of Jac Wright.

Woody Allen (Harry Block) has the Writers' Block.

Robin Williams is Out-of-Focus in Deconstructing Harry

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