Masquerade started out as a diary of my travels to Russia, which got to be more and more bizarre once there and that’s when 1st person narration became 3rd, given the name Hugh Jensen. The obvious problem was the Mary-Sue trap but Jensen was never that, he was more anti-hero who struck lucky here and there but still ran into trouble more often than not, just as in real life.

It started to dawn that it was now “semi-fiction”, not fiction … all the situations used were reported situations I’d picked up along the way … real things which had happened or had been said in conversation. That led to bringing in characters who existed in real life over there but not necessarily in my sphere and they spoke in a real way … but in fictional situations in the book … might be as clear as mud, that.

It made characterisation dead easy though, made it 3D, as they were already real and observable. If I read about an ambush somewhere, for example, all I needed do was take people I knew and put them in there instead, with them remaining true to their own characters, which sometimes changed the outcome. One bizarre situation where I was actually abducted on a camel at Giza … it happened … was included, but with Hugh. Hugh’s girl was my gf in RL … things like that.

Someone like Ksenia was an amalgam of a few ladies. Nikki though was wholly fictional, my idea of a flawed darling … interesting thing was that I then met a friend, Toodles in real life, and blow me down but she resembled Nikki in many respects … she then proof-read the book and helped in so many ways … she appears in a second book, Island, as one of the characters.

So this thing was becoming quite fun, as everyone and everything had a real life equivalent … until the crew reached the shore of Israel near Haifa and the tale moved into the future. That’s when the insane idea struck how to end a saga already 1500 pages long, which had taken over two decades to write, being read in part by people in different countries, some characters even recognising themselves … I thought I’d end it all at Armageddon itself.

It’s uneven by definition over that time period and in different lands … the best parts are not bad at all, the bridge sections less so.

This is the Blgr copy of Masquerade.

Island is a long novella which thinks it’s a novel … two of my fave characters are in here … there’s a bit of a bleak, open-ended finale … but is not life like that? I’m thinking that this was, maybe, my best story overall, many twists and turns along the way, it became quite real with the inclusion of screenshots of photos of the people and places.

Dark Logic is a very short novella, maybe even a novelette. Toodles said it felt curtailed, could have been longer … true. This is my last semi-fiction for the foreseeable … far less raunchy than Masquerade, but I’m decades older now and life changes. At this point in 2025, I’m out of novelist steam … who knows what might happen though?

The short stories … hmmmm … quite variable, written over two decades … not sure I’m a short story writer. One, Lift, was real enough … much of it happened, also Modica to an extent. To my mind, Modica was the best of em.