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, being 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 this thing was now “semi-fiction”, not fiction … because all the situations used were either RL reported situations I’d picked up along the way … or which had been said in conversation by different people I knew or knew of.

Contrived situations driven by the plot(s) still required characters and those characters were based on real people who thought, spoke, acted and carried themselves in the story as they would have in real life … in short, it was far easier just to let the plot follow how they would act in RL, faced with those things … no one miraculously wins the day but they can certainly succeed/escape/whatever to the point they could in RL.

Which can make for a dull plot except for weird things happening to both me and them. For example, one bizarre situation was when I actually was abducted on camelback at Giza … it happened … was included. Hugh’s girl was my gf in RL and she was always larger than life, occasionally off the planet … and so on. Imean, nothing had to be wholly invented.

Someone like Ksenia was an amalgam of a few ladies. Nikki was too, she was 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, a different character.

How to finish the saga … in a moment of brainfade, methought I’d end it at Armageddon itself (cough).

My own summation of Masquerade? The best parts are not bad at all, though I say so myself, mainly those requiring dialogue … the bridge sections less so, the more fictional the plot required them to be. So … uneven but after Toodles, not a bad read.

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 near the end of my scribbling time. Toodles said it felt curtailed, could have been longer … true. It’s far less raunchy than Masquerade, but I’m decades older now and life changes. At this point in 2025, I’m pretty much out of novelist steam.

The short stories … hmmmm … they’re quite variable, written over two decades … in all honesty, I’m 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.