: I want to wish everybody who follows me a Happy New Year, I just finished my new novel, 3 Wishes, which is why I wasn't blogging.
Here is a a couple of quotes from it:
“Come on, tell me where are you from.”
“Why do you want to know?” came the plaintive reply. “I hate prying. You should
respect my privacy.”
“There’s no way I’ll pull you to shore unless you tell me where you come from,”
Jim said with the firmness of an immigration officer at a port of entry.
“It's too far; it wouldn't mean anything to you."
"Just tell me.”
"You've never heard of the place!"
Jim insisted.
The impatient juvenile finally gave in with a sigh. "Oh, all right... I’m
from the Centre of the Universe."
"The centre of the universe?"
"You see!” the boy exclaimed triumphantly, “I told you you'd never heard
of it!"
“How come you’re stuck on the seabed?” Jim asked, trying to bring the
inveterate liar down to Earth.
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Another quote:
“My Dear
Virginia, I appreciate that this is alien territory to you, but in the realm of
thought, there is no such thing as mainstream.”
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One more:
“That
rich, black-brown cake must have had some flour in it, certainly a pound of
butter and a pound of sugar, eight eggs perhaps, but mostly it was pure
chocolate, three thousand calories a bite. Jim savoured every mouthful. He
could detect the difference between this cake and the cakes he had gorged on in
the past when he was Senior Vice President, which had always had a bitter
aftertaste of guilt, a layer of awareness that he was doing something unwise,
clogging his arteries, weakening his heart and stretching his stomach, that he
was a man without will-power, that he was his own worst enemy. But now as the
delicious chocolate melted in his mouth and trickled down his throat, he
actually felt lighter: there were no alien flavours of guilt in all that rich
goodness, only the extra thrill of knowing that he could eat all the cakes in
the world and they wouldn't make an ounce of difference. He could be a pig with
impunity!
"Young man," Ward Banting
called across the empty tables in a shaky voice. His stomach heaved and burned
with hunger, but he tried to sound amused and patronizing. "How often do
you indulge yourself like that?"
Jim didn't know who Banting was, but
he read on his mindscreen curses against fate, the bitter thought that he could
have hundreds of millions yet could not afford to touch anything with a
four-figure calorie content. "I guess I'll have at least one more of these
tonight," Jim said smugly.
Banting's lean but somewhat wrinkled
and jowly face registered this brutal remark with a nervous twitch. "How
come it doesn't show? You look like you live on lettuce!"
Jim patted his stomach with both
hands. " I’ll burn it up."
Seized by a sudden surge of envy,
Banting couldn’t breathe. Suddenly all the air was squeezed from his lungs and
the restaurant turned dark around him. He jumped up from his chair, pounding
his chest to fight whatever was squeezing him. "The bill!" he gasped,
and collapsed on the tile floor.
Even before remembering that he
might actually be able to help, Jim sprang to his feet. Shocked by the deathly
blue of the prostrate man's head and wrinkled neck, he crouched down, tore open
Banting's shirt and began to massage his chest, which was also turning blue.
The young woman behind him was
screaming hysterically. "Oh, my God, oh my God!"
Working away on the motionless body,
Jim wondered whether his taunt about the cake might have had anything to do
with the man’s heart attack.
"Should I call an
ambulance?" the waitress asked eagerly, quite revived, assuming that Jim
liked her.
Still not certain if his hands would
do the trick, Jim ignored the question.
"Oh, my God, oh my God!"
the young woman sobbed, beside herself with fright. "Oh God, don't let him
die!"
Amanda Minton sounded as if she was
having a nervous breakdown. When Banting started to breathe Jim glanced back to
see whether he could help her. With strands of her long glossy black hair
sticking to her tear-stained cheeks, she was down on the tiled floor, sitting
on her heels, beating her knees with her fists, sobbing and crying "Oh, my
God, oh, my God!" But what Jim read on her mindscreen was: Oh my God,
he's going to die and he didn't change his will! Everything will go to that old
bat!
Jim let her go on grieving.
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Once more, wishing you a Happy New Year, don't eat or drink too much
