Traveling Backwards

Today, as I fire up the laptop and avoid the chill winter weather by crawling back into bed with my latest story and a cup of coffee, I travel back to Borneo. That's where the story, Last Man Standing, takes place. I take a sip of coffee waiting for Word to light up and previously written words to flood the screen and call me back.

I jump back into the lives of a greenhorn group of entomologists lost in the Borneo rain forest. As I cheer on Aidan, our resident hero who has the misfortune to have to rescue them, I'm reminded why I love to write these stories.



Every story is a journey into beautiful countries I have briefly touched and into the lives of fictional characters who lead me to places even I can almost not imagine.

So while the ground lies frozen and dormant here in my real life, in my fictional world I am standing on the bank of a river in Borneo waving to my team of misfits as their plane takes them to Kuching and safety - the end of their journey.

Or so they think.

Last Man Standing
Chapter One

He floated headless in a mist of tears. Even the river’s roar was not enough to mask the scream, so piercing was it and so unnatural that it silenced the never silent land. Overhead the Borneo midday sun skidded a brilliant reflection across the river’s surface.
Garrett clapped her hand against her mouth like she owned the scream and squinted trying to clear her tear blurred vision, as if that would shift reality. As if that would change the fact that the San Diego Chargers’ logo on the corpse’s torn, water soaked t-shirt was all that stood between Malcolm and anonymity. Malcolm’s smiling face flitted across Garret’s memory as tears obscured her vision and drained down the back of her throat - his smiling, missing face – she choked and her foot slipped and carried her dangerously close to the river bank, and the body.

And so a journey begins. It doesn't sound much like a romance, not at the beginning. But my merry group of travelers are challenged in every way. So for the main characters for sure, at the end it so only fair that they get their reward. After all, it is a romance. But midway through, I am anxious to get my group to safety's shore but they have other ideas and already in the first draft they have pointed their path in directions I would never have chosen for them. Writing is definitely a journey. A journey that is always best shared.

Until next time.

Ryshia