I just passed the 10,000 word mark on the current WIP. Yay!
For this occasion, I will share a bit more about it.
title:
Embarcadero
Synopsis:
In 1938, a French pilot is hired by British MI6 to ferry a scientist from Stockholm to London before his discoveries can be tapped by German intelligence. With hostile forces on their heels and war brewing, will they manage to fly to safety in time?
I plan to hit 60k by the end of November, with a projected final wordcount of maybe 80 to 100… The goal is to finish the first draft by the end of 2015, let it sit for a bit, then start the editing process in February.
After a long hiatus I have restarted work on two long-term writing projects, the first a SF novel set in the universe that contains the spaceship Freylia, this very website’s namesake, and the second a historical spy story set in 1938 that I’ve been planning for a good while.
I don’t know yet if I can work on both concurrently, so I’ll have to commit to one or the other pretty soon I believe. I have a little over 70k words written on the SF side, significantly more than the other, so that’s that…
We’ll see. I think it’s time for this universe to blossom in full and get to publishing stage.
This series of posts will retrace a few of the surviving airworthy (or close) PBYs around the world, and their history.
If there’s one bird I know well, that would be G-PBYA, a.k.a. “Miss Pick Up”, the white bird of Duxford where she’s being lovingly maintained by the dedicated crew of The Catalina Society. This aircraft was the first (and come to think of it, to date, the only) Catalina I saw “for real”, when they visited Barcelona for the Festa al Cel airshow in 2010. I saw it again two years later at the flying-boats/floatplanes meeting in Biscarrosse where it displayed how graceful it can be on water. For my third visit, it turned out she had something special in store.
G-PBYA – detail
G-PBYA – detail
As some of you may know, I’ve been collaborating this year on a special project called the Féria de l’Air, an airshow in Nîmes, southern France. This airshow took place last week on the 26th-27th of September, and G-PBYA was there, and I had the immense privilege not just of getting another tour, given by crew chief David Legg, whom I had the pleasure to meet at last, but also to fly aboard as a passenger during one of their rehearsal flights.
G-PBYA – running
G-PBYA – in flight
G-PBYA (CV-283) was built in 1943 in Cartierville, Québec, by Canadian Vickers for the Royal Canadian Air Force. This makes it a Canso A, which is a variant of the US Navy PBY-5A. After a long life in military and civilian service, it is now a regular sight on the European airshow circuit, where it flies in the colors of a wartime USAAF OA-10A Catalina 44-33915 of the 8th Air Force 5th Emergency Rescue Squadron at Halesworth, Suffolk.
Here’s a small, somewhat shaky video of my flight on this beautiful bird, with tremendous thanks to all the people involved:
