Short story extract from 'Stopover'.

"Anne was a helpless romantic, hopelessly in love with the idea of romance. In the airline she saw it all around her. It was in the other hostesses' sparkling engagement rings, the pilots' gold-braided uniforms. From dreaming, breathing, anticipating romance, Anne had created her own romantic aura. With her creamy apple skin, her slender velvet-beribboned neck, her crowning-glory of jet black hair, she managed to suggest to the more artistic amongst her admirers, of a work by Romney, perhaps his portrait of a young Emma Hamilton, others of a more literary bent discerned in her a resemblance to Nabokov' 'Lolita'. So they never tired of telling her."

This extract is taken from 'Stopover' one of 18 short stories in my collection 'The Mask and Other Stories' - "an intriguing, sensual and poignant portrayal of modern Irish women"available now in Ebooks. Hope you will read, like and review it!

Airline novels!

There can be a lot of research when writing airline novels. But the ability to get into the mind of the pilot when he finds himself In an emergency, whether flying solo in light aircraft or at the controls of a jet adds drama and excitement to an already fraught situation. In my first Celtic Airways novel 'Up Up and Away' when Captain Graham Pender is trying to land his B707 in Colombo in a heavy Monsoon storm a migraine attack coincides with a faulty ILS - Instrument  Landing  System - and a non-functioning altimeter and  he discovers too late that the rapidly descending aircraft is not at the altitude showing on his instrument panel but merely 200 feet above ground and far short of the runway.