Did you get a Kindle for Xmas?

Get my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

This is a preview of my next novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. It’s a parody of self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese. Look for it after the holidays!

Thematic Literary Magazine, Issue 3

My short story, The Really Real World, has been published in Thematic Literary Magazine. It was in the “smitten” issue and is a darkly comic look at how the quest for fame ruins a budding romance.

I wrote it after The Real World came to DC. They didn’t seem to belong here. We’re not sexy and, as ambivalent as I am about this city, at least it’s composed of people trying to accomplish things rather than just desperately seeking fame, like LA.

Fame distorts everyone, from the people in the spotlight to those in the wings.

Why do the great novels of our age emerge from New York and not DC? Washington is the capital of the country, except when it comes to fiction-writing.

I examine these questions in The Washington Literary Inferiority Complex, recently published by nthWORD Shorts. I think it’s time for the Great Washington Novel.

My short story, “The Happiest Man in Washington” has been published in eFiction Magazine. You can read it below. If you roll over the pages, you’ll see backward and forward arrows. Click on the page and it will become a full-screen view.

This story was inspired by a homeless man I used to see daily at 17th and Rhode Island in DC. He was a neighborhood fixture, a happy face greeting commuters every morning. I wondered how he got there and if he ever thought about leaving the streets.

Like this? Read more of my short fiction and my novel, Murder in Ocean Hall.

(For you WordPress geeks, eFiction is a magazine that was created using Issuu. You can embed and customize the viewer.  I used the Issuu “customize and embed” tool to get the code to paste into my site. I made the embedded viewer one page across (instead of two) and to start on p.67, where my story is, rather than at the beginning of the magazine. The WP Issuu plugin was also necessary to make all this work. It’s not difficult.)

In the age of the e-book, how will readers discover new authors? One possible way might be through journals like Digital Americana, the world’s first literary magazine for tablets. It’s like Esquire or The New Yorker but on an iPad.

And they just published my short story, “The City of the Dead.” My story is about a former Senator’s efforts to right a wrong in sunny Florida, as seen from the perspective of his imperious Egyptian wife.

Digital Americana is a gorgeous multimedia reading experience, featuring over 80 pages of fiction, poetry, interviews, book reviews, music videos and beautiful photos all in a format that you can scroll through on an iPad or iPhone. I’m biased, of course, but it’s one of the prettiest magazines I’ve ever seen.

To read “The City of the Dead”, buy the Digital Americana app for your iPad or iPhone. It costs all of 99 cents and includes the July Freedom issue. My story is on page 44.

Over the past few days, I’ve learned that three different short stories of mine will appear in three different online literary journals. Yea!

All of these stories are set in DC, at least in part, and feature the “beyond the monuments” knowledge of the city that I used in Murder in Ocean Hall. The three stories are all a little different:

The Really Real World - this is a dark and funny satire about the dangerous pursuit of fame. And, yes, the MTV series is involved.

The Happiest Man in Washington – I’m pretty much a realist, when it comes to fiction, but this is my attempt to write a parable like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (an essential read for every artist).

City of the Dead – inspired by a friend’s trip to Egypt, this is a story about mortality and the limits of American power.

Look for all three of these short stories soon! Follow me on @joeflood and I’ll tweet when and where they’re published, as well as update this blog.

The Great Recession has changed the lives of millions. Jobs have been lost, people have been kicked out of their homes, retirement nest eggs have disappeared. Worse than the economic damage, however, has been the loss of hope in the future. Optimism has been replaced by worry and fear.

Which is what my short story, Cheating at Golf, is all about. Published in Story Bleed Magazine, an online literary journal, this is a dark tale set in sunny Florida. In it, an escape to a golf course brings no relief to a man’s troubles.

My short story Boom and Bust has been published in the online literary journal SPLIT. Boom and Bust is a satire, told from the perspective of a self-deluded marketing consultant. Obsessed by money and status, my narrator represents all that’s wrong with America these days. In my story, he’s helping an evil CEO escape the wrath of shareholders.

SPLIT is a new online magazine designed to showcase emerging talent in the art of storytelling. “Spill” is the theme of the second issue of the magazine. SPLIT features poetry, photography, a novel excerpt and even a short film.

Boom and Bust is part of a novel that I’ve been working on. Check out the further adventures of my consulting friend in the short story, Don’t Mess Up My Block.

One of my favorite novels of the past few years is Absurdistan. This comic romp by Gary Shteyngart takes place in a degraded post-Soviet world, where all anyone cares about is making money. The book is narrated by Misha Vainberg who dreams of returning to New York, where he was a student. Though a Russian heir to a fortune, he considers himself a lost American, trapped in corrupt country.

To get back to the United States (and the love of his life), he travels to the Caucasus republic of Absurdistan. He hopes to get a visa there. Along the way he joins in epic bouts of drinking and conspicuous consumption, as the nouveau rich show off their wealth with huge bounties of caviar, vodka and prostitutes.

This is fiction, or so I always thought, the invention of a very funny writer. But then I read the WikiLeaks cable on the wild wedding in Dagestan, Russia. It’s like the world of Absurdistan come to life, featuring a rich cast of characters frolicking along the shores of the Caspian Sea. The cable even has the perfect blurb for the back of a paperback:

The lavish display and heavy drinking concealed the deadly serious North Caucasus politics of land, ethnicity, clan, and alliance.

This could be describing a grand saga like Steinbeck’s East of Eden. After going into a backstory describing the region, the nameless author wryly describes memorable scenes from the wedding, like these:

The cooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables whenever someone entered the room…

The alcohol consumption before, during and after this Muslim wedding was stupendous. Amidst an alcohol shortage, Gadzhi had flown in from the Urals thousands of bottles of Beluga Export vodka (“Best consumed with caviar”). There was also entertainment, beginning even that day, with the big-name performers appearing both at the wedding hall and at Gadzhi’s summer house. Gadzhi’s main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding…

After the fireworks, the musicians struck up the lezginka in the courtyard and a group of two girls and three boys — one no more than six years old — performed gymnastic versions of the dance. First Gadzhi joined them and then Ramzan, who danced clumsily with his gold-plated automatic stuck down in the back of his jeans…

Gadzhi told us democracy would always fail in the Caucasus, where the conception of the state is as an extension of the Caucasus family, in which the father’s word is law. “Where is the room for democracy in that?” he asked.

It’s a fascinating read. The real story of our age, of Americans in the world, is contained in State Department cables. It’s our Great American Novel.