The questions I get most about writing are the practical ones. What do you write with? Where do you write? How do you find time to write?

Answers to these questions are supplied by novelist Ann Patchett in The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. It’s like a FAQ for aspiring writers.

Do you need to get an MFA in Creative Writing? Not if it means going into debt, according the prudent Patchett.

Should you turn your desk away from the window, to avoid distractions? “Desk positioning does not a real writer make,” according to the author.

Are you really a writer? Spend one hour a day for thirty days writing to find out. Sit down and do the work. You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.

She also believes that writer’s block is a myth. If you were stumped by a complicated math problem, do you have math block? No, you’re still working on the problem, even if you have no evident progress.

Patchett also punctures the idea that “everyone has a great novel in them.” Would you say that everyone has a five-minute mile in them? Writing is a craft that must be learned.

Her description of plot is the best I’ve ever read:

The plot of a novel should be like walking down a busy city street: First there are all the other people around you, the dog walkers and the skateboarders, the couples fighting, the construction guys swearing and shouting, the pretty girl on teetering heels who causes those construction guys to turn around for a split second of silence. There are drivers hitting the brakes, diving birds slicing between buildings, and the suddenly ominous clouds banking to the west. All manner of action and movement is rushing towards you and away. But that isn’t enough. You should also have the storefronts at street level and the twenty stories of apartments full of people and their babies and their dreams. Below the street, there should be infrastructure: water, sewer, electricity. Maybe there’s a subway down there as well, and it’s full of people.

This rang true with me. A novel can’t be just about one thing. All your characters, even the most minor ones, are heading somewhere, pursuing their own destinies. They exist in a dynamic world and, if it’s a good novel, are worthy of stories of their own.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life is a Kindle Single. It’s a slim volume but at $2.99 is a bargain for anyone seeking answers on the craft of writing and the realities of the writing life.

Join me on May 12 at 3 PM for an online chat about my novel Murder in Ocean Hall. My mystery about the murder of the world’s most famous ocean explorer is the first book club selection of the Independent Author Index. This new site is a place where “readers meet authors” and is a good example of how communities are forming online to discuss books.

Looking forward to answering questions on May 12!

There’s a reason why Amazon is such a titan in the e-book world – it delivers income to writers. It does so seamlessly, easily and without authors having to do anything. You don’t have to hound publishers for checks or wait for the results of some sort of mysterious accounting process.

Amazon posts sales results weekly. For me, it’s just beer money, as I watch my two novels sell in dribs and drabs. Still, it’s something. My work is getting out there and I’m making some cash, even if it’s not going to get me more than a six-pack or two.

And the company constantly innovates, like with their Amazon Prime program. Among other benefits, you can borrow select e-books for free. And authors get a share of a pool of money set aside for the program. In March, it was $600,000!

Each time one of my Kindle titles got borrowed last month, I received $2.18, according to the Amazon press release. That’s a nice royalty, considering one of my novels is 99 cents and the other is $2.99.

So if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow my books please! You don’t need a Kindle either. There are Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac and PC.

Murder in Ocean Hall is a great read if you like mysteries set in DC. A reviewer wrote that it will take you behind the scenes of the city and show you how things work – or don’t work. It’s a mystery novel written by someone who actually lives in Washington and knows the neighborhoods beyond the monuments.

Looking for something fast and fun? Then check out Don’t Mess Up My Block, a satire of the self-help biz. Follow the adventures of Laurent Christ as he pursues success across an American landscape littered with greedy consultants, social media frauds and incompetent bureaucrats.

Check them out! And remember, borrowing my books will keep me in beer, an essential element of my creative process

Harry Crews is one of those authors I wish I read more of.

His New York Times obituary describes his books as being filled with freakish, swaggering, outsized personalities. Born poor, and raised rough, he’s the type of writer that you rarely see these days, with a voice that hasn’t been sanded down by MFA programs or the need to be politically correct.

“Repellent” is another word used in the obituary, which is certainly true. His novels aren’t for the faint of heart, as they are filled with gory misfortune and sexual misadventure.

I read Body by Crews. It’s a twisted book about a female bodybuilder that brutally satirizes the South. He handles issues of race, sexuality and the American pursuit of success with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Seeing him violently deconstruct the hand-wringing concerns of today is liberating, making you want to be more honest in your life and writing.

As Crews said about writing:

If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.

My favorite books are short ones.

The Great Gatsby is a slim 180 pages. That’s all it takes for Fitzgerald to recreate the Roaring 20s and give us the quintessential American striver.

Ernest Hemingway is a master of economy, using just 251 pages to tell the tragedy of The Sun Also Rises.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh is another brilliant little book from the interwar period. It traces the fall of the British aristocracy in just 264 pages.

Yet, contemporary books seem to sprawl unfettered, as if editors have just given up on their duties. Authors ramble, they discourse, narratives go off into tangents and down weird little cul-de-sacs.

For example, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. It clocks in at a wearying 416 pages.

The novel starts off incredibly strong, giving us the colorful portrait of the Bigtree family, famed alligator wrestlers of the Everglades. Being from Florida myself, I’ve felt that the comic potential of the state has been underutilized. From exiles plotting revolution to greedy condo flippers, if any state could produce The Great American Novel, it’s this one.

The collapse of the Bigtree family mirrors what’s going on in “mainland” society. Their struggles are shared by many in more prosaic circumstances – they lose it all and the family falls apart.

The section of the novel where the Bigtrees adapt to normal life is fascinating. I loved Russell’s depiction of The World of Darkness, a hell-themed amusement park on the mainland. It’s like a Disney World created by sadists.

But then the book rambles, in an endless journey through the swamp as 12-year-old Ava Bigtree goes in search of her older sister. Lush descriptions of flora and fauna are piled one upon another, creating a mangrove thicket of prose that nearly stops the reader cold.

It’s one of those books where you find yourself peeking ahead a few pages. When is the story getting back to the World of Darkness?

The odyssey in the Everglades takes so long that the ending feels rushed, unresolved, leaving dramatic threads hanging.

Swamplandia! is a good hundred pages too long.

Despite growing up reading books, even I turn away from novels that resemble doorstops. Reamde is a book that I desperately want to read. Yet, at more than a thousand pages, I don’t even want to start it. The novel represents too much of a time commitment in our distracted age.

It’s ironic. The Internet and our ever-present electronic devices have collapsed attention spans. Yet, our books keep getting longer and longer.

No wonder why so few people read novels.

Our lives are crowded with information. In order to break through the electronic din, a novel has to be concise and powerful, a book that looks more like The Great Gatsby than Swamplandia!

In honor of my Irish heritage, you can get Kindle versions of both of my books for free all this weekend.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is my newest novel. It’s a funny parody of self-help books that examines the American faith in gurus and easy solutions.

Murder in Ocean Hall is my first book. It’s a mystery and is ideal for anyone who wants to learn about Washington beyond the monuments.

And you don’t even need a Kindle to read them for free. You can also read them for free using the Kindle app on the iPad, iPhone or computer.

My new book, Don’t Mess Up My Block, has advanced to the Second Round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).

ABNA brings together talented writers, reviewers, and publishing experts to find and develop new voices in fiction. The 2012 international contest will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance.

Finalists will be announced in May with grand prize winners selected in June.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is a novel that satirizes self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese and The Secret. It follows the adventures of an ambitious consultant as he goes from disaster to disaster, believing that success is a matter of just following the right catchphrase.

Read the first chapter and then buy it for yourself!

• Kindle – just 99 cents!
• Paperback
• Nook

Here’s the first chapter of my new novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. This fictional work is a satire of self-help books and is a funny, fast read. Check it out!

A Street Corner Epiphany

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.
- Tom Peters

Late one night, I got lost. It is on these unexpected journeys that you sometimes encounter the greatest discoveries. I certainly did.

Was it the 97 Pinch Mountain cabernet? Or perhaps the postprandial mojitos we imbibed at Marquez? It had been a client dinner that had gone long, after a day of business process reinvention. My client (an elderly CEO I cannot name) was garrulous, as many of them are, and wanted to talk and theorize after spending the day planning the next great reorganization of his Fortune 500 company.

I didn’t mind. Despite my hard-won business education and two decades of experience in strategic consulting, my role is often that of handholder, gently guiding decision-makers down the right path.

Besides, I could bill for it. My hourly rate had steadily increased over the past few years, as I moved from one successful client engagement to the next (many of which are described in these modest pages). While I had not quite reached the rarified air of my mentor, Esalen McGillicudy, I was on a slow, but steady, trajectory upwards. As my stomach digested more than a thousand dollars worth of Kobe beef, little did I suspect that the events following the dinner would lead me to my predestined success.

Close to midnight, we broke up, the taste of rum and mint still fresh in my mouth. A black limo glided up and ferried my client away. I declined his offer of a ride; the night was warm and I wanted to walk off some of the alcohol.

One downside of my chosen profession is the necessity of travel to cities around the country and around the world. After so much time in hired cars and five-star hotels, you start to confuse hotels, restaurants, spas. That great Thai fusion place – was that New York or Paris? Is the Four Seasons Scottsdale the one with the waterfall in the lobby? Did I sleep with the Hyatt concierge in LA or Sao Paolo?

I had driven here, I remembered. This was Washington, DC. I had parked my Miata on K Street. Find my vehicle and I could cross the river to my luxury condo in Virginia.

I set off south, I believed. The car parkers outside Marquez watched me with idle, Salvadoran curiosity.

Washington has lettered streets – F, G, H – and numbered ones – 17th, 18th, 19th. It is how the Washingtonians orient themselves and a pattern I had learned. Yet, after a couple of blocks, I found myself on curious, little angle of an avenue called Vermont.

Seemingly off the grid, the block was lined with glass-fronted office buildings, all of which were dark. Cars idled by in a curious pattern, stopping and starting despite the absence of traffic.

I paused. Which way was K Street?

A voice called out, husky and deep. Her tone was low, sexy and I didn’t catch the words the first time. She repeated the offer for me.

“Need some company?”

She was beautiful, standing nearly six-feet tall in pink heels. Tight silk shorts gripped her narrow hips. A tube top held in her bounty.

“I said, do you need some company? You look like you need some.”

The accent was on the “some” as she stepped forward, a friendly hand reaching out for my arm. She smelled like perfume and vodka.

In my position, one frequently has to finesse unexpected offers of female companionship. The director of a Swedish multinational once begged me to head up his marketing department, offering me an Ikea-furnished home and the blonde staffer of my choosing. I politely declined, citing the needs of an imaginary family.

“Mister, you know you want it.” Her lips glistened in the darkness, like overripe apples.

I am far from averse to the pleasures of female flesh but, let’s just say, I prefer something more appropriate for a man of my status.

“Sorry,” I said, the model of politeness. “I must decline.”

“For real?”

“Yes. But if you could point me in the direction of K Street.”

She turned her back on me and what a fine back it was.

I stood in place, unsure which direction I should go in. A car idled past the curb, its occupant lost in shadow. After a moment, it pulled away.

What an incongruent scene this must be, I thought. The stunning hooker and me, the business consultant, in a Burberry jacket and Italian loafers.

“What the fuck?” the hooker asked, watching the Prius accelerate into the distance. “You still here?”

“If you could give me directions.”

“I ain’t giving you directions. Get lost.”

“That’s the problem.”

A minivan with suburban plates pulled up. Seeing me, it drove off.

The hooker turned on me. Fiercely, she shouted in frustration, “You’re messing up my block!”

I staggered back, metaphorically. I was fucking up her block. Of course! My presence was costing her money. I was scaring away customers and denying her income. I was negatively impacting her business, without being aware of it until she brusquely told me.

A flash of insight illuminated me, like Paul on the road to Damascus. I strode off in a direction that turned out to be K Street. Yet, I hardly slept at all, possessed by the power of a simple idea:

DON’T MESS UP MY BLOCK

In business, and in life, we all struggle to achieve success. Yet, we all must deal with obstacles to empowerment – these are the people or situations that are messing up your block.

What’s fucking up your block? This book will teach you how to identify the things that are messing up your block and keeping you from your true potential.

And what do you do when you identify these things? Like the hooker of Vermont Avenue, you must banish the people, patterns and situations that are messing up your block. This little book will teach you how.

___________

This is just the beginning of the story. Buy it today:

• Kindle – just 99 cents!
• Paperback
• Nook

I’ve written a second novel. Don’t Mess Up My Block is a funny parody of self-help books like The Secret and Who Moved My Cheese. Here’s the description:

The secret to success is to not let other people “mess up your block.”

Or at least that’s what Laurent Christ thinks, in this satiric novel disguised as a self-help book.

Laurent has pursued self-improvement to its logical conclusion – he reinvents himself with a brand-new name and history. He drops a hundred pounds, shaves his head and goes on the road as a management consultant, providing advice to corporations around the county. Everywhere he goes, comic disaster follows as companies follow his glib counsel.

But failure is not going to stop him as follows the path laid out by his mentor, Esalen McGillicuddy. One man and a story – that’s all you need to make it in America.

As a management expert, he’s inevitably drawn to Washington, DC. But even he is appalled by the incompetent bureaucracy he finds in the city. Maybe he’s been wrong about everything. Maybe you need more than a catchphrase to find success in this country.

Laurent tells the sprawling story of his life in Don’t Mess Up My Block, a literary novel that examines the American faith in gurus and easy solutions. It’s a dark satire that is reminiscent of Catch-22 and Absurdistan.

Don’t Mess Up My Block is available in a variety of formats:

• Kindle
• Paperback
• Nook

Check it out – the novel is a funny, entertaining read.

I live a block off 14th Street, the setting for much of George Pelecanos’s gritty crime novel, What It Was. Set in 1972, it’s a fascinating read for anyone who likes books set in the Washington “beyond the monuments.” Watergate is briefly touched on, but this book contains no Senators, no wacky Masonic conspiracy theories and hardly any politics at all.

What It Was concerns the lives of real people, mostly cops and criminals, in a city scarred by riots. The popular conception of 14th Street is that it was a wasteland, from the disturbances of 1968 to the start of gentrification in the 1980s. But life went on. Pimps, drug dealers and hustlers of all kinds moved in. And for a lot of them, and the cops that pursued them, it was a hell of a time, even a good one.

Red Fury wants to make a name for himself and is going on a crime spree across the city. He wants to remembered. Hunting him is Frank Vaughn, a dinosaur in the evolving era, someone not afraid to bend the rules to get the job done. Also mixed up in the case is his friend Derek Strange, a cop who has left the force to become a private eye.

Pelecanos has a great eye from the details of the time, from the tricked-out cars to the soul music of the 1970s. He also resurrects a lot of old DC haunts, legendary bars and restaurants that are long gone in this gentrified city. His knowledge of the city is encyclopedic. For example, Red hides out in Burrville, a neighborhood I didn’t even know existed.

I wrote my own crime novel about the city, Murder in Ocean Hall. It’s set in many of the 14th Street neighborhoods of What It Was but during a time of rapid change.

What It Was is a fast, involving read. Pelecanos’s style is muscular, alternating perspectives as it advances towards an inevitably violent conclusion.

Interestingly, the novel is available on the Kindle for only 99 cents. It’s a limited-time offer designed to generate new readers for this crime novelist. Forward-thinking publishers are experimenting with new strategies and promotions to adapt to the world of e-readers.

What It Was is also the first book I’ve read on my iPad. Using the Kindle app, set to sepia, it was a comfortable reading experience – though not as easy on the eyes as using an e-ink reader like the Kindle.

But the 99 cent strategy worked for me. After dipping into the gritty crime world of What It Was, I’m primed to read the rest of Peleconos’s work.