books Archives - Page 9 of 10

Overcoming Writer’s Block

Everyone writes. In this digital age, we’re creating more words than ever. Whether it’s an email to a client, a persuasive blog post or the Great American E-Book, the ability to explain yourself in writing is the critical skill of the Internet era.

Despite this profusion of words, people often encounter writer’s block when attempting large or significant projects. They can fire off tweets and snarky Facebook comments all day long but their fingers stall when it comes to crafting something that really matters.

After I wrote my novel Murder in Ocean Hall, the question I got most was, “How?”

How did I muster up the patience to devote so much time to a single idea? How did I keep at it? How did I overcome the inertia of writer’s block to get started?

Writer’s block happens to everyone. But it can be overcome. Continue reading “Overcoming Writer’s Block”

Book Talk: Prohibition in DC

It’s hard to imagine but booze was once outlawed in DC. The Prohibition era is the subject of a fascinating new book by local author Garret Peck.

He’s an excellent speaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. I wrote an article for the Pink Line Project about his book talk, where he shared what life was like when Washington was “dry.”

Murder in Ocean Hall – Now in Germany

My book Murder in Ocean Hall can now be found in the Kindle online store in Germany. For less than a euro, readers in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg or elsewhere in the country can download this DC mystery.

What did I have to do to publish my work in Germany? Nothing. I had already published my book in the USA with Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon did the rest, creating a new Kindle store for German users.

If a few years ago you had told me that I would write a mystery, publish it electronically, and that people would actually read books on e-readers, and that my book would be available in Europe…. That sentence involves so many improbabilities, but all of these things are now true. Makes you really hopeful about what comes next.

Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year

SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.

The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.

I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls. Continue reading “Why I'm Not at SXSW This Year”

Murder in Ocean Hall Advances to Second Round of Amazon Contest

My novel, Murder in Ocean Hall, has advanced to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA).

ABNA is a competition sponsored by Amazon for self-published and unpublished novels. This year’s competition 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. (I’m entered in General Fiction.)

Quarter-finalists will be announced on March 22 while we don’t find out the first place winner until June 13.

The competition is also a great way for Amazon to highlight their self-publishing tools, CreateSpace (for print books) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for e-books). They’re both easy and free to use.

Murder in Ocean Hall is a mystery set in Washington, DC. The world’s most famous oceanographer is killed at the Smithsonian. Set during the summer before the 2008 presidential election, we follow Detective Thomas across the city as he encounters the powerful and the powerless in his quest to solve this high-profile case. Thomas has grown bitter from decades of investigating bloody mayhem on city streets. Despite the new condos and gentrification, has the city really changed?

Murder in Ocean Hall is available exclusively at Amazon. The paperback is $9.99 while the Kindle e-book edition is just $2.99.

Adventures in Book Marketing

I wrote a short piece for FlackRabbit on my adventures in book marketing. Last year, I published a book, Murder in Ocean Hall, using the awesome CreateSpace.

Why publish it myself? Because the traditional publishing model is broken and it takes a year to get a book in print, even after it’s been accepted by a publisher. Being a web person, that struck me as a crazy and unnecessarily long time.

The downside, of course, is that you have to do your own marketing. However, that’s been a good learning experience, which I write about in the FlackRabbit article.

Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart starts off as a hilarious farce, an inventive look at the future gone wrong. All your paranoid fears about the Department of Homeland Security are well-represented as a bureaucratic error throws Lenny, the book’s narrator, into absurdist peril.

But the novel is much deeper than that. It’s not just a farce, it’s an honest and painful look at a nightmare vision of America. In this dystopia, our country is obsessed with sex and shopping, in hock to the Chinese and teetering on the edge of financial collapse (not too different from today).

The book steadily grows darker and darker as history unravels – we feel for the characters who are so clueless about the inevitable reckoning. And we feel for this country, all the values we hold dear – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty – all imperiled by decades of folly.

That’s what this book is about – Lenny’s collapse into middle age is mirrored by the collapse of America. Ultimately, it’s a very upsetting book. You don’t want the country to end up this way. The book is dark and funny but it’s also a warning to us as a nation to get our act together. Otherwise, the future will be very cruel.

WikiLeaks and Shame by Salman Rushdie

A good chunk of the recently released WikiLeaks documents deal with the problem of a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the grip of radical Islam. Despite the billions of dollars in US aid they receive, they are unwilling to cut ties with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

One diplomatic cable on the New York Times site is called Will Extra Aid Persuade Pakistan to Cut Ties to Extremists? American diplomats discuss whether giving Islamabad more money will lead them to cut ties with the Taliban.

The author concludes:

There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups…

Islamic terrorist groups like the Taliban are key element of Pakistani security. They provide a hedge against India by securing Afghanistan and by causing problems for India in Kashmir. Continue reading “WikiLeaks and Shame by Salman Rushdie”

WikiLeaks and Absurdistan

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.

Continue reading “WikiLeaks and Absurdistan”

The Perfect Gift for Mystery Lovers – Murder in Ocean Hall

Do you have someone on your Xmas list who likes a good mystery, particularly one set in Washington, DC?

Then check out my novel, Murder in Ocean Hall. In this mystery, the world’s most famous ocean explorer is killed at the Smithsonian. It’s up to a cynical DC detective to solve this high-profile case.

Murder in Ocean Hall takes place in a Washington “beyond the monuments”, in the real neighborhoods of the city that most tourists don’t see. Set during the summer before the 2008 presidential election, we follow Detective Thomas across the city as he encounters the powerful and the powerless in his quest to solve this case. He’s grown bitter from decades of investigating bloody mayhem on city streets. Despite the new condos and gentrification, has the city really changed? Or is it doomed to dysfunction?

I’ve lived in DC for almost twenty years. I know the neighborhoods, the conflicts and the personalities of this unique city. I’ve been behind the scenes at the Smithsonian and worked in the field of ocean exploration, where my murder victim comes from. The book is set in places I’ve lived in and is informed by that most universal DC experience, street crime. It features some real characters, including a brief appearance by Marion Barry (no book in DC would be complete without him).

A reviewer wrote about my book that it:

will take you behind the scenes of places you’ve been and tell you how they function then give you insights into people in power and how they fail to function.

Murder in Ocean Hall makes a great gift for anyone who likes a good mystery or wants to uncover the seedy underbelly of our nation’s capital.

And if you live in DC, I will even sign it for you!

Murder in Ocean Hall is available exclusively at Amazon. The paperback is only $9.99 while the Kindle edition is just $2.99.