Tag: novels

Don't Mess Up My Block Advances to Second Round of ABNA

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!

First Chapter – Don't Mess Up My Block

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. Continue reading “First Chapter – Don't Mess Up My Block”

My New Novel – Don't Mess Up My Block

Don't Mess Up My Block book cover

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:

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

What It Was by George Pelecanos

what it wasI 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. Continue reading “What It Was by George Pelecanos”

Amazon's Lending Library Empowers Readers and Writers

Booksellers and publishers criticize Amazon for destroying the clubby old world of publishing. Yet, for readers and writers, the online retailer is constantly rolling out new features to expand the reach of books and the power of authors.

Case in point: Amazon’s Lending Library. Amazon Prime members can borrow one book a month for their Kindles with no due date. And unlike your library and its e-book service, thousands of books are available now and you don’t need to download complicated software to read them. All you need is Amazon Prime and a Kindle (or the Kindle app on an iPad). This is a tremendous service for readers around the country, who now have access to a vast library of books.

How this works for authors – I’m an Amazon author, having used their Kindle Direct Publishing service for Murder in Ocean Hall. When the lending program rolled out, I was given the option of enrolling my book. I did. As incentive, Amazon set aside a $6 million pool in 2012 to be divided up by authors who participate. So, if there are six million borrowed books in the year and a hundred of those borrows are Murder in Ocean Hall, then I get $100.

There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the e-book space, as the market adjusts to this new world of publishing. But what I like about these changes is that more power has been given to writers, and more choice is available to readers. That’s something to cheer about.

A Book for Anyone Who Wants to be Famous – The Winner Stands Alone

The American dream is no longer about accomplishment – it is about achieving a Kardashian-level of fame. We’ve become a society that values the famous more than we do the virtuous.

This desire to be seen, to be known, to be recognized (no matter your dubious accomplishments) is insidious, teaching people that having your own reality show is the ultimate American achievement.

For anyone that thinks that happiness comes from being on screen (or having millions of Twitter followers), I’d recommend The Winner Stands Alone, a thought-provoking novel by Paulo Coelho. He’s the author of The Alchemist, a global phenomenon of a book about the authentic pursuit of your dreams.

Set in the glamorous world of the Cannes Film Festival, The Winner Stands Alone starts out as a murder-mystery but is more a meditation on the desire for fame. It’s a cruel book, at times, as it illustrates the lengths that the aspiring will go to become members of the “Superclass” – and the hollow center that they encounter once they arrive.

It’s a great book for anyone who wants to go to Hollywood, exposing the phony and worthless nature of the “fame game.”

The Winner Stands Alone is far from a perfect book. With all of Coelho’s novels, characters and dialogue are largely secondary to the parable that he wishes to tell. Everyone sounds like Coelho, the wise teacher.

The Alchemist is about following your dream; The Winner Stands Alone is about the danger of following someone else’s.

New Essay: The Washington Literary Inferiority Complex

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.

Warning: Novel in Progress

With more than 40,000 words written, I think it’s safe to reveal that I’m working another another book.

It’s not a mystery like my previous novel, Murder in Ocean Hall.

Instead, it’s a satire called Don’t Mess Up My Block. My novel is a parody of self-help tomes like Who Moved My Cheese.

The story is told by Laurent Christ, a management consultant and life coach from the plains of North Dakota. A late-night encounter with a hooker (who tells him to get lost) becomes his core philosophy, one that he applies successfully to life and work.

Aren’t we all afflicted with people or situations that are “messing up our block”? Whether it’s a nagging spouse or an annoying boss, wouldn’t we be more effective without them?

From the swankiest of CEO sanctums to the bowels of government, Laurent leads us in a misfortune-plagued journey through the world of work in America today. A creature of his own invention, he always comes out ahead, while leaving his clients in misery.

The book was inspired by the self-help genre, this popular and peculiarly American phenomena. If Mark Twain were alive today, he’d probably be writing a book on getting organized.

Excerpts from this book have already been published, as stand-alone stories:

Don’t Mess Up My Block
Thirty First Bird Review
Laurent goes to Africa and destabilizes a whole country.

Boom and Bust
SPLIT Quarterly
Shareholders are angry and only Laurent can save a desperate executive.

I’m diligently working on the book right now. Look for it on a Nook or Kindle later this summer!

 

Murder in Ocean Hall – Now on the Nook!

My book, Murder in Ocean Hall, is now available on the Nook. Owners of the Barnes and Noble Nook and the Nook Color can pick up a copy of this novel for just $2.99.

In my book, 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?

A reviewer wrote about Murder in Ocean Hall 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 is available on the Nook thanks to Barnes and Noble’s PubIt, an online service that allows authors to easily publish e-books.

Powerful tools like PubIt, Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace allow independent authors like myself to connect with readers worldwide. They’ve enabled me to publish Murder in Ocean Hall in print, Kindle and Nook editions.