Two Free Lockdown Reads!

Bored during lockdown? Have a couple of free ebooks on me! Through the end of this weekend I'm offering my novel The Last Hotel Room and my novella The Scavenger for free.

The Last Hotel Room deals with the Syrian refugee crisis and is based on several refugees I interviewed in Iraq and Morocco.

He came to Tangier to die, but life isn’t done with him yet.
Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets.
Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?

The Scavenger is set in my Toxic World setting for the series of the same name.

In a world shattered by war, pollution, and disease, a lone scavenger discovers a priceless relic from the Old Times.
The problem is, it's stuck in the middle of the worst wasteland he knows--a contaminated city inhabited by insane chem addicts and vengeful villagers. Only his wits, his gun, and an unlikely ally can get him out alive.
Set in the Toxic World series introduced in the novel Radio Hope, this 10,000-word story explores more of the dangers and personalities that make up a post-apocalyptic world that's all too possible.

Enjoy!

The Last Hotel Room is on sale for 99 cents!

Just a quick note to say the Kindle Press has put my novel about the Syrian Refugee Crisis, The Last Hotel Room, on sale as a 99 cent ebook on Amazon US until Friday, January 25.
A portion of the proceeds goes to help refugees.

Book Review: Look and Move on by Mohammed Mrabet

Look and Move On by Mohammed Mrabet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mohammed Mrabet is a Moroccan writer and artist who has lived most of his life in Tangier. This is his memoir of the days when it was an international haven for writers, artists, thieves, con men, homosexuals, pederasts, and the idle rich. Like For Bread Alone by Mohamed Choukri, it shows the flip side of this foreigner's paradise, the life of poor Moroccans struggling to survive and often having to serve the newcomers in various unpleasant ways.
Mrabet didn't escape this. At the age of sixteen, he got taken up by an American couple who vied with each other for his sexual favors. They take him to the U.S., where he has more fun with the local Puerto Ricans and blacks than he does with the staid middle class whites. There are some hilarious scenes of culture clashes in these passages. Later he meets Paul and Jane Bowles, who launch his career as a writer. They, too, take him to the States with similarly numerous results. We also get to follow Mrabet's adventures with European swingers, falling into matrimony, and his rather Zen philosophy of life.
While I found this slim volume fascinating because I've spent a lot of time in Tangier and read a great deal about its history, someone who isn't a fan of the place will miss a lot of the references. For example, Marguerite McBey is mentioned but nothing is said about her important place in Tangier society. I hope this work is republished with a long introduction to explain the context to those readers who have not learned about it from other sources.

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The Last Hotel Room is on sale for 99 cents

Kindle Press is promoting the electronic edition of my novel, The Last Hotel Room, for 99 cents from July 5-11 in the Amazon US store only.

It deals with the Syrian refugee crisis and an American who breaks out of his self-pity and apathy to try and help. I wrote it to be timely and political, and never thought it would get as timely and political as this! Please share. A portion of my royalties goes to Syrian refugees.

Check out the Kindle page and you'll see that several Kindle Press reader favorites are on sale during this period, so look through them and gather up some great reading!

And a big thank you to all who voted for it during the Kindle Scout competition. You rock!

Travel Tuesday: Some Tangier Locations From My Novel

"An old man in a brown djellaba hobbled up the hill, his face obscured under the pointed peak of his hood. Tom could tell the man was old only by the way he moved—stiff and slow, yet sure, one foot after another as he ascended the smooth, steep slope of bare stone, rising up over the lip and silhouetted by the water like some pagan sea god. "

When I was writing my novel, The Last Hotel Room, I spent a few months living in Tangier to get the setting and details right. The novel centers around Tom, a broke American who has lost everything and is stuck in Morocco while the last of his money runs out. He's decided to kill himself at that point, but soon finds himself a precarious income helping a crooked cop extort money from tourists. He used much of this money to support Asif, a Syrian refugee boy who's living alone in Tangier.

My publisher, Kindle Press, has put the ebook edition on sale for 99 cents on the Amazon store through April 3. To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to share some of my photos of Tangier along with associate quotes from the text. They're in chronological order. Enjoy!

"On the days he didn’t have tea with Mohammed, he would round the corner to the Petit Socco and sit at one of the cafés, either the Central, with its wicker chairs and awning, or the Tingis, with its little patio on the high end of the Socco, looking down across the plaza’s length."

"The muezzin’s call lilted over the medina, to be picked up by another muezzin in a mosque further away. The alleys echoed and reechoed with their mingled songs as half a dozen mosques near and far sang out the same song a few words apart from one another."

"The tower was square and made of flat bricks faced with a thick coating of plaster, most of which had flaked away. It would take some time to get the details right in his drawing; it was a bit like the tile work on the mosque but with no regular pattern. The general shape looked easy enough: square with saw-toothed battlements on top. The whole thing listed a little over the cliff. Five centuries of Atlantic rain and wind had gnawed away at the cliff until it reached the base of the tower and then taken a big bite out of the tower’s base. As he watched, a couple of teenage boys popped out of its open front (the wall having tumbled down the precipice long ago), edged around the top of the cliff, and sauntered past him."

"Straight ahead the slope plunged steeply down, allowing them an open, sweeping view of the Strait of Gibraltar glittering in the sunset. Asif stepped out to the edge of the slope, looked over his shoulder at Tom with a smile, and then stared out over the water. Tom stepped up beside him and stared too, resting a hand on his shoulder."

“That is the boat from Tarifa, in Spain,” Asif said quietly, pointing at the catamaran. “So easy for them.”

“Spain looks close,” Tom said.

“Fourteen kilometers. Can you get me on the ferry, Tom?”

“You don’t have a visa. They’d never let you on board and they won’t listen to me. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.”

Asif looked disappointed but not surprised.

“I afraid to go the other way,” he whispered, then turned and headed back through the gate. Tom followed, feeling helpless.

Massive Kindle Scout Anniversary Sale With All Ebooks 99 cents!

Kindle Scout is celebrating its second year of reader-powered publishing by running a promotion on the entire Kindle Scout catalog on Amazon.com. All Scout-discovered titles are available for purchase for $0.99 from March 20 through April 3. This includes, of course, my novel about the Syrian refugee crisis The Last Hotel Room, which was published last September after getting enough support on Kindle Scout to win a contract with Kindle Press.

I have big hopes for this sale. Kindle Press did a similar promotion for my book for all of February and my ranking leaped up to 10,000 for much of the time, and even reached 6,000 for a few days. Here's hoping I'll top that this time.

There are plenty of other great books in this sale, a total of 215! You can see the entire list here.

Book Review: Days, A Tangier Journal

DAYS TANGIER JRNL by Paul Bowles
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This short work only took me two good sittings to get through but I enjoyed it. Paul Bowles spent much of his life in Tangier, and near the end of his sojourn wrote this journal. It contains some interesting observations of Arab life and the lives of the various oddballs who passed through Tangier, all written in the author's inimitable style. You need to be well-versed in Bowles and Tangier history to catch all the references, however, so this is a book more for enthusiasts rather than the general reader. Someone exploring Bowles beyond The Sheltering Sky would be better off checking out his other novels and short stories.

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The Last Hotel Room available for Preorder!

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, my novel about the refugee crisis, The Last Hotel Room, was accepted by Kindle Press, an imprint of Amazon. Yep, Amazon has gotten into publishing as well as distributing. Thanks to everyone who voted for it during my Kindle Scout campaign, and a big thanks to my brother-in-law Andrés for the great cover! Everyone who voted for it should get an email today with instructions on how to download your free ebook copy. A print copy should be available next month.

For those who missed the Kindle Scout campaign, you can preorder the book here. It will be released September 20. A blurb is below.

He came to Tangier to die, but life isn’t done with him yet.
Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets. Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?
A portion of my royalties will go to a charity for Syrian refugees.

Book Review: The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This famous novel of martial infidelity still packs a punch more than a hundred years on. It starts sedately, with an unhappy wife slowly becoming aware of the source of her unhappiness while vacationing on an island off the Louisiana coast. She attracts the attentions of a young man who attaches himself to her and shows her far more affection than her aloof husband.
The landscape and society of the time of described in rich Victorian detail. While this style can get tedious, this is a short novel and I never felt I was being slowed down. In fact, amid all the social pleasantries and beautiful sunsets, there's a rising tension within the protagonist that keeps the story moing forward.
It's hard to say much more without adding spoilers, but suffice it to say that while the vacation ends, the protagonist's disconent doesn't. But what's a married mother of two to do in that time (or even ours)? Finally she takes action, and that leads to a rapid series of events that will change her life and draws her to an inevitable conclusion.
Beautifully written, haunting, and sad. A true classic.

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Handed in the Final Edits for The Last Hotel Room

This morning is submitted the final edits for The Last Hotel Room to Kindle Press. They'll look them over and shoot back some edits of their own, and then the book will be on preorder. Watch this space!

Off to Tangier!

I'm heading down to Tangier this morning for one of my regular writing retreats. I'll be there for two weeks and probably take a trip to the Atlas Mountains as well. So I won't be on this blog much, but I will be trying to promote my Tangier novel, The Last Hotel Room, which is up for voting on Kindle Scout. Click on the link and check it out.

If you vote for it and Amazon decides to publish it, you get a free copy and I'll donate $500 to a charity to help refugees. There's some stiff competition, so winning is far from assured!

See you when I get back!

Help Me Win A Book Contract Through Kindle Scout!

I've just launched a campaign for my latest novel, The Last Hotel Room, on Kindle Scout. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the program, writers upload their unpublished book for 30 days, and readers get to vote on them. Those with the most votes are considered for electronic publication via Amazon, with a $1500 advance and 50% royalties. If the book is published, those who voted for it get a free copy of the ebook.

My book is the one I was writing during all those trips to Tangier. It's set in contemporary Tangier and deals with refugee crisis. A blurb is below.

He came to Tangier to die, but life isn’t done with him yet.
Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets. Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?
$500 of my advance will go to a charity for Syrian refugees.

You can check out the book's page and read a sample here. Voting requires you to sign in to your Amazon account or create one if you don't have one. Also check out the other titles, there are some good ones. I've already put a vote in for a science fiction novel I wouldn't mind getting for free!

Blurb and Cover Help Please!

It's that time again, when I ask my blog readers for help with the cover and blurb for my next book. This one is a bit different because I'm submitting it to Kindle Scout, where it can be voted on by Amazon customers. The books with the highest votes are considered for publication by Amazon's imprint, with a $1500 advance and 50% royalties. To submit, I have to have a one-liner of 45 characters or less and a book description of 500 characters or less. Here goes!


The front line of the refugee crisis


He came to Tangier to die, but life wasn’t done with him yet.

Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets. Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?

$500 of my advance will go to a charity for Syrian refugees.

So what do you think of the cover, one-liner, and blurb? This will be going into the Literature & Fiction section.

Book Review: The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the acclaimed first novel of Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing and it's every bit as good as its hype. Written in the 1940s when she was living in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), it's a brutally honest look at how white farmers treated the African natives while slowing becoming debased themselves. One is treated to lines like this: ". . .when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip."

This is one of the key lines to understanding the novel. Brutality and convention are used to cover up personal weakness. Convention preys especially hard on the female protagonist, a fun-loving and superficial young woman who one day overhears her friends laughing at her behind her back because she's still not married. Desperate to be accepted, she says yes to the first man who asks, an incompetent farmer who brings her to his farm to live in squalor. The beauty of the African landscape and the harshness of its sun are both drawn beautifully, as is the slow deterioration of the main characters. The couple have no other family, no friends, no real contact with the outside world. Even World War Two is a vague rumor. The miserable wife, slowly going insane, has an unthinkable relationship with the "houseboy" that leads to a final, inevitable end.

What a first novel! Incredibly rich prose carries a terrifying portrait of people destroying themselves through their own frailty and misplaced pride. It's no wonder Lessing went on to be famous. It's a grim read, though. Now I'm going to pick up something light!

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Book Review: Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an involved and detailed family drama by one of Egypt's most renowned writers. It follows the fortunes of the Al Jawad family, whose patriarch runs a large shop that makes them prosperous but not rich. The setting is 1919, when the streets of Cairo are convulsed with independence demonstrations that are often fired upon by British troops.
The father, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, is an old-time patriarch in all the worst senses of the word--he keeps his wife and daughters cloistered in the home, and is domineering and sarcastic to his three sons. In the meantime, he goes out and drinks and sleeps around every night. Mahfouz is a good enough writer that he makes Al-Sayyid Ahmad strangely compelling. I hated the bastard, but just had to find out what he was going to do next.
Mahfouz gives the life of the family and its slow progression in intimate detail. This is a long novel, and work and other reading made me put it down from time to time, but the characters were so well drawn I could easily slip back into the story as if it was about some old acquaintances. It was fascinating to watch as the events of the day slowly and unstoppably pushed into this isolated family's life despite the best efforts of Al-Sayyid Ahmad. This is a book about a nation as much as it is about a family, and well worth picking up if you want to know more about Egyptian history and culture. Some people might find it a slow read; I found it more of a sedate one.


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Book Review: The Job, Interviews with William S. Burroughs

The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs by William S. Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a Burroughs fan, I was looking forward to reading a book about his writing techniques. Unfortunately that isn't what this book is. While you do get some information about his cutup method and other ideas on writing, most of the book is about the man's philosophy. Special focus is given to the idea of words as a virus, along with some rather overly enthusiastic ideas of using the cutup method in tape recordings for mind control. There are also passages on addiction, government control, anarchism, sex, and much more.
My main problem with this book is that it is, itself, sort of a cutup. The vast majority of the material is from his other works, so if you've read a lot of Burroughs like I have you end up discovering that much of the book isn't new to you. Someone just getting into Burroughs would probably get more out of this book than someone more familiar with his work. Even so, it's more fun to read the original works in all their craziness. This book is for completists only.

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Insecure Writer's Support Group: Switching Genres

Here we are at another Insecure Writer's Support Group, where we air out our collective writerly angst to the world!

Today my topic is switching genres. I've done it before, having written science fiction, fantasy, horror, action/adventure, and western. For my latest book I'm switching genres again.

This time, though, it's a bigger leap. The Last Hotel Room is set in contemporary Tangier and takes on contemporary issues. It isn't speculative fiction like so many of my works. A marketer would probably label it as "literary" although I don't think that's a term an author should use on oneself.

I'm about halfway through the first draft and it's an interesting experience writing about a place where I often visit and dealing with issues that touch me like the refugee crisis. It's also a challenge to write a novel without any gun fights, magic, or spaceships! Whether or not it will work as a novel is still in question. It's also unclear if my readers will follow me that far from my usual path.

That's OK, I'm still writing plenty of the other stuff in 2016!

Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: Book Review: The Slynx

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a half-human four-legged Degenerator harnessed to a troika. He has a house, too, with enough mice to cook up a tasty meal, and he’s happily free of mutations: no extra fingers, no gills, no cockscombs sprouting from his eyelids. And he’s managed—at least so far—to steer clear of the ever-vigilant Saniturions, who track down anyone who manifests the slightest sign of Freethinking, and
the legendary screeching Slynx that waits in the wilderness beyond."

This blurb had me hooked, but once I got into this odd novel, written by a descendent of Leo Tolstoy, I found the actual tale to be far better. It's a weird combination of Russian folk tale, social parody, and science fiction, The Master and Margarita meets Gamma World.
Tolstaya uses her distinct voice and lively imagination to create a laughable yet somehow believable post-apocalyptic world in which everyone covets books from the Oldentimes yet has no understanding of what they read.
The "hero", if one can call him that, has a reading addiction like no other, yet is as irnorant as the rest of the peasants. The lengths he will go in order to escape his dreary daily reality and prove himself above the flock are the heart of this novel, and offer a stern warning to anyone who thinks that reading simply for the sake of reading makes them special.

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Book Review: Bakunin's Son

Il figlio di Bakunìn by Sergio Atzeni
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No, I didn't read this in Italian, but for some reason the English translation from Italica Press isn't on Goodreads.
This novella recounts the deeds of a left-wing activist in a small Sardinian mining town during the time of Mussolini. Bakunin, the famous anarchist, doesn't actually make an appearance here; the protagonist's father is nicknamed "Bakunin" for his own political activism.
Actually, "protagonist" isn't quite the right term, because the subject of this book is dealt with entirely through third-person accounts from various villagers. We discover early on that these accounts aren't entirely reliable (some people even get key names wrong) and this is what makes this an interesting experiment in fiction. We learn of this man through the eyes of sympathizers and enemies, men and women, all of whom have different opinions and impressions about him. All of them, however, are deeply impressed by him and the changes he tries to make in a conservative society. Even those who dismiss him as stupid or unimportant seem to be doing that as a reaction to his being quite the opposite.
This is a book that will make you think of your own legacy. No matter how much you try to affect those around you, no matter how much of a mark you make on the world, how you are remembered is entirely up to those you survive you.
If you're willing to take a bit of experimentation in your fiction, give this a try. The Italica Press edition is still in print, and although there are numerous weird typos ("buried" is consistently misspelled with two "r"s and the last sentence of the book ends with a comma) consider picking it up.

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Book Review: The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was prepared to love this book. I'm a big fan of Indian literature and had heard many good things about this title.
I found it to be a mixed bag. While the writing was lush and beautiful, many passages were overwritten. Arundhati Roy is one of those writers who can't resist using five similes when none would suffice. Sometimes they border on the ridiculous, such as when she describes a smell coming off the river and "hovering over the city like a hat." Since when do hats hover? Sometimes they just don't make any sense, such as when she says "shock swelled in her like phantom applause in an empty auditorium."
The story jumps back and forth in time, a useful narrative device that can increase the power of a story. It doesn't here. Roy also falls into the common trap of literary authors by having everyone talk like literary authors. Even the child characters, whose dialogue is usually wonderfully childlike and distinct, sometimes slip into speaking like some English graduate student at Oxford.
This is a shame, because there's some lovely writing here and a compelling narrative. If Roy had toned down on the literary trappings this book would have been far more effective. As it stands, reading The God of Small Things is like being served a beautiful slice of Black Forest cake. It looks exquisite, smells tempting, and then you take a bite and find the chef added twice the sugar the recipe called for.

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