Kathmandu's Cavalcade

For the life of you, do not attempt to travel half way around the world by flying three different, back to back flights. No matter how good a flier you are, you will find yourself exhausted from lack of sleep. Your eyes will sting from lack of moisture. Your stomach will distend and cramp from too much gas buildup, and the interior mucous membranes in your nasal cavities will crack and bleed. If you insist on flying to four different countries on three different continents over the course of 2.5 days to make for a total of 26 hours in the air, make sure you break the trip up. And don't fly over the Bay of Bengal during a severe thunderstorm...It will scare the crap out of you. Unless of course, you're 19 and don't give a shit.

But the ill effects of three sleepless days and nights were quickly forgotten upon landing in Kathmandu, Nepal. Sure this is the home of Everest and expert climbers from all over the world who come here to scale the tallest mountain in the world (I know this debatable, but it's my blog so bear with me). However, Nepal's capital city of Kathmandu is a vibrant, ancient metropolis congested with people, young and old, who all seem to be moving rather quickly to some unknown destination. The bazaar itself is made up of narrow roads connected at odd angles as if no planning went into them. The roads are boarded with crumbling ancient architecture interspersed with Buddhist and Hindu temples. The smog pervades the air to the degree that, like in many Chinese cities, the locals don masks over their faces to filter the pollution. Some of these masks are made by famous clothing designers. The masks might match a woman's outfit and I imagine they cost a lot.   

Cows and rickshaws share the roads with cars and motorcycles, the latter combustion engine-powered machines forever competing for the finite space that exists on the byways but miraculously never smashing into one another or running anyone down. Drivers honk horns relentlessly and at times, you find it impossible to know who is honking the horn at who. 

The night life is vibrant to say the least. Kathmandu is a musician's paradise with the rattle and hum of live bands competing with one another from the many bars and eateries that exist within the bazaar. Last night I enjoyed a couple of beers while listening to a middle-aged man play trombone not to an accompanying band but instead to digitally pre-recorded tracks. This is 2014 after all, even if the Kathmandu of today could easily fill in for the Kathmandu of 1970, or 1935 for that matter. He was dressed in a long tunic over pantaloons that looked like pajamas. His feet were bare and he wore a long gray/black beard and even longer gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. I took him for a SoCal transplant, circa 1985, who came to find something to smoke and never left. 

I could tell you about the food and how fresh it is ... nan prepared over a stone fire...chicken and beef drowned in savory curries...cool and crisp vegetables cut up in chunks...but I need to head back out to explore more in this city of adventurers and ancient history. 

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

Are Authors A-holes?

My friend, author Elyse Press Major, emailed me this morning with a question: "Do you think 'Author' is derived from 'self-obsessed a-hole?'"

The question made me grin, but it also got me thinking. I can recall my first editor at Delacorte confiding in me over a smoke. "Writers are assholes," he said. I recall my dad showing up at my graduation from my MFA in Writing program at Vermont College and his first encounter with one of the more miserable, stuck up, can't-be-bothered-with-the-common-folk members of the faculty, and him whispering to me, "Who the hell is that asshole?" I certainly recall my first wife screaming at me while I was trying to write at the dining room table: "You're a f'n asshole!" Certainly some of my now fired agents have filed me away under A for ... well you know what. And when some of my novels became Amazon Bestsellers and I started selling more books in a week than that other Albany writer William Kennedy might sell in a year, my head got a little inflated and I most definitely started acting like an asshole.

Today, I'm not always selling more books than Mr. Kennedy and my first wife and I are friends again. I've learned my lesson and deflated my head a little (My apologies to Mr. Kennedy and to anyone else I offended along the way...You know who you are). I still require more alone time than the average bear since I'm always working on multiple projects, and I suppose that might make me a bit of an asshole, but it can't be helped.

So the answer to your question, Elyse, is yes and no. Authors sometimes can't help being a-holes but they don't always have to be a-holes. It's important that we learn the distinction. 

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

  

Don't Read Your Reviews

Papa poised to kick a critic's ass...

There's a great scene in the recently broadcast HBO movie, Hemingway and Gellhorn in which a drunk Papa spots a book reviewer from across a crowded bar, and taunts the man into a fist fight.
"Hey you...Critic!" Hemingway belligerently shouts at the smartly dressed man. "Critic, come here!"
The critic in question is supposed to be Max Eastman who, in the early 1930s accused the macho Hemingway of being a sissy with no real hair on his chest. Whether Eastman was trying to be literal or just tooling with Hemingway is still up for conjecture eighty years after the fact. But I can bet that if the great Papa were still alive today, the nasty review would still be fresh in his mind and just as hurtful. So it went in make-believe-movie land that, when confronted face to face with his less than favorable reviewer, Papa not only tore his shirt open to reveal real chest hair, but he attempted to knock Eastman's teeth down his throat (In real life this altercation occurred in NYC in Max Perkin's Scribner's office. Eastman and Hemingway wrestled around a bit with the critic supposedly gaining the upper hand in the fight, prompting Papa to start laughing and suggesting they share a drink.).

The point here is not critics or macho stances or even boys being boys. The point is that, man or woman, we all loath reviews. Rather, we loath the bad ones. But as writers in the digital age, we not only have to sweat out the professional reviews, we now are forced to put up with the amateur reviewers. I recall a lecture given once by John Irving when I attended the Breadloaf Writer's Conference back in 1991 in which he explicitly stated that he would not review a single book by an author without having read his entire library first. That's the kind of care a professional reviewer puts into his reviews.

Today however, we place a whole lot of importance on reviews that come from amateurs who know as much about writing a proper review as they might flying a 747. That said however, their reviews are not taken lightly. They are considered a crucial component in the sales, or lack their of, of any given author's books. In other words, the more bad reviews an author receives the better the likelihood that his sales will stink up the joint. The converse is also true.

As authors, we don't have a whole lot of power when it comes to who reviews our work, be it other jealous authors cowardly hiding behind a clock of anonymity, or a spiteful ex-boyfriend/girlfriend, or simply someone who doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. But then, in many ways, it's a Godsend that so many non-professionals will take the time to lend their opinion about our novels and therefore help spread the good word.

Thank you!

But all too often, these same reviewers will go out of their way to say nasty things about a book, and this mean-spiritedness translates into one star reviews that inevitably hurt authors who are trying to make a living.

Imagine if you a will a world in which the reviewer must state his or her occupation and we, the writer, in turn, get to observe their performance for the day and write our own review.

1 Star ...  "This Lawyer Really Sucks"

"When I sat down in court to observe this lawyer in action today, I expected great things. After all, everyone is talking about how great he is. But his opening argument bored the hell out of me. It was full of cliches and the whole thing was slow moving. I won't be attending anymore opening arguments by this lawyer." 

Ok, you get the point.

So, what to do then in a world in which the amateur rules?
Don't read the reviews. Good or bad, just don't read them. Instead spend your time writing the best books you can. Then, in the end, you will know that no matter what anyone says, your book is as good as your could make it. A book that will stand the test of time. A book that will put hair on your chest.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

So Little Time, So many Words

"Die hippy!"

I haven't had the chance to blog as much as I would to like lately. I'm in the middle of the rewrite for the third book in what will eventually be five books and five total rewrites as a part of my new seven book deal...

....Ummmm you following me here.

Suffice to say I'm so over the top busy I'm not sure if it's Sunday or Wednesday. Things are so frantic I sometimes feel like Dirty Harry trying to answer all those pay phones for that creepy hippy kidnapper/assassin dude on the streets of San Fransisco. But also like Harry, what I have to ask myself is this: "Do I feel lucky?"

I do feel lucky. Because this kind of frantic is a good kind of frantic. The new book deal kind of frantic. It's what we all wish for as writers.

As for the schedule: I have one more solid month at home and then I start traveling again. In that time I will have gone over and addressed the content edits for my noir thrillers Moonlight Rises, Blue Moonlight, Murder by Moonlight, Concrete Pearl and The Remains. The Innocent and Godchild have already undergone an extensive content edit when they were with Delacorte and Dell respectively, so no use in putting them through the ringer again. Naturally all these books will be copy-edited once more and what were some pretty big blunders in previous editions will no doubt be corrected. Hey, we're talking the majors here.

What this means for now is that Vincent Zandri, Noir Author is about to take a short Winter's nap (after hitting the gym) and then another couple hours of work. But then I'll take in some playoff football and cheer along my New York Football Giants as they crush the San Fransisco 49's ("You feeling lucky punks?".

It's good to take time off from the writing game in order to recharge. But sometimes you need to meet your deadlines. That's the life. As writers, these are the pressures we so crave. And it still beats having to get up in the morning to go to a job.

Hey Harry, if the phone rings, don't answer it!

Stay tuned....

GET MORE VINCENT ZANDRI, NOIR AUTHOR BOOKS: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

Remember 9/11 Today and Then Move On With Your Life

After a divorce or a breakup or a death to someone close to you, a professional therapist will almost always suggest that you try and recall the good things about that person, then move on. Obviously you will never forget and often be reminded of the individual who at one time was very close and special to you. But now that person is gone and they are never coming back to you. The bond is broken forever. Despite the immediate and sometimes agonizing pain, the loss means one thing and one thing only: it's time to reinvent your life.

Today is 9/11, the tenth anniversary of an event that we will never nor should we ever forget, when a Mickey Mouse organization called Al Qaeda comprised primarily of murderous Islamic extremists got very, very lucky, and managed to pull off the mass murder of the century. Since that time the country and much of the world has been tossed into economic turmoil, travel by airplane has become difficult and full of security hassle, many American lives have been lost on the fields of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, we've tolerantly learned to live with degrees of fear defined by color coded bar charts, and we've tried in every politically correct way possible to understand why Muslim Radicals might hate us so much. We've even come close on occasion to apologizing for just plain being us. Well, I'm not apologizing. I don't say "I'm sorry" to bullies and homicidal maniacs.

Other things have happened in the past ten years. Good things.
Osama, the Al Qaeda chief thug, is dead. A man who lived by the gun and died by the gun. Another thug, Saddam Hussein has been tried and hanged. We now have active counter-terrorism organizations operating both inside and outside the U.S. and in turn, we are better able to protect and defend ourselves. The internet has exploded with social media sights like Twitter and Facebook spreading messages of freedom and democracy to citizens of Egypt, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, making it just a little more difficult in this day and age for a Mafia style thug like Saddam to rule over a country of frightened people. No we didn't uncover weapons of mass destruction in his country prior to entering into the second Iraq War, but that never disguised the fact that they did in fact possess them and had used them before in the form of poison gas on innocent Kurds and had been in the process of acquiring light water for their nuclear processing plants which were being reconstructed.

But it's ten years since 9/11.
Nearly 3,000 innocent people lost their lives on that day, and we shall never forget a single one of them. While it pains my soul to try and imagine the unspeakable sorrow and horrors each of these people went through on that sunny Monday morning, these days I prefer to think about the passengers of Flight 93 bound for San Francisco who decided to re-take their hijacked plane even though it was almost certainly going to mean sacrificing their lives in the process. But somehow they knew that given the choice of being a victim or a defender, they all chose defender. They are heros and saints.

So what shall we do over the course of the next ten years?

Move on. Remember what occurred all those years ago on September 11, 2001 and move on with reconstructing your life.

No more apologies for who or what we are as Americans. We have our faults but we are a strong people whose spirit will always be one of defending the right to be free.

Be tolerant. There will be many more people of the Muslim faith moving to America who are as far removed from the murderers of 9/11 as you and I are from Charlie Manson. They just want a fair shake at living the American Dream. So part of moving on is to move on with people you might have formerly harbored a distrust for.

Be vigilant. There as many domestic terrorists at work in the United States as there are foreign terrorists who want to kill Westerners, Christians, Jews and people of color. Yup, they want to kill little children too. Let's force them out of their rat holes and put these haters behind bars.

Work harder. No one single U.S. President can bear the unspeakable burden of creating jobs for us. As Americans we've always found a way to not only to make a living, but to create new industries. Lets stop complaining, stop collecting unemployment and other "entitlements" and get the hell back to work. Now!

Fight back. It's not only probable that another terrorist attack will occur in the US, it's inevitable. And when it does, we find out the party responsible, and we don't hold back. This time we retaliate with a "police action" not with one arm tied behind our backs, but with everything we've got. We take terror to the terrorists and eliminate every single one of them in as swift a manner as possible. We send a message to the world that we will not be bullied anymore.

Most of all, we must live and re-invent ourselves as free people who love not only our country but the entire world and beyond.

Let's take today to remember the past. Let's never forget! But then let's also pick ourselves back up, dust ourselves off, and move on with life.

GET ZANDRI BOOKS: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

How To Keep Going the Next Day

Richard Moonlight doesn't always know precisely where he's going, but he somehow always gets there.


I'm often asked how is that I'm so prolific?
The answer is simpler than you might imagine. And it came to me not in college or MFA writing school, but instead by reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. It was inside a cold water flat five or six flights above a square in the Montparnasse district of Paris that the would-be Papa wrote some of his first short stories. Stories that would come to change the literary world as we knew it.

He was able to write his stories with confidence day in and day out by following one simple rule. He would write a certain amount of words everyday and then complete the session by ending in a place where he was sure to go on the next day.

While this took severe discipline it was also liberating to know that come the next morning, you wouldn't find yourself staring at a blank piece of paper knowing that the day before you shot your wadd, as it were.

So then, I'm not Ernest Hemingway. But I do write a lot of novels, and the way to do that is not only to sit your butt in the chair and write whether you feel like it or not (this is your job after all), but also to always make sure that you end in a place that will allow you to continue the next day. The best way to do this is to simply make some small notes right on the page below your last sentence. If your character is about to enter an apartment with his ex-girlfriend in order to steal a zip-drive containing secret nuclear information her new boyfriend is about to sell to the Iranians, you might make a note about what route they take in order to get to the apartment, and the steps they take in order to get there without being spotted. That should be enough to get you moving come the next morning. The rest of the chapter should reveal itself organically for you.

Thanks Papa for making my writing life just a little bit easier. I wish I could say the same for writing school.

GET ZANDRI BOOKS: WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

All Your "Moonlights" in a Row

The DICK MOONLIGHT SERIES...in ORDER


















My publisher brought up a good point: Since all the Moonlights take place in sequence but can still be read as stand-alones, perhaps it would be a good idea to give you an idea of the order in which the Moonlights should be read thus far. That is, you want to read them in order. So here goes:



1. Moonlight Falls: In MOONLIGHT FALLS, novelist and photo journalist Vincent Zandri asks the question “If you knew your life could end at any moment, how far would you go to prove you murdered your lover? ” Albany, New York, is the setting of Zandri’s paranoid thriller (in the Hitchcock tradition) about Richard “Dick” Moonlight, former APD detective turned private investigator/massage therapist, who believes he killed Scarlet Montana, his illicit lover and wife of his ex-boss Chief of Detectives Jake Montana. The dilemma ... Moonlight doesn’t remember what happened!
1.25...COMING SOON: MOONLIGHT FALLS (UNCUT): The extended and expanded edition of the bestseller, including dozens of unpublished chapters, interviews, reviews, videos links, A Dick Moonlight's Albany Walking Tour, pictures, and more.

1.5 Moonlight Mafia: In this digital short, the too often unemployed private detective is hired by an anonymous client (“John Smith”) to bring down a Mafia wise guy who’s using a used car lot as a front for illegal gambling activity. At least, that’s what Moonlight is led to believe. According to the job description, he is to answer a want ad for a salesman position at the same used car lot and thereby secretly infiltrate the illegal operation. Sounds like a piece of cake.

Problem is, when Moonlight heads over to the used car lot to answer the ad, he decides to pay a quick visit to the bar next door and have a couple of quick “Jacks” to loosen himself up. But when he opens the big heavy door on his late father’s pride and joy 1978 “Cadi” hearse, it gets away from him and dings the passenger-side of the brand spankin’ new black Dodge Ram parked beside it. What Moonlight doesn’t realize as he pretends to ignore the Ram’s damage is that the door he just dinged belongs to his new would-be boss. And his would-be boss is not only in the Mafia, he’s no stranger to torturing and killing people for fun!

2. Moonlight Rises: Dick Moonlight is dead.

Really dead this time, now that three President Obama-masked thugs dressed all in black and communicating only with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed up against their voice boxes have beat the life right out of him inside a dark, downtown Albany alley. What are the thugs after? A box. Size, weight, description unknown. They also want him to stay away from his newest and only client: a handicapped nuclear engineer of dubious Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech.

But then, now that they’ve killed him, Moonlight’s problems seem to be over. In fact, as he undergoes an out of body experience, his soul floating above his train-wreck of a corpse inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U., he feels pretty damned good. Great in fact. To make death all the more sweeter, his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside. With her long dark hair draping her chiseled face and big round Jackie O sunglasses hiding tear-filled eyes, she appears every bit the grieving sig other. Nothing could make the dead-and-gone Moonlight prouder.

But then something happens. Something bad. A man enters into the I.C.U. Some young guy. He takes hold of Lola’s hand, and pulls her into him. Together, the two share a loving embrace over Moonlight’s dead body. Now, what seemed like a peaceful death is anything but. Moonlight wants back inside his body so he can face-off Some Young Guy and find out if his true love has in fact been cheating on him. At the same time, he wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him so he can exact his revenge. No doubt about it, Moonlight needs to live if he’s going to uncover some pretty painful answers and take care of business.

Like a little kid dropping down a playground slide, Moonlight slides right back inside his bruised and broken body. Opening his eyes the white light blinds him. He feels the pain of his wounds and the pain of his breaking heart.

Life sucks, then you die.

But Moonlight rises.

3. COMING SOON... Murder by Moonlight

4. COMING SOON...Blue मूंलिघ्त

MOONLIGHT RISES is RISEN!!!

"The long awaited second novel in the Moonlight series!"


“Life sucks. Then you die. Or, if you’re Dick Moonlight, first you die and then you live.”



The second full-length novel in the continuing Richard "Dick" Moonlight series has been released by StoneGate Ink in Kindle, Nook, and all e-Book forums: MOONLIGHT RISE.

The Story:

Dick Moonlight is dead.

Really dead this time, now that three President Obama-masked thugs dressed all in black and communicating only with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed up against their voice boxes have beat the life right out of him inside a dark, downtown Albany alley. What are the thugs after? A box. Size, weight, description unknown. They also want him to stay away from his newest and only client: a handicapped nuclear engineer of dubious Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech.

But then, now that they’ve killed him, Moonlight’s problems seem to be over. In fact, as he undergoes an out of body experience, his soul floating above his train-wreck of a corpse inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U., he feels pretty damned good. Great in fact. To make death all the more sweeter, his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside. With her long dark hair draping her chiseled face and big round Jackie O sunglasses hiding tear-filled eyes, she appears every bit the grieving sig other. Nothing could make the dead-and-gone Moonlight prouder.

But then something happens. Something bad. A man enters into the I.C.U. Some young guy. He takes hold of Lola’s hand, and pulls her into him. Together, the two share a loving embrace over Moonlight’s dead body. Now, what seemed like a peaceful death is anything but. Moonlight wants back inside his body so he can face-off Some Young Guy and find out if his true love has in fact been cheating on him. At the same time, he wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him so he can exact his revenge. No doubt about it, Moonlight needs to live if he’s going to uncover some pretty painful answers and take care of business.

Like a little kid dropping down a playground slide, Moonlight slides right back inside his bruised and broken body. Opening his eyes the white light blinds him. He feels the pain of his wounds and the pain of his breaking heart.

Life sucks, then you die.

But Moonlight rises.

Where to grab it:

MOONLIGHT RISES in Kindle
MOONLIGHT RISES in Nook