Friday, October 11th was The Atomic Book Signing at the historic Atomic Liquors on Fremont Street, downtown. It's no longer a liquor store these days and is more of a bar. It was an interesting choice of venue with the loud music, bar regulars, and dimly lit areas. I'll admit that if I didn't drive there myself and knew I'd have to drive back, I'd have had a couple of martinis. Most of the attendees were coming in from the Southern Nevada Writers Convention, so the majority of them were writers. And if there's one thing I've learned from writers conventions is that writers don't tend to buy a lot of books. The best events that seem to sell books are at fan conventions and reader events like book festivals. Aside from my book launch parties, I sold the most books at the L.A. Times Book Festival, and I'm hoping to exceed those sales at the Vegas Valley Book Festival on November 2nd. 
On Thursday, October 24th at 7pm at the Clark County Library on Flamingo, I'll be discussing my short story "Reclamation" that's in the Las Vegas Writes Anthology: Progress, Getting Better All the Time. You can read a bit of my story if you click the link and then click on Reclamation. It's going to be interesting explaining how my apocalyptic story of how water reclaiming the Earth relates to progress, but hey, I'm a horror writer. The highlight of The Atomic Book Signing was getting to see Mercedes Murdock Yardley. We had to get a picture of her with The Atomic sign because her latest novella is a "tale of atomic love." Click HERE to buy a copy. You won't be disappointed.
For the second part of my cross promotion experience with Carl Alves, I did a five question interview with him. Great stuff! Please read it. There are freebie opportunities at the end.
1.
To get an idea of your writing
influences, who are three of your favorite writers from three different genres?
In the horror genre, it has to be
Stephen King. Even though I’m not as
fond of his more recent work, his early stuff is pure gold. In the seventies, eighties and nineties he
was churning out mesmerizing horror that delivered every time. He is my biggest writing influence.
In the fantasy genre, I would
have to go with George R. R. Martin. I
only started reading him recently because I was hooked on the Game of Thrones television show. Then I started reading the series, and damn,
the novels are simply amazing. His
writing skills are off the chart. His
world building and characters are top notch.
In the crime genre, I would go
with Mario Puzo. When I was writing my
Mafia chapters in Blood Street, the
voice of Puzo would always creep in my mind.
He got that world down so well.
He is the king of gangster writing, and I’ve always had a great
admiration for his work.
2.
Blood Street has a lot of great
Philadelphia mob and city details – did you do a lot of research, or did you
use your own personal experiences in regards to the area? And well, if you’ve
had any personal experiences with the Philadelphia mob, I’m sure everyone would
like to know about them, too.
I was born and raised
in Philadelphia, so it wasn’t particularly hard to get details of the city
right. I really tried to incorporate the
city into the novel to the point where it was like a character in the story. As far as mob details, since I don’t have any
personal dealings with organized crime figures, I did a lot of research into
the history of the Philadelphia Mafia, and what I found was that in the fifties
and sixties it was one of the most well run and well organized crime syndicates
in the country. In the eighties and
nineties, the organization fell apart in a series of unprecedented
violence. Pretty much everybody who was
in the Philly mob during that time period is either in jail or dead. So what I wanted was to create a mob boss character
who was highly educated and intelligent and would run the organization like a
business.
3.
In Blood Street, I was rooting for the
mobsters. Do you have any tips on how you made these characters more likable
than vampires that most readers seem to be so into?
Growing up in Philadelphia, I had
the opportunity to get to know a good deal of Italian Americans and this was
the basis for most of my Mafia characters on Blood Street. I took the personalities of people that I had
known and ratcheted them up to ten. In
the end, they are exaggerated versions of real people. In the novel I intentionally didn’t try to
make one side or the other being the heroes or the villains. Mob guys are inherently bad since they make
their way through life committing crime, but I did my best to make them
likeable.
4.
Wow, I see you have a degree in
Biomedical Engineering. Is science fiction something you plan to explore in your
writing in the future?
My next novel I have
scheduled for release is entitled Reclamation
Mother Earth, which is going to be published by Montag Press, and this is a
post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller. Based
on my educational background, you might think that I would be drawn to science
fiction, but what turns me off about the genre is that stories often get bogged
down by technological jargon and specific details, which interfere with the
telling of a good story. For me the
story comes first. That’s why I
purposely tried not to get overly technical with a lot of the science in the
novel. I want to tell a story, not teach
a science class. I get enough of that in
my day job.
5.
What projects do you have in the
works?
As I mentioned in the
previous question, Reclamation Mother
Earth should be coming out in the near future. The premise of the novel is that aliens take
over the Earth. On the first day of the
invasion, my main character who is a Navy SEAL, is there when the aliens invade
and is knocked into a coma. Five years
later, he wakes up in the care of a kind alien physician to find out that most
of the human race has been killed off and many of the survivors have been
enslaved by the alien conquerors. He
starts to heal himself mentally and physically and in the process starts a
resistance movement to take back the planet from the aliens.
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