Howard Sherman, Implementor

Like a gypsy roving from town to town I’m happy to announce the latest (and DEFINITELY the last) location of my blog:

http://www.malinche.net/blog/

All of the blogging I’ve done since the beginning — from my days us using an Apple web page to MySpace to Tumblr and finally — my own author/publisher website.

Follow me as we continue our journey together exploring books and so much of what life has to offer.

When I was a wee lad in Brooklyn my mom would take me to Kings Plaza “THE mall” in Brooklyn at the time (for there was only one) so she could do some shopping.

To the relief of my mother, I had absolutely no interest in shopping for women’s clothing.  Ditto crafts, curtains or anything else the mall had to offer.

Except brownies and books.  And Puppy Palace.  And Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs.

It’s been over thirty years but the circuit I followed through Kings Plaza is forever burned into my brain.

Exit indoor parking garage.  Pop right into Nathan’s if somebody was hungry (it was the first thing you saw on your right as you entered the mall from the garage).  Then a walk through Puppy Palace to pet the dogs and cats through the narrow bars, then a peek at the parakeets.  Then some hamming it up with the hamsters.

Then… brownies and books.

Down the corridor, hang a left and there was the brownie place.  They sold cookies too.  I forgot the name of the place but I remember the brownies. 

Just to the left of the brownie stand was Waldenbooks.  My babysitter at the mall.

My mom could park me in that bookstore for any length of time and no matter how much time she took to shop, schmooze or browse she could be sure to find me right where she left me; at the bookstore.

Often times I didn’t move more than than ten feet from my last known location even if hours had gone by.

Maybe it was hours.  Maybe just thirty minutes.  I just don’t know.

I can’t tell you how long I stayed at the bookstore at any given time.  I couldn’t even give you an average.

That’s because I lost all sense of time and place in the bookstore.  I got lost in the books. And the bookshelves.  From fantasy adventure to science fiction to Garfield  cartoon books to Mad Magazine.  I had no sense of time, space or place. 

Just the books.  The words.  The thoughts.  The feelings.

The fun!

Sadly, it’s not realistic or even advisable to park an unsupervised youngster in a public place for any length of time in this day and age.

Go back 30-35 years and it wasn’t just possible — it was positively perfect.

Today Kings Plaza is a shadow of its former self. Waldenbooks is gone and we moved to New Jersey years ago.

But the fantastic memories remain.

Thanks mom! Thanks Waldenbooks!

Reviewing a book as wildly popular and so widely accepted as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo  is like reviewing your local Italian restaurant.

Everybody already likes it so what’s the point of reviewing it?

I’ll keep it simple and confirm everything you already have heard about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; it’s a sensational book.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of three books in the Millennium series.  You can be sure I’ll be reading the other two.

This was my first foray into Swedish fiction and I wasn’t at all disappointed.  The whole book has a decidedly Swedish flavor to it with broader European undertones on every page.

The plot is intricate and stunning as it unfolds.  I was deeply impressed by all the twists and turns the book took, each one a logical evolution of the twist before it leading to a satisfying and head-nodding conclusion, with a splash of humor and irony in the mix.

Stieg Larssson was a master of intrigue and suspense and I salute the man for cooking up such a complex web of intrigue that keeps the reader glued to every page.

More amazingly, all three of Stieg Larsson’s books in the Millennium series almost didn’t see the light of day.  Writing for himself with no serious interest in getting his work published, it’s only right before his death he made any attempts to get his work published.

Tragically, he didn’t get to see his books in print.  His achievements and international recognition are sadly rewarded posthumously.  Stieg Larsson died of a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs up to his office because the elevator was out.  He was just 50.

Order Your Copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Movie Tie-in Edition): Book 1 of the Millennium Trilogy (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

11/22/63 reads more like Star Trek than Stephen King.  And that’s a good thing.

Stephen King really ran off the rails with his latest novel.  Do things get gory and gruesome? A couple of times but only in the context of the violence of the moment that’s dwarfed by the bigger picture of the plot.  Naturally, Stephen King describes such events in truly horrific detail so much so that no one should be concerned about Stephen King losing his horror fiction writing mojo.

As if that could ever happen.  There’ll be a snowball fight in hell first.

Our main character and unwitting time traveler, Jake Epping, steps inside a time machine hidden in a diner back to 1958 to live life as his alter ego George Amberson.

In 1958 the root beer is sweeter and the fruit is juicier.  Everything about George Amberson’s first trip into the past gives him — and the reader — a very realistic glimpse back to the good old days when life was simple.

The television in Mr. Amberson’s hotel receives just a couple of ghostly, static-loaded channels.  He tosses his cell phone in a nearby creek in much the same way James T. Kirk would toss his communicator to avoid polluting the timeline.

George Amberson goes so far as to remove modern nickels and dimes from his pocket change so a 2008 dime doesn’t show up fifty years ahead of schedule.

The Prime Directive and all that.

It’s all so intriguing and charming until we hit the parts about over-the-top racism and segregation, the Cuban missile crisis and, oh yeah, the JFK assassination.

11/22/63 has roughly the same weight and thickness as a phone book yet you won’t be bored for a minute turning the pages.

Not even when you read about George Amberson’s adventures through 1950s Maine down to Florida and over to Texas.  George gambles and wins every time (how can you lose when you know the outcome of every ball game and boxing match in advance?) which leads to one pissed-off bookie burning his house down and, later after George still doesn’t learn, pisses off another bookie in Texas and gets the shit beaten out of him so badly I was half-wondering if he’d still be alive in the next chapter.

As a fiction writer, I was professionally amazed at how many tiny and ordinarily mundane events Grandmaster King wrote in that should, by all accounts,  have bored the reader to death.  A showdown with the town spinster in a parking lot.  A high school dance. Driving two towns over to buy condoms so as not to embarrass his lover and get the town whispering.  Melting ice cream.  Stepping on a pound cake.

It was all so enamoring and engaging but it shouldn’t have been.  I inject a bit of minutia in all of my fiction books to keep things real because fiction without facts is like rain without wet.  Even so, I don’t think I’d ever dare to attempt Mr. King’s feat and dream of pulling it off.

Along the way Mr. Amberson intervenes in a couple of minor tragedies before tackling the history-changing one at the end of the book.

Does JFK live or die? And is that outcome the right one? History already decided.  Know you be the judge.

Own Your Own Copy of 11/22/63: A Novel

In these days of dizzying budget deficits, austerity measures rolling across the globe and the understandable tension of average people trying to live a comfortable life with an eye on a future of an easy retirement, it’s easy for most of us to lose track of the simple ways we can make that happen.

Do you want to live comfortably today and join the millionaire’s club before you retire?

You can.  And all it takes is a very minor monetary investment in just a few books and a somewhat larger investment of time to read them.

After your investment of time and money you’ll need to do just one more thing; apply that knowledge to your life and make it happen.

Knowledge isn’t power.  Knowledge is POTENTIAL power.  If you don’t act on your knowledge and execute new decisions based on your new-found facts all you’re doing is standing still and watching the good life as a mere spectator on the sidelines.

I propose you live the good life and make your new hobby and favorite contact sport.

Here are three books you’ll find in my personal library and should be in yours too:

The Richest Man in Babylon - While the ideas in The Richest Man in Babylon are ancient in aspect, they are as applicable in the 21st century as they were centuries ago.  It’s a short book and very entertaining and the attentive will immediately observe the wisdom unfolded with every turn of the page.  The moral of the story is deceptively simple; don’t dismiss it without giving it a try for at least three months.  Skeptics can cut that short to just one month and still be convinced by the results.

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy - Turn off the TV and your computer and then imagine what a millionaire looks like.  What kind of car do they drive? How do they dress? Where do they live? How did they earn their fortune? Then read this book and prepare to have your mind blown as every stereotype of the rich and every preconceived notion you ever held about wealth is shattered.  You can become a millionaire if you let this book deprogram you from your accumulated impressions of what you think being a millionaire is like.

The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness - Beans and rice and rice and beans.  That’s what Dave Ramsay teaches you to live in as you dig your way out of the hole of your debt you’re in to reach the bright sunshine up and out of the hole.  My favorite Dave Ramsay quote of all time is “Learn to live like nobody else so later you can LIVE like no else.” Dave will teach you to torch your credit cards, cut your spending and then sock away your savings to build wealth slowly but surely to give you the kind of financial security everybody wants but so few people actually achieve.

Read these books.  Absorb the wisdom on every page.  Then put everything you learned into practice and you cannot fail — you MUST win.

The core idea behind a recent BBC News article has been stuck in my head for a week.  After reading The Authors Who Are Going it Alone Online - And Winning all I could do was nod my head a lot and say “Yes! Yes! YES!”

That’s because Dave Lee, BBC News technology writer, pegged my own reasoning when I decided to self publish - ten years ago.

My decision to launch Malinche to self-publish my interactive fiction books was purely a business decision.  Why? Because there wasn’t a publisher anywhere on the planet who published interactive fiction.  My desire to resurrect interactive fiction and bring it back to life in the commercial publishing market meant I had to go it alone.

I wasn’t driven by vanity.  Greed was my gasoline.

For years afterwards, I had to constantly be on my guard for being pigeon-holed as just another self-published author in pursuit of his own vanity.

Sure I’m vain.  Egotistical, even. But those character traits had nothing to do with the path I’d taken. 

It would be several years before the rest of the publishing world caught up to me and embrace my thinking, let alone understand it.

As a veteran geek with near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Internet, website design, Internet marketing and eCommerce, I didn’t have to wait around for Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BookRix and others to develop an online platform for authors to sell their self-published books to the public…

… I built my own from the ground up way back in 2002 when Malinche was in pre-launch.

Year after year I continued to tweak my online bookselling platform and actually changed core technologies three times to get Malinche to its current state of technological near-perfection.

From the day I launched the Malinche website to the present, I had a dual goal of pursuing my passion of sharing interactive fiction with the world while making some seriously good money doing it.

And that’s what many of today’s self-publishing authors have in common with me.  They want to write.  To pursue their passion and make a living at it.

They’re pursuing their dream and with today’s eBook marketplace growing like wildfire, they and me are perfectly positioned.

The days of an author mailing his check for several thousands of dollars along with his manuscript to a vanity press or print on demand house only to receive a book of books that will sit in the garage for years all so he can say “I’m a published author” are over.

The vanity press vanished when the eBook marketplace came into existence.

Sure there are authors out there cranking out eBooks for no other reason than to say “I’m a published author” but their ranks are dwindling fast as the promise of profit supersedes the intoxication of the ego trip.

Back on December 23rd, 2011 I made a blog post talking about the Chapter 7 Bankruptcy of my former publicist BookPros (AKA Phenix & Phenix) and questioned the viable existence of book publicists on a going forward basis.  In case you missed it, review it here before you plunge ahead with reading this book review.

Crush It! tells you everything you need to know to sell any product or service in the 21st century.  Be you accountant, author or aerospace engineer, absorbing and applying everything Gary Vaynerchuk shares in Crush It! will lead to your inevitable success.

The straight-from-the-heart honesty of Crush It! flies in the face of all the “make money while you sleep” sales pitches we’re all bombarded with as Gary tells you very early on that you need to work your face off to make money on the Internet.

Amen, brother.

It doesn’t matter if you want to launch a new business or find your next job, Crush It! will put you in the fast lane to achieve your goals with unparalleled honesty and straight-from-the-heart truth that Gary himself acquired through years of battlefield experience on the plane of social media marketing.

The smarter book publicists will already have received the cue to exit stage left on any chance of a serious future in book promotion. 

That’s because Gary Vaynerchuk tells you everything you need to know to effectively promote you, your product or your service in Crush It! as you pocket thousands of dollars in savings thanks to all the money you won’t be paying to advertisers or promoters.

Order it now - Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Father and son, two of just a tiny fraction of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world like none I’ve ever seen before, try to make their way south in search of the closest thing to paradise as anyone can ever hope to find in Cormac McCarthy’s depiction of hell on earth.

Mankind is virtually extinct.  But so is nearly everything else.  The trees are all dead, the oceans are not teeming with life.  Birds don’t chirp and woodchucks don’t chuck wood.  That’s because they’re all dead. 

Everything is dead.  Everything.

Everything except small packs of survivors, most of which bear no resemblance to human beings except in the purely scientific sense.  A passerby tries to steal a worn pair of shoes, the doting dad is shot by an arrow from a window as he and his son make their way down a deserted street in an empty town.  A baby is killed and eaten, cooked on a spit like a bastard’s barbecue. 

And that’s just the tiniest of glimpses into the darkness of this book.

But there are also glimmers of light and hope; father and son have morals.  The young boy wants to give a starving old man a can of food so the poor, withered soul can enjoy just one more meal.  Another young boy follows behind them for a while before disappearing in the woods in fear.  The son cries, wishing they could have helped the boy and hope he’s OK.  Soon after the boy is hiding for his life as a gang of gun-toting survivors try to hunt down father and son to kill them and plunder their meager possessions.

With high notes of happiness at the discovery of the simplest things we all take for granted and low notes over sometimes simple things, The Road is a book that would move the heart of a cold rock.

The ending is bittersweet.  All at once tragic and triumphant.  Father and son simultaneously fail and succeed.  I’m not going to ruin it for you past that.

I have just the tiniest of complaints; there’s absolutely no back story.  Why is virtually everything dead? Dead grass? No birds? Gnarled trees? Piles of rotted fish on the beach? Not even cockroaches survived in any great number, it seems. 

Why? Nuclear holocaust? Chemical warfare? A new strain of the bubonic plague? The answer to this question doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of The Road but I do wish Cormac McCarthy had devoted even a paragraph to explain how nearly all life on earth was wiped out.

The Road is a truly amazing book that takes the reader on a journey across the emotional spectrum exploring the full range of human emotion while breathing new life into the tired, overused post-apocalyptic theme. Don’t pass this book by.

Own The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Yesterday was an interesting day for Barnes & Noble; it’s stock lost 20 % of its value as it projected steep losses for 2012 with only a single silver lining; The Nook.

Long story short; E-Books and digital media are the only bright spot for this bricks-and-mortar bookstore.

So what sent the stock plummeting? Not just the long-term negative view on earnings but scuttlebutt about spinning off The Nook as a separate company.

That would be a huge mistake.  Probably a fatal one.

The Nook is keeping Barnes and Noble afloat in an ocean of eBooks as pBooks (printed books) became less popular and, by extension, increasingly irrelevant.

If you follow me on Twitter or checked out my other official website you already know I see eBooks as the future.  That’s not to say I don’t love the printed word; I do.

Stephen King said it so well (the way he so often does) in a recent interview: The printed book will soon become as much a novelty as a TV set with a turn-the-knob-to-change-the-channel analog TV tuner.

Further evidence of this is in a story that the Associated Press broke the day before yesterday; James Patterson’s eBook sales have topped 5 million copies.

The future of Barnes & Noble is bright with The Nook in the picture.  Amazon will remain king of the hill for the foreseeable future.  There’s no shame in Barnes & Noble being a distinguished second place winner in the bookseller realm.

Creating The Nook was the smartest move Barnes & Noble has made in years.  Spinning off The Nook would certainly be the dumbest.

This is the first non-fiction book I’ve read in a long while that didn’t come from the how-to or self improvement category.  What a refreshing change of pace!

I scored a free copy of the audio book at the Blackstone Audio booth at Book Expo America earlier this year and it sat on my TBR pile for months.  Then last week I said “Why not?”

I dropped the CDs into the CD player of my battle wagon of my car (She’s a 2000 Lincoln Continental and despite dropping some $4000 on repairs and maintenance on her this year alone I’m never giving her up!) and played track of track day by day and relished every minute of it.

I had to stop myself from making petty excuses to hop in the car to score a fix for more.  “We only have half a carton of milk, I better go run to the store for more…” “Gosh, did I leave my water bottle at the gym, I better swing by and pick it up…” because I couldn’t wait until my next spin to the gym, drive to the store or milk run to the bank to listen to more.

The story is as amazing as it is true.  Narrator/reader Ray Porter made it even more interesting.  I first experienced Ray Porter’s work with another non-fiction favorite I covered just two weeks ago - The Four Hour Work Week. Ray Porter has been a favorite of mine ever since.

From Howard Wasdin’s humble origins in the deep south straight through BUDS training to admittance to the uber elite SEAL Team Six to his re-entry to the civilian world before finding his muse, this book pulls no punches.

You get action, drama, adventure, romance and raw, pure feeling.  These fine literary elements are hard enough to find in fiction books.  Every one of them, and many more, are all present and accounted for making SEAL Team Six an unforgettable story.

If there’s any possible demerits I could give this book, it would be Wasdin’s wanderings to Richard Marcinko, SEAL Team Six founder.  Marcinko’s a SEAL legend and Wasdin’s intentional attempt to assassinate the Rogue Warrior’s character was something I did not like.

I still like the book.  A lot.  And you will too.  We all know there’s no such thing as perfect in anything in this world, but SEAL Team Six comes as close as a non-fiction book can.

Own SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper in Hardcover

Download the Kindle edition of SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper