Saturday, April 30, 2011

Have you read my book?


I wrote a novel called BAD CASE. It's a crime thriller, somewhat of a detective novel, a suspense novel. If I had to compare it to anyone you'd recognize, I'd say it was in the tradition of Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and James Patterson back when his name was the only names on his covers.

I think I did a good job of keeping the book hot with plenty moving from one chapter to the next. Whoever you are, reading this, hopefully thinking about buying yourself a fun book by a self-published writer, I think you'll enjoy it.

It's got everything you want from a crime novel: a suburban private detective who's practice is failing and he's thinking of shutting down, a hot chick, bad guys, a mysterious silver briefcase, cops, stupid redneck criminals, guns, shooting, and punching.

Like I said, I think you'll like it.

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LINKS:
Read Chapter 1 of BAD CASE here for FREE!
J. Simmons, awesome cover designer of BAD CASE and The Good Life
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BUY MY BOOKS:
 

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Book Blurb: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Never before have I read a book that I wanted to see as a graphic novel. How good would this book be if Eddie Campbell drew it in the same style as From Hell?"

—Connor Dix, April, 2011

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NOTE:
Feel free to use this quote, credited, in it's entirety in any medium.
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Book Blurb: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

"I am very afraid of McCarthy's God. I'm afraid of the evil He has let loose in the world and by the greater evil He has unleashed to make a good man afraid."

—Connor Dix, 2011

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NOTE:
Feel free to use this quote, credited, in it's entirety in any medium.
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Man Food Recipe: Wingless Chicken Wings

1. Chicken Tenderloins
2. Olive Oil
3. Chili Powder
4. Garlic Powder
5. Pepper
6. Green Peppers or pepper strips
7. Your favorite wing sauce

1.
Cut the tenderloins (Doesn't matter how many, make what you can eat.) I cut them up into small pieces of around 1 inch square, little bite size things.

2.
Place the chicken in a dish and drizzle with a couple tablespoons of Olive Oil. Mix around so the chicken is covered with the oil. Then you want to take the chili powder and cover the chicken. Do the same with the garlic powder. Add pepper to your tastes. Mix it around and you'll probably want to add more chili powder and garlic. How can you have too much?

This is your marinated chicken. I like to let it sit in the fridge for twenty minutes or so, but it's good if you go ahead and cook it right away, too.

3.
Warm up a pan with oil or cooking spray (I use Food Lion brand cooking spray with olive oil. No fat!)

Once the pan is warmed up turn the stove down to about 7 and put in the chicken.

I usually wait two or three minutes to let the chicken cook up some then add the pepper strips. I like to use the bags of pre-cut frozen strips so I get a good taste of red, green and orange peppers.

Let this concoction cook up for no more than four minutes and flip it over. The pieces of chicken are very small the way I cook it, so cooking this on 7 usually takes less than 10 minutes.

4.
Once it's finished cooking take the delicious-smelling chicken and put it into another dish. (Or do what I do and wash the original dish while it's cooking real quick.)

When placed in the dish, take your favorite wing sauce and sauce to your personal specifications.

5.
Enjoy your Wingless Chicken Wings.

BAD CASE, Chapter 1

1.

John Smith was sitting in his office with his feet up on his cluttered desk when he thought he heard footsteps.

Footsteps were no problem, and no real concern for Smith, who was used to hearing people walk past his office on their way to bigger, better places. There were two dentists, one pediatrician, a gynecologist, a realtor and an Army recruitment office in the building. Most people were on their way to those places and none of them on their merry way to John Smith Investigations.

A few months ago he had given up on the notion that nobody liked him. Now he would sometimes wonder if people even noticed that there was a private detective’s office that they walked by every day.

“Hmpfh,” Smith said to the paper he was reading.

No one in this entire county needs a private dick anymore. Do people even know that private detectives actually exist in the real world? Probably not. I should be spending my retirement on a boat somewhere, not trying to make ends meet by being some stupid detective.

He thought about his chosen profession for a minute. “Mostly, I guess I’m just a dick,” he said to the walls and grinned.

John Smith was living the life right out of what he thought the old fifties crime novels glorified. He had a small office, with a part-time secretary who worked Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. She was a real firecracker, and Smith had yet to meet one single person who liked her. He grinned again when he thought that he was probably going to have to fire her because he didn’t make enough money. Such is the life of a private detective, he thought. To tell the truth, he was kind of hoping she would resist when he fired her so he could shoot her. He figured that would be a lot of fun.

His desk was cluttered with papers, his feet were up on the desk, and the he was looking through was the want ads. The big detective business had pretty much turned out to be a bust, but it had been an interesting two years. He started the business shortly after he retired from the Clark County Sheriff’s Department. He retired at the ripe old age of forty-two, after twenty long years on the force.

There was no way in hell he was going to keep on being a cop, he had never gotten along with the management. Twenty years of having to listen to other people telling him what to do had finally just about driven him crazy. When he put his twenty years in and was eligible for retirement he didn’t hesitate. His wife said he seemed like a happier person.

So he started John Smith Investigations within six months of retiring, thinking that he could still protect and serve a small portion of the public, and maybe make better money. He could be happy solving a case here and there, taking some pictures of some asshole screwing around on his wife, maybe even helping some poor family finding a missing kid. Yeah, he could manage to do that. Hell, maybe he could even help find a lost puppy or two.

It was too bad that no one seemed to need a detective anymore. Everyone just up and ran to the cops, now the cops could handle every damned thing. He made a grunting sound and silently cursed everyone who went to the cops when they could make his life a whole hell of a lot more exciting by coming straight to him. Didn’t they know that he was forced to look for a real job, while they could be helping him while he was a little down on his luck? Good thing he had a good pension from the sheriff’s department.

Good thing he wasn’t bitter.

So there he was, at his desk, looking for a job. Maybe driving a truck, something part time, so he could spend some more time on the boat. He was thinking about how he really wanted the business to succeed, how he needed some money, thinking about how someone really needed to come in that door when he heard those footsteps in the hall.

Probably just someone going to get their teeth cleaned, some poor schmuck who all of a sudden feels the need to join the army.

He went back to his paper and imagined a beautiful, sultry woman walking in and sitting down without saying a word. He imagined her reaching into her purse and flopping a wad of bills – hundreds of course – on his desk. Then she would pull out one of those extra long, thin cigarettes made just for women and light it with a tiny, gold plated lighter. She’d stare him right dead in the eyes as she slowly lit her cigarette, and he’d be in heaven.

What happened instead, the footsteps stopped at his door, which was enough to get his attention up, but not his hopes. It could be someone who was lost. He got that a few times a week, and was frankly sick of it.

When the pretty girl in the blue dress walked in, John Smith almost fell right out of his chair.

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Read BAD CASE on the Kindle or buy it at Smashwords

Friday, April 22, 2011

Book Blurb: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

"A bloody painting of a boy of sixteen in 1940's Mexico, All the Pretty Horses leads you through the landscape and brutality and love and sweat and work with John Grady Cole."

Connor Dix, 2011

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NOTE:
Feel free to use this quote, credited, in it's entirety in any medium.
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Book Blurb: Origin by J.A. Konrath

Origin by J.A. Konrath

"This was my first book by Konrath, the first of many. A tight, fast thriller with more suspense than horror that kept me glued to my Kindle. Highly recommended."

Connor Dix, 2011

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NOTE:
Feel free to use this quote, credited, in it's entirety in any medium.
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Book Blurb: Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard

"A typical fast-paced Leonard mystery with excellent dialogue, a sequel to Out of Sight brings Jack (George Clooney) Foley to California with a prison pal and straight into a woman's deadly sights."

Connor Dix, 2011

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NOTE:
Feel free to use this quote, credited, in it's entirety in any medium.
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Three Sentence Story

terribleminds.com is having a three sentence story challenge. I'd never thought about doing this before and one popped into my head immediately. I really liked it, and plan to definitely do more!

Here's mine:

He took one last look at the girl with the sun behind her standing in her yellow dress and the shoes with the heels and wanted to say something to her before he went into the bank but did not. The went to the teller and gave her the note he wrote the night before and showed her the butt of his gun and after she handed him the money in the gray sack he turned and walked fast and got his hand on the door to push it open. The gunshots did not register in his mind until he saw the sun come from behind the girl and watched her face change before she turned and ran into traffic as his body went limp against the thick plate glass and his world went dark and cold.

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LINK
terribleminds.com three sentence story challenge!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Ballad of John Hunt, preview.

This story came to me in a flash, a story of a good man put through hell, a story of revenge. I'm very happy with the way it's turning out and I feel like all I'm doing is putting the words where they belong.

The novel The Ballad of John Hunt won't be available for a while, possibly the end of summer or mid-fall, but I present to you the first three paragraphs of my novel in progress.

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And they all knew that John Hunt, Jr. was the strong one, the one they could all come to when there was trouble or a dispute or if they needed to talk or if they needed the last word in some trouble they were having. John Hunt, Jr., the oldest of the living sons of a man no man had ever called great.


Everyone steered clear of John Hunt, Sr. because of his views and his opinions and his work. His whole life was about his work, never his children. Never his four sons and what they needed from him as a father figure in their life, a guide to keep them on a path to make them men. 

The four sons only had each other and they became men in spite of their father. In spite of the man who believed that God had put him on Earth to work and nothing else. In spite of the man who, in the damp and dusty evenings eating dinner by candle light would chastise his sons for not keeping up with the work on the farm. In spite of the one afternoon with the sharp yellow sky when John Hunt, Sr. spun around in fury and smacked his second son, John, Jr. across the face.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac Mccarthy

How good was Frank Muller?

I just yesterday finished listening to All the Pretty Horses on audio and I can't get the book out of my head. I absolutely love westerns even though I haven't read a lot of them and haven't seen as many western movies as I want to and know that they just live inside my head in their own little world.

But I love 'em. But I love Cormac Mccarthy a little more. I've been haunted by The Road ever since I listened to it about four years ago. There are images from that book I just can't shake, it was amazing. No Country for Old Men is always close at hand, so I can read bits and pieces of it when I'm too lazy to do anything else. Blood Meridian showed me what the devil was up to in Mexico.

All the Pretty Horses was well written, and drew such a good picture of Mexico in the 1940's that I felt like I was there. Mccarthy is an artist.

This post is just a love letter to Mccarthy's words, not a big review of the book. I wouldn't know where to start, it's a telling of what happened to 16-year old John Grady Cole when he needed to go to Mexico. The book is full of love, violence, horses and Mccarthy's vengeful God.

I'm not a religious man, but I'm afraid of Mccarthy's God.

And damn, do I love westerns. I love the time period and I love horses and I love that people live off the land and everyone is a sinner and they're all filthy from the land. This book is all of that.

This is just a recommendation: go read All the Pretty Horses. Or listen to the audio version, like I did. Frank Muller is a fantastic, perfect translator of the story. Listening to it, I felt like he was poured into the story and was part of the words. It was amazing.

That's my rambling post. I don't want to give anything away. I don't want to give away any of the landscape or the horses or the men or the girl or the violence or Texas or Mexico.

All the Pretty Horses is the first book in a three volume series. I just started reading The Crossing on my Kindle and I started reading it late last night and had to finally force myself to put it down. I got way too tired and couldn't stop myself. The book was singing to me.

An hour later I woke up because, like I always do when I read a good book, I was dreaming that I was still reading the damned thing. When I sleep, my brain keeps reading, keeps writing. It's weird.

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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

BAD CASE - The Book Cover

Here is it, the cover for BAD CASE.

The action-adventure suspense novel is currently being uploaded to the Kindle store!

Monday, April 4, 2011

Reviews and the self published author.

I'm officially a published author. The Good Life is alive and well for the Kindle.

Pretty soon it should be available for Smashwords, and the Nook. Got a few things to get finished before I can get those done.

I never realized how important book reviews were until I published a book. Good or bad, they really seem to be a necessity, especially on Amazon. Right now, even with sales, I don't have any reviews on Amazon, but my short story is still selling.

Red Adept Reviews did a nice review of The Good Life just after it was published and it taught me a few things about rushing the work, and skipping the editing process. I fully acknowledged my stupid, dumbassed bonehead mistakes and quickly gave it a good run-through and put up a second edition.

I admit that putting The Good Life out so fast was a mistake. It's a story I write a few years ago. I revised it a little and got so blinded by having fun the the Kindle format I put it out and ignored things I will never ignore again. I learned a lot from that review.

On a general note, I welcome reviews with open arms. I'm a fairly rational, reasonable guy and I am not jumping into the publishing business blind. I want to know what you think, and I promise to let the reader know what's going on.

As I see my job, as a writer of stuff I want you to enjoy, is to be 100% transparent. I create things I want people to buy and I don't want to sell garbage.

If The Good Life seems like it's up your alley, check it out. It's a good, short ride. I wrote it in the style of Andrew Vachss' short stories from Born Bad and Everybody Pays. I feel like I achieved what I went out there for.

And if you like it, write a nice review. If you don't like it, write a polite review.

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My story, The Kindle, and the last book I read:
   

Friday, April 1, 2011

A review of "The Good Life"

Today Red Adept Reviews posted their review of "The Good Life."

It's a good, honest review and I learned a lot from it. I learned not to rush a story, or a book. I learned not to be a knuckle-head. It really is a good review, hopefully they're review my future books and stories.

Check out the review on their website.

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In response to the good points of the Red Adept Reviews review, the 2nd edition of "The Good Life" is on it's way to the Amazon Kindle store.

Buy it, I think it's a good story and now it's even better.