Goodreads Giveaway

A giveaway is running on Goodreads for The System – A Detroit Story. Five paperbacks will be given away which retail for $8.17 on Amazon.com. The giveaway runs until February 11th. All you have to do is click the giveaway button on the side of this page or go here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13611266-the-system—a-detroit-story–

The System – A Detroit Story – Chapter 1 Part 2 Podcast

I just posted the podcast for Chapter 1 Part 2 of The System – A Detroit Story. Go here to listen: http://johnsilverbooks.com

The System Free Download

The System – A Detroit Story – is a free download today (Sunday, March 18), March 19 and March 20 on Amazon.com. Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/System-Detroit-Story—ebook/dp/B005HZKIBE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1313788718&sr=1-1

 

Reckoning in Escobara For Free

Reckoning in Escobara will be available as a Kindle book on Amazon.com for free Friday Feb 10 through Sunday February 12, 2012.

Here’s the synopsis:

After taking down Vlad Dragovic in Detroit, Ann Peabody quits the DEA and heads to Mexico to investigate and avenge the murder of her brother Jason Peabody, a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The trail leads to Escobara, a suburb of drug cartel controlled Juarez. Peabody becomes a bodyguard and security consultant to Olga Espinosa , the newly elected Mayor of Escobara, and works with Olga and her brother Manuel to rid Escobara of the drug trade and gangs. A certain ex-DPD Inspector Freeman Washington shows up to help Peabody out.

Along with the multiple, horrific drug-related slayings a serial killer is on the loose around Escobara, and he’s prolific. Peabody discovers that Jason was killed elsewhere before being found on the Texas-Juarez border. Why? Was he connected to the drug trade, or worse, the serial killer?

…then there’s the CIA...

Stand tall with Ann Peabody and Freeman Washington on the vicious streets of Escobara as they build a force to protect the people, unravel the mystery of Jason’s murder and uncover the rabid serial killer in RECKONING IN ESCOBARA.

CLICK HERE FOR Reckoning in Escobara ON AMAZON’S KINDLE STORE:

http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-in-Escobara-ebook/dp/B006P0O0L4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324591819&sr=1-1

 

Characters and Meyer-Briggs Assessments

I live in Detroit, and whenever I start a new book I feel like I’m walking from here to California in the snow. The finished book is thousands of miles away, and if I think about it too hard I get discouraged. I also know that the new book will be harder to write than the last one, but that’s okay. All that means is that I’m learning more about writing and applying what I’ve learned to future work.

Here’s something I learned to do before writing Reckoning in Escobara. I apply a Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI to each of my characters. The MBTI measures sixteen personality types based on eight preferences. The preferences are:

E – Extroversion

I – Introversion

S – Sensing

N – iNtuition

T – Thinking

F – Feeling

J – Judging

P – Perceiving

These preferences are grouped into sixteen categories. I’ll provide the link to the Meyer-Briggs Foundation for useful and detailed information. Here are some of the categories:

ISTJ – Introverted, Sensing, Thinking Judging

INTP – Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving

ESTP – Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving

ENTJ – Extroverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging

You get the idea. There are dozens of websites that go into detail for each of these classifications, and you can take an assessment test yourself to see where you land. I did, and I fall in the INTJ category.

When I first develop characters I make a template using these classifications along with other character background data. When I write the book I make sure that each of the characters follow their MBTI type for the most part. If they react to a particular situation, I make sure they react with the proper behavior. If a character is a laid back, ESFJ type I’ll make sure their reaction falls into that classification’s predictive behavior. Same goes for an uptight INTP type. This lends consistency and credibility to the characters and guides me, as the writer, with a personality roadmap. I working on this right now for Thomas Edison: RESURRECTOR, developing MBTI profiles for Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and the fictional characters.

Here’s the link to the Meyer-Briggs Foundation: www.myersbriggs.org/

I read something in one of William C. Martell’s screenwriting bluebooks that really stuck with me. He said you should be able to cover the names in a screenplay and still know exactly who is talking. I believe that applying MBTI analysis to characters and using the classifications with consistency helps to achieve just that.

The System and Objectivism

I work in downtown Detroit and have so for years. Detroit’s small downtown core, running from the Renaissance Center along Jefferson, down Woodward and up to Campus Martius resembles a small town. People are in the streets, parks and stores and you get to know them by name. Go into a restaurant and the girl behind the counter already knows what you’re going to order and calls our your name when it’s ready.

Bands and street musicians play, even in winter. The same beggars beg (give them a dollar and they hound you forever), street vendors sell hotdogs, people stroll along the boulevards and kids ride the carousel at the edge of the RiverWalk. Some people haul in catfish and walleye two at a time and watch thousand foot freighters lumber down the Detroit River. Others sun themselves on the grass near Hart Plaza and eat lunch with their shoes off at Campus Martius.

Inside the Renaissance Center, the largest building complex at the base of the city, an old, well dressed gentleman sits outside a coffee shop every afternoon listening to John, Miles and Ornette stream from his small transistor radio. He’s a fixture and everyone knows him. There isn’t a person that goes by he doesn’t politely greet. This is civilized life at its best.

Walk a few blocks in any direction and it all changes. Walk a few blocks in any direction and you’re in the midst of eighty thousand abandoned houses. Eighty thousand. Walk a few blocks in any direction and you’re surrounded by unthinkable violence, lawlessness and brutality, where human beings are no more than street dogs to be put down if they get in your way. I could cite hundreds of horrific examples, even as recent as this morning, but there isn’t enough room here to post them.

News stories showing the dark side of Detroit are everywhere, as with the positive stories. Blurbs that pledge “we can rebuild Detroit together”.

Sorry, there is no “together”.

After close of business on any give day the Detroit work force heads for city limits. Fast. So have the residents. Detroit’s population, once two million strong, is now roughly 714,000 people and declining. What’s left is a no-man’s land of abandoned neighborhoods where the principles of urban Darwinism prevail and human life has profoundly little value. It’s a wasteland where bodies are dumped in empty fields, wash up on the shores of the Detroit River and even rolled out of vans on major freeways.

I used to ride a bus downtown everyday and listened to the driver talk. He once said, “You can get anything in Detroit, you just gotta know where to look.” Simple supply and demand, and Detroit supplies one thing in excess- profound hopelessness, along with a “what’s in it for me?” attitude. “What’s in it for me?” Isn’t that the theme of Objectivism?

The System – A Detroit Story – is a violent, shocking book, but it’s written to be hopeful and inadvertently anti-objectivist. Here’s a quote from Ayn Rand circa 1962:

Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The hero of The System chose otherwise. Why? And why in Detroit? Through the tidal wave of corruption, lawlessness and incompetence, fierce racism (white and black), blind self-interest, con men (and women) politicians, murders and addiction, some people choose to sacrifice themselves for others. They let go of their dreams of escaping to a better, easier life and act in someone else’s self-interest. That’s what makes us human. That’s what gives us hope and provides us with the strength to wake up in the morning and face another day. Is Detroit hopeless? Probably. But what isn’t hopeless is human nobility rising in the midst of a cold, dark place.

That’s why I wrote The System.