Dmitri Ragano's Blog, page 3
October 2, 2012
The Voting Machine available in eBook format at Smashwords
The novel is now available in Kindle, EPub, PDF, Sony Reader and other digital book formats at Smashwords. You can download the first 20 percent of the book for fre or you can purchase the entire digital ebook for 99 cents.
The election thriller is currently under review to go in Smashwords Premium Catalog, which would make it available at major ebook stores such as Barnes and Noble and Kobo.
It will become available at the Amazon Kindle store in the next couple weeks.
The election thriller is currently under review to go in Smashwords Premium Catalog, which would make it available at major ebook stores such as Barnes and Noble and Kobo.
It will become available at the Amazon Kindle store in the next couple weeks.
September 24, 2012
September 21, 2012
September 20, 2012
Big Orange Book Festival at Chapman University
I will be signing books at the Sisters in Crime book store booth on Saturday morning.
http://bigorangebookfestival.com/
http://bigorangebookfestival.com/
September 6, 2012
Book cover for the Voting Machine
Sometimes you can judge a book by it's cover and this cover art by Chris Clarke rocks!!!! The Voting Machine will be available in second half of September in Amazon with the Kindle version coming in October.
August 20, 2012
Excerpts from my upcoming novel "The Voting Machine"
My new book The Voting Machine will be out on Amazon next month in print and Kindle form. Still hashing out the final proof and getting an exact date. In the mean time, I've set up a special blog for the book, aggregating current information on the topic of voting registration struggles and also providing limited excerpts from the new novel. Enjoy!
This morning's excerpt gives some of the history behind the voting scandals that occurred in past election cycles leading up to the murder.
This morning's excerpt gives some of the history behind the voting scandals that occurred in past election cycles leading up to the murder.
August 9, 2012
Trevanian on why we write
Reading Don Winslow's Sartori, a story based on the Nicolai Hel character from the legendary spy novel Shibumi.
I have never been a voracious reader of espionage fiction but there is something so addictive and inspiring about the novels of Trevanian. His ability to infuse genre with unique language and a rich tapestry of history, themes and ideas was really unmatched.
Very few authors can inspire and entertain at the same time the way Trevanian did. Shibumi was the rare book, like the Stieg Larsen series, that provides the manic, ephemeral excitement of the thriller with a timeless, transcendent quality.
I came across Trevanian's discussion of why he wrote the way he did, skipping from genre to genre and marching to his own drummer throughout his writing career.
It is an eloquent assessment of the forces that drive us to write, the need to keep readers interested but keep ourselves interested as well:
I have never been a voracious reader of espionage fiction but there is something so addictive and inspiring about the novels of Trevanian. His ability to infuse genre with unique language and a rich tapestry of history, themes and ideas was really unmatched.
Very few authors can inspire and entertain at the same time the way Trevanian did. Shibumi was the rare book, like the Stieg Larsen series, that provides the manic, ephemeral excitement of the thriller with a timeless, transcendent quality.
I came across Trevanian's discussion of why he wrote the way he did, skipping from genre to genre and marching to his own drummer throughout his writing career.
It is an eloquent assessment of the forces that drive us to write, the need to keep readers interested but keep ourselves interested as well:
Right from the first I wrote, not for the aesthete, the academic or the intellectual, but for the bright and sensitive person from any walk of life. It has been my job and my pleasure to take the topics, the social and political concerns, and the emotional evocations we associate with higher literature and express them in the idioms and techniques of what we call genre literature: forward-thrusting story, sharp character, crisp dialogue, and an inevitable engine of narrative. (You recognize that your narrative machine is running when moments in the story stop being attached by the word 'and' and begin to be attached by 'then', and the machine is in top gear when they are linked by 'therefore'.) These story elements render the concerns of the pure novel both palatable and easy to assimilate.
I could have made more money if I'd stuck to one genre as most successful writers do. Most readers use books as an escape, and they pretty soon discover their genre-drug of preference. If they find a writer who works well for them, they read his other things, confident that he'll satisfy the itch, and so each time a writer sells a new book, he also sells three or four of his older books. So, sticking to the same genre makes sense financially, but I would be bored by writing the same kind of book again and again. I am as concerned with my book being an excellent example of its genre as I am with the social, philosophical and political messages it carries -- but if I had to choose, I'd save the story elements. I try to drench each novel with enough story and action and crisp dialogue to keep people from throwing the book against the wall when I start to preach at them.
It was more interesting for me to change genres, but it was difficult for my readers to follow me from, say, spy thriller to Edwardian romance, and understandably, some dropped out. However, a gratifyingly large number of readers have followed Trevanian throughout his career. Trevanian fans are an interesting bunch, not genre addicts, obviously, and appreciative of elements of careful craftsmanship and solid story-telling.
July 30, 2012
The War on Voting
Democracy in the United States of America has always been a struggle and perhaps it will always be this way.
We celebrate Independence Day and the idea that "all people are created equal" without prolonged discussion of all the people who were not allowed to vote back in 1776 such as women, Native Americans, African Americans.
As long as we've been a country, powerful rulers have tried to thwart and obfuscate the voting process for many Americans, particularly those without access to education and economic resources.
The only surprising thing is that this is even surprising. As Frederick Douglass observed long ago: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
The current Voter ID battles for the election of 2012 are the latest chapter in this saga. The concerted effort by Republican officials across the country to orchestrate voter ID laws is remarkable in its coordination and ruthlessness.
Witness the case of Viviette Applewhite in Pennsylvania, a 93-year-old woman who has been voting in Presidential Elections since the 1940s and will now be unable to vote under the new Pennsylvania Voter ID law.
This is clearly a miscarriage of justice that no law should ever intentionally subject on a citizen. It is directly counter to our national goal of participatory democracy and civic involvement. And yet no leading Republican official on the national scene has had the courage to speak out on this travesty.
The Pennsylvania law alone has the potential disenfranchise over 750,000 voters. This in a state that has had no cases of voter fraud in at least a decade.
The election of 2012 will be a year of epic battles in our nation's ongoing struggle to create a participatory democracy.
It will be a nasty and ugly fight, but it will also make for a great story. This struggle is a major theme for my upcoming novel The Voting Machine, a sequel to my literary mystery Employee of the Year.
We celebrate Independence Day and the idea that "all people are created equal" without prolonged discussion of all the people who were not allowed to vote back in 1776 such as women, Native Americans, African Americans.
As long as we've been a country, powerful rulers have tried to thwart and obfuscate the voting process for many Americans, particularly those without access to education and economic resources.
The only surprising thing is that this is even surprising. As Frederick Douglass observed long ago: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
The current Voter ID battles for the election of 2012 are the latest chapter in this saga. The concerted effort by Republican officials across the country to orchestrate voter ID laws is remarkable in its coordination and ruthlessness.
Witness the case of Viviette Applewhite in Pennsylvania, a 93-year-old woman who has been voting in Presidential Elections since the 1940s and will now be unable to vote under the new Pennsylvania Voter ID law.
This is clearly a miscarriage of justice that no law should ever intentionally subject on a citizen. It is directly counter to our national goal of participatory democracy and civic involvement. And yet no leading Republican official on the national scene has had the courage to speak out on this travesty.
The Pennsylvania law alone has the potential disenfranchise over 750,000 voters. This in a state that has had no cases of voter fraud in at least a decade.
The election of 2012 will be a year of epic battles in our nation's ongoing struggle to create a participatory democracy.
It will be a nasty and ugly fight, but it will also make for a great story. This struggle is a major theme for my upcoming novel The Voting Machine, a sequel to my literary mystery Employee of the Year.
July 28, 2012
More books on the way during second half of 2012
Currently working on publication of two novels to follow up on Employee of the Year.
The Voting Machine is another thriller starring Temo McCarthy, the hero of Employee of the Year. It's set in Las Vegas during a Federal election campaign.
(It's roughly based on my experiences in Sin City working on Get Out the Vote volunteer drives for the Obama campaign during the summer and fall of 2008... without the bizarre murders and sinister conspiracies.)
Las Vegas is a great setting for a story and I am not talking about the glamorous hotels and luxury casinos, I am talking about the working-class neighborhoods outside the Strip.
The other book The Fugitive Grandma is a dark comedy about the health care crisis: a boy and his grandma on the run from the law after they pull off a string of armed robberies for cash and prescription drugs. This is actually a manuscript I wrote four years ago that has just been sitting around, but my friends and family enjoyed the quirky story and I've been meaning to get it out there.
The Voting Machine is another thriller starring Temo McCarthy, the hero of Employee of the Year. It's set in Las Vegas during a Federal election campaign.
(It's roughly based on my experiences in Sin City working on Get Out the Vote volunteer drives for the Obama campaign during the summer and fall of 2008... without the bizarre murders and sinister conspiracies.)
Las Vegas is a great setting for a story and I am not talking about the glamorous hotels and luxury casinos, I am talking about the working-class neighborhoods outside the Strip.
The other book The Fugitive Grandma is a dark comedy about the health care crisis: a boy and his grandma on the run from the law after they pull off a string of armed robberies for cash and prescription drugs. This is actually a manuscript I wrote four years ago that has just been sitting around, but my friends and family enjoyed the quirky story and I've been meaning to get it out there.
