Daniel Wetta's Blog, page 18
June 22, 2013
Facebook Hitman Highlights Organized Crime’s Online Presence – InSight Crime | Organized Crime in the Americas
This analysis speaks for itself. Social media is used for the good and the bad. Social media empowers everyone, regardless of financial class. Our world is revolutionized. The new divisions are between those who know, and those who do not. We must understand the new world in which we live.
June 21, 2013
Hero Mayors Pay With Their Lives.
Ask yourself this, because this question may become topical one day in the United States: If government cannot protect its people from organized crime and violence, who will the leaders in local communities side with? If you think this cannot happen here, you just might want to take a look at the growth of organized crime in Chicago (again), Atlanta, Memphis and many other cities. You might want to consider the culture of corruption that has been permeating our federal government for decades. Money, guns, drugs, and the seduction of children are the weapons of cartels and mafias. Growing disparity between the haves and have-nots is the hallmark of the environment in which these groups grow in power. Corruption and debasing of governments are everywhere around us, in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe. To see how it happens, you only have to follow the trail of…well…money, guns, drugs, and the seduction of children.
There is good everywhere in this world. There are ordinary people who will rise up to become amazing heroes in bad times. There are people who love and teach their children well. (Sound familiar?) None of these people deserve to be surprised by horrible things because the world has not paid attention.
June 18, 2013
Virginia Loves Authors Event!
At the Virginia Loves Authors Event at Yankee Candle in Williamsburg June 15, Daniel Wetta, author of The Z Redemption, demonstrated the various devices and formats used for reading e-books. About ten authors had tables at this event, hosted by Yankee Candle.
June 15, 2013
Profile of Organized Crime in Mexico
For readers of The Z Redemption who might like a quick profile of organized crime in Mexico, this analysis brings a lot of information together in one place: Mexico – InSight Crime | Organized Crime in the Americas.
June 11, 2013
Excerpt from The Z Redemption
Stepping through the Ruins of Love
Mazatlán, México
1986
Ana Sofía Valdez was a child who loved deeply and was loved deeply, and she had been born with a generous and compassionate heart. As she became a beautiful young lady, she responded to her increasingly curvaceous body by dressing in romantic style. Maybe it was because she was the last of six girls or because her mother bore such heavy responsibilities of a large family of means or because her father was an older and kind gentleman experienced in life that young Ana had such an old soul. She loved old-fashioned, romantic, Hollywood movies; happy endings; ball room dancing; love ballads; and older, tender boys.
In Spanish the verb describing being born is in the active tense. It is something a person does, not something happening to a person. The beautiful way of saying that her mother gave birth to her in Spanish is that her mother Lili gave Ana to light. Mothers do that in Mexico. They give their children to light.
Lili came to work in the housewares store that Ana’s father Javier started in the historic downtown section of Mazatlán. She was seventeen and he was thirty-nine. Once Javier met Lili, he was a man in love all his life. He married a young beautiful girl with common sense and reserve, a perfect person to manage the large family he wanted to have once he got established financially. In the first months before children, Javier came home at lunch every day and made love to his wife. After the children arrived, he came home to have lunch every day with his family, a tradition seldom breached. He adored each of his daughters, and he could not believe his good fortune to have six of them. The last of them was Ana, and she was the first daughter to look like him. Definitely she inherited his love of the classics, education, the arts, and all things Mexican. She also had something that delighted Javier to the end of his days: a voracious appetite to devour life and to experience the untried.
Ana attributed her romantic yearnings and love of life to this father whom she adored. He was the man of her life, and as a child she never expected that she would ever find a man as wonderful as her dad when she grew up.
She fell in love for the first time at fifteen in a way that she had never imagined.
June 9, 2013
Review: Colorado Mandala
Colorado Mandala by Brian Heffron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Colorado Mandala
Brian Heffron
Little House Books
Published May, 2013
My Rating: Five stars of five.
I asked to review Brian Heffron’s novel of literary fiction, Colorado Mandala, because I saw that it had attracted praise early on, and I wondered what it would be like to read a novel written by a poet. Having finished this moving story, I can say that Colorado Mandala is a poem in novel form. Brian Heffron is a lover. The reader can feel this in the tenderly placed setting of words, like the cut gemstones set in the jewelry so handsomely made by Paul, or the beautifully patterned batiks crafted by the lovely Sarah, two of the main characters. To write what Paul feels when he admires the mandala fashioned in the bun of Sarah’s hair could only be done by a man who understands how it feels to be in love. Brian Heffron loves to set words in magical settings. The narrative of this novel is a love poem.
Much of the action takes place in the gorgeous and rugged outdoors of the mountains of Colorado. Clearly the landscapes of this Western wilderness have shaped Brian Heffron’s spirit. His word-craft soars to high altitudes when he describes the botany and geology of the ageless Rockies. I felt breathless at times. In these giant turns of boulders, caves, and craggy peaks, the main characters hold their own: Paul and Michael, like two enraged mountain goats butting heads to the death, fight for the lithe and sweetly strong Sarah; and little Stuart, Sarah’s perceptive son, whose asthma almost costs him his life in one notable outdoor excursion with the two men who love his mother.
There are minor characters who support the plot, but one is a scene stealer the reader will never forget: the tall, sexy, and frightening Emiliana, who referees a cock fight. She is so energized that I suspect the author knew a person like her.
There are four or five events that move the plot along, and these are skillfully constructed. The reader learns Michael’s secret through Michael’s own writing about his time in Cambodia during the Vietnamese War. Brian Heffron’s creation of Michael’s journal is a literary device that rings highly authentic. Mr. Heffron must have known firsthand the experiences described here, or he must have heard stories that lent to this fiction. I sat in my chair contemplating what that war must have been like for those who had to endure it. In the novel, this experience shattered Michael and threatened to destroy his life and the lives of people who loved him.
In the novel, Michael is in a bar and recites a self-written poem to a spellbound group of rugged, Western mountain people. The poem is delightful, and I can understand why the boozy and jabbering tavern customers settled down to listen, as their local celebrity commanded a stage in the midst of them. At the conclusion of the poem, the audience cheers Michael wildly in appreciation for his work. This is how I felt at the end of the novel, like I had just heard in my heart a poem of wild beauty. I know Brian Heffron’s literary work of love will stay with me like a rhyming poem paced to the speed of my most peaceful days.
June 7, 2013
May 28, 2013
I Can’t Stop the Voices in my… Heart
People ask me how I create the characters when writing a novel. I used to reply that they are inside me and talk to me and let me know what they want to do. I was careful not to say that the voices tell me what to do. I had said that before, and the looks I would receive made me nervous. I envisioned having to write from within institutional walls.
When I meet a person, I am naturally inquisitive. I have been getting to know a man fast becoming a friend. The other night I was unconsciously probing him for details of his life history when suddenly he stopped me. He laughed and said, “Wait a minute. You are a writer. I am not telling you another thing. You steal people’s lives. I know what you are doing.”
I had never given recognition to this habit of mine to soak up the stories of everyone I meet. He is absolutely right. He named it: I am a thief of lives.
I think people live in our hearts, not in our heads. The voices within us often are the voices of friends, lovers, strangers, people who have been lucky, and people who have been murdered. For some of us, these voices compel us to write so we can show how their lives have impacted us.
I met Israel in Mexico in 2009. As I explain in my novel, The Z Redemption, we became good friends. We had the relationship of an older man and a young man sharing with each other phases of life that were years apart. He was a fun companion to work out with in the gym, to discuss investments with, and to share a beer with his roommate. Then he got murdered in a horrible way by a drug cartel, and Israel had nothing to do with drugs. He was truly an innocent.
As painful as this was for me, this probably did not compare to the pain and fear that his roommate experienced afterwards. Israel and he were the same age, they were close friends, Israel was dead, and then suddenly the roommate was in danger. He moved out of his condominium quickly and did not tell me or anyone in the complex where he went.
After I had experienced the worst of my own grief, I wondered what would it be like for Israel’s roommate. Suppose that they had grown up together and that they had shared their life’s experiences? I have such a friend who shares my entire life up to my present age. What if he were suddenly gone? How would I feel? What would I do?
I did not know much about Israel’s childhood or even in what city in Mexico he had grown up. I would have eventually known all that. I knew even less about his roommate, but for some reason the voice of the roommate shouted from within the cavities of my heart. He wanted to tell the story of Israel. This is how Enrique Santos was born. He became a major character in The Z Redemption. He screams the pain of losing his soul mate friend, Israel, who owned a huge chunk of his heart and who was a spur for the more slowly maturing Enrique to try daring things.
So I invented childhoods for Israel and Enrique in Mexico City. I knew what qualities they had as people. What would be experiences that would mold the character each possessed? I would get quiet sometimes and listen. They spoke to me from my heart, and I would write.
I hear writers sometimes say that the story just pours out of them from within and that they are surprised by what comes out. They have not yet realized that they are simply enjoying the schizophrenia of their hearts.
May 22, 2013
Updates to the Website!
See the changes in these pages: Characters and Samples now has a sample of the Prologue and Chapter One. Purchase the Novel explains how the novel can be obtained from Amazon and downloaded to almost any e-reader, tablet, or computer for Windows, Android, and Apple operating systems. News and Opinions has new articles and comments.
May 21, 2013
Why Vigilante Groups Threaten Mexico’s Knights Templar – InSight Crime | Organized Crime in the Americas
In my novel, The Z Redemption, a citizen-self-defense group organizes to protect people from the violence of organized crime because the corrupt government would not protect its people from the exploitation of the drug cartels. This group, the Zs, employs defense tactics that disable aggressors who carry firearms. The Zs do not carry firearms. However, the violence and insecurity are so bad that the Armed Forces take over the government in order to enforce calm and order in Mexico. The photo above, from CNN Mexico, shows citizens of Tierra Caliente applauding the entry of the Armed Forces into their town after weeks of bloodshed between a local drug cartel and a vigilante group that formed to protect people from the violence of the cartel. In the comments to the article that went with this picture, a gentleman named Ernesto Iñigo astutely pointed out that: Corrupción = impunidad = anarquía = violencia = caos. Corruption=impunity=anarchy=violence=chaos. I didn’t have to translate it for you, did I?
