New publisher seeks stories of Florida, Caribbean adventures

Charles Kropke has launched Tropic Moon Press in Miami and is looking for both non-fiction and fiction stories set in Florida and the Caribbean. 

My recent story in the South Florida Business Journal describes how Kropke is an adventurous businessman. He owns eco tourism company Dragonfly Expeditions and he’s reviving Windjammer Barefoot Cruises. As you might guess, he’s looking for stories that capture the essence of Florida in its natural state. He told me that he enjoys reading Randy Wayne White, who I enjoy as well, A.C. Brooks and Jimmy Buffet – yes, he’s an author too.

In non-fiction, Kropke is following up South Beach – Stories of Renaissance with other books that combine photography with real stories. The initial focus is on the Everglades and the Keys, especially places really off the main paths. He's open to stories set in the Caribbean as well.

Kropke is not an ebook enthusiast. He likes to hold his paper, especially with high quality photos. Yes, it can be tough to sell print copies, and many smaller publishers are going digital (including mine). Yet, Kropke has plenty of connections, including with the owner of Books & Books in Coral Gables. He can also market the books to the adven-tourists on his expeditions so they can learn about the places they are going.

If you have an idea for Kropke, check out this web site and see the contact page.

I read this great scifi novel by a couple of screenwriters

I’m glad I picked up Heaven’sShadow at a local book fair because it was a great scifi read. The 2011 novel is co-written by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt. While Goyer has made his mark in comics and movies such as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Cassutt has worked on TV shows like The Twilight Zone and Eerie Indiana.

In Heaven’s Shadow, a near-Earth object (NEO) named Keanu for a certain actor is going to zip by Earth and rival teams of astronauts are set to rendezvous with it. Soon both the American team and the Russian-Indian-Brazilian Coalition (that would make a fun multi cultural party) find way more than they bargained for. The NEO hits the brakes and goes into orbit around earth. What looked like a frozen asteroid was really an alien craft with a small world inside.

The premise is similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, where humans hitch a ride on a space ship cloaked as an asteroid that turns out to be a great social experiment to see if they can get along with alien races. In Heaven’s Shadow, there is also a great sense of adventure and some big surprises, “space zombies” among them. The characters have touching back stories as that come into play well. This includes the relationship between the lead astronauts and his daughter awaiting his return.

I know Goyer and Cassutt have successful careers in TV and film, but I hope they find time to collaborate on another fine novel.

What I would make Miami Art Museum do for $35M

What’s with all the bellyaching over Related Group’s Jorge Perez asking the Miami Art Museum to take on his name in exchange for a $35 million donation? A recent CBS4/Miami Herald poll found that 54 percent of local residents said it was a bad idea. I don’t think the new name, the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County, is all that outrageous considering the amount of money he’s giving them. Is a little name change really too much to ask in exchange for a small fortune? 

Now if that was my donation, we’d be talking some major changes over there.

Not like I have $35 million to throw around, but if I did, the art museum would have to consent to my list of demands to get my cash. I’d insist on it being named The BRIAN BANDELL Museum of Super-Awesomeness (and art) of Miami. Yes, my name in all caps is part of the contract, thank you.

Now about those exhibits. If this museum is truly to reflect my monumental donation, then I want no less than 20 percent of the exhibits to be Bandell family portraits and pictures of me posing as scifi movie characters. And I’m not talking about the exhibits hidden behind the trash cans. I want prime wall real estate, with bullet proof glass, 24/7 security and eternal spotlights. 

Got a problem with that? Thirty-five million dollars.

What else does that buy? How about the right to make this museum truly super-awesome? I plan to turn over to the curator the following list of must-buy items that my donation shall procure:

-          The toy car that the late Ryan Dunn lodged in his anus in the movie Jackass.

-          The glass mirror that Lindsay Lohan snorted cocaine off of.

-          The stained Monica Lewinski dress.

-          Vials of fat liposuctioned from celebrities, with labels ie: Heidi Montag’s thighs.

-          The microphone Rick Perry used when he made his inspiring “I can’t remember” speech.

-          The blue speedo UFC fighter Dennis Hallman wore into the cage before getting his ass kicked.

-          A wax sculpture of Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf.

-          The rubber hand that wresting legend Mae Young “gave birth” to on WWE television after getting “impregnated” by Mark Henry.

-          A wall-spanning photo essay on the training regimen of Major League Eating’s superstars.

-          An entire wing dedicated to the passionate lovemaking of humpback whales.  

Now that’s a museum I would visit! It would be worth every penny, yes, all 3.5 billion of them. 

Compared to my list (albeit imaginary), I don’t think Perez is asking the museum for too much. After all, this is South Florida, where entire universities and hospitals are named after their biggest donors. 

On second thought, maybe I should donate my pretend $35 million to a university instead. Does the BRIAN BANDELL School of Sheer Genius have a nice ring to it?

Lifting the curtain on my next novel - Famous After Death

I did it! I completed the first draft of my next novel, Famous After Death.

I still have Mute coming out in 2012 with Silver Leaf Books. I will take that baby through the editing process with my publisher and then we’ll announce the launch date. I haven’t been sitting on my hands all this time. I’ve been writing another intense story.

Famous After Death is a white knuckle thriller that takes murder viral. The storyline has been gathering inside my head for years as I imagined how the trouble I saw kids get into growing up would play out with this recent development of instant online videos. 

The theme can best be summed up by a 2010 column in the Miami Herald by Leonard Pitts. In describing bullying and prank videos posted on YouTube, he said: “There is always some video going around whose calculated effect is nothing more or less than humiliation on a global scale. Technology, it seems, has unleashed an ugliness in us.”  

In Famous After Death, three Miami-Dade teenagers take out their angst over their troubled family lives by setting up a roadside prank for an online video only to see a police officer drive to his death because of their trick. Chris Crawford, a high school dropout whose father ran off to start a modeling agency, and Kelso Stokes, an underachieving skater and son of a famous motocross rider, pressure Jorge Casanegra to post the video online anonymously. Given that his only friends are the horror movie action figures in his room, Jorge chooses to seek notoriety through murder videos to impress his new pals and attract a gothic girl he has a crush on. With an overwhelming number of hits on their video, the teens press on with more viral murders. But they aren’t doing it alone. Jorge solicits help from “Sir Black Market,” who runs a bootleg software website. Soon enough, Jorge’s mentor insists that they strike back at the police officers that are investigating them.

Clyde Deauville pursues online sexual predators with the vigor of his Born Again Christian faith as a “cyber cop” for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He helps Miami-Dade detective Olga “OC” Cohen track the viral killers after her ex-fiancé becomes their first victim. With each new murder, OC becomes more vengeful and self-destructive while Clyde grows increasingly frustrated that the online audience is reveling in the bloodshed. When the teens realize that Clyde and OC are closing in, things turn personal.

In the end, someone will be famous for the wrong reasons. 

This novel won’t see the light of day until it’s thoroughly edited. I’m going to let it sit for a while – let the fruit ripen on the vine – and then dig in with an open mind. At some point, I might post part of it on Authonomy and request feedback from the generous readers/authors on there. 

I hope you don’t mind the wait. Trust me; this one will be well worth it.

E-Book Excitement at the Book Fair

I’d like to share some great insights on the e-book market that I recently picked up.

I introduced a panel on e-books at the Miami International Book Fair on Nov. 20. It was organized by Christopher Kenneally, of Copyright Clearance Center, and included Ami Greko, of the Kobo e-reader, and Argentinean publisher Ana Maria Cabanellas. The classroom was packed for their discussion and there were plenty of questions from the audience.

Greko was particularly giddy over Japan’s Rakuten recently acquiring Kobo for $350 million. Not only does that validate the importance of e-books, it should give Kobo access to more international markets, especially Asia and Brazil. Right now, e-reading is strongest in North America, Greko said, but international expansion could open doors for many authors.

“Small publishers have realized that their audience has been magnified tenfold because of the international market,” Kenneally said.

Still, downloading e-books is more difficult in Argentina and much of South America, Cabanellas said. They usually can’t be downloaded directly to mobile devices and there isn’t a large enough selection of Spanish books in digital format. Yet, the demand is there. Some “e-pirates” have copied thousands of books onto a CD and sell them all for $20, she said. 

“If the book is ready in digital and at a good price, the pirates don’t do it,” Cabanellas said.

Greko touted some of the unique features of e-books. Kobo allows readers to share their favorite passages of a book on their Facebook and Twitter networks. An optional feature allows readers to track their reading speed. Internally, Kobo is debating whether it should share information with publishers about when readers stop reading certain novels. 

Would it be helpful for publishers and authors to know that a certain chapter made many readers quit? By the time the book is already for sale, it’s probably too late to do much good. Greko noted that publishers are divided on whether they want this information.

I’m hoping that the launch of my novel Mute with Silver Leaf Books next year will be an international affair. I already have some fans in the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand that I met on Authonomy. 

To hear this discussion from the Book Fair in full, check out the podcast at www.beyondthebook.com

Who would banker Alan Levan be in scifi/comics?

Alan Levan pulled off a galactic-sized deal today. The chairman and CEO of BankAtlantic Bancorp (BBX) agreed to sell the good assets of his bank to BB&T while leaving the more problematic assets and the corporate debt with the holding company. You can read the serious part of my story at the South Florida Business Journal. But, here I will ask the bigger question from the perspective of a novelist:

If Alan Levan was a scifi or comic book character, who would he be?

The deal came after many people were betting for shares of BBX to plummet. One stock analyst told me that he wouldn’t cover the company because he doubted it would survive. I got calls from stock traders who told me its shares were worthless.

And yet, it’s last laughs for Levan.

To accomplish all this, Levan raised capital from shareholders and his BFC Financial holding company at a time when few banks could do so. He endured a nasty class action securities fraud trial and got the judge to toss out the verdict against him. He had regulators all over the bank, including a “cease and desist” order, an SEC investigation and an overdraft fee investigation. And he swung a deal to sell the bank that avoided the immediate repayment of a ton of corporate debt. 

That’s sort of like dodging a speeding train, leaping over a pit of alligators and then climbing up a wet chain with fire at your heels. So is Levan the elusive Flash? 

Hmm, BankAtlantic is all about red outfits. But it’ hard to call banking flashy. 

It’s not fair to call Levan a runner. If anything, he doesn’t shy from confronting critics. He took on banking analyst Dick Bove and ABC News in court. He won a motion for sanctions against the class action securities attorneys that dragged him to trial – and then he appealed because he wanted MORE damages for the sanctions. He has waged public battles as a shareholder of restaurant chain Benihana and (briefly) Office Depot. 

And if you don’t pay your mortgage to the bank, well, just ask developer Dan Catalfumo what happens.

The bottom line: don’t mess with Alan Levan.

Maybe a more appropriate character for Levan would be Nightcrawler from X-Men. Not only can he teleport to escape danger, but he is an expert swordsman. If you can somehow catch Nightcrawler, he will make you pay.

Of course, Levan isn’t blue and nor does he have a tail. Moreover, Nightcrawler prefers to hide in the shadows and he rarely takes a leadership role with the X-Men. Levan is almost always the top guy at his companies and he certainly doesn’t hide.  

So who is a leader, evasive from danger and tough in a fight? Let’s travel to Star Wars and pick Han Solo.

Imperial Star Destroyer (federal regulators) on his tail? Light speed, Millennium Falcon! Leading the rescue of a princess (or his shareholders)? Blaster ready! Frozen in carbonite (wrong side of a jury verdict)? Friends and lawyers set him free. 

And remember that Han Solo was able to fend off Jabba the Hut, who wanted to collect on his debt. Levan has confronted issues with debt on soured real estate deals at Levitt & Sons and Core Communities but he exited those properties without the creditors coming after him.  

So there you have it: Alan Levan is the Han Solo of banking.

What does that make his son Jarett Levan, the president/CEO of the BankAtlantic subsidiary? I’m torn between the child prodigies of Children of Dune and Ender’s Game. Is running a bank at a young age more comparable to riding a giant sand worm or piloting a spaceship against an alien horde?

Latest Read: Think of a Number

I just finished reading John Verdon's murder mystery thriller Think of a Number, which I picked up from Books & Books in Coral Gables. This was his debut from 2010 and it left me impressed.

The story follows "retired" New York police officer Dave Gurney as he tracks a serial killer who intentionally leaves evidence meant to torment his victims, and the cops. I like how Verdon makes it seem like the killer is impossibly far ahead of Gurney every step of the way and that any evidence he discovers is what he's meant to see. It's a solid detective story that relies on evidence, logic and psychological profiles instead of car chases and flying bullets.

Verdon gave Gurney a great back story with equal parts accomplishment in his professional life and heartbreak/shortcoming in his personal life. Of the other characters, a few more are developed in depth but the other officers are there for amusement or to get in Gurney's way.

Based on this novel, I'm thinking about buying Verdon's follow-up Shut Your Eyes Tight. Although, next on my list is How Firm a Foundation, the fifth book in the Safehold series by scifi author David Weber.