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Writers & Fraudsters: We Dream Big and We Believe Our Lies

Post Media Columnist Praises The Dead Celebrities Club:

To read an excerpt from the novel,

Click Here.

Read An Excerpt

The Dead Celebrities Club book cover

Off to Jail Excerpt: The Dead Celebrities Club

Anxiously, I follow the C.O. into a room the size of my walk-in closet in the Receiving and Discharging Building. I have purposefully worn an old, double-breasted suit, and when the C.O. asks if he should mail my clothes home, I suggest he burn them. The man doesn’t crack a smile. Instead he asks me to undress and then he searches my orifices; his latex-sheathed fingers inside my rectum feel thick and unpleasantly warm.

I receive the standard prison issue: two large-sized khaki uniforms called “browns,” two blankets, two sheets, and a pillow. I am also given undershirts, socks, and undergarments. I can buy sweat pants at the commissary shop. Then the guard marches me out into the yard and leaves me standing dizzy and frightened like a prison mole blinking up at the light.

Unfortunately, the dope has left me feeling light-headed. If you aren’t subject to spells of dizziness, it’s hard to fathom a sensation akin to a window opening behind your eyes, a porthole that lets in air where coil upon coil of your brain matter should be. As soon as my dizziness kicks in, my heart begins beating too quickly. The sinus node, the body’s natural pacemaker, is sending the wrong electrical impulses through the right
atrium, increasing my heart rate. Because I make a crash when I fall, because a large falling man changes the environment no matter how much I might wish otherwise, because I will end up a creature of ridicule, I have no interest in fainting on my first day in my new home.

The tang of male sweat drifts my way. I force myself to turn around. Nothing anyone has said prepared me for the sight in the prison yard. I may as well have stepped into a scene from the television show Oz. Most of the ne’er-do-wells are black or Latino, while the beefy guards are white-skinned, and they all stand waiting for me to play my role in the tawdry prison melodrama to which I’ve been consigned against my will.

Over by the gate, an imposing black man wearing a Vandyke is heading
my way followed by three guards who are each restraining a German shepherd. The man’s closely shaved head rests like a black bowling ball on his shoulders. As he comes closer, I see he is wearing rimless glasses and a dark business suit. His stiff military bearing and the way the other men look at him suggest I am about to meet the warden.

Nathan Rickard, the warden says, extending his hand. The tremor in his voice suggests my presence is having an impact. Celebrity has a habit of doing that, although you could chop up my Midas-like traits, along with the traits of other celebrities, and feed the parts into a blender and out would come some variation of a well-known financier and nobody would notice the difference. I was once mistaken for Wolf Kruger, the head of the securities commission. Wolf and I don’t even look alike. Yet there is something there—a grave facial expression—a knowing gleam in the eye. The gold dust of celebrity does the rest.

Behind the warden, some of the prisoners are clapping and calling my name while others are yelling the same insults the journalists had used earlier: Fraudster! Crook! You get the gist. The warden ignores the men and steers me forward, his large dark eyes behind the lens of his glasses darting warily around the yard. We have almost reached the prison buildings when three men step into our path. Is one of the miscreants about to stick me with a knife? They could be bubble-wrapped for all the good my ability to read my fellow humans does me this morning. While I try to quiet the arterial flutters of my heart, one of the scofflaws shouts, Make us rich, Dale Paul!

With your money and my ideas, we’ll go far! I execute a mock bow.

The scofflaws call out enthusiastic hurrahs. The German shepherds begin to bark, standing on their hind legs, straining against their leashes; the guards appear to be marshalling all their strength to keep the dogs under control. A whistle shrills; the dogs drop to all fours, stop barking, and the cries die away. By the time the warden and I reach my dormitory, the place has assumed a churchy quiet.

If you figure out how to make money in here, let me know. The warden smiles an odd, secretive smile.

You have my word, good sir, I reply.

Heck, you sound just like you do on television. He chuckles.

He doesn’t realize I am serious. In the parking lot this morning, while my friend Nugent stood chatting with the guard, the idea of betting on the death of aging celebrities popped into my befuddled brain like the ping of an email dropping into my inbox. To qualify, you must be in the news and about to die.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Well, all in good time.

To read about the writing process for this novel,
Click Here.

Can someone like Dale Paul be forgiven?

In Susan Swan’s new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, Dale Paul isn’t just looking for legal redemption but also forgiveness from those he claims to love. So we asked – Can someone convicted of financial crimes be redeemed?

Thank you to our video participants!
Cher Jones Cher Jones Social Media Trainer
Stephen Thomas Halo Advisory
Francina Grazette Necesse Naturals
Zoe Share Schmooz
Kevin Huhn
Alan Gruda

Could you be like Dale Paul?

Susan Swan’s new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, chronicles a Toronto-born financial tycoon’s imprisonment for fraud and shows the lengths people go to for paydays. So we asked – Do you think most people would throw someone under the bus for $1 million dollars?

Thank you to our video participants!
Cher Jones Cher Jones Social Media Trainer
Stephen Thomas Halo Advisory
Kevin Huhn Kevin Huhn – Business Growth Strategist, Results Coach
Zoe Share Schmooz
and Alan Gruda, Be Your Best Today

The Dead Celebrities Club

The Dead Celebrities Club book cover

Susan Swan’s latest novel is The Dead Celebrities Club.

 
Loosely inspired by men in the financial markets like Bernie Madoff, Florian Homm, and Bruno Iksil, protagonist Dale Paul is a witty, self-absorbed rogue who gambles away other people’s money for his own enrichment. As long as this delusion is shared – the same delusion that makes it possible for predatory capitalism to succeed – Dale Paul and his friends are living out another Gilded Age. However, charm and boarding school connections aren’t enough to save Dale Paul from jail time.
 
While incarcerated, he has a choice: repair his fractured relationships with his family and become a new man or throw himself into another deadly, high-stakes scheme in an attempt to make himself rich again.
 
Publisher: Cormorant Books

“Most of us are waiting for Trump to go to prison… And The Dead Celebrities Club could be a trailer for that movie.”
–Marni Jackson

“Dale Paul is the archetypal anti-hero of our era & Susan Swan compelling delivers his message.”
– Jane Urquhart

[button color=”” size=”small” align=”left” link=”https://www.amazon.ca/Dead-Celebrities-Club-Susan-Swan/dp/1770865446/”][icon style=”book”]Get this at Amazon[/button][button color=”” size=”small” align=”left” link=”https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-dead-celebrities-club/9781770865440-item.html”][icon style=”book”]Get this at Indigo[/button][button color=”” size=”small” align=”left” link=”https://anotherstory.ca/?q=h.reports.iv&eisbn=Sz_EzYizsPnnYaZ2blC1xw”][icon style=”book”]Get this at Another Story[/button]

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BOAT TROUBLE Podcast

Row Boat on Water

It’s been two years since I wrote a blog here. My excuse? I’ve been down a rabbit hole with my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club, and I am only now coming up for air. This website is getting a face lift in October and I will start posting about Anxiety Pancakes: Life at the End of the Novel.

But right now I wanted to let you know that Accessible Media is airing a podcast this Sunday of my short story in the Walrus titled, Boat Trouble. AM is also broadcasting a short interview with me talking about the real life incident that inspired the story. That is, the summer night, my partner and I were out in an old wooden boat without a moon or proper running lights, lost like cijits (short for city idiots) in the Open, as the locals call the wide open water of the Georgian Bay.

Here is the pertinent info about the podcast:

The broadcast is this Sunday July 30 at 7pm Eastern time. It will be available on AMI-audio’s audio-only cable television channel (Rogers 196, Bell 49, Telus 889, etc) as well as on our online livestream at www.ami.ca/listenlive

This group also puts the shows up online as a podcast: you can search for “the Walrus with Lloyd Robertson” on iTunes or any other podcast program.

Read BOAT TROUBLE (published by The Walrus, summer 2017) BoatTrouble-WalrusPub

Anxiety Pancakes: Writing a Novel is like Building a House (Or Something)

1024px-Wood-framed_house

“Wood-framed house” by Jaksmata – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons 

It’s back to the drawing board for me. My knowledgeable readers have spoken and said that the story in my novel doesn’t start moving early enough. I accept their views because I did what I said was necessary in my last post: I listened to them and I reread a good chunk of my manuscript myself.

Some writers have to complete each page perfectly before they move on to the next. But for me, writing a novel is like building a house. I do it in stages. First, the note making and research, and filling a large page with the names of some of the characters and a list of some of the scenes. Then I do the first draft on a tape recorder so I have something to work with–a blurt, as I call it. You get the gist. Down goes the floor but oops maybe I’ve forgotten to dig the foundations. And how about that missing roof?

A crucial stage is finding the voice. It took me almost a year to find the right voice for The Dead Celebrities Club. Now it seems I have been confusing the theme of my novel with the story and I need to go back, and streamline my prose so the story isn’t lost in my descriptions. That means throwing out some chapters and extraneous pages, something I find hard to do because I am the loyal type. If I’ve worked on passages until they glisten it breaks my heart to say good-bye although saying good-bye is what I must do.

I’ll put my discarded sections in a file so I can bring them out if I need them. That way these passages aren’t banished forever.

So I’m picking up my hammer and saw and possibly a wrecking ball. It’s time to get down to work.

Anxiety Pancakes: The Horror of Vulnerability

 

girlfloatinginairI’m waiting for reactions from two very knowledgeable readers to the latest draft of my new novel, The Dead Celebrities Club.

The experience of waiting is like floating free in a void, as if I’ve been set adrift in the galaxy without a space station in sight. Adrift? Really? Yes, adrift in the sense that my identity seems to be on the line. Do I rely too much on my work for my sense of who I am? I do, I admit it, and I hate waiting for reactions to my writing. It makes me feel vulnerable and edgy.

Waiting on others is especially hard for someone like me. In the personality chart of the enneagram, I’m number eight, the challenger. A prominent trait of this personality type is taking charge of their circumstances. The basic fear of the challenger is being controlled by others. Being vulnerable, in other words. And feeling vulnerable is horrifying.

Yet vulnerability is the link to creativity. Without it, I would understand nothing about myself or my fellow humans. So I’m going to hang there in space and stay open to the help that others can give me with my book. Aren’t I?