A new short story -- a new fiction genre

Remember that picture of Cartagena, Colombia that I showed in my last post? Well, now it is the cover photo for a short story that J. Lee Porter and I wrote. The idea came to us while exploring the walled city and we wrote most of it right there in Colombia, although I'll confess we wrote a lot of it in Medellin, then I went back to Cartagena to double check some important details.

"Invisible Fortune" is a crime (short) story. It's a story about expats in South America. It's a story about cryptocurrency. In fact, we think it's the first crime story that involves cryptocurrency. And now it's on pre-order on Amazon. It will be in the Kindle Unlimited program and available for 99 cents. For less than a buck (free if you are in KU) you can get a little over 10,000 words of suspense, intrigue, technological mayhem, and sheer fun in a brand new genre.

Just click on the book cover below and order it for delivery on February 9th--soon!

What could be easier?

This story will give you a taste, just a morsel of what is in store for you when we unleash CRYPTO SHRUGGED in May of this year (that's 2018 in case you don't have a calendar handy.) The novel will be more political, more incendiary, more technology, more of everything. It's a cyber, crypto, thriller.

Stay in touch with our efforts here, and at Nomadic Giant Publishing. Just follow the friendly nomadic giant wherever he goes and you will get to a lot of interesting places... promise. Here he is.

A Story from Cartagena

This is part of the old Spanish wall that was built around the city of Cartagena, Colombia between the late 1500 and 1796. It was intended to keep the Caribbean pirates out--and Johnny Depp wasn't even born yet.

When J. Lee Porter and I were visiting Cartagena this month (Jan 2018) it inspired us as a location for a story about an expat. The character we came up with is not a typical expat, nor a good person, but sometimes justice prevails. It's also a story within the theme of cryptocurrency that we are using for the novels in progress. We are looking at the disruptive nature of the technology, not just on finance, but on people's lives. Change, disruption, brings good and bad, and you don't get to choose which parts you want and which you can ignore. It's a complete package.

A number of institutions and moralists will (and are) argue that cryptocurrency is a spawn of the devil because bad people use it. That's quite true. Any innovation gets used and the intentions of the inventor don't necessarily get taken into account. That doesn't make the invention bad. Henry Ford wasn't a serial hit and run artist, to the best of my knowledge.

At any rate, this story will be out soon (published by Nomadic Giant https://www.nomadicgiant.com). Besides the fact that we got inspired and just started writing the story in Colombia--it just came bursting out, we love the idea that we will have something tangible to give you a taste of where we are going with the Bitpats series. Just a taste, mind. The scope of a short story is far different than that of a novel, and even further removed from that of a series of books.

We will be in Mexico next month, at the Anarchapulco Conference -- yup, it's a real thing (https://anarchapulco.com), where issues around cryptocurrency and personal freedom are bandied about. It should be a great deal of fun and education as well. Should be grist for the mill.

Hunting Locations

A sense of place is important to my stories. Incorporating the textures, sounds, essences of a place is part of my writing process. I'm in Medellin Colombia this week, with my coauthor J. Lee Porter, learning all we can for the series of techno-thrillers we have in the works.

Yesterday we took a trip up to Santo Domingo, high above the city.

While it might not seem the most interesting area for tourists, when we got off the areal tram ride, and even going over it, the clusters of homes, the personalization visible even among similar places, made me think of the people living there. Now there is no way I can put myself in their shoes, but being here made me realize that it was a great place for the action in Book two of our work in progress. So I'll be going back to learn more.

The cable run is 4000 meters long with four stations dotting the run as it comes up from the metro station.