queries

query 19

Arno — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:13:11 +0000

Hosni is a good, hardworking boy. So when his father tells him to carry a dead lamb across the city to his grandfathers house, he does what hes told, no questions asked. The problem is: hes bad with directions and the lamb is falling apart.

Along the way, Hosni meets a street girl with her head in the clouds, a Bedouin who lives on the river, a body collector with a forgetful streak, and a blind old woman in need of a new reader.

Thats not to mention the lighthouse full of spiders, the elevator that wont stop closing, and a certain flock of vultures with a passion for dead lambs.

In the tradition of The Alchemist, Life of Pi, and the Arabian Nights, Hosni and the Lamb tells the story of one boys struggle to understand his place in his city, his family, and his world.

query 18

Arno — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:25:40 +0000

Query: THE X-RAY MAN (Sci-Fi)
"I love you darling, please love me" live skeleton begs his love Cleopatra. As the skeleton speaks like human, she is scared and fainted. Entire Washington and the police are also frightened and tried to kill him.

Skeleton man loves Cleopatra, but his girl friend Jennifer hates his love towards Cleopatra. She propagates skeleton man as demon. She encases by recording and telecasting his activities. His life is in hot water. Then he acts as if he were a real devil. The walks of the skeleton on streets, fights, chasings, and climbing are these kinds of movements give excellent visual impact.

Does how a hero (Robin) becomes as a skeleton man?

Why Jennifer hates him, how does he escape from police?

How does he prove his identity in the criminal court?

How does he give tit-for-tat to Jennifer?

How does he save his lover and get married to her?

query 17

Arno — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:22:45 +0000

Solitary Internet habits and rapidly changing technologies are creating mental disorders by weakening the brain’s neural circuitry controlling human contact, warn psychiatrists Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan in their recent book iBrain. The American Medical Association classifies Internet obsession as a psychiatric disease. A Stanford University study found that 14 percent of computer users neglected themselves, their family, and the society to remain online.

My mainstream novel SOLVING THE SOLUTION, complete at 73,000 words, and set in the U.S. a few decades ahead of the present, humorously and satirically describes where we are heading to with our daily flood of data, images, and other digital stew in our computer-mediated lives. May I seek your interest in publishing the novel?

Anderson is passionately developing software to speedily reach the leading edge of IT, not letting normal human living come between himself and his computer. His wife Nora wonders how dangerously close to the edge can he go, and whether the folly of ignorance is less dangerous than that of too advanced technologies? She tries to wean him away, determined to save her family and the world from at least one technology leader.

In the blinding rush to be ahead in technology, Anderson and his peers build up an expensive IT solution, but only to find that there is no problem needing it. To discover or invent a problem for a ready solution is known as “solving the solution.” While striving to solve the solution, their ISP breaks down and they lose Internet connectivity. They struggle to find their worlds outside the Internet. Cut off from virtual reality, they cannot cope up with any reality, and are constantly in conflict with themselves, their colleagues, and their environment. Their encounters create comical situations.

In Ape and Essence Huxley depicts humanity deviating from its path and concerned only with war and technology, while spiraling toward World War III. Faust warns that certain kinds of power come at a price of what we hold uniquely human. Should we steer the course of technology to create a human-centric community, or passively experience the power of technology in a technology-centric community? My novel discusses this issue.

query 16

Arno — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:33:36 +0000

I have completed a commercial novel: The Auto Mile (107,000 words). In this unrestrained story of moral corruption compounded by greed, Chuck Testo finds himself awash in the sleaze of the car-selling business during its heyday in the mid 1990’s. The Auto Mile is the story of Chuck’s all-too-real search for order and affection in his personal life, while struggling with addiction and deceit in the workplace. The need to be #1 drives him to unthinkable measures. With the imminent arrival of the Internet and computer car buying, Chuck is forever worried about the business changing around him. We follow Chuck and his cohorts through Albany’s corrupt auto world then the drug underbelly of Miami Beach, where the biggest score of his life awaits. Or is the whole thing just a set up? The Auto Mile is the unraveling of this Gordian knot in a tale of love, lust, and greed, and the pathos that is their companion. Will Chuck live to an honest end or be buried in a grave of dishonesty? Every human thought and sense is enriched with this novel. You’ll never look at your car salesman the same way.

The novel’s narrative and flow lends itself to comparisons to William Kennedy’s Legs, Joseph Finder’s Company Man, and Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty. This tale of super greed is highly appealing to adult markets which are seeking gritty novels with substance. The level of writing would not preclude its use in college courses on Literature and Human Studies. I applied three years of experience in the automobile industry to shape and authenticate the characters and story. In September 2008, I was selected to participate in a Master’s Fiction Writing Class taught by 2007 National Book Award Finalist Lydia Davis (Varieties of Disturbance: Stories). I was invited by 1984 Pulitzer Prize novelist William Kennedy to attend the NYS Writers Institute, where I studied under Russell Banks (Cloudsplitter), Jay McInerney (Bright Lights Big City), Elizabeth Benedict (Slow Dancing), and others. I have already had my novel read by William Kennedy and Hollis Seamon (Body Work). I have corresponded with both authors at length.

I am currently an English/writing teacher at the high school level. I am a graduate of the College of Saint Rose Graduate School and the University of Albany. I was awarded a $1,500 scholarship from Hudson Valley Community College for a sample of creative writing I submitted. I have published a critical essay “An Examination of Classroom Writing” for an educational journal through U Albany. I have had a short story “The Golden Mile” published in a literary magazine Spell for Rain, and an editorial article published in the Times Union newspaper. I am a registered writer with the Student Operated Press. I was a founding member of the Saint Rose Creative Writing Club. I currently author a daily blog for the Times Union newspaper in order to build a consistent reading audience. I can send a full manuscript or partial of The Auto Mile at anytime. Thank you in advance for considering my work. I am open to any suggestions you may have to make this novel more appealing and marketable.

query 15

Arno — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:01:59 +0000

The world ends on December 21st, 2012. People get up on December 22nd completely unaware their world has ended. Only one man knows it has. He’s a Jewish cowboy from the high plains of Colorado named Albert Mendoza Schweitzer. He’s a horse doctor. While paying the Army back for his education in Afghanistan he meets the love of his life, a genuine Mongol princess. The Afghans love Doc; something al Qaeda cannot tolerate. In the flash of an IED Doc loses his love, his identity…and his upper skull, which is replaced by a metal mesh with some unusual side effects. His “Tin Head” makes him the only human capable of handling what happens just after midnight on December 21st, shortly after Doc is in a traffic accident.

Doc meets the Greys on the plains of Northeastern Colorado. He can control them. He can control their ship. He and the ship become bonded.
Doc delivers the New World over the ensuing months. He assists the Universe in arresting an ancient evil.

From the mountains of Afghanistan to the edge of the Universe, Mayan Solstice: A Novel of 2012 is an interesting and exciting ride.

query 13

Arno — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:19:49 +0000

What happens when the First Lady is killed while at an overseas wedding and the president’s only daughter is kidnapped? The perpetrators attempt to make the world believe al-Qaeda did it, but when their guile is unmasked, America turns to its only hope of finding and defeating them.

Captain Jake Matthews has already sacrificed almost any hope of a normal life in order to battle America’s enemies far from home. Now Jake, and his team of Green Berets, joins forces with an ex-Navy SEAL working for the CIA, to put an end to the most malevolent covert operation ever conceived. Jake must face losing the only people that mean anything to him, his men, as they track an elusive foe leading a group of psychotic commandos determined to bring America to its knees.

query 12

Arno — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:14:39 +0000

My pen name is Sebastian Yohanan. I prefer to use my pen name in order to protect my privacy. I'm paranoid schizophrenic and I wrote a 60,000 word novel titled ‘The Schizophrenic Human journeys through the baked desert to adore you’ that was insipred by my disorder. Schizophrenia can give people visual and auditory hallucinations. I my case, I can't trust my memories. I would be happy to help with promotions. I just want to use my pen name to my condition a secret from people I know.

The novel is about Sebastian Yohanan and his sister Kripa. Sebastian lives in a fantasy world of false memories and it is only at the end in a mental institution that he records all his memories because he believes they are true and that the new drugs he takes will wipe away his reality.

People say my writing reflects my schizophrenic mind. I hope it would be interesting enough for me to give you my first chapter.

query 11

Arno — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:07:01 +0000

With the death rattle of modernity shattering his brain, SHIELDS TARRY, discovered his beginning at the end of Past Oz—a 120,000-word novel that tells how a hi-tech business executive triumphantly sabotages his unmitigated success with abject failure.

This second existence of Shields through professional suicide is the premise of Past Oz. As today’s technology consistently strives to squelch every stillness, downtime, or scrap of dead air, anyone seeking even a modicum of solitude is deemed a social Neanderthal, or worse, disconnected and way off-line!

Yet it’s exactly SHIELDS’ detachment—his introspective mutation from power-player to piss-ant to self-actualized man—that silently thrusts him towards his saving grace, a childhood conviction, a first passion, an original wish, that of freeing God Almighty from all the yowling insanities that man promulgates in His name.

query 10

Arno — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:46:07 +0000

THE FIVE O'CLOCK CLUB . Adult fiction sans violence and erotica. Brief Synopsis follows.

No young adult jump starts his or her career with the sole aspiration of becoming a
waitress, a bartender, a second rate musician or a short order cook. How and why
do so many of them evolve in serving others in neighborhood pubs, chic cafes, or
posh restaurants ? Are they losers ? Drifters ? Failures ? Or are they merely
human beings, who after wrestling with lifes disappointments and heartaches,
remain steadfast and survive in a humpty dumpty world ?

THE FIVE O'CLOCK CLUB contains five chapters. The first four are biographies
of a piano player, a waitress, a bartender, and a cook. The final chapter relates
the last evening wherein all four work together at this cafe.

query 9

Arno — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:40:51 +0000

"A Fog in the Mirror", a novel, is a slice of dystopia featuring the Zymers, a model American workingclass dysfunctional family of six from central Pennsylvania whose salient quality, as typified Tal, the father, is an egregious repudiation of simple honesty regardless how insubstantial the matter. When Raela and Camden, a married couple of smalltime con artists posing as strangers, come into town, with Raela taking up lodging with the Zymers as a boarder, Camden targets Tal as his next mark. But Tal is such a prevaricator it prevents Camden from gaining the foothold into Tal's trust essential to establishing the investment scheme forcing him to resort to an improvised Plan B. What follows is a series of cons and counter cons that in the end leave Tal and Camden the ultimate losers.