Euromaidan – Sid Stark, Academic Suspense Author

Greetings All!

I write to you in a somewhat tired and foggy state. As I may or may not have mentioned earlier, I’m seriously ill and have been for several years. A charming combination of late-stage Lyme disease, a nasty case of toxic mold poisoning, and various other problems. Did you know you can get a whole-body yeast infection? Now you do! It’s rather like being covered in nettle rash and sunburn while being sick with the flu while suffering from severe mental health issues. FYI: turns out our brains are largely controlled by our guts, and if the latter get overgrown with bad stuff like candida, you might, I don’t know, start having panic attacks every time you brush your teeth.

Anyway, the good news is that after several months of medical leave and scrupulously avoiding my mold-infested classroom building, I have gone from having to crawl up my stairs on my hands and knees, to being able to walk up them on two feet. Like Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, and that is especially true for things like the ability to walk.

The bad news is that I’m currently going through a phase where I don’t feel like eating during the day (hurray, weight loss!), but wake up in the middle of the night feeling sick, sweaty, and ravenously hungry. Hopefully this is all part of the healing process. Although sleep deprivation is rarely good for health.

BUT on the other hand, I have the launch of Campus Confidential to look forward to! The official launch date is next week, to coincide with OWS CyCon 2019, when I will be doing a big blowout free giveaway, but the book is already up on Amazon so that advance copy readers can start posting their reviews. And so that I can have the several weeks it takes to wrestle a book page into something resembling decent shape, but mainly in order to gather reviews before the launch announcements start going out into the big wide world. A HUGE thank you to those of you who have already left reviews! And if you haven’t left one yet but would like to, and I sincerely hope that you would, the universal link to the book’s Amazon page is here. Helping a debut indie author on a small budget by dropping a couple of lines on her Amazon page is one of those little things that–who knows?–may make the world just that tiny bit better.

AND, in other news, I have still forged boldly ahead with a long-held desire of mine to turn my books into audiobooks. I’ve decided to start by making them freely available as podcasts, both because I like the audio of making my content as widely available as possible, and because I’m still in the very steep section of the learning curve when it comes to recording and editing sound files. So I’m sending my rather rough-and-ready podcasts out into the world for free right now. So far I’ve finished podcasting “Foreign Exchange,” and have started on Campus Confidential.

The podcast is currently freely available on SoundCloud and iTunes.

“Foreign Exchange” was a lot of fun to write and narrate, although there may have been a few moments when I felt like chucking that my brand-new Blue Yeti microphone through the window. And there was some serious doubt and struggle over voiced/voiceless assimilation in compound words in Russian, which instigated a spirited Facebook debate. Like the other stories in the series, it’s fiction, but it’s heavily based on real-life stuff going on now, and strives above all for authenticity and verisimilitude, along with some action and romance 🙂

It’s set during the Euromaidan protests, and references a number of things that happened during the period in which it is set. (For an excellent overview of the situation in Ukraine and just how fucked-up it is, I strongly recommend Charap & Colton’s Everyone Loses). In the first chapter Dima, Rowena’s fiance, mentions Dmytro and Tetiana getting attacked; he’s talking about Kharkhiv protest organizier Dmytro Pylypets, who was stabbed 12 times on December 24, 2013, and Tetiana Chornovol, a journalist who was severely beaten on December 25. Later his editor asks him to write a story about Ukrainian nationalists getting assaulted; that’s a reference to the January 3, 2014 assault on Andriy Illenko and Sydir Kizin, representatives of the far-right Svoboda Party.

But it’s Chechnya that casts the longest shadow over the story. That and corruption, that eternal problem in Russia (and most other places, too). I can and no doubt will go into much greater detail about the Chechen conflict, since that’s my current area of research, but for the moment I’ll just say that a lot of that was drawn from eye-witness accounts of the conflict and the atrocities perpetrated on both sides. I strongly recommend Anna Politkovskaya‘s writings on the subject, particularly A Dirty War and A Small Corner of Hell, as well as Asne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny, for a journalist’s take on the topic. For stories by combatants, the best (and pretty much only) English-language books are Arkady Babchenko‘s One Soldier’s War for the Russian side, and Mikail Eldin’s The Sky Wept Fire: My Life as a Chechen Freedom Fighter for the Chechen side. Mikail has very graciously granted me and my students a number of interviews to discuss his book and his experiences as a prisoner of war who was detained and tortured by Russian forces, and I highly recommend his book for those wanting to read something authentically Chechen–and/or the authentic account of a guerrilla combatant and torture victim.

If all that has whetted your appetite, or you just want to hear me try to switch between English and Russian while getting into a fight to the death with GarageBand, here are those links again: SoundCloud and iTunes.

And, of course, it’s time for this week’s roundup of book giveaways! Check out the selection below:

The Mysteries & Thrillers in Exotic Locales Giveaway does exactly what it says on the box.

The International Action Thrillers Giveaway has been extended to May 14!

Get set up for some summer reading with the May-Day’s Murder and Mystery Tour!

Hello everyone! I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve got a new story in the Doctor Rowena Halley series out now. In fact, it’s the prequel, the foundation story, the backstory…whatever you want to call it. It’s a novelette of about 20k words, takes place the winter before the beginning of the main series, and explains how Rowena and Dima broke up and why Rowena can’t go back to Moscow…or can she?

You can get a FREE copy of my new story “Foreign Exchange,” plus dozens of other free stories, in the Event Horizon Giveaway!

I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but the story takes place over Christmas 2013 and New Year’s 2014. It’s set in Moscow, but the events of the Euromaidan protests in Kiev form a backdrop to the action.

A couple of the key scenes in the story take place in Gorky Park. I chose to do that first of all because Gorky Park is a major Moscow landmark and one I have happy memories of, and second of all because it’s one of the few Moscow landmarks that Americans know by name. It’s my little homage to Martin Cruz Smith’s excellent and ground-breaking Gorky Park, that foundational Russian-themed thriller. And although my own series is very different from Smith’s, I do enjoy dropping that kind of Easter egg 🙂

Of course, “Foreign Exchange” is choc-a-bloc full of references to Russian literature as well, and lots of other things Russian. I could go on and on about the real-life people and events behind the story, and I’m sure I will in future posts, but instead of getting sidetracked, I think I’ll drop an excerpt for you here instead:

Foreign Exchange

It started off just like any other trip to Russia.

After living a life of extreme parsimony all fall, I had saved up enough money to buy a cattle-class ticket from Indianapolis to Moscow, where I had been going every school break for the past six years.

Just like I had every single time previously, I promised myself as I sat at the gate at Indianapolis, and then again at the gates at O’Hare and JFK, and with considerable fervency somewhere around hour six of being jammed into the very back row for the ten-hour flight from JFK to Sheremetyevo, Moscow’s biggest international airport, that next time Dima would come to me.

The reason I was making this trip, just like all the trips before it, was not because I loved Moscow—although I did—but because I loved someone in it. Namely, my fiancé, Dmitry Vladimirovich Kuznetsov. Known as Dima to his friends and family, and, increasingly, a national traitor and an enemy of the people to his enemies. And by December 25 (tickets were cheaper on Christmas Day), 2013, Dima had made a lot of enemies.

He hadn’t originally meant to. In fact, originally he had meant to be a hero of the people, just like his father before him, who had died so gallantly and so pointlessly in Afghanistan shortly after Dima’s birth.

Being the son of a dead war hero you didn’t remember was a lot of pressure. Growing up during perestroika and then the incredible turmoil of the collapse of the USSR and the wild, wild Yeltsin years was a lot more pressure. Maybe that explained why Dima had decided to re-enlist after he finished his mandatory two-year military service, only this time in OMON, the special forces riot control units that had such a bad reputation. Or maybe as the only son of a single mother with long-term health problems, he just really needed the money.

In any case, they had sent him off to do bad things in bad places, mainly hunting down and interrogating suspected rebels in Chechnya. That had turned out to be less glorious and honorable than Dima had hoped. Back in Moscow, dragging his former friends by the legs into police vans had been even less glorious, and the money had never been very good anyway. So by the time I met him, in 2005, he had gotten out of OMON and started a new career, this time as a journalist hellbent on fighting crime and corruption. There was certainly plenty of scope for that. Unfortunately, in Russia crime and corruption had a tendency to fight back.

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Tag: Euromaidan

Check Out My Podcast! And This Week’s Selection of Giveaways