13 | January | 2020 | R&R Book Tours

Welcome to the blog tour for What to Do About POTASS, a hilarious political satire by Glenn Shepard! Read on for more details and an exclusive excerpt!

What to Do About POTASS: A Comedic Novella of Political Errors

Publication Date: October 4th, 2019

Genre: Political Satire/ Comedy/ Novella

Publisher: Mystery House Publishing

What To Do About POTASS tells the story of the bumbling antics of legislators and The President or, as he is known in the book, POTASS. When Capitol Hill maintenance worker Thomas Wilson (or Will Thompson, as POTASS calls him) overhears different groups of legislators scheming about saving the country through various plots, he believes it’s incumbent on him to notify The President, who has recently hired him part-time to collect press clippings. But The President dismisses Wilson’s pleas. Will the legislators bungle their way to greater disaster or can they succeed in their efforts to rescue the country? Where does Thomas Wilson fit in? How will they all ultimately decide What To Do About POTASS? Read this book, and it will have you laughing out loud.
This new novella is the first comedic endeavor for surgeon-turned-thriller-author Glenn Shepard (Dr. Scott James Thriller Series, including The Missile Game, The Zombie Game, The Ebola Game, and The Encryption Game). Ever with an aim to heal, in What to Do About POTASS Dr. Shepard offers the sorely needed medicine of comic relief in this politically divisive age.

“Bipartisan political tomfoolery. Diet Cokes. Bungled assassination attempts. Secret meetings in basement restrooms. Great Walls. Poisonous needles. And the most popular President of all time, POTASS. What more could anybody want in a great modern day political satire? This book is of this moment and also one for all moments. Read it. Laugh out loud. Pure satiric genius. Enjoy.” ~ Rich Krevolin, Author of Screenwriting in the Land of Oz and The Hook

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Excerpt

“I like Diet Cokes.” The President pointed to the button. “This guy brings a Diet Coke each time I press it, at least eighteen times a day. Diet Coke stimulates my whole body and my brain as well. It improves my performance, which I need to stay on top of everything I do. I drink one before my every tweet. In fact, during my most productive days, when I do two dozen tweets in an evening, I just about pop from the heavy intake.” He laughed.

***

“How about I bring you a hamburger for dinner tonight, one of those monster burgers with onion rings and bacon? That’ll get your mind flowing strong again. And I have a few ideas to float, if you are in the mood to listen.”

The President looked up and nodded slowly. “The burger sounds good, but I want two of them, with a double order of French fries. And I don’t know if I want to hear your ideas or not. There are just too many people who seem to think they know better than I how to run this country. I’ll have burgers delivered to the West Gate at six. Pick them up and return here. Just come in. No need to knock since I’ll know it’s you.”

***

Wilson awakened in the morning with a start. He looked around and saw that he was in The President’s office, lying on a sofa that was not a part of the office yesterday. The President was there reading at his desk.

Wilson sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Where are all the people that were here last night?”

“I dunno. I hope Congress is in session today, but no one has told me that.” A President who was so warm and open to Wilson last night was coldly indifferent, like someone else.

Available on Amazon

About the Author

GLENN SHEPARD is the author of The Missile Game and The Zombie Game. His first novel, Surge, was written while he was still a surgical resident at Vanderbilt. In the following years he wrote The Hart Virus, a one-thousand-page epic about the AIDS crisis, as well as three other novels. In 2008, he created “Dr. Scott James,” his Fugitive-

like action-hero, and began publishing the series. The first volume of the Dr. Scott James series was originally released as Not For Profit, but was later changed to The Missile Game.

Born on a farm in eastern Virginia, Dr. Shepard lives and maintains a thriving plastic surgery practice in Williamsburg. The third volume of The Dr. Scott James Thriller Series, The Ebola Game, is due out this year, through Mystery House.

Glenn Shepard

Mini Tour – Schedule

January 13^th

Reads & Reels (Spotlight) http://readsandreels.com

My Bookish Bliss (Review) http://www.mybookishbliss.com

January 14^th

The Magic of Wor(l)ds (Spotlight) http://themagicofworlds.wordpress.com

The Bookworm Drinketh (Review) http://thebookwormdrinketh.wordpress.com/

January 15^th

I Smell Sheep (Spotlight) http://www.ismellsheep.com/

The Faerie Review (Review) http://www.thefaeriereview.com

January 16^th

Book Dragons Not Worms (Spotlight) https://bookdragonsnotworms.blogspot.com/?m=1

January 17^th

Jessica Belmont (Spotlight) https://jessicabelmont.wordpress.com/

Blog Tour Organized By:

R&R Book Tours

Welcome to the blog tour for The Weighing of the Heart by Paul Tudor Owen. Read on for more details from this exceptional debut, and enter for your chance to win one of three signed copies of the book!

The Weighing of the Heart

Publication Date: March 22, 2019 (Obliterati Press)

Genre: Literary Fiction

Following a sudden break-up, Englishman in New York Nick Braeburn takes a room with the elderly Peacock sisters in their lavish Upper East Side apartment, and finds himself increasingly drawn to the priceless piece of Egyptian art on their study wall – and to Lydia, the beautiful Portuguese artist who lives across the roof garden.

But as Nick draws Lydia into a crime he hopes will bring them together, they both begin to unravel, and each find that the other is not quite who they seem.

Paul Tudor Owen’s intriguing debut novel brilliantly evokes the New York of Paul Auster and Joseph O’Neill.

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Excerpt

Sooner or later, everybody comes to New York, and I was no exception. For me it was art school that brought me over, and I left behind the brash primary colours of late-90s London gladly and without remorse. Here I could reinvent myself, as others had before me, among the shining slabs of a city that seemed to have scale where others only had size, where history was measured in the minutes rather than the centuries, and where each of its ten million inhabitants began their lives anew each morning when they awoke and pulled up the blinds. After college I did everything I could to remain, winning a job and the work permit that came with it at the Bougainville Gallery in Chelsea, and spending the next few years living in a tiny apartment in Greenpoint with my girlfriend Hannah, working together at the gallery each day and growing gradually further and further apart.

In early spring in 2011, things finally came to a head, and I moved out, for reasons I don’t really want to go into here. I left, and went to stay on the couch of a former colleague in whom I’d increasingly been confiding. His name was not Jeff, but I have to give him a name and Jeff will do as well as any other. Hannah’s name wasn’t really Hannah either.

Jeff had two aunts who lived uptown in one of those huge late-nineteenth-century apartment blocks where wealthy families often take up a whole floor. Their apartment was enormous, sprawling, Jeff said, with an elegant roof garden looking out in a wide panorama over Central Park. But it was also ragged and unloved, and slowly rotting away; his aunts only lived there two days a week, spending the rest of their time at their other home on Long Island. To make sure the place didn’t collapse completely they usually took in a lodger, and as luck would have it, Jeff told me, they needed one right now. Since I was desperate to find somewhere to live, he would take me round to meet them and we could see whether we hit it off.

Far from being desperate to find somewhere to live, I was in fact quite enjoying my evenings in his apartment in Clinton Hill watching reality TV with his witty and outspoken girlfriend Severin, whose parents had named her after the character in the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs. But I am a very suggestible person, and I must admit that as Jeff and I talked about it more I found myself drifting off into an agreeable fantasy about life in that cavernous apartment a stone’s throw from Central Park – the white whorl of the Guggenheim visible from the living room window, MoMA, the Met – and I began to feel really quite excited about the whole idea. For the five days each week when the Peacock sisters would be away I would have the whole palatial penthouse to myself, and it was pleasant to feel even in a vague and materialistic sense that I would be making some progress in my life after my break-up with Hannah, which I felt had set me back a step as the rest of my friends busied themselves getting married, getting pregnant, getting comfortably settled in for the next stage of life.

So I went up there with Jeff and Severin after work the next Wednesday, Severin boasting during the subway ride that the sisters viewed her as “the daughter they never had”, and they introduced me to Marie and Rose Peacock. We all had a glass of California red, and Marie and Rose took me on a quick whirl around the apartment – including the small bedroom beside the roof garden that would be mine. Then it was time for the Peacocks to leave for the theatre and we all took the lift down to the street. As Jeff flagged them down a cab, Marie Peacock asked me a few questions about my job, tugged thoughtfully at her coat cuffs, peered into my eyes, and abruptly proposed rent of a hundred dollars a week, a sum so minuscule for the Upper East Side she might as well have made it one peppercorn. I couldn’t shake her hand fast enough.

“We’ve been looking for a lodger for a while now,” she told me, as we sheltered from the spring breeze under the building’s awning.

“A year or two, off and on, since the last one,” put in Rose.

“We like to have someone we know…” continued Marie.

“Someone we know, or a friend of a friend…”

“Or a friend of a nephew!” said Marie, waving a gloved hand in Jeff’s direction. “So it often takes us a while to find the right person.”

“The last young man painted the bedroom walls green,” Rose recalled mournfully.

“I think we’ll say no painting the walls this time,” decided Marie. “Is that all right, young man?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You can move in tomorrow if you like,” added Rose, as Jeff held open the cab door.

So I did.

Obliterati | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Paul Tudor Owen was born in Manchester in 1978, and was educated at the University of Sheffield, the University of Pittsburgh, and the London School of Economics.

He began his career as a local newspaper reporter in north-west London, and currently works at the Guardian, where he spent three years as deputy head of US news at the paper’s New York office.

His debut novel, The Weighing of the Heart, was shortlisted for the People’s Book Prize 2019 and longlisted for Not the Booker Prize 2019.

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