HEAR YE, HEAR YE

Announcing the upcoming serialization of Kicking Dogs on this very site.

The name is Jack Shackaway, and I’m a kind of freelance journalist. You meet some interesting people when you’re a hack writer living in Bangkok.
For example, the other day I was enjoying a few drinks with a pair of dubious characters name of Tommy Two-Toes and Wrong-Way Willie Wong. Actually, it was more than a few drinks, and these gentlemen were more than just dubious characters. They had robbed me, only a short time before joining me for these drinks I mention.

An antic portrait of boom-time Bangkok,
Kicking Dogs is also a comic thriller—
one that moves ever faster as the story unfolds.

Bangkok is being transfigured by unrestrained development and corrupted by rampant greed. Meanwhile Jack Shackaway, American freelance journalist and author of such literary masterpieces as A Dick for Dorothy, is succumbing to a bad case of culture shock—no matter he himself believes he is adjusting nicely to the Thai Way, learning among other things how to maintain his cool under all circumstances.

Every time he turns around he gets involved in hassles with the local population. Also every time he turns around someone is either telling him he is a babe in the woods, extracting money from him, or else shooting at him.

Jack has no idea who is trying to kill him. But, given his talent for annoying the wrong people, it could be just about anybody. Not only that, if he isn’t careful he’s going to wind up married to Mu, which might be better than being dead, but maybe not a lot better.

“Easily labelled a comic thriller, and taking Bangkok’s underworld for its setting, Kicking Dogs is something deeper, wider-ranging … and, ultimately, transcending physical place in its theme of coming to terms with cultural alienation.”
John Hoskin, Outlook

“The market being sated with farang-written books about Thai prostitutes, it was a pleasant surprise to read Collin Piprell’s Kicking Dogs.”
Bernard Trink, Bangkok Post

A fast and funny novel
from the author of Bangkok Knights and Yawn (A Thriller)

Serialization

Hereafter, I resolve to post two items per week on this site. A Kicking Dogs chapter, and a complementary sidecar.

• chapters. Every week I’ll post a chapter of  Kicking Dogs, kicking each off with a mini-synopsis of the previous week’s offering plus a teaser for the one to follow. The tone of the early chapters owes something to Damon Runyan, a writer I’ve admired since I was a boy. Runyan’s influence becomes less obvious as the story develops.
• sidecars. Each week, on another day, I’ll post what I’m calling SIDECAR items of interest, some closely related to my fiction-writing projects, some not. These posts will adopt a tone somewhere between affable mind candy and impenetrable failures to find a suitable mental laxative for challenging ideas. Whatever one writes, it’s good to keep Nietzsche’s stylistic advice in mind: 

Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

– Friedrich Nietzsche