My father, the artist Dan Wetta, now 87 years old, possibly is more productive than any other time in his life. This is my opinion, based on the fact that he has authored seven e-books and two beautiful printed books of his life’s art and cartoons in the last couple of years! Plus, he keeps painting and sharing the ways in which he sees the world. Proudly I announce, from Daniel Wetta Publishing, the artist’s latest printed book of full-color paintings and cartoons: An Artist’s Vision, Twenty-Twenty. 

In this book, my dad expands on his first with more in-depth stories of his family and friends in New Orleans. We are talking about his memories of a vibrant city in the 1930’s during the Great Depression. What a cast of characters my dad has described in this book from that time! There was no virtual world then. It was physical and sensual, with the smells of beer and bread, sweat and humidity (in a semi-tropical city before air conditioning), relief from the heat thanks to sno-balls, and justice sometimes dispensed by means of a good fist-fight. 

Dad received his high school and junior college education in a Louisiana seminary. When he joined the Army, he got stationed at Camp Lee in Hopewell, Virginia, and he met my mom in Richmond. That is when his life in Virginia began, and it led to his having two sons, two granddaughters, and five great-grandchildren, all in Williamsburg now, except my brother, Stephen, who lives in New York City.

What he did was to paint his life and the scenery around him. He has always been sharp on details about everything. Nothing goes unnoticed. What becomes interesting is how he displays those details. You see that in his art, of course, but you get a glimpse of his life philosophy and ironic sense of humor in his cartoons. When I was going about the business of publishing his works, I found myself laughing out loud when I was reviewing his cartoons. I hadn’t really noticed before how funny my father could be.

An Artist’s Vision, Twenty-Twenty is my favorite work by him…so far. I recommend this book to you. Yeah, I’m his son, but I guarantee you will feel a push on your heart a time or two, and also a good laugh.

The Z Redemption Second Edition!

For the second edition of my first novel, The Z Redemption, I spent a few weeks updating the story for changes in technology the past three years. To be honest, there were some paragraphs throughout that I couldn’t resist rewriting for clarity or just to make them read better. I am happy with this book and proud of it. I was worried when I began to read it again after the distance of time that I wouldn’t like it or would be embarrassed by it. The opposite is true. The story holds up and is faithful to the purpose I had in writing it. I do think the second edition is better. I wrote a new brief description for it in my marketing materials:

“In this steamy and romantic suspense thriller based on true-life events in Mexico, the author tells the story of ordinary heroes who fight to save lives in the midst of the drug cartel wars. With a military coup in Mexico as backdrop, a celebrity homemaker and her lover make two countries face harrowing choices to obtain justice. A roller-coaster ride guaranteed to make an impact on your life!”

I had quite the experiences during the year I lived in Mexico. The people whom I met made life-changing impacts on me. Several are characters in the novel. They would recognize themselves. There is no criminal event described in my fiction that did not have a counterpart in real-life stories making the news. There is no act of heroism in the novel that I did not see in Mexico.

My handsome young friend Israel, a law student and Volvo salesman, got tortured and murdered horrifically by a drug cartel. His only crime was to fall in love with the wrong woman. She disappeared, and I am certain that she was murdered as well. Israel had a roommate named Enrique, also a friend of mine, who wisely got himself out of town after it happened. The kind of heroism that Israel must have summoned in his last minutes, knowing that no one would come to save him, almost runs beyond my ability to imagine. I still hate it, absolutely hate it, when I think about how he must have felt in those moments. But, damn it, I wrote a book for him to let people know that his life was valuable in the world.

Israel and Enrique are characters in the novel. Enrique becomes a strong lead character in Corvette Nightfire, and he will be on board in the third, which will be co-authored with me by Robert Selfe.

That brings me to this point: Israel and all the people I met in Monterrey not only had a big impact on my life, but they also made big changes in Robert’s (Bob). Robert Selfe has had years with me now in the novels, and he is creating characters for the third (and did this in Corvette Nightfire) that are right up our mutual tree. We want the reading to be fun, captivating, interesting and informative. The two of us are definitely having fun, and we think the readers who get into these novels will enjoy them like roller-coasters.

The Zs are urban warriors who fight without weapons. They have skills in parkour and free running and martial arts. They live by the “Z Code of LIfe,” a code grounded in the ethics of the sanctity of life. The millions of young people throughout the world who do this type of physical training are incredible athletes. I am meeting them on Twitter and Instagram, where I can see the photos and videos of their jumps and flips and the running of obstacles. In my novel, when I speak of the people who can “fly,” I am describing these real-life young men and women. Some of them have become interested in The Z Redemption simply because it is novel to them (pardon the pun) to find fiction that incorporates this as a main plot component. I didn’t expect this when I wrote it. I’m just lucky to know people like this.

More information about the novel and how to purchase it (the e-book is cheap) can be found at this link: Click This Link

About The Cover

On the cover of The Z Redemption is a photograph of Monterrey, Mexico. In the background is the distinctive mountain, “El Cerro de La Silla” (Saddle Hill), which is nature’s emblem for the city. The couple holding hands could represent David and Ana, the main protagonists of the novel. Overhead are the “Zs,” leaping parkour-style from one roof to another.

Daniel Craig (alias James Bond) and I share March as a birthday month. So this month I have been posing as “Bond, James Bond” and have been feeling quite sexy. But now I have only five more days of being 007. Then I return to being a normal superhero.

And you have only five more days to be able to purchase the e-books, The Z Redemption and Corvette Nightfire, for only $1.99 each through Smashwords at the following link. The sales codes to get the discounts are ym93w for The Z Redemption and zy87s for Corvette Nightfire. You simply enter those codes in the discount block at Checkout. I like Smashwords because when you buy, you can download all of the e-book files for any e-reader device. So if you have multiple devices using different file formats, you can download one of them whenever you want after purchase. You are covered for Apple, Nook, Kindle, Android, and Windows devices. Here is the link:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/13490

 
Robert Selfe and I have a working title for the third book: The Dark Road (El Camino Oscuro). That subtitle and title may be reversed. Old people like us remember a Chevy “El Camino,” which was part car and part pickup truck. The photo above shows an orange 1959 Chevrolet El Camino. I love it! The bad-guy-Zeta in the novel will own one, but, of course, the novel is not about cars. “El Camino Oscuro” refers to the dark web, an area of the internet inaccessible to most people and where much illegal and dark transactions take place: like mass merchandising of illegal drugs, human trafficking, and contracts for hire. And in case you don’t realize it, the novel, Corvette Nightfire, is not about Corvettes or cars. Corvette Nightfire is the name of the main character, a celebrity name for a World Series of Poker player who encounters changing destinies when he becomes involved with victims of organized crime…and with Valentina! Anyway, here are the orange El Camino of my dreams and the notice to you that my days of 007 are numbered. (Get it?)

 

 

 

Robert Selfe  edited the first two novels of The Z Redemption Trilogy and contributed sections in the novel, Corvette Nightfire, as an author as well. Here is his interesting article on how we changed course when we were deciding what the second novel would be about. The original idea may surprise you!

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Selfe 

For those of you who missed it, my first “blog” dealt with being dragged, kicking and screaming, into editing the story of David Wilson James, the lead character in The Z Redemption. This collaboration with Daniel Wetta led to the second novel, Corvette Nightfire, in which I took a more active role writing sections of several chapters at the end of the novel. My sections dealt with the poker aspect, and my writing was merely supportive. Daniel’s vision drove the novel, and I contributed my limited experience playing Texas Hold’em.

Readers know that Corvette Nightfire is the sequel, but they do not know that it was not the original idea for a sequel. When we first discussed a second novel, I had suggested a prequel: David’s background fighting the cartels in South America. I started researching the cartels while Daniel finished writing The Z Redemption. My research led, quite naturally, to the most famous drug lord of them all, the “King of Cocaine,” Pablo Escobar. There is a wealth of information available about Escobar, and when I saw that he was born in 1949, I knew our plot. Daniel and I were both born in 1949, and that was reflected in the birth year of David. I suggested parallel stories of the rise of Escobar through the drug cartels and the advancement of David through his military and government career. The sequel was set. Or so I thought.

At the end of The Z Redemption, both Daniel and I were emotionally spent. There was little humor in the novel, reflecting Daniel’s grief after the death of his friend, Israel. When we discussed the character of David, we decided that he would have a dark secret and that we would only hint at his inner demons and need for redemption. Between finishing the novel and my research into the second one, I found myself getting depressed. The more I thought about developing what David had to do while infiltrating the cartels to eventually assist in the downfall of Escobar, and the thought of having David do things which would take him through the hell of that experience, I knew I couldn’t spend a year in this state. I made the phone call to Daniel.

I should have known that Daniel would understand my situation, and, within a short period of time, he told me about the germ of an idea he had: “A gambler named Corvette Nightfire would be walking, early in the morning, into one of the large casinos in Vegas, when a beautiful young woman would come bursting out of the casino, rush to Corvette, and hand him a bag before sprinting off…”

 

I was 60 years old when it happened. Israel, my young friend in Mexico, was only a 26-year-old law student and part-time Volvo salesman. His accidental and unfortunate encounter with the wife of a drug cartel leader in Monterrey cost him an unbearable torture and death. All of us who knew him were a mess. His roommate, scared that he would be next by association, fled town and told no one, even me, where he was relocating. It was during the beginning of the drug wars in Monterrey.

But enough about all that. I want to tell Israel that his life had meaning, and that he brought happiness into the world. I want to tell him that lives changed for the good. There are people who will remember him always, will love him and thank him for his life.

In my younger days, I wrote and never could complete a novel. But Israel’s short life put me on fire. In the last five years I have published two novels that were inspired by Israel, his roommate, and other ordinary people in Monterrey who were forced to muster uncommon courage in the face of barbaric and inhumane acts. I was witness to a civil war, really. I saw the beginnings of organized movements in Mexico against corruption and violence. I wanted people in the United States to know that people just like them not far away were living lives of hell, but they were doing it while still loving and preserving their families and friendships. The Mexicans are affectionate, creative, imaginative, and very funny people who have the perfect language for describing life around them.

So my first two novels, The Z Redemption and Corvette Nightfire, (assisted by my life-long friend and talented educator, Robert Selfe), tell the stories of Israel and his roommate, Enrique, as well as a host of other characters. They are people filled with hopes, dreams, energy, cunning and bravery. In real life, Israel was like this. Israel worked hard but partied with absolute joy of life. He would have been a leader on the national scene, I am certain.

No one heard Israel’s cries of pain except for his brutal tormentors. He knew that no one would come to save him. I wrote my novels so that people in two countries would hear his screams. In The Z Redemption, Israel is a mentor to his best friend, Enrique, the roommate in Monterrey. In real life, Enrique is the one who got to live. So in the two novels (the third is in the works), Enrique lives on with Israel in his heart, still guided by his life-long friend. Enrique becomes one of my favorite heroes of both novels. He matures, fights for a lady (and loses) in Corvette Nightfire, but in the end, he is the one who largely saves the day. Israel would be immensely proud of him.

I can’t speak for all the people who were moved in some way by Israel’s life and murder. I will say what happened to me.

Thanks to Israel, I have published the two novels of the trilogy of international suspense, romance, passion and heroism. With Robert Selfe, I am writing the third. I studied and learned to speak Spanish fluently. I have made many friends in Monterrey who are special in my heart. I research the Mexican portions of the novels with original Spanish sources. Obsessed that details be accurate, I have made several return trips to Monterrey and have gone so far as to time and act out action sequences in the geography of that city. I have learned a lot of Mexican history and much about their political parties and government.

Then there is the work that developed with my father. At 87 years old, he is still painting and expressing himself through art and technology. He has a long lifetime of works in a collection that is largely intact. Every painting has a story, and his cartoons speak for themselves. We decided that it would be good to publish his works and stories in books. Over the past couple years, I have published seven e-book volumes of his works in a series called, El Artista: A Lifetime of Curiosity. We are final-proofing the first printed volume of his art. Its title is An Artist’s Life, New Orleans Framed. It should be available in book stores by the beginning of March, 2015.

In a prior blog, I detailed my on-again, off-again battles with depression and the tools I use to defeat what would rob me of joy in life. I will admit that I was numb after Israel’s death. I returned to be with my family in Virginia a few months later. There were personal and financial problems to confront. It would have been easy to give in to inertia and the emotional paralysis of a disease that is so prevalent in our modern, hyperactive society.

But…I think that Israel claimed ownership of a piece of my life by his death. I suspect that he did this with a good number of people.

When I look through his eyes, I am looking through the eyes of a young man who will remain 26 years old through eternity. He wanted a career, love, a wife, children, fun, parties, loyal friends and justice. That is why he wanted to be a lawyer. He wanted to help his country. He saw bright skies, sunrises from the border of heaven, and the majestic mountains of Monterrey. He had the juice of a young man excited by life.

Yes, Israel, you infected me. You caused me to look at the world around me with young eyes. I am not afraid of dying, my young friend. I just want more years to get things done. I want to love fully. When I look at midnight, I want to see justice. I did hear you, Israel. You would be surprised how many have heard you.

Muchas gracias, mi buen amigo. Tal vez en el futuro, nos platicamos otra vez. Siempre empezamos otra vez.