Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Blog Tour of F.W. vom Scheidt's Coming For Money & Guest Post

I'd like to welcome F.W. vom Scheidt, author of the financial thriller Coming For Money. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about how you'd come to write your first book. Without further ado, let's all welcome F.W. vom Scheidt to Starting Fresh!
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Why was I drawn to write a book? By F.W. vom Scheidt

I have always been drawn to writing because I have always been drawn to a search for some understanding of this human life.

At my last count, there are not many literary writers originating from the financial world. I wanted to write from personal experience. I wanted to write from what I know best.
In this novel I’ve written as truthfully as possible about the world of international finance – not with the over-dramatization so common in film and television, but with an intimate telling through a first-person narrative of what it can be like to labour in the world of money spinning...of how the money’s immense leverage for triumph or disaster doesn’t so much corrupt people as corrupt the way they treat each other...of how the relentless demands of the money so often deprive a person of sufficient time and energy to live through the events of their emotional and interior life.

Moreover, because our societies equate financial success with a successful life, we are often blind to the inner stories of countless people in all endeavors who, in their desperate search for inner happiness, endlessly repeat a formula for financial success even while remaining deeply unhappy due to unresolved emotional and psychological issues at their core. I wanted to bring one of these inner stories to life.
The great fallacy of the financial industry is that its workings are accomplished with money. They are not. They are accomplished with people – people who need to be understood and valued, people with whom you must communicate. And this communication is often extremely complex because you have to focus on future results that have not yet occurred, or you must focus on derivative results that are produced by other events … and, invariably, you must align divergent agendas.

Investment decisions must be accomplished with brutal honesty; because, with money, you are either making informed decisions, or you are investing out of greed or fear. There are no other possibilities. But putting investment decisions into action requires people. Maintaining sensitivity to people in an insensitive environment helps bring them to a common focus: on value, on integrity, and on success.

I sat down at the keyboard. Although I have always been a literary writer, I had no idea how I would capture my experiences in international finance in literary fiction. Without thinking, the first sentence came to me. I typed it. Then I looked at that sentence for a long time.

Instinct told me that the sentence had risen from something that was deeply absorbing me, and that it was something I had to tell. I knew I had to find some way to tell it truthfully. From that point, I knew there was no way out . . . except to construct the novel.

While Coming For Money is a story that advances from chapter to chapter along the corporate intrigue that beats at its heart, and continually mirrors the financial headlines of our daily newspapers, it is much more. It is an illustration of what happens to us as human beings when we lose emotional connectiveness, when we lose emotional logic.

And this was how Paris Smith came to me - because he is tragically, if admirably, flawed. He is not flawed in the classic Shakespearean sense of a noble man who is brought to ruin by his won avarice or rage. His weakness is not that he lusts after wealth or power or flesh. Rather, and far more important for us in these times, he is flawed in that he never learned the great lesson of his generation: don't become emotionally involved. Paris Smith's weakness is that he needs, and has always needed, emotional involvement in order to sustain his life. It is for him - as, ultimately, it is for us all - as necessary as breathing.

As Paris Smith refuses to relinquish his search for emotional connectiveness, he becomes a character we learn to appreciate and admire. In the sometimes stubborn, sometimes creative, battles he wages against other men in his corporation who are pitted against him, Paris Smith becomes ever more conscious of how he could stem his personal pain and loneliness by simply retreating emotionally and victimizing those around him. Or he might learn anew how to offer up his own emotional involvement. I'll leave it for readers to see how this plays out in the end, and decide what they may want to take away from his quest for human meaning in our contemporary world. But I hope readers will appreciate Paris Smith as much as I do.

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About the Book, courtesy of the Author:

How much money is too much? And how fast is too fast in life? Investment star Paris Smith steps onto the top rungs of the corporate ladder, only to discover he is caught between his need for fulfilment and his need for understanding, between his drive for power and his inability to cope with his growing emptiness where there was once love. When his wife disappears from the core of his life, Smith s loneliness and sense of disconnection threaten to overwhelm him. When he tries to compensate by losing himself in his work, he stumbles off the treadmill of his own success, and is entangled in the web of a fraudulent bond deal that threatens to derail his career and his life. Forced to put his personal life on hold while he travels non-stop between Toronto, Singapore, and Bangkok to salvage his career, the embattled financier is deprived of the time and space he needs to mourn the absence of his wife and to objectively assess his future options. In the heat, turmoil and fast money of Southeast Asia half a world from home and half a life from his last remembered smile Paris Smith finds duplicity, comradeship, and power. He also finds a special woman who might heal his heart.

About the Author, courtesy of Amazon:

F.W. vom Scheidt's education, experience and career have embraced the author's broad spectrum of interests, from film and philosophy to mathematics and economics. Before entering the investment industry, he held university and corporate appointments in marketing and finance, always with a core focus on fostering creativity and entrepreneurship. For more than a decade, vom Scheidt has been a director of an international investment firm. The author works and travels in the world's capital markets, but makes his home in Toronto, Canada. Learn more about F.W. vom Scheidt and Coming For Money on his marketing page at http://www.bluebutterflybooks.ca/titles/money.html

Thanks so much, F.W. vom Scheidt for sharing the origins of Coming For Money with us all. The novel sounds so intriguing! I am so looking forward to reading Coming For Money! Please check back for my review which will follow shortly. Thank you Dorothy and Pump Up Your Virtual Blog Tours for this opportunity!

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