Book Talk with DJ Swykert

About DJ Swykert

DJ Swykert is a former 911 operator and fiction writer living in Burlington, NC. His work has appeared in The Tampa Review, Detroit News, Coe Review, Monarch Review, the Newer York, Lunch Ticket, Gravel, Zodiac Review, Barbaric Yawp and Bull.

His novels include The Pool Boy’s Beatitude, Children of the Enemy, Maggie Elizabeth Harrington, Alpha Wolves, For the Love of Wolves, Sweat Street, Nude Swimming and The Death of Anyone.

Do you have a favorite author? If yes, what draws you to that person’s work?

Hemingway, because his writing is direct, simple and understandable. I don’t care for esoteric stories where you need a compass to find the theme.

Where do you gather inspiration for your work?

We all intake a lot of information in this highly technical world. What I absorb I tend to think about, and what impacts me becomes a theme. I write a story by first doing a characterization and then putting them into a conflict, from the character and conflict a story will always develop.

What can readers who enjoy your book do to help make it successful?

Review them on Amazon and Goodreads or any review sites. The reviews do help attract further readers.

Do you have any tips for readers or advice for other writers trying to get published?

Write the best book you can, edit it, edit it, and then edit it again. When it’s finally done, don’t ever give up on it. And don’t discount self-publishing. There are many agents recommending it now as the best deal out there for writers.

Tell us about your novels

I have eight novels and a collection of romantic short stories titled Nude Swimming in print now. I’m working on a mystery titled Blood Libel with a female detective, Benham, who appears in three of my other novels.

My newest release For the Love of Wolves is a story about an elderly woman who shoots a bounty hunter to protect an imaginary wolf. Wolves are a couple of my favorite characters, and I mean real Gray Wolves, not fantasy werewolves.

About The Pool Boy’s Beatitude

The Pool Boy’s Beatitude by DJ Swykert
Genre: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Jack Joseph understands physics. He understands the nature of quarks, leptons, dark matter and the desire to find the God particle. What Jack doesn’t understand is Jack. He has a Masters degree in particle physics, an ex-wife, a sugar mama into spanking, a passion for cooking and chronic dependencies he needs to feed. He cleans pools to maintain this chaotic lifestyle. Spinning about in a Large Hadron Collider of his own making, facing a jail term, the particle known as Jack is about to collide with a particle known as Sarah.

The Pool Boy’s Beatitude convincingly portrays a life of romance, addiction, and entropy, filled with the temptations of drink, drugs, and sex, broken with the miseries of ruined relationships, and balanced on the needle of false hope.

Somehow through it, all the story is hopeful, positive, humorous and oddly enticing. The question is not so much will Jack survive as how will he survive, because surely, behind all this science, there has to be a truth worth living for. A thinking readers’ romance novel, The Pool Boy’s Beatitude creates a character you long to hate and makes you love him.

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