F. W. vom Scheidt and Coming for Money

Joining us today is F. W. vom Scheidt, author of Coming for Money.

How much money is too much? And how fast is too fast in life?

International investment firm director and author F. W. vom Scheidt, writes from his first hand-hand experience of the world of global money spinning with candor and authenticity in his remarkable literary novel Coming for Money.

As investment star Paris Smith steps onto the top rungs of the corporate ladder, he is caught between his need for fulfillment and his need for understanding; trapped 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, his 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 nonstop between Toronto, Singapore and Bangkok to salvage his career, he is deprived of the time and space necessary to regain his equilibrium.

In the heat and turmoil and fast money of Southeast Asia, half a world from home, and half a life from his last remembered smile, he finds duplicity, friendship and power --- and a special woman who might heal his heart.

A talented author, vom Scheidt has confidently crafted a fast-paced, highly readable and intelligent novel. His details are fascinating. His characters are real, and not easily forgotten. A deeply felt story about the isolation of today’s society, the prices great and small paid for success and the damages resulting from the ruthless exercise of financial power, Coming For Money is a taut literary page-turner about a man who refuses to capitulate to the darkness in his journey into the light.

I've asked the author to tell us a little of how he came to write this novel and about his main character, Paris Smith.

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 own 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 to 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.

F.W. vom Scheidt is the author of the literary fiction novel, Coming for Money. You can visit his website at http://www.bluebutterflybooks.ca/titles/money.html.