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Author: Adam

Adam Bender is an award-winning journalist and author of speculative fiction that explores modern-day societal fears with a mix of action, romance and humor.

Bender's latest novel is Utopia PR, a speculative satire about a public-relations specialist who struggles to find work-life balance while managing crisis after crisis for a dystopian American president. It won the 2021 IndieReader Discovery Award for Humor.

Previously, Bender wrote The Wanderer and the New West, a near-future western about a rogue vigilante who seeks redemption in a lawless America that fully protects the rights of armed citizens to stand their ground. Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018, the novel also won gold for Dystopia in the 2018 Readers’ Favorite Awards and best Western Fiction in the 2018 National Indie Excellence Awards.

Bender authored We, The Watched and Divided We Fall in a dystopian series about an amnesiac who struggles to conform in a surveillance society where the government keeps a Watched list of its own citizens. Also, Bender has published several short stories.

In his day job as a journalist, Bender covers telecom and internet regulation for Communications Daily. He has won awards for his reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

Bender lives in Philadelphia with his wife Mallika and son Rishi. He’s usually a rather modest and amiable fellow.

Learn more about the author at WatchAdam.blog and join The Underground email newsletter for news and info on Adam Bender's latest projects. Follow him on Facebook (wethewatched) and @WatchAdam on Instagram.

Music Review: Saves The Day

Published by Adam on September 26, 2013

The new album by Saves The Day might be the most fun record I’ve heard all year.

Saves The Day

On their new self-titled album, the New Jersey band brings wave after wave of infectious pop punk. On first play it’s all sunny and sweet, but repeated listens reveal honest lyrics about lost-and-found love and run-ins with racist drunks (see: “Xenophobic Blind Left Hook”).

It’s all over in just over 30 minutes, but Saves The Day pack a lot into these 11 tracks. It’s not easy to write a three-minute song that actually feels complete–with a few verses, chorus and bridge–but these boys seem to pull it off effortlessly. There’s not a dud on the record and when it’s over you want to play it again.

I hadn’t seen it before, but singer/songwriter Chris Conley reminds me a lot of John K. Samson from Canadian indie darling, The Weakerthans.  Both Conley and Samson come from a punk background, and yet both stand apart from others in the genre with clever, observational lyrics that fit big literary words around instantly catchy hooks.

As someone who first heard this band in high school (back in the early 2000s), it’s very cool to see Conley has matured so much as a songwriter. Saves The Day isn’t writing exactly the same kind of songs they used to, but they have harvested the best elements.

Some other reviewers on the Web say that Saves The Day have overdone the cheerfulness on this one, but to them I say, “Lighten up!”

It’s refreshing to hear music with such positive energy. It’s not a concept album. There’s no political agenda or “screw you” to the mainstream. It’s just a bunch of guys having fun and hoping their fans will come along for the ride.

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Watched and Printed

Published by Adam on August 13, 2013
It's real! It's in my hands!
It’s real! It’s in my hands!

The day has finally arrived — my first novel We, The Watched is now available as a paperback!

It’s had a long history. After working on the novel during college, I self-released We, The Watched on my website chapter by chapter.

Later, I found out about Smashwords, an e-publishing platform that let me sell the book through a variety of popular eBook stores includes Barnes & Noble, Apple and Sony. After about a year, I added We, The Watched to the Amazon Kindle store.

I avoided print for years, not because I was on a crusade for eBooks or anything, but because I knew there was a lot more formatting and appearance details to consider.

Finally, this year, I decided to go ahead and pay a few professionals to help me with that. It turned out not to be as expensive as I thought, and the result is amazing! Much thanks to Belinda Pepper for the cover design and Lis Sowerbutts for interior formatting.

But don’t take my word for it, as LeVar Burton would say. Buy a copy for yourself at Amazon.com for $9.99 (Amazon might even sell it to you for less) or Barnes & Noble. If you’re more of an eBook person, you can still of course grab the digital version for $2.99 on Kindle, Smashwords and other popular eBook stores.

If you’re looking to get even more hyped up about the paperback release, check out my official press release announcing the print version right here.

 

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Brilliant new cover for We, The Watched

Published by Adam on July 10, 2013
The new cover for my novel! Sweet!
The new cover for my novel! Sweet!

I’ve got a pretty exciting update. We, The Watched is getting a brand new cover. And this time it’s professional.

The new cover was designed by Belinda Pepper over at Red Swallow Design. The basic design is a modification of the previous cover, but instead of the CCTV camera, it features the fire-eyed graffiti tag of the secret rebel organization known as the Underground.

For those of you keeping track, this is now the third cover for We, The Watched since it was first published a few years ago. However, the more important thing to remember is that it’s the coolest. By far.

“But that’s not all!”

There was a very important reason for designing a new cover: We, The Watched is finally getting a print version! This freshly revised edition will be sold through CreateSpace and available on Amazon from the start. There’s still a little more work to do before it’s up for sale (these things take time), but I’m shooting to have it ready for purchase in the next several weeks. Stay tuned to this blog for the announcement.

But don’t worry, eBook fans, I have not forgotten you. I have also gone ahead and updated the eBook version to include the new cover, more eye-catching formatting and minor revisions made for the print edition. You can get the Kindle version on Amazon or the ePub version (for all other eReaders) on Smashwords right now!

The latest eBook will be rolling out to Apple, Sony, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers over the next few weeks. If you have already purchased We, The Watched online, depending on the store you should be able to download the new version for free (if not, please contact me).

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Watched in the real world

Published by Adam on June 12, 2013

We, The Watched by Adam BenderThe current debate over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, PRISM, highlights a great conundrum for citizens of any country: How much personal privacy should one give up in exchange for better national security?

When I wrote my novel We, The Watched and its upcoming sequel Divided We Fall, I imagined a dystopian nation in which the government had used national security as an excuse to take all privacy rights from the people. That’s not the case today, but it’s one possible outcome if the balance swings too far in one direction.

With every call, social media update or credit card transaction, people leave behind a long trail of data that can potentially be stored and analyzed by businesses and the government. The digitization of video and an increasing number of surveillance cameras potentially adds even more data to mix.

Evolving tools for big data analysis provide an ability to parse and make sense of all this information like never before. This technology can be used for good and keep people safe, but like any great power it can be abused without the right privacy checks in place.

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Divided We Fall manuscript acclaimed by Publishers Weekly

Published by Adam on April 18, 2013

Publishers Weekly has praised the manuscript for my unpublished second novel, Divided We Fall.

An independent reviewer from the literary mag wrote that the story “raises interesting questions about the influence of propaganda on the construction of the self, the idea of true tabula rasa and the power of memory.” In addition, “the central love story propels the narrative energetically.”

Divided We Fall received the review after finishing as a quarterfinalist in this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, one of the top 100 novels selected in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror category. Unfortunately, it was not one of the five entries to go onto the next round, but I’m quite happy with how well it did and look forward to seeking representation.

While you’re waiting for the release of Divided We Fall, please check out my first novel We, The Watched as well as my recent short stories “Life Trade” and “Smokers Corner.”

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Adam Bender | adambenderwrites.com | watchadam.blog