Orchid Blooms

Carnegie Mellon Today, Fall 2008

When Ralph Ashworth first tried pitching his mystery novel, The Killer of Orchids, to agents and editors 15 years ago, he didn’t have much luck. Sure, they liked the writing and they were intrigued by the plot, in which Jeff Redwing, a gay computer genius, investigates the murder of a Carnegie Mellon alumnus. But at the time Ashworth didn’t think readers would be ready for a gay detective, so when he submitted the manuscript he removed any reference to the hero’s romantic life.

“Editors would tell me, ‘We like the story, but something is missing,’” says Ashworth. “And I would think, ‘Well, you’re right…’” So he put the novel aside, took a job as a supervisor at a Borders bookstore, and concentrated on other writing projects.

Last year, he decided it was time to rewrite The Killer of Orchids, with Redwing as a gay man once again. Coincidentally, at around the same time, Borders announced a fiction-writing contest open to all 30,000 employees. The winning book would be published, sold in over 1,000 bookstores, and featured in the Borders newsletter, which is sent to 28 million people.

“Normally it’s a struggle to get one copy in bookstores,” says Ashworth. “This would have the full brunt of Borders’ promotional powers behind it.”

The deadline was six months sooner than he planned to have the book finished, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. Even though it was the holiday season and he was working at Borders six days a week, sometimes 10 hours or more each day, he pushed himself to keep writing, whenever he had time to spare. Exhausted, he managed to submit the book by the deadline.

A few months later he got the call. Out of over 200 submissions that Borders received, The Killer of Orchids was chosen as the winner.

Darmen Sadvakasov

Carnegie Mellon Today, Fall 2008

http://www.carnegiemellontoday.com/article.asp?aid=616

Sixteen people sit behind chessboards along the orange and yellow walls of Amani International coffeehouse, in Pittsburgh’s North Side. They are all different ages- a boy in grade school is at a board between a goateed college student and an older man with thinning gray hair. Most of them just play regularly at local chess clubs; a few of them are highly ranked experts. Probably the only thing they all have in common is their opponent. Moving from board to board, stopping at each for only a few seconds to watch his opponent’s move and then quickly make his own, Darmen Sadvakasov, an international grandmaster takes on all sixteen of them- at once.

The term Grandmaster is a title awarded by FIDE, the World Chess Federation, to the best chess players in the world (the only rank higher than Grandmaster is the World Champion) and there are only 60 in the United States. Sadvakasov, a native of Kazakhstan who is currently working towards a Masters of Public Management in the Heinz school, was awarded the title after winning the World Junior Championships in 1998. Since then he’s competed as a chess professional in tournaments in over 40 countries. At one of his first international tournaments in 2001, he played Gary Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time, to two draws. In 2004, he defeated Kasparov’s longtime rival, former World Champion Anatoly Karpov.

“On any given day, Darmen could potentially beat one of the world’s top twenty players,” says Clyde Kapinos, a board member of the Pittsburgh Chess Club.

It’s unlikely to see Sadvakasov playing a serious game around campus- the games he plays in international tournaments last six hours, and he’ll spend another three hours preparing beforehand. Occasionally, when he’s not too busy with classes, he’ll play games for fun, usually on the Internet. And at least once a week he trains with Alex Shabalov, a former CMU student who is the current U.S. Champion, analyzing positions and poring over moves from past games.

Sadvakasov says that the skills he’s developed playing chess- memory, concentration, logic- have been extremely helpful in his coursework at CMU. Which is a good thing too- although most of Sadvakasov’s professors know he’s an accomplished chess player, “They don’t play with me for grades,” he jokes.

Always eager to get other people interested in chess, especially kids, Sadvakasov has held simultaneous games before. This match at Amani is actually relatively small for him- he’s played against as many as 50 people at once. So it’s little surprise when, 70 minutes after the first move, only one of his opponents has managed a draw. The kings on the other 15 boards lie peacefully on their sides, defeated by the grandmaster.