I thought I would do something different this week and share one of my favorite scenes. This comes from my short story, “The Legend of Roy Utt,” which appears in the 509 Crime Anthology, A Bag of Dick’s.
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Always be where flip-flops can be worn.
If you could live your life by a single rule, what would it be?
That’s a question I asked myself one summer afternoon while running around my neighborhood in flip-flops.
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My writing career began in 1996. Sometime during that year, I sat at my computer and wrote a single-page story. It featured a cop drinking in a bar. Anger and bluster filled every word. It was an unreadable tale written by an unhappy man.
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In 2019, I attended Left Coast Crime (LCC), a writers’ conference held that year in Vancouver B.C—only six hours from my hometown. It was my first conference of the sort, and I quickly learned it offered many great experiences.
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The knockout game is the concept of randomly selecting a victim and then rendering them unconscious with a single blow.
It’s violent, it’s illegal, and it always preys on a weaker victim.
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SPOILER ALERT!
If you haven’t read THE BLIND TRUST yet, this post gives away a big component of the story. Turn back if you want to keep this reveal hidden.
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For a period of roughly six months, I woke up frequently with a song snippet in my head.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. I wasn’t concerned by it. More than anything, it was an oddity. A funny trick that my mind seemed to be playing on me. When the songs happened, I kind of enjoyed them.
Those musical greetings gave my mornings a little bit of a twist.
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Hearing a word, or a combination of words, can sometimes spark a writer’s imagination. This occurred to me when I first encountered the term ‘side hustle.’
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C316—pronounced correctly as Charlie three sixteen—is a police officer call sign. To be exact it was my call sign for a year while with the Spokane Police Department.
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It took four years to get Tales from the Road into print. Buildings can be designed, built, and occupied in shorter time. Marriages have been started, consummated, and ended in that amount of time. That’s four complete seasons of baseball. Needless to say (yet I’m still saying it), creating that book took a long, damn time.
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On January 4th, 2019 I released The Side Hustle, a self-published crime fiction novel. I didn’t seek a publisher for this novel for a couple of reasons. I’ll get to that in a bit.
Before I do, let me tell you about the book.
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Instead of rewriting all the good stuff below, I just blatantly stole it from frankzafiro.com, the website of Frank Zafiro, my writing partner. Not much of a grifter, when I announce to the world I stole it, huh? - Colin
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The bar circuit in the late 70’s and early 80’s was something special.
Before the birth of MTV and the internet made music readily accessible and boringly safe, bands rolled into big cities and small towns across America to ply their trade. These musicians lived a fantasy many have only dreamed.
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