There’s a saying that the days are long, but the years are short. Well, that means the months are pretty darn quick themselves. It’s amazing how fast three of them just went by. I feel that a couple of things cause this.
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In August 2021, I released a double collection of short stories—Murder by Any Other Name and Black and Blue in the Lilac City. I dubbed both “509 Crime Short Stories” and created a series separate from the 509 Crime Stories.
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In An Unfinished Story, I shared a letter from my dad written twenty years ago. He mentioned that it was “nice to see something without a lot of swear words and cussing.”
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It’s been a minute (as the cool kids say) since I wrote The House of Dog, my recap of the first year with a vizsla. Since then, things have calmed down with Rose, but there are still plenty of stories to share.
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I’ve been wondering how you keep your series separate in your head. Do you find yourself writing and then saying, “Oops, wrong character/genre/storyline!” - Coleen
Thank you for the question, Coleen. It’s a great one!
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I read several personal finance and real estate blogs daily during this time. I also listened to podcasts related to those fields. The one thing that always left me feeling underwhelmed was that no one ever talked about how personal finance could link to commercial real estate (an area I worked in).
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I imagine most every city has an official nickname, and it’s something horribly drab that was likely coined by an equally drab civic group. Yet those cities also developed more organically cool nicknames, too. And those are the terms that the residents hold dearer to their hearts.
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I love Eastern Washington (aka the 509). My signature series is set here as are most of my other books (John Cutler/Flip-Flop Detective/Charlie-316).
I’ve lived here for close to four decades now and enjoy telling people about this region.
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By the time I graduated high school, I had attended six schools in three different states (California, Ohio, and Washington). My family frequently moved for my dad’s work. That’s how a young boy ended up with an appreciation for the San Diego Padres, the Cincinnati Reds, and the Seattle Mariners but undying love for the Ohio State Buckeyes.
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I thought it would be fun to do a game-review channel. Our family tends to play many board games, so it seemed a natural fit. It’s not the only idea for a YouTube channel that I’ve had. I’m sure there are others like me. We get a wild idea, play with it, and then put it away.
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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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The 2022 Left Coast Crime convention was held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from April 7-10th. This was technically my third time attending LCC.
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Goodreads posed this question: “If you could travel to any fictional book world, where would you go, and what would you do there?”
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I thought I would try something different this week—a quarterly update for all things related to the writing life. I’ve never done this before, and I hope it provides more insight into how things are progressing. I’m not going to delay further with chit-chat. Let’s get started.
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I recently saw a question posed to authors: “Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?” This immediately reminded me of a YouTube video.
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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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I love crime fiction movies above every other genre. Okay, Rocky is my favorite movie, and that’s a sports drama, but the genre falls short compared to crime fiction. The same goes for crime fiction. I love the original Star Wars, but I’d rather watch any movie on the below list than A New Hope.
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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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There’s a well-established financial concept known as “pay yourself first. It can be applied to creative types as well.
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Here’s something from the way-back machine. While digging through some old digital files, I found these pictures and thought I would share them.
In 2006, I noodled around with the idea of drawing a comic book. I wasn’t writing much at this point and was looking for a creative outlet. Unfortunately, I’m not that great of an artist, and that was made clear by my inability to draw faces.
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