A friend asked why I joined the Army when my dad was a Navy veteran. It’s sort of a funny in a shallow, teenage way. I joined the Army for two reasons.
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Recently, I was on the highway and spotted the little blips of paint separating the lanes.
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I recently bought a photo scanner to start the process of importing my old photos into the digital world. There are several reasons to do this, but none are interesting enough to share.
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Over the years, I’ve dabbled with writing poetry. In full disclosure, I don’t pretend to be a poet, and I’m not too fond of 99.9% of the poetry out there. While in college, the only poetry that ever “spoke” to me were some of the war poems written by soldiers.
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My flagship series, the 509 Crime Stories, recently had its covers upgraded. For some, that was a change to the title font. For others, that was a complete redo.
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The Public Safety Writers Association held its annual conference in Las Vegas this past weekend (July 14-17, 2022). According to the PSWA website, the association was formed in 1997 as the Police Writers Club and “exists to support people involved in writing about public safety.”
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The call came about 6 A.M. on the morning of Friday, July 16th, 1999. It was from my boss, Rick.
“Have you seen the news?” he asked. “There’s a fire at the Fairmont. Get down here as soon as you can.”
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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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