I once had a creative writing professor tell me my writing was too violent. This was the same professor who also told me I shouldn’t use the word “fuck” in my writing. This article in LitReactor was my ode to that professor. Needless to say, I discounted the advice at the time.

However, as I’ve grown as a writer, I’ve learned that there is a fine balance in the violence writers should show on the page and the violence they should leave off the page. In crime fiction, you will inevitably run into violence. It’s what you’re chasing as a reader who picks up such books and stories. The question is: how will that violence manifest itself?

Good writers know when to paint every detail of the bloody, ugly crime on the page. When to pull the reader along in the stomach-turning description of a murder scene. When to suggest the horror of a character being tortured instead of showing it. But where is that line? How do writers know when to cross it and when to toe it?

I think the answer comes down to experience. That professor I had in my undergraduate studies was right. My early writing was probably more violent than it needed to be. Not gratuitous necessarily, but it left too much on the page. The blood splattered writing took away from the story. Remember, the violence itself is not the story. The crime and the characters are the story. Later, in my graduate studies, I had a professor who pointed out examples of writing where the suggested violence was worse (in a good way) and more powerful than if the writer had chosen to show the full scene. This helped me as I refined my crime writing. I don’t claim to be a good writer, but I do think I have a good grasp of when to show violence and when to suggest it.

The idea for this article came as I was reading Jordan Harper’s A Violent Masterpiece. The title should tell you what to expect. And if you have ever read Harper’s work, you know, he uses the blood and gore as a story-telling device as well as anyone. His writing and his stories benefit from the blood on the page. It needs to be there. It cannot remain a mere suggestion.

Without giving anything away from his new novel, I can highlight examples of this violence in a scene where one of the victims of a serial killer is found. Harper does not give us the news report style description of this victim’s death. We get the first-person view. Not only does the violence shown in this scene shock, it serves an important purpose in the story. I’m not going to name that purpose here because you need to read the book and I don’t intend to spoil it. But trust me, had Harper not walked us (literally) through the crime scene in gritty detail, it would not have worked.

Another book that comes to my mind often when I think about violence on the page is David Joy’s Weight Of This World. David Joy is an incredible author. His books are some of my favorites. He writes with a level of empathy that every crime writer should try to emulate. His characters are flawed and often downright bad. But Joy does not allow himself to judge these characters in his writing. He let’s them live, for better or worse. And then he lets them die (sometimes).

In Weight Of This World, one of Joy’s characters completely snaps and tortures another in such a sickening way I actually had to put the book down. It was necessary to have that violence on the page, though. It showed just how broken the character was. Had Joy left the torture off the page and simply shown us the outcome, we wouldn’t have felt the character’s fall so viscerally. The violence served the plot and led directly to subsequent scenes that just could not work if the torture was off-page.

I could go on and on with examples of violence on the page (Don Winslow’s Border Trilogy, S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes, etc). But we should explore counter-examples. Where the violence is better served off the page because putting it on the page would slow the plot, hurt the story.

You’ll often find violence off the page in mystery novels because the violence itself it central to the mystery. In Ivy Pochoda’s masterful Visitation Street, violence comes from mother nature and teenage stupidity. But you never see it. You only see the aftermath. The impact. The violence sits in the shadow of the psychological impact the characters must carry. And it’s a different kind of violence than in the books I mentioned previously. Had Pochoda chosen to show this violence, it would have made the book decidedly worse.

I recently finished Tana French’s In The Woods, and this novel (also a mystery) perfectly highlights what I’m talking about. There are two bits of violence in this book that are kept off the page. There’s the original crime that took place twenty years before. We never see the violence that led to a little boy standing in shoes filled with blood, but it hovers over the entire story. It’s a great example of not showing the actual violence on page. The other example in that book is the central murder. We hear how it happens, but we never see it. The violence of it is not something we need to see. It’s the emotional fallout that is most important.

I could go on and on with examples from both sides. So, the question is: how does an author know when to go all in and when to hold back?

I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer this, but I’ll give it a shot. I think the answer is feel. Authors know the feel of the book. They know the tone. Does the violence play a critical part in the story, or would it provide more depth if it were kept off the page. Only the author can know this, and they can only know it by feeling things out. I don’t think this can easily be surfaced in an outline. It has to be felt through writing.

Back To You

This all, of course, is one writer’s opinion. What do you think? Do you prefer stories of one type versus the other? How and when should the violence be shown on the page and when should it be held back?

Thanks for reading!

This week’s Friday Read is another one from the archives, another early story where I was still experimenting and finding myself as a writer. It was also my first attempt at something close to mystery. It leans a little toward the hard-boiled detective side of fiction as well, which is interesting.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Four Corners!

Four Corners

Buckle dropped the newspaper on the table in front me, chewing his nicotine gum with an open mouth. “This is yours.”

He didn’t speak much, but when he did, he was so eloquent. I looked at the paper then back up to Buckle. “I don’t subscribe.”

“Not the paper, Reagan,” he said, pointing to the top article on the front page. “The job.”

I read the first few lines. Someone had chopped a person up and spread the body parts out across the four points of the Four Corners National Monument. “Jesus.”

“Harry wants you on it.” Buckle leaned in close when he said this. I heard his lips and gums and tongue mashing and moving the little white piece of gum in his mouth.

“You’d think if they’re going to make you chew a gum, they might actually add some breath freshener to it.”

Buckle stood up straight, blew into his hand, and sniffed. He shook his head then walked out of the break room, down the hall, and presumably back into the security closet that he called home. Harry may have gave him the title—Security Manager—but Buckle was the muscle. That’s it. The job was a front, something to make him look respectable to the outside world. Not a dumb move by Harry, but if the casino ever needed real security, I wasn’t sure Buckle would know what to do.

I took a minute to read the entire article. It wouldn’t be the first murder Harry had me investigate, but this was was more brutal than the others. Most everything else was a simple bullet to the head, a beating gone too far, a knife driven into just the right spot.

Those investigations stayed in house. With me. So did the thefts and people disappearing and the exploration of new business contacts and their histories. These were the things I was good at. The things I was trained for. The things I had done while I was still a cop.

This, though, this was different. And I knew why Harry wanted me on the job.

It wasn’t the type of case I’d work normally. The victim was not part of the organization. He wasn’t a business partner. He was a Native American who had lived on the reservation like I did. He did so because of his blood. I did so because they liked having me there.

The reason Harry wanted me on this was because the placement of the body and the victim involved federal law enforcement, local law enforcement from four different states, and the tribe police. All that heat converged on the main trucking route we used. Harry couldn’t deliver his customer’s products in a timely fashion without that route. And he couldn’t just send trucks loaded down with stolen goods, guns, and drugs into the open arms of cops.

I was about to stand and head out to the casino floor when Harry came into the room. “Hey, sweetheart.”

He kissed me on the top of the head and I thought about the night we had two months ago. Nights like that happened from time to time. He knew and I knew that they couldn’t happen all the time. He was twenty years older than me, he was on the police big board, and my father was still a detective with Dewpoint P.D.

“Harry, this case,” I said. “What the fuck?”

“I know, I know.” He sat down across from me.

“Where are you sending the trucks?”

He smiled. “See, there’s a reason I hired you. You catch on, girly. You catch on real quick. Right now, I’m not sending them anywhere. That’s why you’re on the job.”

“I’ll head out to the rez this afternoon, start asking about the vic.”

Harry’s hair was gray and long, but he kept it combed back. When he nodded his approval to me, I watched two or three strands fall across his forehead. I wanted to reach out and brush them away. I wanted to come across that table and kiss him. But I knew everything happened on his terms. In his time.

I winked, grabbed my John Deere trucker’s cap off the table and put it on, sliding my ponytail through the back. People on the reservation knew I had been a cop, but people around here—Native American or not—preferred the down-home, country girl. And that’s what I’d give them.

***

Dewpoint, Arizona is made up of 2,238 residents, not including the tribe. The northern point of the Hopi Indian Reservation stretched across the bottom half of Dewpoint, in the mountains of Northern Arizona. It was a short drive to Four Corners, and it was a good distribution hub.

I had called my father on the drive and got the victim’s home address. Jonathan Sakeva lived a couple miles from my trailer on the rez. Hopi Police had already been there, interviewed his wife and sister. They’d collected evidence and packaged it all up for the FBI, I assumed.

My dad, always hesitant with the information, had asked me about the job I was working. “Reagan, you know the people you work for. I shouldn’t be helping you on any of this.”

“Dad, I worked casino security and Jonathan Saveka was suspected of counting cards. My boss—”

“Harry Belmont,” my father said, interrupting. “Do you know who Harry Belmont is?”

“Yes, Dad. He’s my boss. He’s worried that someone at the casino took things personally, and they want me to check in on it. That’s all.”

My father knew I wasn’t just some private investigator working casino crimes. But he also loved me, felt bad for the way I fell out of the department. I had felt bad too, but I’d had eight years to think about it, and I was tired of apologizing for a mistake I didn’t make.

But the thoughts of the boy I shot didn’t just go away. I could see his face, his hands, the quick movements. And I still saw him on the ground, bleeding, his mother being held back behind the police tape.

After he gave me the address, my dad warned me that the feds were keep a tight lid on the case. They were trying to push out locals. It made sense, at least from their perspective, from their perception of the police around there. Can’t have stupid hicks from Northern Arizona fucking up a murder investigation in which someone was scattered across four states.

I stopped my El Camino in front of the squat adobe house where Saveka had once lived. Before popping the door open, I wondered how someone from the tribe could get themselves mixed up in something like this.

As soon as I climbed out of the car and stepped into the snow-packed dirt in front of Saveka’s house, I was hit with a rock.

“Go home,” a voice yelled from somewhere near the house. “You people did this to him.”

Another rock hit my car, and that’s when I got pissed. I leaned in through the driver’s side window, opened the glove box, and pulled out my revolver. When I came out of the window and leveled the gun toward the house, the rocks stopped flying. And then I saw the girl.

She was standing on the porch in a brown canvas dress with a black hoodie over top that was two sizes two big. Her eyes were wide and looking right at my .38. I lowered it then slid it into the waistband of my jeans near my back.

“Why are you throwing rocks at me?”

The girl, who couldn’t be but twelve, shook her head. “Because you did this to him.”

I walked across the lot, careful to avoid the patches of snow packed in so tight that they had turned to ice. “Who did?”

“You.” She pointed at me. “Your people. The casino.”

“He was your brother?”

She nodded. “And he is gone because of your people.”

She meant Harry. That’s who everyone meant when they talked about the casino. Harry didn’t own the casino, of course. It was on Native American land and owned by the tribe. But Harry financed it, and it financed him.

“My name is Reagan Jones, and I’m here to help figure out what happened to your brother. I want to find the person who did this to him.”

She considered this for a moment. All I really cared about was solving the case so that Harry was happy, so that business could flow again. I thought about my father in that moment. He would have cared about Saveka.

The little girl shook her head. “You can’t do anything.”

“If you help me, I can.”

“How?”

I took stepped onto the porch and sat down next to her. After a moment she as well. “Did you see anything weird before this happened to your brother?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that you normally wouldn’t see.”

“They already asked me all this. They asked if I saw any people, any cars, any anything.”

I nodded. Of course they did. “Well, maybe they forgot to ask you some questions. So, let me ask you this one. Did the police take anything from around here?”

She thought about this, tilted her head. “They looked around a lot, but the only thing they took was a piece of trash.”

“Trash? What trash?”

The girl shrugged. “I saw them pick it up, but I couldn’t tell what it was. They put it in a plastic bag and took it away.”

“Did you see which police took the trash? Was it Hopi police?”

She nodded.

Thank God, I thought. If they hadn’t sent the evidence along to the FBI, I might still be able to get a look at what they took. I’d have to call in a favor.

The mother wasn’t home and there wasn’t anything else for me to ask, so I patted the girl on the shoulder, and pulled a business card out from my back pocket.

I looked at the card. Reagan Jones, P.I. It had my email address and phone number listed. It also had the casino’s address printed at the bottom. You had to have an address to qualify for the investigator’s license, so that was mine.

The girl took the card and slapped it off her thigh. She looked up at me, her eyes a little wider. I smiled and told her I appreciated her help. Then I left before she could cry.

Hopi P.D. had a quiet station in the northern part of the reservation. It’s even quieter in the winter. When the snow falls and the ice builds up along the walks, the few officers working tend to stay home.

So when I got there by late evening, the lights were off and the doors were locked. I dialed Brandon on my cell. Time to call in that favor.

He answered after six rings. “Hey, Reagan.”

“You guys don’t work around here, or what?”

“Ain’t shit to do.”

“I got something for you to do.”

Brandon’s voice lowered, got playful. “Oh, I bet you do.”

“Shut up.”

“What do you need?”

“Heard you guys pulled some evidence from the Saveka house.”

“Yes we did, but it’s going to the feds.”

I climbed back into the El Camino and cranked the engine. I let it idle on the side of the highway next to the darkened police station. “Has it gone yet?”

“No, first thing tomorrow.”

“I need to see it before it goes.”

“Reagan, I can’t let you take the evidence.”

I pulled out onto the highway and headed for my trailer. “I don’t want to take it. I just want to see what it is.”

Brandon was quiet for a while. “Shit. Yeah, all right. Come by first thing. I’m supposed to run it up to their command post.”

“I’ll see you bright and early.” I clicked off and drove as the sun set behind me.

Part II of Four Corners comes next Friday. Hope to see you back here, but let me know what you thought about Part I.

Admit it, you’re addicted to social media. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re one of the few who has been able to stay free from the algorithmic grasp of an endless feed. For most people though, social media is an addiction that’s hard to break. It was for me.

Rather than deleting social apps or setting screen time limits, I tried a different approach recently. I bought a small 10-year-old Kindle on eBay with the goal of replacing every urge to reach for social media with some reading. It was surprisingly easy.

When eating a quick lunch during work, social media was a constant companion. Now, I flick open the book I’m reading on Kindle and get a few pages in. At nighttime before bed, instead of Threads or X or Instagram, I pop open the Kindle and read until I’m ready to fall asleep.

Because the Kindle is small, it goes everywhere with me easily. The same way my phone goes everywhere with me. That makes it much easier to reach for the Kindle and read a book instead of scrolling a social media feed.

But outside of kicking the social media addiction, why is this important?

Reading Is Writing

The more a writer reads, the better they write. I don’t think there’s much dispute in this logic, but how much is enough? Can you quench your thirst for reading? Can you hit a peak in writing quality at which point you don’t need to read anymore? Probably not. With reading, more is almost always better.

I was already what I would consider a voracious reader. But since I implemented this new social media replacement strategy, I am ripping through books. I use Libby to find e-books from my local library, and if I can’t find something I want, Kindle books are relatively inexpensive. Because I’ve increased my book consumption velocity, I’ve been reading wider than I normally would.

Literary fiction, mystery, science-fiction, and yes, of course thrillers. Book club fiction and things a little more academic. I’m consuming in a way that is productive and educational while also being fun.

Being exposed to multiple types of writing from people of all different backgrounds, my own writing gets better. Books challenge me to experiment with my writing. They suggest new ways of bringing characters to life, new ways to present dialogue and life on the page.

As Stephen King once said:

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Book Recommendations

What I’m reading has not changed. I’m still working through the same three books I mentioned last week, but after talking with Ron Clyburn last week (more on that below), I realized there are a lot of books I’ve read in the past that I could recommend here. Some of these books, I’ve read multiple times. Let’s take a look at three very different books.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

If you’ve never read Liz Moore’s work, I highly recommend you change that. The God of the Woods is her most recent novel and it’s an incredible mix of generational trauma, period piece, and mystery.

Not only does Moore make you feel like you’re living in the middle of the 20th century throughout the novel, she also makes the setting so real you can feel it and taste it. The God of the Woods is set between the early 1960s and mid 1970s and follows the disappearance of a camper at a summer camp owned by a wealthy family. It just so happens that the missing camper is the daughter of the family and her brother also went missing 15 years before.

River, Sing Out by James Wade

For the crime fiction lovers, this one is highly recommended. Wade’s River, Sing Out is far more literary than most crime fiction, but that doesn’t slow the plot at all. Wade has a talent for writing action and dialogue within a violent world that draws you in and makes you forget the danger until it’s right there upon you.

The novel follows a young boy living in East Texas with his dead beat father. The boy crosses paths with a teenage girl on the run from dangerous men. Despite the boy’s age and his fear, he refuses to leave the girl’s side as they both navigate the violence around every corner.

Wonder Valley by Ivy Pochoda

Ivy Pochoda is a master story-teller. It’s hard to compare her to anyone else because the way she writes is both immersive and effortless. Surely, it’s not actually effortless, but it feels that way, and that’s damn hard to pull off. Wonder Valley is an acid trip of a story that revolves around a commune in the middle of the California desert.

In Wonder Valley, Pochoda traces the lives of multiple characters from very different circumstances. Two violent criminals (one more violent than the other) on the run, a business man from Los Angeles who becomes entranced by a man running naked on the freeway, a girl who seems to be on the run herself as she finds the commune, and the commune itself. It’s run by a family with the patriarch leading nightly story-telling and communal killing of animals. Every character’s collision is well timed and leads to an explosion of violence and relief.

Person of Interest

Last week, Ron Clyburn—a fellow Substack writer of crime fiction—was kind enough to have me on his podcast. We ended up going for a full hour and talked about everything from books and writing to 1930s immigration and naturalization in New York.

I had so much fun chatting. I hope you’ll give wrong a follow, subscribe to his Substack, and watch/listen to the podcast.

Back To You

I’d love to hear how you read. E-books? Audio? Paperbacks with cracked spines? Brand new hardcovers? How has reading influenced your writing if you’re a writer? How has reading influenced your life if you’re not a writer?

If you missed last week’s read, be sure to read that first. Now, we continue with the conclusion of Uncle Paulie.

Uncle Paulie

“Hey, you know your grandpa was in deeper than us even?” Uncle Paulie ask wanting conversation to break his mind away from the coke.

“What do you mean?” Anson asked.

“My old man rolled with hard dudes. None of the stuff we’re into. He rolled internationally.”

“Like Mexico?” Anson asked.

“Mexico’s international, yeah? Fuck yeah Mexico. He crossed the border every couple weeks.”

Uncle Paulie stared at the white lines on the road ahead. They seemed to begin wiggling side to side like a snake that was always a step ahead of them.

“That’s what got him killed, though,” Uncle Paulie finally said.

“Thought so,” Anson sighed.

“That’s part of why I’m so careful with it all, you know?” Uncle Paulie asked, not looking for a response.

Anson laughed. “You’re careful?”

“Fifteen years out is fucking careful, boy,” he said.

“No, that’s lucky,” Anson shot back.

Pride swelled in Uncle Paulie’s chest and he banged happily on the dashboard, ignoring Anson’s suggestion that it was all luck. “Think what you want, but I built a damn empire. We run a hundred-k every month, and you know how many of us got popped last year?”

Uncle Paulie knew Anson had the answer already, but he didn’t let him reply. “Fucking two!” Uncle Paulie said.

“Counting me, right?” Anson said sarcastically.

A long time ago, Uncle Paulie felt like the weight of everything he was doing would crush him. He’d wake up in the middle of the night covered in sweat. The first time it happened, he thought he pissed the bed it was so wet. Those nights, he’d feel his chest shrinking. He expected it to crush his lungs, his heart. He expected to be found dead, a disgusting pile of smashed bones and organs. The feeling always passed, but it made him wonder too much.

He finally found solace in the sins of others. Anytime he felt guilt or remorse creeping in, he reminded himself there was always someone worse. Eventually, he stopped waking up at night. Eventually, he didn’t have to remind himself of the evils of other people. He became content in what he did. No, he became happy in it again.

“We’ve got a big deal coming up, so what’s it gonna be?” Uncle Paulie asked. “You got enough rope to roll on it?”

Anson nodded, “Yeah, no one’s on me. I just have to check in weekly for the next thirteen months.”

Uncle Paulie laughed. “Fuck, that’s a good deal! You should be happy, kid.” A star-shaped splash of water hit the windshield. “You know when I went in the first time, I begged for a deal. Would’ve taken anything. But you know what they were giving? Shit. They were giving fucking nothing.”

The sky spit two more drops onto the windshield.

“’Bout time,” Uncle Paulie said. “So, this deal. I can’t trust anyone else to lead it, so you’ll run it straight right? None of that righteous, ‘oh we hurt someone,’ or ‘I don’t wanna go back to jail’ shit, right?”

Anson looked Uncle Paulie in the eye, “I might be pissed, but I’m not a bitch. Have I ever fucked you?”

Uncle Paulie pursed his lips and raised his hands in mock defense. “Alright then.”

“Alright,” Anson said.

There wasn’t another drop of rain for the next ten miles. Uncle Paulie and Anson seemed bound to the silence of the car while they waited for the sky to explode. But it never did. Finally, Anson pulled out another cigarette from the glove box, and spoke.

“Details now or later?” Anson asked.

Uncle Paulie shrugged. “Whatever. You can remember it, I’ll run it down now if you want.”

Anson rubbed the bridge of his nose and nodded. It reminded Uncle Paulie of the fight the kid got in when he was sixteen. Anson saw some fucking black kid getting the shit kicked out of him in the street. Was for nothing more than being black, or something. Anson had this sense of duty that served him well as part of Uncle Paulie’s crew. That sense of duty got him into shit where he shouldn’t have been when he was younger, though.

The fight unfolded on the street in front of Uncle Paulie’s house. Anson and a kid six inches taller going at it. Rolling around on the black tar street, punches flying. Neither kid won. They eventually just got tired of beating on each other. Anson walked away with a broken nose. The other kid had to watch his back with one eye for a week straight while waiting for the swelling to subside in his left eye.

Uncle Paulie chuckled to himself. All that shit just for a kid Anson didn’t even know. He hoped Anson didn’t have any of that shit left in him. It’d get him killed one day on some random job.

“You take two of the guys — probably Juan and Joe-Joe — and head down to Abilene. You aren’t going to meet anyone there, but you’ll have some shit to do. Count on that,” Uncle Paulie began.

Anson adjusted himself in the seat, listening as far as Uncle Paulie could tell.

“There’s an old Pizza Hut down there. It’s just a shell now. Boarded up windows, but you’ll know it from that God damn hut-roof they have on all their joints,” Uncle Paulie took both hands and held them up in the shape of a roof. “I’m gonna let you figure out positioning, but I don’t want you going in. You send fucking Joe-Joe for that shit.”

“Any heat to worry about?” Ansons asked.

Uncle Paulie shook his head, “Not from the cops, no. But this here is a bigger deal than we’ve done. Heat will come from elsewhere if it comes.”

“Another crew?”

“Or bigger. But don’t worry about that. Just be prepared. Guns, exit plan. You know the drill.” Uncle Paulie stuck his left arm out the window to feel the warm, wet air. “Is it ever going to fucking dump on us or what?”

“How much are we pulling from the Pizza Hut?”

“Three barrels. You’ll have to unload them into something else though. I fucking told ‘em barrels are too conspicuous, but they insisted the drop be in barrels,” Uncle Paulie said.

Writing a novel is hard. It is for me, at least. Short stories are hard in a different way, but they are sort of like bowling with bumper rails. You know where the edges are and it’s pretty hard to fall off the tracks. Novels have no bumper rails and there are endless ways to land in the gutter.

To help mitigate this, when I have a novel idea I never begin writing it. I might take note of the idea or the character. Sometimes it starts with a single line. Sometimes it starts with a character’s name. Regardless of what sparked the idea, though, I need the idea to become real. I need the character to live inside my head long enough to build relationships with other characters, long enough to grow a life. Like a weed taking over a lawn, I need the story to consume my brain.

Many writers experience writing this way. The characters become real. You can see them and hear them. Your brain, while technically and physiologically in control, takes a back seat and the characters drive. While folding laundry, the characters speak. While in the shower, they act. While working out or jogging or walking, the entire world builds inside your mind, all seemingly without your control.

If I were to start writing my novels the second the inkling of an idea hit, I would lose the opportunity to watch my characters grow. The story would be so much harder to write. It would come out forced.

Stephen King, famously, does not outline his novels. He let’s the characters take the wheel and often doesn’t know where the story will lead until it’s reached its destination. This is how my writing works as well. I wrote last week that for my first mystery novel, I had to do some quasi-outlining because I had no idea how to write a mystery and how to land the clues and proper beats. Still, I didn’t know where the characters would take things. I had no idea what people would do in my story until they did them.

This is only possible if you allow the characters to breathe. To live. Let them hang out in your mind before committing them to the page. Let them be vulnerable and free. As soon as the first words hit the page, the walls start to close in and the freedom is minimized.

For me, at least, writing is hard but living with the characters in my head is easy. If I can do that for as long as possible, I make the process of actually writing that much easier.

New Reads

I picked up a few new books this week, all in different formats.

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper

I’m reading Jordan Harper’s newest thriller on my Kindle. I picked up an old Kindle about a month or so ago and it goes with me everywhere. Maybe I’ll write about how it has largely cured my social media scrolling, but that’s for another post.

This book from Harper, like his others, creates a depressing and sad depiction of Los Angeles. And that’s intentional. Harper wants to strip his settings to the most authentic version of themselves. In Los Angeles, he doesn’t want you to see the tourism-soaked postcard version. He wants you to see the depravity of greed, the destruction of poverty. He wants you to feel every punch and kick, whether metaphorical or physical. And he does an amazing job.

I’m about half-way through, so we’ll see how it turns out.

The Likeness by Tana French

This is now the third book I’ve read/am reading from Tana French. She’s a new favorite for me. I’m listening to this one on audiobook when I workout or am commuting. The Likeness is the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad series.

When you hear series, you probably think it follows a single detective (or partners) across multiple books, but French does things differently. She switches the point of view to a character that has appeared in the series but was not the protagonist in prior books. This being the second book, French follows Cassie Maddux, the former partner of the first book’s protagonist.

This is the first Tana French book I’m listening to, and I appreciate the Irish accent of the narrator. It makes the book feel more authentic and immersive. This is a long one—21 hours in total. So I’ll be listening for a while.

All The Colors Of The Dark by Chris Whitaker

Whitaker’s debut novel, We Begin At The End was amazing. I loved it. I’ve mentioned Whitaker before because he’s a Brit who writes about American small towns better than most Americans. All The Colors Of The Dark is his second novel and landed on many top lists.

This one is a paperback copy sitting on my nightstand. It’ll take me longer to read it because it’s my night reading only at the moment.

What Are You Reading?

I like reading multiple books at once and in different formats. Am I alone in this? Let me know what you’re reading right now and how you prefer to read.

As I read this, I can see myself starting to develop my voice. This isn’t set in Arizona, but is still very much Southwestern noir. I hope you enjoy!

Uncle Paulie

The drive from fucking Amarillo was a beat down. Three hundred and sixty-seven miles of West Texas and New Mexico desert. He lifted his pinky nail to his nose and snorted. Uncle Paulie didn’t let himself get lost in his own supply. He’d grab a taste here and there when needed, but if he ever found himself spiraling into the hole, he’d check himself into some rehab center and clean out. That was the beauty of money. It could buy you what the junkies only wished they could have. Control.

Uncle Paulie checked the gas gauge. The ’67 El Camino was sitting at three-quarters of a tank. He figured the rumbling engine was sucking down a gallon every six miles. This trip was going to cost him a fortune. He’d remind Anson of that as soon as he picked him up.

Anson Belmont was lucky to have landed at Cibola instead of some other federal prison. Uncle Paulie wasn’t sure how Anson’s attorney had swung the deal, but he was glad. No matter how long the stretch, he needed Anson back in one piece.

With spotty sunshine blazing trails of light along Interstate 40, Uncle Paulie scanned the side of the road. Anson would be walking east, but Uncle Paulie was driving west. He’d have to look across the eastbound lanes and hope to spot Anson on the access road. He didn’t figure the boy would be walking along the highway.

He pulled the black cowboy hat down low across his brow as he searched. He grew up as far from the cowboy life as you could get in Texas. He was born in Fort Worth and raised in Plano. He was a city boy, but when he went into business for himself and moved down around Amarillo, he needed a persona. The black cowboy hat worked.

It was six in the morning, and the rising sun behind him was a welcome relief from the deepness of the dark he had driven through to that point. But the fucking clouds kept snuffing out the sun every few minutes. He never did understand why the prisons let inmates out at all odd hours. A little consistency would be appreciated. Or at very least, they could let folks out in the afternoon. Instead, Uncle Paulie had been driving for five hours so that he could catch Anson on the side of the road before he had to walk too far.

Brownish-green sagebrush flew past either side of the highway. The private land beyond Interstate 40 was marked by barbed wire and not much else. Open fields of dry, dead desert. Just beyond a rotted billboard, Uncle Paulie spotted someone walking the access road. It had to be Anson.

He checked his mirrors. No cops. He slowed the El Camino down and turned into the dirt and brush of the median. Uncle Paulie pulled back onto Interstate 40 eastbound just as the sun ducked back behind the gray sky.

He knew Anson had seen him, but he blared the horn anyway as he pulled to the shoulder. Anson had to climb an embankment made of reds and browns and yellows. Uncle Paulie leaned over and opened the passenger door as Anson made it to the car.

“Couldn’t pick me up at Cibola?” Anson asked, sliding in and pulling on his seatbelt.

Uncle Paulie wanted to believe he saw some resemblance, but Anson looked more like his pops than his mom. To the rest of the crew, Uncle Paulie was just Uncle P. It was a name, something to take a little bit of the stress out of the job. To Anson, it was blood. It was Uncle Paulie to him and him alone.

“Shit man, you know I don’t do well around joints like that. Jails or prisons or whatever the fuck you wanna call them. Them and police stations.” Uncle Paulie snapped his fingers, “Oh, and courthouses.”

He kicked the El Camino into gear while staring at Anson’s profile. He’d yet to turn and make eye contact with Uncle Paulie. Even without seeing the eyes, he knew Anson had changed. It’s hard not to once you go inside. Anson’s hair was shorter, but still the same color dirty blonde. His jawline looked crisper, more defined. Uncle Paulie saw Anson’s shoulder muscles stretched and sculpted beneath the thin t-shirt he was wearing. Six months of lifting in the yard.

“Told you to keep your head down, nose clean, you’d be out in way less time than the sentence, right? Was I right or what?” Uncle Paulie asked.

Anson nodded, staring at the empty stretch of black asphalt ahead of them. The clouds drifted together to form a solid slate wall in the sky. The sun did its best to light the morning, but the darkness hung around.

“Hell of a lot better than two years, yeah?” Uncle Paulie asked, begging for some conversation.

Anson looked at the dash, “You still ain’t got A.C. in this thing?”

“A.C.? Fuck that. You ain’t some prissy movie star, are you? Our crew don’t need luxuries. I know I don’t, at least.”

Anson rolled down his window letting the forceful wind of highway speed air break through the car.

“Besides, I hollowed out the condenser in this thing,” Uncle Paulie continued.

Anson looked at Uncle Paulie for the first time. “Why?” he asked.

Uncle Paulie laughed. “Why? Boy, you forget the whole operation while you were inside?”

Anson shook his head and returned his stare to the road ahead. Jagged brown rock hills rose from the ground to either side of the highway. In the distance, below threatening skies, a purple mountainside taunted them and reminded them of the long drive ahead.

“I’m ever in a pinch, right? I can run some in the condenser. The only way it’ll be found is if cops have a goddamn drug-sniffing dog,” Uncle Paulie said.

“Running your own dope now?” Anson asked.

“Come on, Annie,” Uncle Paulie started, watching for the expected agitation in Anson’s face at the nickname he hated. “I do what I gotta do.”

“Like get your nephew locked up, right?” Anson asked.

Uncle Paulie hated ungratefulness more than anything. Guys in his crew made good money, but they had to take risks. Blood or not, Anson didn’t get to be pissed for getting caught.

“What’re you bitching about?” he started. “You got popped for the first time at 30. I did six different stints before I turned 25. Now, I’ve been free and clear for fifteen years running.”

Uncle Paulie slapped Anson on the arm and tried to lighten the mood. This was no time to start letting the tempers flare. “You get popped sometimes, but as you learn, you get better. You’ll ride it out after this. I’m sure.”

As they rumbled on toward Albuquerque, the dark skies split ever so slightly just above the horizon. The sun streaking across the break in the clouds reminded Uncle Paulie of the first burst of paint from a sprayer on the stripped panel of a hot car. That’s where he got his start when he first got to Amarillo.

It wasn’t always drugs. Uncle Paulie started making a name for himself when his crew got good at flipping stolen cars. Painted up nice, numbers wiped, the cars sold quick in the classifieds. If they couldn’t sell a car, they could sell the parts. Problem was, no matter how hard they tried, some cars could be traced. It was too risky.

Beyond the risk, Uncle Paulie made the jump from cars to drugs for the simple fact that the money was better in drugs. Less work, more money. It was an easy decision.

“How’s Ma?” Anson asked while scraping at a piece of vinyl on the door.

“I ain’t her babysitter,” Uncle Paulie replied.

Anson stared over, his mouth tight. “She’s your sister, man. You should’ve been checking on her while I was away.”

Crackling of electricity popped at the front of Uncle Paulie’s head. He didn’t want it to, but the temper always flared just after he felt that electric feeling in his head and his blood starting to heat. It wasn’t a great feeling, but it helped him get to where he was.

When Uncle Paulie turned thirteen, just dipping his toes into the pool of adolescent angst, he discovered how frightened people were of his temper. The anger he was capable of, the destruction he could wreak in a single fit of rage, was enough to force most people to step aside or give him what he wanted. He used this as he stumbled through the awkward years of high school. He used it when he first started running with a low-level crew run by Smitty Barnes outside Amarillo. He used it when he took every last one of Smitty’s guys and made them part of his own crew.

“I took care of her my whole damn life! Older sisters are supposed to take care of their younger brothers, but fuck no. Ten years older than me, and I still have to babysit her?” Uncle Paulie’s voice rose above the blast of wind jumping between the two open windows.

“You take care of her? You?” Anson started, his voice never rising. Uncle Paulie respected his even head, but he knew Anson lacked the rage that would truly make him great. “Fuck that. I took care of her. Were you there when she was flopping around like a fish out of water, high off your damn supply? Were you there when she was locked in her bedroom closet, a .357 to her fucking temple?”

Maybe it was just because they were family, but Anson was the one person who never bowed to Uncle Paulie’s temper. It should have made him angrier, but Anson’s defiance always impressed him. Eventually, the rage would burn itself out, no harm, no foul. He couldn’t say the same for other people who ignored the temper.

“No, I wasn’t there for that shit, kid,” Uncle Paulie felt like calling Anson ‘kid’ or ‘boy’ would help put some distance between their ages. Most people thought it was fucked up enough that they were only ten years apart, so he’d try anything to make that gap feel larger.

The next sixty miles blew by in silence. The clouds chased the El Camino along the Interstate 40 corridor, never opening up and dumping on them. Uncle Paulie figured the sky would wait until they hit Texas. It wasn’t West Texas unless there was the threat of a spring tornado.

His voice broke the silence like the thunder that the clouds just couldn’t push out. “So what’re the terms? Can you start working or you looking at too much heat?” Uncle Paulie asked.

Anson shook his head, “Work.”

“Yeah, fuckin’ work. Making money for you and for me,” Uncle Paulie said, feeling his temper rising again.

“Work with you’s a fucking trap,” Anson said. “You even think about her?”

The desert landscape slowly gave way to signs of civilization ahead. Albuquerque was rising up in front of them. Uncle Paulie figured they’d have to stop for gas, but he wanted to push it as long as he could. Maybe they’d make it to the eastern outskirts.

“No. Bottom line, shit happens,” he said.

Anson snorted. “Yeah, shit to her, shit to me.”

Uncle Paulie thought about the sawed-off shotgun beneath his seat. Anyone else, it’d be over. He looked at Anson. Thirty years old, single, and free. What the fuck else did he want? Uncle Paulie had given the kid everything. A job and money to burn. All he asked for in return was a little respect.

“Pushing your luck here, Annie.”

Laceless boots flew up to the dash. Uncle Paulie knew Anson was testing him with feet up on the El Camino. He let it slide. Getting deep in this shit while riding in the car wasn’t part of his plan. He and Anson always got along fine. They respected each other’s work, maybe even loved each other like normal uncles and nephews do. But the girl fucked everything up.

Part II coming next week…

The mystery thriller where the mystery is the element that propels forward the thrill of the novel, and that thrill can be danger or violence or a ticking clock. It can be a lot of different things, but the thrill of the thriller is an accelerant and it quickens the pace of the book.

Then there’s the psychological mystery—often still referred to as a psychological thriller, but I think they are different. Here, the mystery is deep and it plays on the characters’ psychological tendencies, their flaws, their traits. It’s not always as fast-paced as a true thriller, but it’s still propulsive.

Noir mystery is not generally a term you’ll find in the bookstores, but I think it’s an apt description of mystery novels that take are told from the perspective of criminals or victims. When people think of noir, they often think of private detectives, but noir is broader than its cousin Roman noir which focuses more on detectives and is more hard-boiled.

Regardless of the type of mystery novel, it’s hard to write one. At least for me.

My First Mystery Novel

I’m currently querying agents with my mystery novel. It’s my first mystery, and it was incredibly hard to write. Harder than anything else I’ve ever written. First, let me give you the two-line pitch, and then I’ll explain why it was so hard to write.

Returning home to care for her dying mother, Sara Campbell falls into the very obsession that destroyed her father: solving the 1981 cold case of a dead girl found in the desert. But as her viral 2001 blog uncovers a dark web of small-town secrets, Sara must break a generational cycle of vengeance before the truth claims another life.

This novel was inspired by two things:

1. My grandfather, who was a real police sketch artist and drew the picture of an unidentified girl—a case that was eventually solved by an early internet sleuth who went on to start the Doe Network

2. A short story I wrote during my MFA

The short story was not a mystery, but I knew the novel had to be. But I’d never written a mystery novel despite reading so many of them. So, as I wrote, I listened to mystery novel audio books and I re-read some of the paperbacks I had loved in the past. Still, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

Finally, it dawned on me that I could not write this book the way I had written others. I’m what the kids call a pantser. I don’t have outlines for my books. I just write and hope the characters guide me. This was impossible to pull off when writing a mystery. I needed to know the specific beats, the clues, the threats, when they would land. All of that had to be planned up front.

So I outlined for the first time ever and it mostly worked. It helped me get a first draft done. And then, I had to refine the story, refine the mystery. I still laugh at this page in my notebook from the outline.

Ignore the terrible handwriting. That sentiment encapsulates my headspace as I was writing the first draft and outlining it. It was hard. Harder than anything I’ve ever written.

But, you know what? I loved it. I want to write another mystery. I want to get better at it. We’ll see what happens with this book, but I’m already sketching out the plans for my next novel. And you better believe there will be a mystery element to it.

Oh, and if I had to categorize my story, I’d put it in the psychological thriller bucket.

Now, let’s take a look at some authors who have done mystery well in each of the categories I listed earlier.

The Professionals

These authors are just a few contemporary picks I came up with and I have personally read that I believe do mystery well in each of the categories I mentioned.

Mystery Thriller

Dennis Lehane is one of my favorite authors. I’ve mentioned him before. He showed me what I was allowed to do in writing and unlocked so much. Turns out, he’s a pretty damn good mystery writer. His original Kenzie and Gennaro series would be considered Roman noir, not necessarily noir. But I put those books in the Mystery Thriller category because they are truly thrillers.

Both Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are constantly on the run, getting shot at, shooting at other people, and generally just in some really bad situations. It’s fun and fast-paced. And the thriller portions of the books do not minimize the mystery elements.

Now, we should contrast that with another category. Dennis Lehane does Noir Mystery as well as anyone. Look no further than Mystic River. It’s an incredible example, and it show his range.

Psychological Mystery

There are so many examples, it’s hard to pick just one. The knee-jerk reaction would be to list someone like Gillian Flynn. Gone Girl is the preeminent example of psychological thriller (and also a myster), but I wanted to pick someone slightly less mainstream.

Tana French is an Irish author, and she very much is mainstream. She’s incredibly successful, but I’d bet many people who have read Flynn have not read French. Pick any of French’s novels and you’ll find wonderful psychological elements that make the story work. In fact, without the deep psychological angles, her novels probably fall flat. Her Dublin Murder Squad books all have flawed and complex characters grappling with their psychological demons, but it’s a newer standalone novel I want to focus on.

The Witch Elm is a perfect example of a psychological mystery. I wouldn’t consider it a thriller at all. It’s a mystery through and through. It’s relatively slow paced, and that’s intentional. French wants you to live inside the protagonist’s head and understand his trauma and his ego. Specifically, a traumatic event at the beginning of the novel shapes everything this character does. It paints the entire mystery differently than if this character had not gone through the ordeal he does. It’s a wonderful novel.

Noir Mystery

Often books in this category are labeled as crime books. And what is this Substack if not a crime fiction blog, so it’s fitting. However, most crime novels have mystery elements. Not all, but most. I want to highlight someone who has done noir mystery as good as anyone.

Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is a brutal, pessimistic (but probably accurate) portrayal of Los Angeles. The characters are often bad people. They don’t just operate in the moral gray zone, they step entirely across the line. But his characters are rich and real. You can see them and hear them like they are in the room with you.

And then there’s the mystery at the center of the novel. It fuels everything that happens and it is what makes you willing to live with these characters. That and the writing is so damn good.

Back To You

What are some of your favorite sub-genres of mystery? Who are your favorite authors and favorite books? Mystery is such a fun genre, despite how difficult it is to write.

If you didn’t read Part I last week, stop what you’re doing and go read it. This week, we conclude Carli’s adventure near the border.

Coyote

After leaving the group in the guest house, locking them in as she left, Carli backed the Nissan up the driveway toward the main house. The conveyor belt never stopped.

The main house wasn’t much better than the guest house. The drywall had holes throughout—either from immigrants trying to punch their way out or an enforcer who just didn’t have the patience to watch another woman or child cry. As best Carli could tell, the benefit of being moved into the main house was the bucket. Like the guest house, there wasn’t any running water, but there was a five-gallon bucket in the living room.

Leopoldo Ruiz ran the house. He was also second-in-command of the crew that worked with the cartel to smuggle people across the border. Carli considered herself more of an independent contractor, but she guessed Leo was technically her boss.

She walked past the empty living room. Leo didn’t keep anyone in there anymore. Too much shit to clean up. Too big a space. He stuffed them all in the back two spare bedrooms. Carli made her way down the hall past the kitchen, toward the bedrooms.

When she found him in one of the rooms, Leo was running his fingers through a teenage girl’s hair. The girl, like the rest of those in the room, was clad in just her underwear. A sweat-stained pair of panties and a tattered bra.

The girl closed her eyes and turned her head as Leo whispered in her ear. Everyone else in the room pretended not to notice.

“Having fun?” Carli asked, standing in the doorway.

Leo jerked his head away from the girl and looked at Carli. “Si, siempre.”

“Esa es tu novia?” Carli said.

Leo pushed the girl away, and she huddled near the rest of the group. “Why you got to fuck up my mojo, Carli?” He stood and patted her on the shoulder as he passed by into the hallway.

Carli followed him into the living room. “They ready?”

“Ready as they will be,” Leo said. “As if my hospitality wasn’t good enough for them.” He spit on the floor, a mixture of tobacco and saliva that joined the other stains on the bare concrete.

“Send them out then.”

***

Carli locked the two dog kennels in the bed of the Nissan. She slid the third one—the one with the dogs—back toward the tailgate, concealing her load as much as possible. The dogs barked until Carli slammed her fist down on top of the kennel. She looked into the two kennels full of people and did a quick count.

Missing one.

“Fucking Leo,” she muttered, looking back at the main house.

Her boots clicked against the cracked cement driveway on her way back into the house. She scanned the property one more time before entering. No tracks nearby. No movement. Just empty, brown, dusty desert. The neighbors weren’t much of a problem because of the distance, but she didn’t want some kids on four-wheelers romping through here and catching a glimpse of something they shouldn’t see.

Inside the house, Carli yelled for Leo. He didn’t respond. She shook her head as she went down the hallway. He wasn’t in either of the two spare bedrooms, so she stepped into the master. Leo was straddling the teenage girl. Her bra was flipped up near her throat, and Leo was staring at her breasts. He touched her stomach. Then her cheek. The girl squirmed, but she didn’t scream.

“Jesus Christ, Leo,” Carli said. “I need a full load.”

Leo laughed. “You don’t need shit.”

“She paid, right?”

“Sure. Her family wired the money a couple days ago.” Leo squeezed the girl’s cheeks until she cried out, kissed her on the lips. “But fucking look at her. Qué bonita.”

Carli’s face felt hot. Her hand began to shake. “I need her. I’ve got to make the final drop.”

Leo shook his head. “You’re not getting it. This one’s worth more. More than what her family already paid. The way I see it, I’ve got two options that’ll make us some extra cash. We rent her out—you know these old white fucks around here will pay for her. Or, we ransom her. Tell her family she’s going to be fucked six ways from Sunday if they don’t pay extra. A beauty tax. What d’ya think?”

She watched Leo licking the girl’s ear and wondered how she’d been able to put up with this shit for so long. It wasn’t just Leo, and it wasn’t just the girl. Carli was a professional. She wanted things done right and on time. Leo fucking this girl was not part of the plan.

Last week, I promised to talk about a few authors who write about specific places so well you’d think they were from those places even though they’re not. We’ll cover that today as well as talk about short stories and how I think about publishing them (just had a new short story published by a literary journal!).

Writing Place Beyond Your Own Backyard

Last week, I talked about why I write about the desert. I talked about how the desert is a character and how my history with the desert makes it a viable and engaging setting for my stories. But I also mentioned how some authors are so good at writing about places that they don’t even need to be from the places about which they write to be good at it.

Here are a few examples.

Chris Whitaker

Whitaker is a British author, but he sets his stories in the United States, usually in small towns. In his debut novel, We Begin At The End, Whitaker sets most of the novel in a fictional coastal town in California called Cape Haven. He does such a great job building the setting and places the characters perfectly in the setting that you’d assume he was from a small town along the beach. Instead, he was born and raised in London.

If you haven’t read Whitaker’s writing, I highly recommend it. In addition to being great at setting, he’s a master of character development.

Phillipp Meyer

While Meyer isn’t as far removed from the settings of his novels as Whitaker, he still manages to write about place in a way that makes you feel like he must be intimately familiar with the cities and towns in which he sets his stories. Meyer was born and raised outside of Baltimore, Maryland. So, it’s not a stretch for him to be able to set his first novel, American Rust, in Pennsylvania. But he does it so well that it feels like Meyer must have lived in the old steel towns in Pennsylvania, must have felt the depression that residents of those towns felt as manufacturing dried up and people were left without jobs.

The novel that is far more of a stretch from Meyer’s own home is The Son. The novel is a multi-generational tale set in Texas during the early 20th century. He immerses the reader in the feeling of the time—American exceptionalism, Texas pride, racism, war, violence. It feels like Texas. It tastes like Texas as you read. All from someone whose closest ties to Texas was a brief stint to get his MFA at the University of Texas. It’s incredibly done, as proven by the novel being the runner-up for the Pulitzer in 2014.

Jeanine Cummins

This one may stir some emotions from corners of the literary world. Jeanine Cummins wrote American Dirt, which I thought was a wonderful, tense book. It’s also a book about Mexican migrants battling violence and law to escape Mexico. It’s a book that generated quite a bit of controversy because of Cummins’ heritage. Cummins was born in Spain and has Puerto Rican heritage, but right before American Dirt was released, a string criticism accused her of cultural appropriation for writing about a Mexican family escaping to America. Some of the critics were well-known authors of color and have valid lived experience to join the debate.

That said, I don’t think the criticism was fair, and I’m including her on this list because of how well she portrayed Mexico and the far southwest generally. Cummins did not live in or grow up in Mexico, but she was able to capture the beauty and the ugliness of the country through her writing.

A Place For My Stories

When I was going through my MFA program, I published short stories with literary magazines frequently. I learned to press through rejection and even championed the art of being rejected as a mechanism for forcing yourself to get your writing out there. However, since 2017, I had not had anything published and I didn’t really try.

Part of this was because of life. Work overtook me and writing took a back seat. Part of this was because what little writing I did was focused on novels. Regardless, I started writing short stories again a little more than a year ago. Some of those short stories are building into a world that I think might be my next novel. Others are just sitting in a folder, never to see the light of day.

But for some, I now have two paths to publish them. I can publish them here or I can try to get them published in literary journals. You’ve seen some of my stories that I’ve published here. They are squarely in the crime fiction bucket, I think. Some of my other stories lean a little more literary. For those, I send them to the journals and hope for the best.

Well, for the first time since 2017, I had a story accepted for publication and it’s now live. The journal is called Brian’s Bookcase and it’s a special kind of literary journal. It’s an ode to the founder’s brother and it supports mental health, which is near and dear to me. I’m so excited to have a piece accepted and published in this journal. And it’s a fitting piece. The story is about two siblings grappling with the fallout from their parents’ choices. Left to fend for themselves, never properly brought up, they each search for ways to drown the demons of their past. One chooses drugs, and the other chooses adrenaline rushes.

Anyway, if you think that sounds cool, you can read it here.

Over to You

How much does an author’s background matter to you when they’re building a setting? Do you prefer local insiders, or do you think an outsider’s eye brings something unique to the page?

Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts! And if you enjoyed today’s post, hit that button below to subscribe.

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This week’s short story will come to you in two parts. This one is a story I published a long time ago in a journal that I’m not sure still exists.

Enjoy the desert, the heat, and the quick violence of this story that turns 10 years old later this year.

Coyote

She crossed northwest of Sonoyta, just south of Ajo, in the Organ Pipe National Monument. Carli Echeverria was on the first leg of what would be a two-leg journey. After she made this drop, she’d make another run further north. To Tucson or Phoenix or Gila Bend.

She looked over her shoulder, the rear window of the Nissan pickup pressed right up against her seat. The truck’s bed was just long enough for three small dog kennels. The first kennel, nearest the tailgate, held two dogs. The two kennels behind it were stuffed with blankets.

Behind those blankets were people.

Carli tried to fit five or six people in the two kennels with each load. Today, she had seven thanks to a couple of children making the run.

After she picked the group up at a gas station in Sonoyta, they walked west toward the crossing point. The Nissan was tucked behind a collection of organ pipe that rose ten feet into the blue, desert sky. In her experience, getting across the border was the easy part. Once there, she needed help. She relied on an old C.B. radio in the Nissan’s cab. If a lookout spotted Border Patrol, Carli would know. And she would adjust.

They were on Highway 86 heading toward Three Points when Carli passed the spotter tower. Two weeks ago, the radio crackled just before she came across that same tower. The lookout told her to hook a left and head further north down the dirt roads. A temporary checkpoint had been set up that day, and if not for the lookout, Carli would have been sent to secondary inspection. She would have been forced to sit while a dog sniffed up and down her truck, and they would have found her load.

Not today. The highway was empty, quiet.

Today, I want to talk about the gravity of setting and subject. There is no universal formula, but for me, the desert and the crime were inevitable.

The Desert

I’ve written before about place. The setting of a story is often as important as the characters, and writing about that place requires an incredible amount of discipline and care. It's much too easy to fall victim to tropes when writing about a certain region. Fortunately for me, I grew up in Southern Arizona. I know the region like the back of my hand. I know its people and its problems. I know the heat, and I know the crime.

But why do I focus on the desert instead of somewhere like Los Angeles or Chicago or New York? It’s for the same reason authors such as David Joy, Wiley Cash, and Michael Farris Smith set their stories in places such as the Appalachian Mountains, North Carolina, and Mississippi. They all lived in those places. They lived the lives of their characters or they lived lives that ran parallel to their characters. That’s true for me as well.

I wasn’t born in the desert, but I spent most of my life there. My father finished his stint in the Air Force in Tucson, AZ. That’s how we were introduced to the Sonoran Desert. And but for a brief stint in California, I spent the next 25+ years of my life in Tucson.

And yet, the funny thing is I had no desire to write about the southwest when I first started writing. I thought I had to write stories set in the big cities. When I applied for my MFA program, I sent in a half-baked novel set in Washington, D.C. It had never occurred to me that I could write stories set in the place I grew up even if I didn’t see many (or any) other writers writing about Pima County, Arizona. It took reading writers like the ones I mentioned above plus countless others to realize my greatest strength as a writer was my intimacy with the desert.

That’s why you’ll find my stories set in Arizona. Maybe someday I’ll write something set somewhere else, but for now, I’m comfortable exactly where I am.

The Crime

So, what about crime fiction? Why do I focus my time there? Why not romance or fantasy or sci-fi? Why not cozy mysteries or horror? I think there are a variety of answers to this, but if I had to boil it down to three main reasons I write about crime, they’d be:

1. Dennis Lehane

2. Economics

3. Law enforcement relationships

Let’s take these one-by-one.

Dennis Lehane

Lehane was the first author I read who gave me permission to write about violence. To write about characters who were flawed and cursed and did horrible things for good reasons and did good things for bad reasons. His writing opened my eyes to the world of crime fiction.

If I had to pick a single author who has influenced my writing the most, it’d be him. Even his regional focus in Boston can be seen in the echoes of my stories set in Arizona. While Boston is a big city by my standards, Lehane wrote about Boston neighborhoods, tight-knit communities, regional specificities. Without Lehane I wouldn’t have discovered Daniel Woodrell or Eli Cranor or Jess Lourey. I wouldn’t have discovered any of the authors who write about home.

Economics

Tucson, Arizona is a poor city. It’s not a rust belt city impacted by the loss of factories, but its poverty rate sits significantly higher than the national average. It’s a college town with a few key employers, and that means great jobs are hard to find.

There’s a strong correlation between poverty and crime, and I grew up living in this correlation. I knew people who had to steal to get by. I knew people who were so bogged down by financial pain that they lashed out, did things they never would have done otherwise. I was generally pretty fortunate, but I was frequently around crime as I grew up.

Law enforcement relationships

My father was in law enforcement. My grandfather (on my mom’s side) was in law enforcement. In fact, my grandfather wasn’t just a police officer, he was a police sketch artist. His home was filled with sketches of missing persons, bank robbers, and the occasional murder victim. Beyond my family, many of my friends from high school went into law enforcement (remember, not many job opportunities in Tucson).

In addition to being around crime as I grew up, I was also around the police a lot. It’s through that balance that I could see the impact of crime in the city from both sides. Those law enforcement connections helped shape the eventual direction of my writing.

Connecting The Dots

I think I write about crime because of where I grew up. I write about the desert because of where I grew up. It just took me a while to realize I was allowed to do that. My younger self stumbled through writing that was not true to me as a person. Fortunately, I grew out of that and discovered authors (like Lehane) who gave me permission to write the way I do now.

Next week, I will give some examples of authors who are not from a place but write about that place, perhaps, better than locals would.

What about you? Are there specific regions, settings, or hometown authors you find yourself drawn to as a reader? Let me know in the comments.

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When I decided to offer up serialized or full length short stories on Fridays, I decided to go looking through my archives. I have the rights to all the stories published in my debut collection, Leaving Arizona, and you’ll surely see some stuff from there. But I wanted to go back and find writing that hadn’t made it into the book, writing that hadn’t been published.

As I was looking back through my writing, I realized how incredible it was the amount of fiction I’ve been able to produce over the years. So much of it never seeing the light of day. A lot of it will remain that way. But today, I’m pulling something out of the dark, dusty drawer. This is a flash fiction crime story I wrote a few years ago. Flash fiction is fun because it’s the closest prose writers can get to poetry. You have such limited space to tell your story. To evoke emotion. To leave a mark. Hope this one leaves a mark on you.

Ride

The first time, I’d been too short to reach the pedals. With the sun cut in half by the ridgeline in the distance, half-light slicing across my pupils, I’d slid my butt all the way to the end of the seat, toes just touching the gas, and lurched out of the carport and down the dirt road leading south.

The second time was freshman year. Two hours after Amé broke up with me, an hour after I’d smoked my father’s last Black and Mild. By that time, I could reach the pedals just fine. Same truck, same seat. But I could fly then. Flew all the way past the Boneyard—the old skeletons of planes cackling across the dust.

The third time shouldn’t have happened. A game of basketball in the packed dirt out behind the house. My father calling me for traveling. Me calling him a fucking liar. The words dropped from both our lips until he was back inside, until he wasn’t on my side. Until I found his keys and was halfway to my best friend’s house, shoulders shaking from the tears and the guilt and the stupidity.

Who is this for?

Readers. Especially readers who love mysteries and thrillers and crime/noir. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, so the safe bet is to write for other authors. I don’t want to make the safe bet. I want to write for readers.

And if you’re an author, hopefully you’re a reader too.

What to Expect Here

I write crime and noir fiction set against the stark, unforgiving backdrop of the Sonoran Desert. My debut collection of short fiction is exactly that. It’s brutal and unforgiving but beautiful and twisted. If you like thrillers and crime/noir fiction, this place is for you.

Twice a week, you’ll get:

• Behind-the-Scenes & Craft Dispatches: Every Tuesday, get notes from the writing desk, research deep-dives, and book recommendations.

• Original Short Stories & Serialized Fiction: Every Friday, get, atmospheric tales delivered straight to your inbox.

Grand Re-Opening Bonus

It’s not a Friday, so I shouldn’t be sharing any of my fiction, but I’ve changed things around in a way that every new subscriber gets one of my previously unpublished short stories delivered to them. And I want to tell you about that story.

Here’s a look inside The Fence:

To read the rest, download the short story by subscribing (it’ll be sent to your email). If you’re already subscribed, I have very cleverly placed the download link below the subscriber only section below.

Welcome to the Desert Dispatch! Let’s read some dark crime fiction together.

In 2017, I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing. Along with that came my thesis project which I was sure would be the novel that would get me and agent and would kick off my professional writing career. As part of the thesis submission, my novel had to be read by three professors, all of whom had been published professionally. All of whom had literary agents. Aside from a few minor suggestions—which I promptly addressed—the reviews were glowing.

I was ready.

I had to be. I had workshopped a query letter, I had a polished novel. It was time to start firing away to agents. When I began that process, I had no idea what to expect. The cohort I was a part of had a bit of exposure because one of the adjunct professors in the program was not only an author but a literary agent. It would be a conflict of interest to query him, but he did provide insights into the process. But something I’ve learned since then is that agents are not the best people to provide these insights. It’s other authors and your own earned experience.

And did I ever earn my experience.

I didn’t connect with other authors who were querying. Others in my MFA program weren’t there yet. So, I experienced this alone and without an understanding of what to expect. Sure, I expected rejection. I had grown used to that while submitting short stories to journals. But the rejection that comes along with querying agents somehow feels more final, more painful. Querying an agent is the first step in a multi-step process to getting a book traditionally published. Failing, as I’d come to label it, at the first step was brutal.

I also didn’t use any tools. I was so naive and lost. I manually searched for agents by looking through books I liked, Googling who the authors’ agents were, and compiling a list in a spreadsheet. Even in 2017, this was archaic. But I did it, and I built up a list of 20 agents to query. Knowing what I know now, I realize that was a tiny pool.

But here’s what made things worse. I didn’t even query all 20 agents. I queried—wait for it—seven.

Now, I’ve written about tenacity and how when you have creative optionality, tenacity is especially hard, so that contributed to this. But the other thing that contributed to it was how alone I was in this process. It was the first time I’d done anything like it, and every rejection felt like a door slammed in my face. I hadn’t learned from others, I hadn’t learned from my own experience.

When things got tough, I didn’t just give up because they were tough. I pulled back from querying because I didn’t know better. I was also going through a growth stage in my tech career and learning to be creative with code. So I rationalized to myself that I was fulfilling my creativity that way.

Writing never left me. Or, I never left writing. I just took a six year hiatus from the business side of writing. In late 2023, I dusted off a novel I had written right after I finished my MFA program. By then, I think it had been sitting in a metaphorical drawer for four years. Let me tell you, if you want space from your novel, give it four years. Just kidding, don’t do that. That’s way too long.

This space though gave me a truly fresh pair of eyes to read the manuscript and analyze it. It was good. Much better than the novel I had queried in 2017. I spent a year rewriting, editing, finding beta readers, reading out loud, printing, reading again, and editing again before I felt like it was ready. I also learned how to find community. I found other writers on Threads. I followed Book Threads and Author Threads and Writer Threads. As I found myself closer to querying again, I followed the QueryTrenches Threads. I read hundreds of submissions on Query Shark. I spent hours on Reddit’s PubTibs subreddit. I listened to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing constantly.

And when the new year rolled around, I felt ready to query. This time, I was mentally prepared. I had knowledge and a community and reasonable expectations. I knew of the tools and I knew how to research agents better. And I treated my query process like an experiment.

I knew that if I was not getting a bite on my query letter, I should consider two main things:

1. If the agents were the right agents for my book

2. If my query letter was doing its job

Through these early experiments, I refined my query letter and I got better about selecting agents. I’ll have to write an entirely separate post about the process I finally landed on for finding agents to query, but through all that trial and error, I found a group of agents that I felt were perfect. I, of course, had my favorite. I waited to query that top choice just in case there were any other tweaks I wanted to make. But I felt as prepared as I could possibly be.

Throughout this entire process, I received rejections. Plenty of them. On some days, I felt that old pain in my gut that told me I wasn’t good enough. Thankfully my wife was always there to remind me that I was. But in the round of queries where I felt like I had best refined the list of agents to match my book’s content, something changed.

I received an immediate request for a full manuscript from one agent. Then another. With this confidence, I queried my top choice, and received a full request from that agent as well. Within a couple of days, my top choice agent wanted to have The Call.

Two weeks ago, he offered me representation, sent me a template contract, and told me to take the time I needed to notify other agents and give them a chance to respond.

Since then, I’ve accepted and am officially an agented author! I’ll write more about this soon, but I am happy to be able to say the tenacity paid off. The experience paid off.

But I couldn’t have done it without finding the resources I did, finding the community I did, and finding the tools I did. I’ll link to as much as I can below, but if you’re querying, keep at it. It’s hard, and nothing is guaranteed. And remember, if it doesn’t work out, you can ALWAYS write another book.

Resources

Author Threads

Book Threads

Writing Threads

Query Trenches

QueryTracker

QueryShark

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

I will write a few sentences and then I’m drifting. It’s not quite like falling asleep at the wheel. It’s more like floating in an ocean. One minute you’re in one spot, the next minute, you’re a hundred yards away. But you remember how to get back, and you might have found something new along the way.

I’ve set the audacious (for me) goal of ten pages per day on this first draft. So far, I’ve been able to hit it. But if this were Strava and someone were mapping the run of how I finish a block of ten pages, it might look like this:

I didn’t have this same wandering problem (opportunity?) with my previous novel. That novel came to me pretty well formed, and there wasn’t anything in the way of mystery. That novel was a escape-the-bad-guy type thriller where I could run straight ahead from point A to point B. With this new novel, I generally don’t know where I’m going.

I will write a paragraph and then I’ll realize I’m not quite sure where to take it. So, my hands travel from the keyboard to the mouse. The mouse clicks away from my writing window. I find myself reading articles, scrolling Threads, anything but writing. And then, just as quickly, I find myself back on the page and I’m writing again. It’s half conscious, half sub-conscious.

Taking walks and working out work equally well for this, but I generally can only do each of those things once per day, not every thirty minutes.

My wandering thus far has propelled me forward. As long as I always wander back, I think it’s fine.

A common approach to editing is to read your work out loud. Many people believe this is one of the most critical steps in the editing process because you will hear awkward sentences, repetitions, grammatical mistakes, and more easier than if you were reading in your head. However, I’ve found a major flaw in this approach—at least a major flaw for me, personally.

When I read anything I’m familiar with, whether it’s out loud or in my head, I tend to read what I meant, not what is on the page. So, when reading out loud, I might catch a few issues, but more often than not, I will end up reading my story the way I meant for it to sound and I will even insert words or fix grammar without realizing it as I read. Because of this, reading out loud hasn’t been as helpful for me as I think it should be.

Luckily, while browsing Threads, I found several posts from authors who recommended using Microsoft Word’s read-out-loud feature. This feature uses simple AI to read the words on the page. The problem is that the AI is so simple that its reading is robotic. When the reading is robotic, you can’t possibly pick up on whether your writing sounds awkward or if the robot reading it just sounds awkward. I liked the idea of someone else reading my work to me though. I had a suspicion that it would allow me to pick out issues much easier than if I read it myself.

So, I started looking for better text-to-speech tools. Unlike the modern generative AI craze, text-to-speech is one of the older uses of AI. And because it’s been around for a long time, I figured there were good tools that would create more natural-sounding reading.

Through my search, I came across Speechify. The technology was developed to help people with dyslexia and ADHD have a better reading experience. It was then expanded to more general use cases. Because of its initial focus on helping those with neurodivergent conditions, I believe the quality is significantly better than most tools on the market. With that quality, though, comes a price. Speechify is not cheap. At $29 a month, it might not be a tool many writers want to pay for, but I wanted to give it a shot.

I subscribed and downloaded the macOS app and the iOS app. There are simple keyboard commands that allow you to have any text read to you when using the desktop version of the app, and that’s what I used the most. I opened my manuscript in Google Docs and highlighted the text in the first chapter. I chose the voice I wanted to use for reading and the speed of the reading. And then I hit play.

While it’s not perfect, Speechify reads in such a natural way that it feels nearly like an audiobook. This means I was able to find issues with my manuscript much easier. When someone is reading something naturally, any unnatural flow in your writing will be obvious. This is especially true of dialogue. Speechify doesn’t always read the dialogue with the right intonation, but it’s close enough to get a sense of whether or not your dialogue works.

I just finished having Speechify read my entire novel to me as I edited along the way. It absolutely helped me improve the book in ways I couldn’t have done on my own. That means, even at $29 a month, this is a tool I’m keeping in my writer’s toolbox. I highly recommend it if it’s something you can afford.

I’m not tenacious enough. At least historically, I haven’t been. Tenacity is the drive to push through something when it’s hard. It’s the intrinsic motivation you feel when you want to succeed regardless of the obstacles. Don’t get me wrong, I want to succeed, but I’ve had a hard time pushing through obstacles in the past. At least, I have when there has been an alternative available to me that doesn’t require that same tenacity. Let me explain.

When someone is talented at many things—which if you’ll allow for a potentially egotistical moment, I consider myself to be—they have options. If this type of person struggles or fails at one thing, they can move onto another thing. This is especially true if the person enjoys the other things they are good at. When you have optionality, the need for tenacity is not as strong.

For me, this manifests itself in many ways. In my non-writing life, I work in the software industry. I learned to code late in life, but when I did I was suddenly exposed to options. I could write code for employers or I could start my own companies. What this meant for my writing was that as much as I loved it, I didn’t HAVE to persevere through rejection after rejection. At any moment, I could pivot to doing something else.

However, this doesn’t just apply to writing. As I mentioned, I could start companies because of my work experience and my coding experience. I did this. My companies failed, and that’s fine. That happens more than it doesn’t. The problem, though, is that when I’ve tried to start other companies, I’ve struggled to find the tenacity to push through the early disappointments and troubles that come with starting a company. If the company or product wasn’t getting much traction, I could just pivot to a new product I would build.

As you might imagine, this is a surefire way to avoid success.

Circling back to my writing, I want to talk about how this lack of tenacity because of optionality manifested itself. I received my MFA in 2017. During the program, I wrote a novel. After many edits, I started querying the novel. I received many rejection letters for it, but looking back now, I realize I didn’t actually query that many agents. I didn’t have the tenacity to push through the rejections and keep trying. I didn’t have the tenacity to try to improve the manuscript or the query letter or both.

Contrast this to the early part of my MFA program, back before I felt like I had optionality, back before I knew how to code. I would submit to literary journals, and I had a yearly goal of 100 rejections. This goal meant that I was putting myself out there, and by putting myself out there, I gave myself a chance to be published. Through that process, I had over a dozen stories published. I had tenacity.

Where does that leave me now? I have rededicated myself to writing for two reasons:

1. I love writing and reading and books

2. For my mental health, I need an escape from traditional “work”

This means that after seven years of letting two novels sit on a shelf and nearly five years after my short story collection was published, I am writing in earnest again. This requires tenacity. Reviews, critiques, rejections and more will require me to fight through the desire to run to something else. I need to recapture the same tenacity I had when I was writing short stories.

I think I’ll do it, but guess what? You all get to follow the process as I work on it publicly.

Editing is a personal journey. No two writers will go about it the same way. For me, I’ve found a process that helps me stay focused and shapes what will ultimately become the final product.

Writing a first draft is the easy part. For me at least. That’s the part of writing I love most, where I don’t know what’s going to happen next, where I’m meeting the characters for the first time outside of my own head. The first draft is the only part of the writing process where I enter a flow state. In that state, I can listen to music while writing and it doesn’t distract me. In fact, I think it enhances the writing.

Compare that with editing. When editing, I have never found myself in a flow state. If I have any sound around me while I’m editing, I get too distracted to focus on the work. Without focus, the edits are useless. Now, there are many types of editing, and the process for each type probably varies for each writer. I know it does for me.

Let me explain the various stages of editing and how I approach it.

Second Draft

I know what I’m getting into with the second draft. I’m going to find all of the easy-to-spot plot holes, all the simple grammatical errors. I’m going to find underdeveloped characters and forced dialogue.

That said, I’m probably not going to be making huge structural changes in this draft. So, I will create a new document, paste in the entire contents of my first draft, and I will read and edit as I go. If I spot something on page 200 that doesn’t make sense because of something I wrote on page 20, I’ll go back to page 20 and adjust in the moment.

I do this until I have patched over the obvious plot holes and caught most of the grammatical issues. I will have cleaned up a good chunk of dialogue but the characters will still probably need some developing.

As a quick aside, I create a whole new document because even with version history on documents, I like to have a distinct file copy of each draft I write. It’s like my own personal historical record.

Third Draft

This is where things get interesting and I might deviate from what a lot of writers do (tell me if I’m wrong!). The third draft is all about plot and character development. There will still be cleanup work, but this draft needs to be about the larger picture.

To accomplish this, I once again create a new file for this draft. However, instead of copying the second draft in, I open the second draft side-by-side with this blank third draft. And I write the third draft from scratch.

I type out the same lines from the second draft until I feel like something could be better or cut or adjusted in some way. Sometimes this means I rewrite entire scenes. Sometimes it means I create entirely new characters as I write. And sometimes, though more rare for me because of my writing style, it means massive cuts.

By typing the entire manuscript out again in this draft, I feel connected to the characters and the plot in a way that I am able to shape them into a much more publication-ready state.

It takes a long time to edit this way.

All Other Drafts

For everything after the third draft, I edit inline. I create one final draft file and copy the contents from the third draft in. I then start normal line edits and will adjust characters and plot points as I go. I will occasionally add in this draft, but it’s really about cutting or changing more than adding.

These drafts are the ones where I am also editing based on reader feedback. I don’t send my manuscript out until the third draft is complete. Then, when I get beta feedback, I will act on the feedback I agree with in these drafts.

How many drafts is “all other drafts”? I never know. It might be one more, but probably not. It could be many more. The key is making sure the story works and the characters feel real. It’s all about making sure you are putting the best possible work out there regardless of whether you will be self-publishing or querying an agent or submitting your fifth book to a traditional publisher.

What about you?

I’d love to hear how other writers approach the editing process. Please share in the comments. And as always, if you like my articles, I hope you’ll subscribe.

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Home is comfortable. It’s inviting and familiar and powerful. It amplifies your voice as you write because you know it. Because it’s home.

It’s also a trap.

When setting a story, choosing somewhere you know well makes a ton of sense. What better way to ensure the right amount of verisimilitude? What other way to convince the reader that they are not reading a book or story, but experiencing it? What you can feel and hear and taste in your mind because of your familiarity with the place becomes what the reader can feel and hear and taste. But what happens when your own preconceived notions and deep-set stereotypes about a place seep into your writing? They pass on to your readers. These negative (whether obvious or subtle) suggestions made in passing — because it’s your home and you know it and you don’t recognize the stereotype when it’s right in front of you — spread like a disease.

That’s the trouble for a writer who sets a story in an intimately familiar place. The writer is lazier with that place than they would otherwise be. Sounds counterintuitive, I know. But hear me out. You’re writing an epic fantasy in which the setting is, of course, completely fictional. You research places around the world. You research customs. You pick and choose and carefully construct your world. In doing so, you (hopefully) avoid tired tropes and stereotypes. But, let’s assume you’re writing something based in your hometown, a place where you might still live. Do you do the same amount of research? Do you take the same precautions you otherwise would when setting your story somewhere unfamiliar?

In most cases, the answer is probably no.

David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go and The Weight of This World, has been vocal in his disapproval of how some of the writers from Appalachia (Joy being an Appalachian writer himself) misrepresent the people. He is a staunch critic of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and how it portrays people, saying Vance is not their voice.

While Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir, the same issues surrounding the (potential) misrepresentation of a place apply to fiction.

But there are ways to combat this. After all, writing about your home provides you with a certain level of access in your fiction. It allows you to take parts of you — and your home undoubtedly is a part of you — and extend them to your story. So, you should write where you know because writing where you know allows you to extend yourself beyond the limitation of writing “what you know.” Here are three ways to continue writing where you know without falling into the trap of self-perpetuation of stereotype.

Research the Hell Out of Your Home

I spent most of my life living in Southern Arizona, dodging cacti and rattlesnakes in the Sonoran Desert. And while much of my fiction takes place there, I still research. I read interviews and old newspaper articles. I talk to friends. I read much of what the Arizona Historical Society makes available. It’s all useful. In a region with centuries of Native American history, Mexican and Spanish history, and a history of violence on both sides of the border that runs right through the desert, it’s beyond important to make sure the voice I put out in the world is one I am comfortable with, one that I think represents the people I grew up with as best it can.

So, queue up the old Google machine. Start there, and read anything you can on your hometown (or the place you’re writing about that is intimate to you). Here are some resources to help:

Newspapers.com
Not a free service, but if you’re a writer of any kind, it’s worth the cost. With its powerful search features and enormous archives, you’ll be able to cover your historical research at the same time you’re making sure you don’t slip into stereotypical representations of your setting.

Twitter
Yes, that Twitter. The one that sucks and is awesome and is degrading and is uplifting all at the same time. Use Twitter to connect with people in your region of choice that you don’t already know. Talk to them. Watch the way they interact. Build relationships even if you think you have enough friends from your hometown.

Local Historical Society
Don’t underestimate how willing (and happy) to help the local historical society will be. They want their locales portrayed as accurately as you do. So search their website, check out their book recommendations, email them. They will help you make sure you understand your setting as well as you think you do.

Share Early Drafts With Others From That Place

This is where your friends come in handy. When you share a draft of your story or novel, don’t ask your friends from home for feedback on the story. In all likelihood, they will just tell you, “it’s good.” Or, if they’re like my friends, they’ll just say, “yep, those are words.” Instead, you want to be asking folks from your hometown to check you on the way you show their place. The way you portray their home may feel different to them than it does to you when that place is locked up inside your head.

Read Widely

Cliché alert. But seriously, do it. Read outside of your chosen genre. Read authors with backgrounds that are different from your own. Read books and stories from people of color, from women, from those in the LGBTQ+ community.

Then read some more.

It’s not just about reading works set in the same location as your own, it’s about understanding the way another author uses their voice to convey a place. Read with a critical eye, because as you read widely, you will come across authors who are clearly injecting their own preconceived notions and stereotypes into their works and propelling that out into the world. Understanding what not to do when you see it is just as important as understanding what to do.

So just read.

When I was getting my MFA, professors and advisors seemed to look down on the idea of writing under a pen name. Without a good reason, a pen name could do more harm than good. And this makes sense. Why give away your personal brand to a name that isn’t yours? Why build from scratch when you have your entire life to build from with your actual name?

I published my debut collection of short stories in 2020. Not the best timing with COVID lockdowns and no book events to be found. But it was an incredible moment when my publisher sent me advanced copies of the book and when sales started coming in. The book and, maybe more importantly long term, the author were virtually invisible online. Unless you were going directly to the book on Amazon or some other bookstore, you weren’t going to find it on Google by searching my name.

Why? My name is common, but not as common as others. Unfortunately (for me and my author SEO potential) I share the name with a famous NFL player. Who do you think wins the SEO battle between a newish author and an established football player?

For a few years, I didn’t worry about it. It didn’t seem to matter much until I started thinking about completing my debut novel and looking for representation. Your job as a writer is not just to write. Your job is to also build an audience. It’s also to sell. You have to apply what I call horizontal focus and do everything. If you get an agent and have the backing of a large publisher, they are going to help with marketing, but you put yourself in a better position if you can do some of the marketing lift yourself. With that in mind, my name started to matter a little more.

Whether it’s ego or some sort of narcissistic desire to see my last name in print, I didn’t want to generate a completely new pen name. I just wanted to distance myself from the NFL player if people Googled my name. Fortunately, I have been reading J. Todd Scott for a number of years and even got to meet him at a writer’s meet-up in Dallas once. His name inspired me. I could keep all the elements of my name without being confused with the football player.

My pen name, if you can even call it that, would be J. Edward Hunter.

It works for a number of reasons. First, it sounds literary. Thanks, Dad, for passing that middle name down. Second, my parents and my friends always called me J in high school and many still do now. And third, none of it is made up. It’s my name in a different format.

Oh, and as a bonus, the domain was available.

As authors, we have to walk the line between creativity and promotion. And part of the promotional aspect of the work is to make sure we’re thinking about everything from our social profiles to our names. Pen names don’t always make sense, and if you can write under your own name, you should. But don’t be afraid to play around with it a bit if it’ll help you market yourself.

Marketing isn’t a dirty word. It’s a necessity. So, play the name game if you need to.