Book touring. Touring with books. Book talks. Talking about books, I’m kinda tired, can you tell?

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Okay, so this post won’t make any sense because even though I had a good night’s sleep I’m still kinda brain-fried. So prepare yourself. Head-scratching is not only likely, but recommended.

My longtime friend and fellow author Jill Blocker – she’s one of the masterminds behind Constellate Creatives and Constellate Publishing – just held two days of book talks and signings in Muncie, Indiana. We’re still groggy, and Jill has only just begun her extended book tour.

Two days, you scoff. That’s barely any tine at all.

On the contrary, we packed five book talks and signings and an afterparty event at a local martini bar, RoHo’s, into those two days. We spoke at the Ball State University-affiliated EB and Bertha C Ball Center, Carnegie Library, Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore, Aw Yeah Comics and the Orchard Shop at Minnetrista, all in Muncie, where I was a newspaper reporter and editor for 40 years and Jill attended Ball State and interned at the newspaper. That’s where we met, a little less than 20 years ago, and we kept in touch. When we published our novels WHAT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, THAT OCTOBER, SEVEN ANGELS and HAPPILY AFTER EVER – the latter two newly out this summer – we decided we’d publish books by other authors who wanted to work with us. We’ve published one other so far and have others in the pipeline – and we’re looking for more authors. Go to the Constellate Creatives website for more. (Link below.)

Anyway, the sadist who set up the Indiana portion of our book tour (raises hand) didn’t leave much room for seeing family and friends or even breathing while we were in the Hoosier state, yet we somehow managed to.

Now Jill is off to Seattle and NYC and back to her home base of Zurich, Switzerland.

At a couple of events, we were joined by our talented friend Sara McKinley, who painted the beautiful cover for THAT OCTOBER. That’s Sara on the right there.

And we’ll be doing all this again, probably next year. Hopefully with even more books by other authors.

Nest year? Man, I better get some sleep.

Do you have BAD INTENTIONS? The crime fiction anthology inspired by the music of Warren Zevon? Cause it’s here!

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Maybe you’ve seen some of us online talking about the BAD INTENTIONS crime story anthology. Hopefully we’ve caught your attention. Fifteen great stories by fifteen crime writers, all taking their cue from the music of the late, great Warren Zevon, edited by Michael Downing and brought to y’all by Literary Garage.

But did you know the anthology is OUT? Huh? Didja?

Okay, forgive me. It’s a project I’m excited about and I hope you are too.

My story SUNSET STAKEOUT is included in the anthology and it was inspired by Zevon’s “Looking for the Next Best Thing.” It wasn’t the Zevon tune that was uppermost in my mind when I was pitching this story to Michael. Until I listened to the song for the first time in years and realized what I was hearing. The “what the hell” lyrics. The soaring electric guitar.

To me, this all sounded like the theme for, each week, a “Rockford Files”-style TV series, featuring the rambling adventures of a private investigator named Jim Rock- wait, scratch that.

It’s not a story about Jim Rockford, played by James Garner as the personification of the best 1970s TV PI. It’s about a bunch of guys who’ve created “Sunset Stakeout,” a Rockford-adjacent TV series that, in January 1979, is facing cancellation by NBC.

How desperate will the producer, co-star and fledgling screenwriter of “Sunset Stakeout” be to save their series? Would they start looking for the next best thing – a movie financed by Los Angeles’ biggest drug dealer, the coke-purveyor to the stars?

Where else are you gonna find this level of Hollywood desperation, played for all the laughs and danger inherent in it PLUS a cameo from the Six Million Dollar Man?

You can find my story SUNSET STAKEOUT in BAD INTENTIONS, and you can find BAD INTENTIONS at the link below. I hope you love all these stories. And feast your eyes on that Frank Vatel cover!

Jill Blocker and I sat down to talk about our new books, writing, publishing and more

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My longtime friend and fellow author Jill Blocker and I have been all over the Internet lately, talking about our new novels – HAPPILY AFTER EVER for Jill and SEVEN ANGELS for me – and we had the idea of interviewing each other and asking a few questions that we haven’t really addressed in the many articles, interviews and podcasts so far.

In the process, we worked out all the problems in the universe.

You believe that, right?

We did talk about our early writing days, what our journalism backgrounds brought to our writing and more.

For example, Jill on journalism:

I wish journalists were valued more in our society. Some of the most brilliant people I know are journalists -including some of the characters in the book. Journalists have the ability to sit down and understand important, complex issues and communicate them to the masses. Journalism definitely affects my writing style. I like short sentences and punchy lines, but more-so, I think accuracy and reliability in storytelling is one of our most important roles as writers. No one needs Fake News… real life is unbelievable enough.

And my writing routine:

My routine is to not have a routine, at least not in hours. I write almost every day, but the hours of when I write vary in that I work around other things, like taking care of our cats, laundry and exercise or appointments or interviews. Some days I don’t write fiction but I’m writing articles for sites like CrimeReads. One thing I almost never do is write in the evening, because I’m brain-fried by that point.

Here’s a link to the full interview, which is on the Constellate Creatives/Constellate Publishing site. While you’re there, if you have a book inside you or your computer that’s waiting to get out, consider clicking a button for more information about Constellate.

Q&A: Authors Keith Roysdon and Jill Blocker

Muncie, Indiana … can you keep a secret?

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Muncie, Indiana – my hometown – has kept some pretty wild secrets over the years, including generations of crime and corruption that’s sent mayors and other prominent people off to jail.

It’s also been the scene of wild pop culture events. Remember Steven Spielberg’s classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” The first half of the movie, where aliens abduct the little boy and Richard Dreyfus builds a mountain in his family room, is set in Muncie.

So with my friend and fellow author Jill Blocker and I planning on book talks and signings July 14 and 15, we’re planning something else … a little hang with the authors.

Hit us up if you want to learn more.

Hey look: A press release about where we’ll be in July

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I’m not sure if you heard or not, but I’ve got a new crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, out and my longtime friend Jill Blocker has a new novel out, HAPPILY AFTER EVER.

You know I’m kidding, because if you’ve seen me on social media for the past several months, you know these things.

But if you’re in Indiana – both of us are from the Hoosier state – and want to come see us, you can.

Here’s a quick rundown of where both of us will be. Jill will also have events in Seattle, New York City and Zurich after our Hoosier trip. (I’ll link to the Constellate Publishing events page below.)

Anyway:

Authors Roysdon, Blocker plan book talks, signings

Two authors with Muncie, Indiana, ties are releasing new novels and planning on talks and signings in Muncie in July.

Keith Roysdon and Jill Blocker will be speaking and signing books at events July 14 and 15 in Muncie.

The two will be talking about “Seven Angels,” Roysdon’s latest novel, and “Happily After Ever,” Blocker’s new novel.

They’ll be speaking and signing books:

Tuesday, July 14, 6-8 p.m., at the E.B. and Bertha C. Ball Center, 400 W. Minnetrista Blvd., Muncie. The talk is free and open to the public, but the Ball Center requests advance registration to ensure plenty of seating and refreshments.

Earlier Tuesday, at 3 p.m., they’ll be at Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore, 108 S. Walnut Street.

Wednesday, July 15, 6:30 p.m. at Carnegie Library, 301 E. Jackson Street.

Earlier Wednesday, at 3 p.m., they’ll be at Aw Yeah Comics, 119 E. Charles Street.

Also earlier Wednesday, July 15, at noon, they’ll be at the Orchard Shop at Minnetrista, 311 W. St. Joseph St.

Blocker, a native Hoosier, is a Ball State University graduate who worked at The Star Press while she was attending the university. A resident of Switzerland, Blocker is the author of “What Was Beautiful and Good,” an epic but personal account of love and the beginnings of the Dada art movement in the early days of World War I, and her new novel, “Happily After Ever,” the story of a young writer from America who finds love, disappointment and renewed hope as a citizen of the world.

Blocker and her sister are principals of Constellate Creatives, a multi-faceted international company that publishes books (through its Constellate Publishing division) and provides editorial and marketing services for a variety of books, authors and clients. Constellate’s announcement of its 2026 slate of books was widely publicized earlier this year. Constellate also has a studio for recording audiobooks or podcasts.

Roysdon, a resident of Tennessee, was a reporter and editor for 40 years for The Star Press (and its predecessors) in Muncie. He won or co-won more than 30 first-place awards in Indiana and national journalism competitions. He’s the co-author with Douglas Walker of four award-winning true crime books about the Muncie area, including “Wicked Muncie,” “Muncie Murder & Mayhem,” “The Westside Park Murders” and “Cold Case Muncie.” Roysdon’s short fiction, news and pop culture writing has been widely published. His short stories are included in three 2026 anthologies, “Fighting Words,” “Bad Intentions” and “Daydream Believer.”

Roysdon’s first novel, “That October,” was published in 2025. Set in a fictionalized version of Muncie in 1984, the novel is about six high school friends who band together to solve the mystery of a friend’s murder and another’s disappearance. His new novel, “Seven Angels,” is about a young woman who returns to her small Tennessee town to help run the family funeral home. After she’s named county coroner, she must not only solve a murder but battle white supremacists, a pill-pushing doctor, a corrupt sheriff and a ruthless Russian trafficker hunting a young girl from Ukraine.

More about Constellate Publishing and the authors:

Constellate Publishing

Instagram, Facebook running explicit porn in ads

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I’ll say this at the top: I’m not an anti-porn crusader.

I think pornography is, on its own, a perilous thing for some people to consume. I think there can be enormous harm done to people, particularly women, who appear in it and are exploited for it. That being said, online porn, like any kind of sex work, can be financially beneficial to women, especially if they control every step of the process and make money from it.

But I think you could say – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or follows me on social media – I am an anti-hypocrisy crusader.

And yes, for my own little hypocrisy declaration, I am on social media, including Instagram and Facebook. I think the latter, much like modern-day Twitter, has done a lot to spread lies and disinformation that have ultimately hurt this country and our democracy. I’m on social media to promote my work and the work of friends (although the effectiveness of social media has never been great).

Having issued all those disclaimers, I’ll say that I was surprised recently to notice that Instagram in particular (and fellow Meta platform Facebook also; I don’t know about Threads) is running ads that include hardcore sex footage.

I’m not talking about the “I’ll be your AI girlfriend” ads that run on those platforms. Those are insulting (“I’ll never say no,” all those pretty pixel princesses coo) to everyone concerned but they’re not what I’m talking about here today.

I’m talking about explicit ads, usually popping up between Instagram stories, that are marketing something, I’m not quite sure what (I know that advertising fails if you don’t remember what product the ad is advertising) but this is a “click this link” medium, not a “hop on your Schwinn and pedal down to the corner sin store and ask for it by name” medium. And I didn’t click on any embedded links. So I’m not quite sure what they’re advertising. Pornhub or something? Dunno.

The screenshot at the top of this piece I have heavily cropped so you can’t see the bottom of the screen and its graphic depiction of oral sex. As for the top half, is that actress Sydney Sweeney? I wonder if she’s aware she’s used in porn ads?

But the fact that IG in particular is running ads with graphic sexual content when it bans that content among its users is hypocritical to say the least.

One account I know, for a genuinely legit artist and model, has to blur out her nipples in photos she posts. Yet IG users could conceivably see, after they see one of her IG stories, completely explicit sexual activity.

Even after seeing repeated examples of these ads – and yes, I’ve forever broken my algorithm in doing this research – I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. But I found a couple of news articles from 2025 that reported about the graphic ads, including a piece from Le Monde. “Thousands of pornographic ads go unmoderated on Facebook and Instagram” is the headline. (I’m not linking because most of the article is behind a paywall, but a cursory search found it.)

I’m very explicitly NOT calling for action or any kind of boycott of Meta social media platforms, especially Instagram and Facebook, that are running these ads. But I think people should know that Meta has two sets of standards: one for its users, who must toe the line over content, and one for its advertisers, who can follow an “anything goes” practice.

What’s the moral of the story? A friend of mine who has in the past placed ads on Instagram for legitimate, mainstream brands notes that the Meta platforms have been painstakingly trivial in their criteria for and criticism of said ads.

So I guess the bar is lower when it comes to the many, many dollars that can be made.

AI, Michael Caine and Mr. Potato Head, together again

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I mentioned on social media in the past couple of days that I got the biggest reaction I’ve ever received on LinkedIn after posting that i’d unfollowed a LinkedIn connection after seeing them post touting AI.

Now this isn’t unusual on LinkedIn, where a lot of people have some financial investment and a vested interest in seeing AI succeed.

I posted this:

Unfollowed and cut my connection with an AI user.

AI is a destructive force. It kills jobs, creativity and the environment, all for profits for billionaires who don’t care about any of us. And when the AI bubble bursts, the economy will suffer.

If you’re an AI user, go ahead and unfollow me and cut our connection. You might as well, because when I see you touting AI, I’ll do it.

This brought responses from people I actually know and some that I don’t, taking the approach of warning me that: I’ll never get ahead without AI – similar to Reese Witherspoon’s “don’t get left behind” warning to all her girlies out there – and that I’m already using AI but probably don’t know it and that I’ll be using it in the future because everybody will be.

My answer was more polite than “bullshit” but that was the gist of it.

Anyway, the whole thing was amusing and good for engagement and I’ll probably go to that well again, despite the dire warnings – all, without a doubt, from people who have something invested in AI or at least hope to make a buck in it – popularizing the notion that all of us who have been writing email, writing books, etc., for decades WITHOUT the assistance of AI have apparently lost the ability to do so unless we rely on the processes that are killing the environment and killing jobs just so some poor schmuck can imagine themself as an author or have a “girlfriend who won’t say no.” (See my recent post on the topic of the AI girlfriend.

Then this morning, Publisher’s Marketplace reported on an “AI voice company” that plans to release an audio version of “The Odyssey,” timed to coincide with the Christopher Nolan movie, that will be narrated by the AI version of Michael Caine’s voice.

I can guarantee you I will live the rest of my days without listenng to that.

Those of you who know I have an absurd sense of humor know that the final paragraph of the article was my favorite:

ElevenLabs primary business is creating synthetic AI voices and text-to-speech audiobooks. They have partnered with Spotify to produce audio for self-published authors, and digital distributor Bookwire. Their Iconic Marketplace allows brands to license famous voices for AI-created content, in partnership with the celebrity or estate. Currently available voices include Dr. Maya Angelou, Judy Garland, David Hasselhoff, Laurence Olivier, and Mr. Potato Head.

So I want to know, did the company license the AI rights to the voice of Don Rickles, who voiced Mr. Potato Head in the “Toy Story” movies? And if so, why not just say their available voices included “Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head?”

My newspaper work lives on! The Case of the Guilty iPhone

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I’ve been out of the daily newspaper grind for … yikes … more than seven years now, but I’m always amused when any of my work lives on. It’s best when people find my stories about the FBI investigation that resulted in the city’s mayor going to federal prison. Or even pieces I wrote about Stephen King or interviews with directors like John Carpenter or George Romero I conducted back in the 1980s.

But I’d guess my most-reprinted or reused work has been the photo above, which was posted as promo art on The Star Press today.

Probably at least 15 years ago, we needed a photo of an iPhone to go along with a story. Probably a crime story. Probably a story about some pervert taking photos of something he should not have and getting arrested and possibly going to jail for it. What the photo was originally taken for is lost to the vagaries of time and memory. It survives in the newspaper’s system, however, and is easily recalled when a reporter needs a photo to go with said stories about said perverts and said crimes.

What’s funny, however, is not just how long that photo has been in use. A funnier (to me anyway) behind the scenes element is that I took that photo of my wife’s iPhone and that it’s immortalized as a substitute for a law-breaking iPhone.

Fame and infamy find their way to us in interesting ways.

Here’s ya favorite authors on public radio!

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New right now on Indiana Public Radio, the Pop of Culture interview with me and Jill Blocker about our new books, our publishing venture and our Muncie appearances in July. Thanks to longtime friend Michelle Kinsey for the chance to talk.

As Michelle points out, she and Jill and I all have a newspaper in common: The three of us formerly worked at The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana.

https://indianapublicradio.org/popofculture

Do the hustle: dancing as fast as we can … maybe

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(And yes, you’re welcome for injecting that 1975 Van McCoy earworm into your brain.)

Every day, I see dudes in our apartment complex walking through the parking lot and down the hill to the busy commercial street below. They’re wearing knit shirts with restaurant logos and I’m assuming they’re going to work in the kitchens of said eateries.

In these hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell summer days, they’re walking to work, maybe because they don’t have cars and, luckily, there are so many places to eat nearby.

Increasingly, they’re turning out for work every day at some risk: getting swept up by state-sanctioned kidnappers.

Whatever the risks and whatever the meager rewards – nobody working in a restaurant kitchen is making more than minimum wage – they’re hustling every day.

They’re an echo of their parents and, honestly, my parents. My dad worked for 30 years in an auto parts factory. The days were hot and dirty and noisy; he was half-deaf by the time he retired. And when he retired, he ran pay-to-fish ponds down the hill and behind our house. Once a week he drove to another city, his old Chevy pickup with a waterproofed wooden tank that he built on the back, to pick up catfish and bluegill to stock the ponds. He’d owned and ran an apartment house years before I was born and sharpened saws after he retired.

My mom’s story was similar, and I tell some of it in my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW. She and her sisters gathered wild-growing plants near their little town in Tennessee – the place that inspired the town in my novel SEVEN ANGELS – to sell to reps of pharmaceutical companies. They collected the plants in burlap sacks and sold them, at the end of the day, for pennies.

My mom ran our 20-acre farm for those 30 years my dad worked in the factory. She cleaned houses and factories, a job I helped with before I started working in the newspaper business.

I have only a portion of the hard work, the sheer hustle, of my parents. Or those guys walking to work in a hot kitchen every day.

And I’m acutely aware of that.

“I need to work more and work longer hours if I’m gonna write all these books,” I said the other day.

“You know, you can take downtime,” the reply came.

And I do take down time. Too much of it. I need to work harder and smarter. I need to hustle.