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What is the Nickajack and how does it relate to my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS?

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Anyone who follows me on social media – bless you dear folks – knows that I’ve been promoting my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS, which publishes June 1 from our own Constellate Publishing.

When I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019 I was living in Indiana but had a history with Tennessee: My parents were from the little town I based Seven Angels the town on. And I had family members in Tennessee and still do. More than three years ago, I moved from Indiana to Knoxville, where the finishing touches of the novel were written.

I didn’t get to hear “Southern Comfort,” a song by the sister blues/rock/country duo Larkin Poe, when I was writing SEVEN ANGELS, but I’ve grown to love the song and feel it relates closely to SEVEN ANGELS with its story of a woman who returns to her home place.

There’s a verse in Larkin Poe’s “Southern Comfort” that struck a nerve:

Left my soul in the Nickajack
God willing, I’ll find my way back
Counting down, my days are numbered
Gimme, gimme that southern comfort

But what is the Nickajack?

There are more accomplished historians than me – I’m not one at all, really – who can tell you better what the Nickajack is or was, but it was basically parts of two states, Alabama and Tennessee, that didn’t support the Southern ideal of slavery and whose leadership considered secession from the Southern secession movement.

The Nickajack would have been a state of its own, independent of Tennessee and Alabama, and an ally of the North. Leaders of the Nickajack modeled their secession plans after West Virginia’s exit from Virginia.

It never came to that, fortunately or unfortunately, because that would no doubt have cost lives if hostilities had broken out.

And the defeat of the South by the Union meant that the boosters of the Nickajack’s statehood movement dropped their plans.

So when the Lovell sisters of Larkin Poe sing about leaving their souls in the Nickajack, they’re talking about a pro-Union, anti-slavery part of the country, made up of parts of Alabama and East Tennessee, where I live now and where SEVEN ANGELS’ main character is from. Gloria Shepherd is a prosecutor’s investigator in Knoxville as the story begins but she returns to her home of Seven Angels in Crockett County, where much of the story takes place.

So now you know at least a little about the Nickajack. There’s more out there, especially about the Native American history of the area and the African American history of the Nickajack, and I’ll link to that below.

Credit to the Justin Brown and the Battleground substack for a lot of history and for that illustration of the Nickajack above.

https://battleground.substack.com/p/statehood-nickajack

And more info here:

https://www.quora.com/What-if-the-proposed-state-of-Nickajack-had-successfully-separated-from-the-Confederacy-and-was-admitted-into-the-Union

The Facebook page I can’t kill

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This is NOT a “pity me” post. Poor baby! He’s got a Facebook page that’s so popular he wants to kill it but can’t!

Well, I guess it is a “pity me” post.

My longtime co-author Douglas Walker and I wrote the first of our true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, for the History Press in 2015 and the book was published in 2016. It did well enough that History Press wanted us to keep writing the books and we complied through our fourth, COLD CASE MUNCIE, published in 2023.

My favorite of the four books is THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS, about the most famous unsolved murders in our area, in and around Muncie, Indiana, published in 2021. A pandemic publication, it has done well despite – or because of? – we didn’t get to do our usual talks and signings.

Even before we were unable to talk to people in person because of the pandemic, four years before, in fact, I created a Facebook page named after WICKED MUNCIE, the first book. Over the years since 2016, I populated the page – sometimes on a hit and miss basis – with anecdotes about the four books and their making, plus I told stories that were not included in any of the books.

This year, 10 years after I created it, the WICKED MUNCIE Facebook page is still going strong, adding new followers every day. I haven’t posted much true crime content in a while – hmm maybe people prefer a page that doesn’t have a lot of new content from the likes of me – and now tops 3,600 Facebook followers. Undoubtedly some of those are bots and now-inactive accounts, but it’s a lot of eyeballs to just casually turn away from. Until just recently, it was my largest social media presence. That’s no longer the case as just this week, my Bluesky account reached more than 3,800 followers. That’s about the same number as follow my Twitter account, although I really suspect many of the “people” on that hellsite are not actually people.

So with 3,600 followers on the WICKED MUNCIE page, I don’t feel like I can shutter it or even walk away and neglect it. So I’m cross-posting some of the same stuff I post on my other socials. And of course there’ll be some true crime stuff occasionally. Not as much as in the past, though.

So yes, there’s a word for someone who won’t walk away from a platform that affords them thousands of followers. Several words, really.

It’s like that old joke with the punchline, “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Less than a month until SEVEN ANGELS is here!

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Less than a month until my second crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, is out.

A young woman returns to her small Tennessee hometown to help run the family funeral business after her father’s death and discovers Seven Angels has changed for the worse: prescription drug abuse is rampant, murders go unsolved, the sheriff is corrupt, white supremacists rule and a human trafficker from Russia controls the town.

Gloria Shepherd grew up in Seven Angels and is shocked by the changes. She gets drafted into replacing her ailing mentor as the county coroner. The duties put her in deadly conflict with the sheriff and the trafficker, who pursues a Ukrainian girl.

Gloria assembles a close group of trusted friends – including an overlooked sheriff’s deputy, a fearless state investigator and an old mountain woman – to fight the forces of crime and corruption and rescue the missing girl.

You can pre-order the softcover anywhere now. Ebook to come late summer/early fall.

Facebook is the worst. And yeah, I’m still on it.

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The photo above appeared on the Facebook history page for my hometown and hundreds of people are commenting on it. The building in question was the headquarters of a long-gone local dairy operation that was a beloved part of the community. In the comments, people are mourning the loss of the building and, long before that, the dairy business, and they’re citing their favorite products.

Only one problem: As some of the comments point out, this photo is more than 10 years old. The building was torn down more than 10 years ago. Because it’s not a great picture, it’s hard to tell that this demolition, more than a decade ago, left a prominent part of the complex standing. And it’s still there this morning.

The caption reads only, “Demo of Riggins Dairy.” That’s it. It doesn’t note that the demo took place 11 years ago. That’s left up to a commenter.

There are soooo many problems with Facebook. (And yes, I’m still on there, because it’s a way to communicate with friends and family and promote my work and that of others.) The worst is that the parent company, Meta, actively supports the destruction of our democratic society.

But another huge problem is misinformation and, charitably, half-assed information. I suppose the original poster didn’t intend to mislead people – including many, many people who follow the page who haven’t been in the city in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years – into thinking the demo was actively going on today. It’s hard to say.

But even by omitting information and context, even if innocently intended, it’s given the impression that “they’re tearing down the old dairy building.” I thought that myself because I haven’t lived there in going on four years. Then I saw the comments giving some trimeframe context.

I can’t tell you to boycott Facebook because I’ve got three pages – my personal page, which has very limited access by readers, and my author page and Wicked Muncie page, created in 2016 to promote our true crime books.

But for pete’s sake, be aware that you’re not getting the whole story when you see something on Facebook. Sometimes all that means is that you’re misinformed about a building. Sometimes it means you’re misinformed about assaults on our democracy.

Blurbs about my new novel SEVEN ANGELS: this one from Emily J. Edwards

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As part of a series, I’m highlighting some blurbs from authors who’ve read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS, out June 1 from Constellate Publishing. Today, Ms. Emily J. Edwards.

Maybe I violate some unspoken rule here when I note that some of the people who’ve read my book and been kind enough to blurb it are friends, like Colin Harker and Emily J. Edwards. But who would not want to claim them as friends?

Emily is a friend I met through social media and we chat a lot about writing and publishing. We trade pieces and snippets we’ve written to give each other some thoughts and she’s so smart and savvy.

I was recently a guest on her upcoming podcast, Silver Screen Sleuths, and we had a blast recording it.

She wrote the “Girl Friday” series of 1950s-set crime novels, led by “Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man,” and you should see out those books because they’re spot-on recreations of the time and setting, New York City.

Emily had written short stories and has a new novel in the works that you will, trust me, love.

To know more about Emily:

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Cellphones replace newspapers for noir surveillance scenes

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For writers and screenwriters of crime and mystery stories, cellphones pose some problems but also some solutions.

Two of the three novels I’ve written have been set pre-cellphones, in 1984 and 1948. I really enjoyed writing scenes for THAT OCTOBER and GHOST SHOW in which the characters have to urgently contact or find each other and can’t communicate via cellphone like my characters in SEVEN ANGELS – set in 2019 – can. It’s a great exercise in how your characters can problem solve.

Cellphones are so handy to modern-day stories that they can pose a problem writers must work around: They’re so handy that you have to find a way to circumvent them, like no cell service or a broken phone or a lost phone. Kind of like how the writers of the Superman comics, radio show, TV show and movies had to find a way around Superman’s godlike powers. The dude is hugely powerful, so you introduce Kryptonite or block him from the rays of the yellow sun, two things James Gunn used in his excellent 2025 film.

But one way that cellphones change everything is surveillance in thrillers, cop stories or spy stories.

No long would a gunsel like Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon” have to sit in a public place, pretending to read a newspaper, looking so suspicious that Humphrey Bogart clocks him.

These days, a shady type can simply sit or stand and look at their phone, or pretend to. Think about it: How many times a day do you see someone looking at their phone and assume they’re scrolling social media or watching Korean pop music and never think they’re surveilling someone? Surveilling you?

Two years since my first story published in an anthology, MOTEL

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It’s been two years since the first time one of my short stories was published in an anthology. The Cowboy Jamboree Press MOTEL anthology, edited by Barbara Byar, came out in March 2024. I’d had short stories published before, starting in 2023, and of course my non-fiction had been published since 1977 and in true crime books since 2016. But having a short story in an anthology was a very cool development.

I still really like the story, “Independence,” about an unnamed cowboy passing through a small Tennessee town who gets caught up in a conflict between some small business owners and the corrupt sheriff. If you read my upcoming second novel, SEVEN ANGELS, you might realize that town is Seven Angels. I never cite the town by name in “Independence” but the sheriff in the short story is named and he’s the same corrupt sheriff as in SEVEN ANGELS.

It was a kick to have the story published in an anthology and a few followed. It’s always a kick, although I suspect the anthologies you have to purchase have smaller readership than the stories published online. Still a kick, though.

This year, in 2026, I’ll have short stories in three anthologies I know of, including my story “A Fighting Life,” about foul-mouthed kids in 1948 who figure out they can make money by scrapping with neighborhood kids, which is in the just-published-in-paperback FIGHTING WORDS. My story “This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day,” about a kid spending the day with his older brothers in 1970, will appear this fall in DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime stories based on Monkees songs.

And a while back, I had a crime story accepted for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet.

For me, three stories in anthologies in one year is a lot, so I doubt there will be others. But I’ll submit some stories and we’ll see.

Here’s a link to the paperback of FIGHTING WORDS is you want to read my short story and the work of some really amazing authors:

Blurbs about my novel SEVEN ANGELS: Colin Harker

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I’m occasionally posting here the kind comments provided by authors who read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS. They’re included in the book – out in paperback on June 1 and available for pre-order – and have my undying gratitude.

Today I wanted to include author Colin Harker’s quote and I love that she noted Seven Angels, the small town in Tennessee, would be a nice place to visit. I agree – once my heroine Gloria Shepherd and her friends have worked to clean up the town.

If you judged Colin by her writing, you’d think she was a horror maven and that’s certainly true. But since Colin and I became friends a couple of years ago, I’ve learned there’s a lot more to her. She’s a wonderful writer, definitely, but she’s a wonderfully engaged reader too and even though we’re not at all in the same age cohort, she has a love for some of the great books I loved growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, we’ve been bonding over Harlan Ellison, the famously talented and cantankerous author.

I got to have dinner with Colin and her sister – another hugely talented author – at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and we talked about all kinds of things, maybe especially ghosts.

To know more about Colin:

https://sublimeterror.wordpress.com/

‘Star Trek,’ ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Star Wars’ – the future’s not what it once was

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This is ancient history – actually, that would be a good name for this site – but there was a time in the 1970s when “Star Trek” looked deader than one of Dr. Leonard McCoy’s patients. The original series had ended nearly a decade before, the show’s creative minds were waffling between making a new TV series and a big-screen movie – I don’t have to tell you how the success of “Star Wars” in 1977 made up their minds to produce a theatrical film – and it was not at all certain the franchise – which isn’t a word that was commonly applied to creative properties back then – would continue.

So Paramount’s decision to hire director Robert Wise to make “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was a pivotal moment in the … well, franchise.

I can’t describe to you today what it was like to be watching a syndicated rerun of the original “Star Trek” series one Sunday morning on an Indianapolis TV station in 1979 and see a commercial for “The Motion Picture.” My friends and I in our local “Star Trek” club had been keeping up on the making of the film, of course, so it wasn’t a surprise. But it damn sure was a thrill. (Say what you will about the first movie, but we anticipated it like crazy.)

Fast forward to spring 2026 – it is spring, isn’t it? – and “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” has been canceled after its first season on the Paramount Plus streaming service. A second season has already been filmed and will air, I guess, on the streamer, as well the fourth and fifth seasons of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which have already been made and which has already been canceled.

I’m not inclined to support Paramount because of its repugnant politics, but I gotta say I’ve stuck around with the service in part because of the chance to see new “Trek” episodes. These cancelations aren’t giving me many reasons to stick around longer.

I know plenty of people who are so sick of working in restaurants and stores and even patronizing restaurants and stores and hearing music from a half-century ago playing on the Muzak. When will Boomers die and take their music and their franchises with them? I’m at the tail-end of the Boomer generation and I wonder that sometimes too.

But we’ve reached a point here in which we might see an end to, or at least a hiatus of, some long-running franchises.

“Doctor Who” is at a crossroads with the latest season of the show, which began in the 1960s, ending (except for a purported Christmas special still to come this year) and Disney opting out of future involvement.

The “Star Wars” franchise – HOW MANY TIMES WILL HE USE THAT WORD? – had substantial success with the recent “Andor” series and some uncertain promise with the “Mandolorian” movie – or has interest in that story and the lil Yoda kin dude already faded? When will we get “Star Wars” stories that aren’t immediately adjacent to the Skywalker family saga? And will we accept them if and when we do?

I suppose it’s logical enough to ask how much longer Marvel movies and TV series will continue to be made, but while the Marvel Comics world has been around for more than 60 years the MCU hasn’t been around for 20 yet. And a big hit movie will clinch the MCU as an ongoing thing.

As a matter of fact, a big hit lifts all boats. And studios are loathe to give up on any intellectual property, which is why we’re going to see more “Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” shows and movies. We’ll someday see more Indiana Jones, I’m sure, and we’re already seeing more Godzilla. And I did a whole piece for CrimeReads about the Universal Studios monsters and their undead – undying – popularity.

As for “Star Trek,” it’s a shame that things – a new series? a new movie? – are so up in the air this year, the 60th year of the intellectual property.

But I’m sure the franchise will be back with some hit and life beyond the grave at some point.

And we can go on saying “franchise” and “intellectual property.”

Can you vote for the Anthony Awards? If you can, consider voting for my book THAT OCTOBER

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“But … awards are all a popularity contest!”

Damn right they are. But they do more than gauge or reflect popularity. They raise visibility and awareness.

If you’re eligible to vote for the annual Anthony Awards in crime fiction, I’ll note that my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER is eligible for the Anthony for Best First Novel.

The list attached here is in no way an exhaustive list of novels that could win the award when it’s presented at Bouchercon in Calgary this fall. But I’ll note it here anyway.