Another in the recurring series of quick profiles of characters from my novel THAT OCTOBER: Today, Sammi Bradford.
Sammi, like Toni in this space the other day, is the high school friend we all wish we’d had: Beautiful and popular but also unwaveringly loyal. There’s a reason Sammi is the last of the group of four that Jackie talks with in the book. Sammi is probably the closest of Jackie’s friends.
(Sammi is seen on the cover as drawn by my friend, artist Sara McKinley, who is saramckinleyart on Instagram.)
While Sammi’s look was inspired by Brec Bassinger – I’d watched the very fun superhero TV series “Stargirl” not long before, and she looked the way I wanted Sammi to look – Sammi has troubles that none of the other friends have, namely a father in prison.
Sammi’s mom is also the local newspaper editor in Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place, and that gives my young protagonists access to the newspaper library files – the morgue, as some call them – that fuel speculation about one of the major characters in the young heroes’ life.
Sammi might also be the most courageous of the young friends, turning to face a deadly bad guy near the climax of the story, on Halloween night 1984.
Because I love returning to characters in my fiction, Sammi has a cameo in “The Devil’s Cut,” my short story in Hoosier Noir Volume 7. She’s a couple of years older, she wears her hair in an undercut and she has tattoos. Never mind that the time frame of THAT OCTOBER, set in 1984, and “The Devil’s Cut,” pretty much set in the present day, don’t match up.
Each day since even before THAT OCTOBER was published on June 1, I’ve been looking around the Internet, finding unique and sometimes out-of-the-ordinary places where my novel is mentioned or even available to purchase.
Since finding the book on all the big online booksellers, like bookshop dot org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others, I think the most fun surprise has been finding it available through the Allstora site.
Allstora began life as ShopQueer and, according to the site itself, was co-founded by New York Times bestselling author and LGBTQ+ advocate Eric Cervini, drag performer and actor Adam Powell and television icon and author RuPaul.
After finding my book on Allstora, I sent them an email thanking them for carrying it and got a sweet and enthusiastic response from Aubergine:
Hi Keith,
Thank you for your kind words, we’re happy to have you here. 🙂
Have a fabulous weekend! ❤
If you’re wondering why I’m so thrilled to have THAT OCTOBER on Allstora versus any other site where the book can be purchased, it’s because, as some of you who’ve read the book know, THAT OCTOBER has an important gay theme among the high-school protagonists of the story.
That the book just happened to be carried by Allstora is probably just luck, but I like to think that someone, somewhere, recognized the storyline and characters as some that will – hopefully – resonate with readers and count a little toward representation of LGBTQ+ characters in mainstream fiction.
So Allstora, I’m thrilled to be part of your fabulous site.
(My site, meanwhile, is being difficult in letting me post a link to THAT OCTOBER on Allstora, but it should be easy enough to find if you want to direct a little business their way.)
If you’re wondering about those four friends on the cover of my 1984-set high school crime novel THAT OCTOBER, maybe a couple of introductions are in order.
All credit to my friend and amazing artist Sara McKinley for bringing these characters to life for the cover of my book. She’s saramckinleyart on Instagram.
One of the things I tried to do when writing THAT OCTOBER was make some characters familiar without making them stereotypical. I’m not sure I succeeded, but Toni was probably toughest for me.
Toni Carter fulfills the “best friend” role in the book for her unwavering support of Jackie Rivers, but I hoped to give Toni some depth by making her the friend who was most confused and felt most isolated of the girls. Toni is an outsider, with a mom who’s considered strange – she is on the hospital cleaning staff and is a part-time psychic – but whom Toni fiercely defends.
All of us knew or know a Toni: Loyal and sweet and a little out of the mainstream. With a friend like Toni, you’re never alone.
The actress I saw in my head and I was writing Toni: Brittany Murphy, so wonderful in the “best friend” role in “Clueless.” She passed away in 2009 but is forever frozen in time for me as Toni.
More of the cast of characters to come.
And you can buy THAT OCTOBER anywhere, but here’s a link to the Barnes & Noble site:
I was interviewed for a podcast recently when I was back in Indiana promoting THAT OCTOBER and I ended a question with an off-hand comment that I’ve verbalized before but this interviewer said she really appreciated it.
“If you write, you’re a writer,” I said.
That seems obvious enough, but I think some writers feel like you’ve got to attain some particular level of success, or something, to consider yourself a real writer:
You’ve got to finish every story or article or book that you begin. You’ve got to publish every story or book or see it published. You’ve got to be paid for every one. You’ve got to be published by a prestigious site or magazine or anthology or publishing house, all to be considered a legitimate writer. (Now that I write that sentence, I can’t imagine what a “legitimate” writer would be anyway.)
None of those things are necessary to being a writer.
For certain, it’s a good thing to finish what you’re writing. That’s good discipline and a sign that you’re able to follow through, even if it’s not your best work. It definitely would be a cool thing to try to get every story or book you write published, but no way in the world does that happen to every writer (maybe to Stephen King or Lee Child, and probably not even them).
Getting paid or being published in some cool place is super and I highly recommend it. But that’s not the definition of being a writer.
Sitting down at your keyboard – that’s mine in the photo; please disregard the random junk in the keys – is part of the definition of being a writer. Or sitting down with your notebook or legal pad and your favorite pen.
You’re also a writer if you’re sitting in a comfortable space, staring out the window, watching random squirrels frisk their way past enjoying the sun, or watching the headlights and taillights of passing cars cutting through the dark. While you’re sitting there, you’re probably thinking about stories or coming up with ideas of ways to execute a scene. Or you might just be letting your imagination roam. You can do the same thing while mowing the lawn or watching TV or listening to music.
There’s enough anxiety and imposter syndrome for writers, and always has been, about writing or what they hope to write or what they have written to feel more of it because they’re not turning out a thousand sterling, perfect words every day.
If you’re exercising your imagination, if you’re mulling over characters or phrases or plots, if you’re making notes or writing it out longhand or you’re dashing out a couple of thousand words every day – even if you go back and start over – you’ve accomplished your goal.
I went viral on social media – two different social media, with two different posts – over the Fourth of July weekend.
(This is not a pat myself on the back post. I think there’s something interesting that’s happened here, beyond the viral-ness.)
The first post that went viral is the one above. On Saturday, I was in the Barnes & Noble bookstore near me and took a picture of the first table inside the door. If you can’t tell from the picture, it’s a display marked “Dystopian Vibes” and offers books including “1984,” “Animal Farm” and the works of Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler.
I thought I’d snap a picture and post it and thank Barnes & Noble for putting these books out there so prominently. Yes, that placement encourages sales. Yes, it’s ultimately a big corporation trying to move copies of books. But it’s something.
I thought the post might get some traffic, but I never get a lot of engagement, even with 3,000 Bluesky followers.
By Sunday afternoon, this was the response:
380 accounts reposted my post, which got 2,700 likes.
This is a multiple of thousands the reaction I was expecting. I had to mute notifications on the post.
That wasn’t all, though.
I saw a bitterly amusing meme on a friend’s Facebook account – there was no indication on the account who originally posted it – and I posted it on various social media, including Instagram, which shares posts to the social media app Threads (which I don’t use much).
Here’s the post, and the reaction:
Believe me when I tell you, I usually don’t get 600 likes on Threads, a social media I barely use.
So what’s the upshot to all this, besides a little more engagement and traffic to the companies that own Bluesky and Threads, the latter the detested Meta? (The even more detested Twitter turned up with very little notice of either post, by the way.)
The upshot, it seems to me, is that there’s a lot of interest and engagement in posts about our currently untenable, dangerous and yes, dystopian path.
That’s a good thing, that people are engaging in posts critical or even acknowledging the path this country is on.
And, as a bonus, the Bluesky post shows a ton of engagement about books that forecast, define and address our society.
There’s nothing more encouraging than the realization that people are engaging with literature that calls to light our current peril.
So maybe a small percentage of the frogs in this slowly boiling pot of water are aware they’re in a slowly boiling pot of water. I hope.
I can’t say I’ve listened to Dr. Demento’s radio show in a couple of decades or more. I’m not even sure he’s still on what some call terrestrial radio.
But I heard today that the Doctor, born Barry Hansen, has announced that he’s retiring after more than 50 years of doing his show, which traditionally played the weirdest and wildest novelty songs from several decades of the music business.
Demento is probably best known for “discovering” the work of Weird Al Yankovic, who was first showcased on the show in 1976. Demento had received a cassette of a parody song, “Belvedere Cruisin,” from Yankovic. Before too long, Yankovic was a mainstream star of TV, movies and especially music and music videos. I even saw him live in concert once!
Demento brought a lot of new and long-forgotten talent to listeners. “Fish Heads” by Barns and Barnes was one that stands out in my memory, as does “Shaving Cream,” by Benny Bell, which might be the ultimate novelty song. The 1946 tune’s gimmick was that each verse made you think it was going to include the word “shit,” but at the last minute the phrase “shaving cream” was substituted.
My friends and I turned into our area FM station every Sunday evening in the early 1970s to listen to Demento.
That feels like a thousand years ago now, when radio was still a viable thing, could be a daring thing, and could communicate new and exciting shows and acts to new listeners.
Anyway, I wrote about a Demento song that stuck with me, and I wrote about it on this site way back in 2012. Here’s what I wrote:
The Suicide Song on Dr. Demento. If you’re not hep to what the nerdy kids listened to in the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Demento hosted a syndicated radio show playing offbeat songs like “Fish Heads” and “Shaving Cream.” The oddball doctor introduced a nation of youngsters to the work of Spike Jones and helped launch the career of Weird Al Yankovic. But the song that Demento played that sticks with me, 30-plus years later, was “The Suicide Song.” What was it? Incredibly enough, I can’t seem to find it online. There’s a listing of songs played on the show that includes it but I can’t find an audio or video snippet, which makes me wonder if I’m mis-remembering the name. But once I hear the song again – and its dirge-like, monotone recitation of dire lyrics – I’ll get goosebumps all over again.
Here’s a mystery for the ages, and one that I’m not going to solve here.
How much is too much for a writer to care about their work? How much is just enough? How much is not enough?
2024 was a good year for my writing in a lot of ways. Several short stories published. The stories were published with some effort on my part but much more luck. Much more.
So toward the end of 2024, as I began to focus on self-publishing my book THAT OCTOBER, my short story production dropped off dramatically. I didn’t chase every call for submissions like I had been for much of 2024. (This followed a LOT of story rejections, by the way.)
Since I hopped off the short-story-submission merry-go-round, I’ve had, unexpectedly, some luck with short stories. A few months into 2025, Shotgun Honey accepted my short story “Trouble, Start to Finish,” submitted in 2024, and it was published in May. (Link below.) Another story that had been held for months is slotted (for now) for publication, this year I think. Another story that had previously been accepted is still set to publish on December 21, 2025, as far as I know.
Then an author I know contacted me and asked if I had a story in a very particular genre that I might be able to contribute to an anthology he was editing. I had had one in mind and pitched it, he said yes, I wrote it in a couple of weeks and it’s going into an upcoming anthology. I’ll be promoting it when I know some details.
So with THAT OCTOBER out and available everywhere, I’m tentatively looking at short-story writing again. A friend sent me a link to a call for subs and I’m sending the super-short story out this afternoon. No idea if it’ll be accepted.
So is the moral of the story that it’s good to take a breather once in a while? That you should focus more narrowly?
Or is the moral of the story that the less you care about something, the more likely you are to achieve it?
I’ve noted on social media in recent days that we recently spent a little time in Muncie, Indiana, promoting THAT OCTOBER and getting together with family and friends and looking around the city that was my lifelong home until we moved to Tennessee almost three years ago.
It made perfect sense to promote the book there because 1.) more people know me there than here and B.) the book is set in my version of Muncie as it was in 1984. The novel’s not a documentary, obviously, but it’s got the overall vibe of Muncie more than 40 years ago and the teenage characters do some of the same things my friends and I did in Muncie when we were that age or a little older – going to movies, watching MTV, going to house parties. I never prowled through a junkyard, I admit, but that part of the book was inspired by my late Uncle Si Stewart, who talked about when he took a shortcut home from school through a Muncie junkyard when he was a kid in the 1950s.
We get back to Muncie once or twice a year since we’ve moved down here, and I’m always so grateful that I get to see family and friends there and get to look around the city I knew so well and covered for the newspaper for most of my life.
I always come away with gratitude for the people I get to see, those that I get to meet and the places that are familiar to me.
But I always feel sad when I’m there. I’m nearly swamped with melancholy while I’m there and for a while after.
It’s not just that the city has changed. It has, and not just in the three years we haven’t lived there. It was changing most of the time I lived there too.
I always explain to people who don’t know Muncie as the city where David Letterman went to college, where the first half of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was set, where Garfield the cartoon cat was created and is still produced and where Ball canning jars were made dating back to the 1890s.
It’s the city where four true crime books I co-wrote with Douglas Walker, my frequent collaborator at Muncie’s newspapers, are set. There’s no getting around that Muncie – one of several Midwestern cities that were nicknamed “Little Chicago” – was sometimes a violent and murderous place.
It’s a city that in some ways peaked when I was young, as young as the teenage protagonists of THAT OCTOBER. Its population peaked at just over 76,000 in 1980 and has fallen regularly since to an estimated 64,000 now. Most of the big industrial employers went away, some of the most recent in the 2000s, although luckily there’s some stopping of the bleeding thanks to growth in employment in the education and healthcare fields.
Still, Muncie has struggled and is struggling. The city can’t keep the streets paved. The mall is all but dead. Some, not all, of the government leadership seems determined to wipe out all the welcoming efforts that groups and private individuals have made over the years. And at the same time there’s decades-long efforts to bolster downtown, there’s a proposal to pull the last few hundred government workers out of downtown and put them in an ill-advised government center miles to the south, outside the city limits. (When one of the downtown government buildings was being built in the early 1990s, there was discussion of metal detectors inside the doors. An attorney who oversaw the project said it was insulting to frisk people who were on their way to pay their taxes. Yet here we are, decades later, and metal detectors are a way of life because life is cheap and murder is easy. That said, I think it’s insulting to tell people who pay their taxes that they can’t even pay those taxes or go to court or talk to their representatives without leaving the city, ffs.)
It’s depressing to contrast the city currently with the city as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t even get into a lot about how thriving the city was in 1984 in THAT OCTOBER, but as strange and upsetting as it was for murder and mystery to envelop the city and the young protagonists of my book, 1984 in the real-life Muncie was a boom time. Life in the city had peaked, in some ways, and in the decades since, it has not struggled its way back.
My friend Tammy told me this morning, as I was ruminating on all this, that my hometown’s struggles reflect this country’s stuggles and she’s right, of course. I take that as personally as I take what’s happened to Muncie.
One of the consistently amusing sights around Muncie is a public art project from a few years ago that prompted artists to decorate traffic light control boxes. The art was contributed by a lot of different artists and ranged from the beautiful to the abstract to the whimsical like the “Stay Weird, Muncie,” message above. I took that picture our first day back and I’ve thought about it a lot.
I’d like to think that my hometown can be weird, interesting, welcoming, fulfilling, progressive but comforting and I like to think it can be a good hometown, either for someone who’s still living there, someone who’s just visiting or someone who’s come home again.
I’d like to think that, and maybe take comfort from that once I shake this profound melancholy I feel. But I’m not sure its possible.
This is definitely not going to be one of those posts about how TV was better in the old days or how TV was better when a season of a show consisted of 22 episodes or even more, although I think there’s something to be said about a season that has enough episodes to give the characters and the world they inhabit a little breathing room.
This is a post about how much I enjoy “Star Trek Strange New Worlds” and how much I’ll miss it when it’s gone after its fifth season. Paramount+ announced this week that the series, a prequel of sorts to the original “Star Trek,” would end after its fifth season.
If you’re not scoring at home, the third season of the series will begin streaming on July 17. The fourth season will follow, probably in about a year, and the fifth season after that.
This is a post in part about how Paramount+ said the fifth and final season would consist of only six episodes, fewer than the 10-episode seasons we’ve seen so far.
I’ve got lots of thoughts about the series, which has focused on the Enterprise under the command of Captain Christopher Pike. Those who remember the original “Star Trek” know that Pike was presented as a man who was left shattered after rescuing a group of cadets from a horrific accident. Pike was left disfigured and paralyzed and in a motorized chair for the rest of his life.
“Strange New Worlds” has already addressed this, with Pike having received the gift of seeing his future in an episode of “Star Trek Discovery,” the series from which “Strange New Worlds” was spun off.
Key to Pike’s journey is that he’s accepted his fate and made peace with his future, so even though “Strange New Worlds” has already played with the timeline as established by the original series, it would feel like a cheat to have Pike escape that fate in the final season of this show. Even though we like Pike, as played by Anson Mount, and might want him to go on adventuring forever.
The fact that the final season is projected to include only six episodes would indicate 1.) the showrunners have a very set plan for the final season and needed only six episodes to tell it or 2.) Paramount+ only gave them enough budget for six episodes, which would be a pretty ignominious way for the series to go out – on the cheap – but really, we don’t expect much of Paramount anymore.
There’s another “Trek” series in the works, one based on Starfleet Academy, and there could be others announced in the next two years.
But I’m wondering if “Strange New Worlds” might not morph into a new version of the original series, with most of the players – Kirk, Spock, Uhura and others – already in place on the current series.
So what do you think will happen? Will we see a revamping of the timeline and Pike’s fate? Will we see some new adventure? Will we see a reboot of the original series?
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve seen people argue that the social media platform Bluesky is a failure. It has “only” 36 million-plus users, compared to more than 600 million twitter users. (The latter is a number I think is highly suspect, but that’s a topic for another day.)
I joined Bluesky more than a year ago, I think, but I didn’t spend a lot of time on the social media site until last fall, when some odious thing the owner of twitter had done drove other people there. All of a sudden, Bluesky seemed populated – much more so than in the first few months after I had joined – and much livelier.
So-called “Starter Packs” on Bluesky – curated lists of writers, engineers, performers, artists, whatever – gave my follower count a boost early on, but the growth in the number of followers there has been pretty consistent. I have about 2,800 followers there now, compared to more than 4,000 at my peak on twitter. That Bluesky following was built in a matter of months, by the way, compared to all the years since 2009 I’ve been on twitter.
(I still have a twitter account, to keep in touch with friends who are still more active there than on Bluesky, but I spend much, much more time on Bluesky.) I’m also active on Facebook, where I started an author page this year despite my misgivings over the attitudes and behavior of the suck-up American oligarch who owns it, and I post regularly there and on Instagram (same owner, same dislike for the owner). The reason I’m still on all those platforms is, besides keeping up with friends who are on them, is to publicize my book, THAT OCTOBER.
But I spend most of my time on Bluesky, regardless of follower numbers and engagement, because it just feels like the least awful place on socials. I’m not choosing the lesser of evils here, I promise. I feel like using any social media is like building a new house (ie active thread that’s hopefully engaging) on somebody else’s property.
In other words, all of social media is someone else’s real estate. When they want to take it away from us, they can.
That’s also why Bluesky is the least reprehensible social platform. The owners of twitter and Facebook and other Meta platforms have shown themselves to be dishonest in how they treat the people who actively bring eyeballs to those platforms. They take the value of our work and bluster and censure us.
BlueSky seems the least likely social media platform to do this.
This might change if the semi-collective, not-especially-concentrated ownership of Bluesky changes, perhaps through a sale at some point in the future. Money talks and bullshit walks and aside from political ideology, there’s been no more certain death knell for various socials than how much their owners can make by selling them or just selling out.
So I’m spending time on Bluesky – too much time, probably – and little time anywhere else, although I have a presence everywhere. This site is a pretty reliable place to find my latest thoughts but it is not a two-way street, unlike even the worst social.
So I don’t think Bluesky is dying. I do think it is, right at this moment, a less reprehensible (there’s that phrase again) place than the alternatives.
keithroysdon 