I’ve had my name on the cover of a book since our first true crime book came out in 2016, but it’s pretty cool to see my first novel, THAT OCTOBER, go live for pre-orders in advance of the June 1 publication date.
Here’s a couple of links to where you can pre-order it. I always try to include something other than Amazon, so there’s a link to Barnes & Noble as well. I’m including a link to bookshop dot org, although a friend told me she couldn’t get bookshop to complete the process, so that might be problematic.
I’ll include further links as we move toward the June 1 publication date and beyond. My preference is always that you order a book from a reliable independent bookseller.
The bright young faces in this photo belong to David and Julia.
The bright young faces in this photo are of Julia and David as portrayed by Ella Anderson and Xavier Jones.
My friend Julia Scheeres’ 2005 memoir, “Jesus Land,” is being made into a movie. If it’s anything like Julia’s book, the movie – directed by Saila Kariat – will be poignant and harrowing and heartfelt and, yes, controversial. Julia’s memoir is routinely banned because she tells the truth about the fundamentalist Christian life.
I’ll give you the shorthand version of why we should all care about “Jesus Land,” and why you should read Julia’s book and see the movie when it comes out. First, a little background.
Julia and I grew up in Indiana at about the same time. In the 1980s. I lived in Muncie and she lived in the Lafayette area. Her parents were abusive religious fundamentalists – my family was Baptist but never abusive when I was growing up. Julia’s parents ended up sending Julia and David to the Dominican Republic to a teen concentration camp run by an Indiana church.
I didn’t know Julia until about 20 years ago, when she contacted me from her home in California to ask if that church was undergoing a rebirth in Indiana.
I spoke with Julia and other survivors of the church gulag and, along with a small group of reporters and editors, wrote extensively about their experiences and the modern-day church and whether it was still sending, at parents’ expense, kids out of the country to hellholes, where they were abused and made to work.
I disappointed Julia back then because my editor at the time was so afraid of upsetting the church and the local chamber of commerce that they gutted our stories.
Julia’s “Jesus Land” had come out the year before, and it told the story better than we could have anyway.
Julia and I became friends – we never met but kept up to date on each other’s families and kids on Facebook – and I wrote about “Jesus Land” again in 2021, when I interviewed Julia for an article about fundamentalist groups that were pressuring Indiana schools to ban the book. It’s something that Julia has grown accustomed to: “Jesus Land” is among books regularly banned because it dares to tell the truth about the religion-based “troubled teen industry,” and how there’s money to be made by pseudo-religious organizations that incarcerate “troubled” young people.
The two of us also spoke while I was working on, shortly after that time, another story about money flowing to the troubled teen industry in Indiana. Julia encouraged me to pursue the story and read drafts of it, which I worked on on a freelance basis for more than a year. Ultimately, the cowardly editors of a major newspaper spiked my story but kept all my research – legal documents, video depositions, reports – and, a year later, did their own story. It remains a very bitter end to my newspaper career.
I’ve moved on from those disappointments to other forms of writing, and Julia has moved on in spectacular fashion: She’s written and published two more books, and now “Jesus Land” will move from the realm of New York Times bestseller to big-screen film.
Julia and David’s story, so movingly told in “Jesus Land,” will find a whole new audience.
Julia, always gracious and kind, was the first person I thought of when I thought of writers who could read my new 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER. I hoped she would appreciate its story of Indiana teenagers grappling with injustice and forces beyond their control. Her comments about the book are prominently displayed on the back cover.
Thank you, Julia. I’m so happy for the movie version of your book.
We hear so much bad news, all the time, that I wanted to share some good news with you.
After the latest depressing study about how few people read books, I have to say that it seems like somebody out there is reading, because bookselling is a growth industry all of a sudden.
Barnes & Noble, the longtime bookstore chain that was a fixture of many malls and shopping centers before struggling a few years ago, is on an aggressive growth curve.
USA Today reported this week that the bookstore company plans to open 60 new stores in 2025. B&N has about 600 stores, up by several that opened in 2024.
Where I live, the city is getting a second B&N, in the most prosperous and thriving part of the city … not far from its existing location in the most prosperous and thriving part of the city.
This means a few things:
No company like B&N makes decisions to expand on the basis of hope. B&N has done some demographic research, run the numbers and thinks there’s market for even more books.
The company made that decision on the basis of sales and probably surveys and analysis of foot traffic, and that’s a pretty clear indicator that sales are good and the book business is good.
Maybe coolest of all is that B&N thinks there’s enough call for books that it doesn’t have to exist solely on online sales.
The last time I bought a couple of books, it was through the online arm of Powell’s City of Books, the PNW-based mega book retailer. I’ve spent a little time and money in McKay’s, a used bookstore chain, lately too.
And I continue to be on the lookout for my favorite retail spaces of all time, small and independent bookstores. Unfortunately we’ve had two that I know of close in the city in the past couple of years.
Yes, Barnes & Noble is a big company, although not as big and possibly not as soulless as Amazon. And yeah, other stores and companies sell books.
I’m glad people are buying books, no matter where they get them. I’m glad people are reading. (Not surprising sentiments for an author who has a new book coming out in the next couple of weeks, I know.)
If some of that increased interest in books, reading and book-buying benefits a big company like B&N, I’m glad of that.
Don’t forget though – patronize your locally-owned booksellers.
I just got my print proof of my 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER.
It looks amazing. Self-published through IngramSpark. Edited by the awesome Jill Blocker. Cover imagery by the awesome Sara McKinley. (@saramckinleyart on Instagram.)
I’ll proof this and let y’all know when it’ll be on sale, both in print and electronic.
When I was looking for an image for this post, I was tickled to find the one above, illustrating an instructional video posted by InterDidacta.
I thought it was perfect because this is the first time I’ve worked on a new novel since spring 2023, when I finished THAT OCTOBER.
It’s not just because THAT OCTOBER is close to being self-published that I’m starting a new one.
I’m starting a new novel – after flirting with the idea of writing another non-fiction book, my fifth following four true crime books – because, as I’ve noted here, I’ve changed my daily writing habits. I’m still writing most days, non-fiction articles for sites like CrimeReads and others, but I’m not writing as much short fiction as I did in 2024, for example, when I sold or placed more than a dozen short stories to several sites and anthologies. I’ve got more stories out there in the ether, stories I’ve subbed and haven’t heard back about, and another couple that have publish dates later in 2025.
And while I’ve got something to keep me busy, the urge to write fiction, especially some particular stories and characters, is still there.
So it’s a good time to write a new novel. I’m going to incorporate characters from some of my recent fiction, including SEVEN ANGELS, which won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest, as well as some characters who have shown up in some other stories AND a bunch from a series of novels I wrote 20 years ago.
I’m posting here to help keep myself accountable. After I reach a promising point in these notes, I’ll turn them into a chapter-by-chapter outline. (I’m a committed plotter but I make changes and add and subtract chapters as I plot and write.)
So hopefully I’ll be motivated to keep going and update here occasionally.
The “how to type on a keyboard” video is more basic instruction than I’ll need, I think, but I’ll for sure remember that I’m starting new on this one, so baby steps will come first.
A quick update to start things off: My editor and I pulled the trigger on THAT OCTOBER the other day, uploading the book for self-publishing. What’s next? An electronic proof, then a print proof, then ARCs, then the electronic edition and getting the book in front of as many people as possible.
Writing the book felt easier and more straightforward than self-publishing, it seems. But we’re pushing forward with the book after some technical red flags about the cover. We think it’ll be okay.
Uploading the book came within the same 24-hour period of getting my latest short story rejection. I don’t think I’ve placed more than a short story or two so far in 2025, after a good year in 2024 with about a dozen short stories sold or accepted. One of those has a very long lead time and will be published on December 21, 2025. In the meantime, I’ve got several stories out on submission that I haven’t heard back on.
So it felt like a good time, frankly, to reassess what I’m doing with my writing.
I’ll continue to write pop culture pieces for CrimeReads – my latest, about men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s-1970s, was published today. I’ll have other non-fiction pieces out there too.
But as much as I loved writing short stories – and there’s no doubt it’s a thrill to see them accepted and published – I’m not going to chase every call for submission I see anymore. I’m going to write short fiction more strategically, and I hope to make good on my one 2025 writing goal, besides getting THAT OCTOBER out in the world: targeting the biggest – and most competitive – markets with my short fiction.
This will let me focus my remaining brain cells on the most important tasks I can take on.
And it’ll free up some time to work on my next crime novel.
I haven’t written a novel since I finished THAT OCTOBER in 2023. I’ve got two previous novels that I might revisit, but I want the thrill and enjoyment of writing something new – which will have the added benefit of letting me throw some characters I created for unpublished novels as far back as the early 2000s into the mix.
So I’ll update y’all here, of course, as well as socials like my BlueSky account and my author page on the accursed Facebook.
It’s a good time, with everything in chaos, to exercise a little control over what I’m doing.
I think we can all agree that exercising some control over what we can control these days is a good thing.
No. No it is not. But it’s almost time for THAT OCTOBER, my 1984-set YA crime thriller.
We’re only a week or two or so from the book being ready to publish, in both paperback and electronic versions. We’ve been working on proofs this week. The cover’s ready to go.
When I started writing THAT OCTOBER in 2021, I wondered if we’d ever get to this point.
The first words I wrote on the book remain mostly unchanged:
Yesterday (March 20, 2025) I wrote here about discovering two of my four co-authored true crime books were among those pirated through LibGen for AI training.
(Scroll down to read that entry.)
This morning, a quick update: Yesterday it was said that more than 2 million books, articles and academic papers were pirated. Today Authors Guild, a writers collective, says that number is actually 7.5 million.
Authors Guild (I’m not a member, but I might join) has really stepped up, as did the Atlantic, the magazine that called a lot of attention to the piracy this week and included a search function. It was certainly known that LibGen – which may be working with or at the behest of Meta, those wonderful people behind Facebook and Instagram, in this AI training theft was doing this, but I think this flew under the radar until this week.
A class action lawsuit is in the works, but Authors Guild provided a link to a form that writers can fill out to ask that their work be removed.
As a writer, I find AI an intensely bad thing. Yeah, it’s momentarily distracting and amusing to be scrolling through social media and see what are obviously AI-generated images of a horrible, horrible person licking the feet of an equally horrible person, or even to see some fanboy’s imagining of what a Justice League movie would look like if it were made in the 1960s.
Then you realize that this is AI and valuable natural resources are being used to run servers that create these images. Not to mention that real, actual artists – and in the case of the written word, writers – could be put out of work by this.
I first had some foreboding realizations about the effect AI might have on my work a few months ago when I went looking for one of my pieces for CrimeReads, so I could post a link to it, and realized that Google AI had generated bullet points of my articles. Why would someone need to click through to CrimeReads when they could just read the AI interpretation of what the site’s writers had written?
I was aware that some writers were saying they believed entire books of theirs had been used for AI training.
I was concerned about that because I know a lot of writers. I thought no one would possibly pirate and upload my little true crime books. Who would need that?
Then, on March 20, the Atlantic published a story about the 2-million-plus books, articles and scientific papers that have been added to Library Genesis, or LibGen, which is what Wikipedia calls a “shadow library” of file-shared work, including work that is not available digitally.
One of my writer friends said a couple of her books were there. Another had 15 of her 19 books pirated on LibGen.
The Atlantic offered a real public service that allowed readers to search to see if their work, or the work of someone they know, was uploaded to LibGen for AI training.
Here’s a screen shot of my search results using the link in the Atlantic.
I found two of the four true crime books I co-wrote with Douglas Walker on there, using the Atlantic’s search engine.
I later found what purports to be LibGen’s own search portal and could not find these two books. Had they been taken down in the meantime? Was there some mistake? It seems hard to imagine that the Atlantic got that wrong. Based on that article, I saw dozens of writers, some of whom I know, posted that they had also found their books on the site.
It’s unclear what to think about what’s there and what’s not, but there’s no question that pirated work hurts writers and publishers who might not be able to sell copies of books if people can get them for free. Since shit flows downhill, that trickles down to harm for writers, that’s for sure.
We’re all still figuring this out. It’s been pretty clear for a while that AI-generated art and writing is bad for the planet – servers use a lot of water to cool to create AI – and bad for writers. I suspect it’s also bad for consumers, but then I was never one to snap up pirated books and art and have been pretty skeptical of that inclination.
Brave new world, hell. This seems like a very cowardly ploy.
Hollywood is forever looking for variations on Sherlock Holmes stories, although the “Sherlock” series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a Brit production overseen by Mark Gatiss) is very hard to top. “Elementary” did a good job of modernizing the Arthur Conan Doyle detective and “House” focused the mystery to medical conditions diagnosed by a Sherlockian-level grump doctor.
Now there’s two series, one more directly tied to the Sherlock mythos, that cast Holmesian logic as medical diagnosis.
The more directly Conan Doyle-connected is “Watson,” starring Morris Chestnut in a very appealing turn as John Watson, who is running an elite clinic in the wake of the Reichenbach Falls confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis James Moriarty. Watson suffered a head injury as he tumbled into the water trying to save Holmes. Now he’s trying to recover, make a new life for himself and, as of the second episode, doesn’t realize that Moriarty isn’t dead and means to bring Watson down.
As we know from the Sherlock canon, the Falls were not the end of Holmes, so I’m wondering how long before the detective shows up to assist his best friend?
The cast is good but the show has some of the faults of network shows in that everything is explained too explicitly to ensure audiences who are barely watching the show while scrolling on their phones catch what’s going on.
Even if it is less Holmes-related, “Doc” is the better series for me right now. Molly Parker, from “Deadwood” and “Lost in Space,” plays a doctor who lost her memory of the past eight years after a head injury. (Lot of that going around.)
Now she must navigate a return to a personal life that, for her, is where she left it eight years ago. (Spoilers.) She doesn’t remember that one of her children died, she and her husband divorced, she began a new relationship and her former friend is now an enemy.
Parker is, like Chestnut, just incredibly appealing. I’d watch another couple of seasons of “Lost in Space” featuring her as Maureen Robinson if I could. And what wouldn’t we all give for several more seasons of “Deadwood?” “Doc” might be the best Molly Parker fans will get, and that’s pretty good in its own right.
keithroysdon 