Tag Archives: novel

My novel GHOST SHOW is coming

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I wrote GHOST SHOW between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER.

I’ve always described it as “Rich Man, Poor Man,” but there’s no rich men. It’s VERY loosely based on the post-war years, when my mother’s family had moved to Muncie, Indiana (in the novel from Seven Angels, in real life, from Jamestown, Tennessee) to find work and a life.

The characters, several siblings from the Anderson family, work, play and try to survive and find their consciousness raised in the process.

The novel has gangsters, traveling Romani, infidelity, untimely death, lesbian college professors, a Bela Lugosi-type washed-up movie star, a traveling “ghost show,” a haunted theater with a real ghost named Milo and the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who visited Muncie that year as part of his election campaign.

But know this: Truman’s role is the most tearjerking of the entire book.

We’re going to publish it through Constellate Publishing in the coming months.

Photo above is by my friend John Disher and it’s a photo of the real Rivoli Theater, taken from just below its dome, in the theater’s final days before demolition in the 1980s.

GHOST SHOW is a big book. If you’re looking for a long and absorbing read, this will be it.

I’ll keep you updated here and on social media.

Countdown’s almost over: SEVEN ANGELS publishes tomorrow, June 1

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Okay, I should just acknowledge that when you’ve published a book, the promotional push for it is never over.

But it feels like we’ve reached something of a milestone as my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS is published tomorrow, June 1, 2026, by Constellate Publishing, a publishing imprint of Constellate Creatives, a company founded by my longtime friend Jill Blocker and for which I do some editing and other work.

By way of noting that promoting a book is never ending, I’ll say that I’ll be darkening your doorstep plenty even after the book is published.

A few quick words on how I got here:

I wrote a few crime novels back in the early 2000s that weren’t completely baked and I didn’t pursue publishing them. A few years later, sometime before 2010, I outlined a book called SEVEN ANGELS, a crime story about a fictionalized version of the little town in Tennessee where my parents grew up.

(I was still about 14 years from being a Tennessee resident myself, but I’d been down here plenty of times, visiting family.)

After I outlined SEVEN ANGELS, I set it aside. I didn’t write a book-length project again until my first true crime book, co-authored with Douglas Walker, was published in 2016. Three more true crime books followed. It turns out that writing and co-writing and editing those books was essential for me in figuring out how to write a book-length manuscript. I’m a plotter and outliner, and turning out an outline – one paragraph per chapter, outline length in total 15 or 16 pages or more – is a step I can’t imagine skipping.

In 2019, I took a buyout from my newspaper job and finally felt I had time and focus to write novels. In a few years, I’d written SEVEN ANGELS, GHOST SHOW and THAT OCTOBER. The latter was the first to be published (self-published) in 2025.

I’d gone back to SEVEN ANGELS almost every year since 2019, fleshing it out with new characters and I hopefully made it better.

The blurbs and comments and reviews have been laudatory and I appreciate it.

For a few months now, I’ve been actively compiling ideas for a new novel, including using some elements from an aborted novel from 2025. (I’ve mined those early 2000s books for a number of ideas and characters, and I’ve done the same with GHOST SHOW, so nothing ever entirely goes to waste.)

So here I am with a promise: I’ll be working on the next novel, along with articles and short stories.

And I’ll be promoting it all, so forewarned is forearmed.

Blurbs about my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS: Julia Dahl

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I’ve got my hands on the blurbs from some of the authors who’ve read my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS – which we at Constellate Publishing will publish on or about June 1 – and I’m gonna share them here and on social media occasionally.

Julia Dahl is one of the coolest and most talented people I know. She’s a journalist and professor and editor and an amazing writer. I became a fan after I read her novel THE MISSING HOURS way back in 2021. It’s a spellbinding book about how a young woman’s life can change dramatically after one night.

At some point after that, she let me read a screenplay she wrote and I’ll tell you that it is a story and set of characters that cry out to be adapted as a streaming series.

I got to meet Julia at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and she’s just as delightful in person as she is online.

Julia reading an advance copy of SEVEN ANGELS and giving me a blurb for the book means so much to me. She’s just aces.

More about Julia:

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Just like starting over – with a new novel

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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.