Tag Archives: Pistol Jim Press

Kill your darlings? I say writers should resuscitate their darlings: the story behind Door to Door

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Writers are always told to “kill your darlings.” That means, of course, that they should learn to be comfortable with cutting lines, paragraphs, chapters and even more if they get in the way of the story. Stephen King famously cut about 400 pages, or 150,000 words, from the manuscript of his magnum opus THE STAND for its original publication. His publisher said the novel was just too long. After THE STAND was hailed as the masterpiece it is, King restored a later edition to something like the original manuscript at 1,152 pages.

I think writers can get in the way of our own success – not only in terms of publication but also story merit – when we’re reluctant to kill our darlings.

That doesn’t make it an easy thing.

I wrote “Door to Door,” published this week by Pistol Jim Press – link at the end of this post – in 2024 for a call for submissions for stories about cults. It got rejected.

So when editor Martine Proctor and Pistol Jim honcho James Maxwell posted a call for stories about doors, portals and gates, it seemed like a good time to revive and sub “Door to Door.”

The only problem? The original was about a third again as long as the 1,000 words or so that the call for subs wanted.

So I cut two or three hundred words. For a story of that length, that’s a lot of dead darlings. It’s not the most I’ve cut from a story, though. I cut some dialogue and I cut a few details, but the point of the story still came through.

I liked the original version of the story and I like the new version. And feedback by people who’ve read it is good.

I should note here that the story was inspired by something that happened in real life: I was home one uncomfortably warm day a few years ago and a young woman came to the door selling magazine subscriptions or something. She literally looked like she was about to faint from the heat and I invited her in and gave her a glass of water.

No murder ensued, however, unlike in the story. No magazine subscriptions ensued either.

I very well might have written some other story for the Pistol Jim call for subs, but it worked out well to give the original, rejected story a shot. Albeit in a slimmed-down version.

Writers should still kill their darlings, especially when it’s necessary. (Says the guy who might publish a 108,000-word novel, GHOST SHOW, in the coming months.)

But even dead darlings can have a new life in some altered form.

Say, that sounds like a story idea …

Here’s my story “Door to Door” for Pistol Jim:

https://pistoljimpress.substack.com/p/door-to-door-by-keith-roysdon

The many lives – and deaths – of Butcher Crabtree

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A lot of writers, maybe most of us, have characters that we love to play with. They might be heroes or villains, but we love to return to them again and again.

Mine is Butcher Crabtree, a character I created back in the early 2000s in DEATH AND TAXES, the first novel I wrote. It was the first of a series of books I wrote about Middletown, Indiana, my version of my hometown, Muncie, Indiana. That first book was about Jack Richmond, a newspaper reporter who investigates the death of the head of the local chamber of commerce and finds that the chamber chief was involved in shenanigans with some unsavory characters.

One of them was Butcher Crabtree, at the time a muscled and menacing, fire hydrant-shaped tough guy who was working as the bouncer at the Gilded Cage, the strip bar in Middletown. In his spare time, Butcher was up for committing murder on behalf of his bosses.

I’ve returned, in the past few years, to some of those characters. Reporter Jack Richmond was a novice newshound in 1984, the time period for my novel THAT OCTOBER, which was published just this past June.

Butcher is in that book, too, although in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo at a Halloween party. He’s referred to as “Uncle Butcher,” but it’s good old Butcher. Complete with his characteristic baseball bat.

(By the way, that’s not Butcher above, but it is Ernest Borgnine in the great 1973 thriller “Emperor of the North.” In that movie, Borgnine is a vindictive and murderous Depression Era-railroad guard. I didn’t have Borgnine in mind when I created Butcher, but at least in that movie, he’s a pretty good illustration of Butcher. George Kennedy is also a passable doppleganger.)

But Butcher isn’t just a tough guy. I’ve enjoyed casting him in a variety of roles, from the threatening old uncle in THAT OCTOBER to his role in my story “Rousting,” published just recently by Pistol Jim Press. In that one, Butcher is a racist sheriff’s deputy who pushes his luck too far.

Butcher also showed up in “The Devil’s Cut,” my story in HOOSIER NOIR 7. In that one, Butcher is once again a sheriff’s deputy and is again murderous.

Is Butcher ever a good guy? Well, in my book SEVEN ANGELS – winner of the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest – he’s a mentor figure for Travis King, a troubled young man trying to make sense of his violent life.

I’ve included Butcher in a couple of other stories, too, and those – like SEVEN ANGELS – might see the light of day sometime, as THAT OCTOBER has.

Butcher often meets his end in my stories. He did way back more than 20 years ago in DEATH AND TAXES and he has since.

I don’t mind that Butcher’s lives and deaths conflict and contradict and that he seems to move back and forth through time at my whim.

When you’ve got a fun character, you don’t want to let them go.