New right now on Indiana Public Radio, the Pop of Culture interview with me and Jill Blocker about our new books, our publishing venture and our Muncie appearances in July. Thanks to longtime friend Michelle Kinsey for the chance to talk.
As Michelle points out, she and Jill and I all have a newspaper in common: The three of us formerly worked at The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana.
(And yes, you’re welcome for injecting that 1975 Van McCoy earworm into your brain.)
Every day, I see dudes in our apartment complex walking through the parking lot and down the hill to the busy commercial street below. They’re wearing knit shirts with restaurant logos and I’m assuming they’re going to work in the kitchens of said eateries.
In these hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell summer days, they’re walking to work, maybe because they don’t have cars and, luckily, there are so many places to eat nearby.
Increasingly, they’re turning out for work every day at some risk: getting swept up by state-sanctioned kidnappers.
Whatever the risks and whatever the meager rewards – nobody working in a restaurant kitchen is making more than minimum wage – they’re hustling every day.
They’re an echo of their parents and, honestly, my parents. My dad worked for 30 years in an auto parts factory. The days were hot and dirty and noisy; he was half-deaf by the time he retired. And when he retired, he ran pay-to-fish ponds down the hill and behind our house. Once a week he drove to another city, his old Chevy pickup with a waterproofed wooden tank that he built on the back, to pick up catfish and bluegill to stock the ponds. He’d owned and ran an apartment house years before I was born and sharpened saws after he retired.
My mom’s story was similar, and I tell some of it in my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW. She and her sisters gathered wild-growing plants near their little town in Tennessee – the place that inspired the town in my novel SEVEN ANGELS – to sell to reps of pharmaceutical companies. They collected the plants in burlap sacks and sold them, at the end of the day, for pennies.
My mom ran our 20-acre farm for those 30 years my dad worked in the factory. She cleaned houses and factories, a job I helped with before I started working in the newspaper business.
I have only a portion of the hard work, the sheer hustle, of my parents. Or those guys walking to work in a hot kitchen every day.
And I’m acutely aware of that.
“I need to work more and work longer hours if I’m gonna write all these books,” I said the other day.
“You know, you can take downtime,” the reply came.
And I do take down time. Too much of it. I need to work harder and smarter. I need to hustle.
The authors of Constellate Creatives and Constellate Publishing are going to be out and about this summer, talking about our books, our publishing journey and our quest to find new authors to bring to the reading public.
Here are some of our events:
I think there are few writers who enjoy asking other writers and book influencers for blurbs, quotes and reviews.
I don’t know that I’ll continue to seek out marketable opinions of my books, if I continue to write books, but I’ve been blessed with insightful comments from people who’ve had a chance to read my books – in advance for inclusion as blurbs like the one shown above by wonderful author and friend Emily J. Edwards – and after the books are published as the most marketing-heavy element of book marketing.
I’ve had only one author say they’ve been too overwhelmed with their own work to take the time to read the book for a blurb or review.
How this process went for me:
Of course, we all know what reviews are, but blurbs are those little snippets of opinion – inevitably praising – that you see on book covers and inside. They attest to the value of the book and, sometimes, of the author.
With my first published novel, THAT OCTOBER, I waited until almost too late to ask. The book was slated for self-publishing on June 1, 2025 and I probably didn’t ask people until March or April. Every person I asked except for one hugely busy person was able to read the book and provide a blurb.
With SEVEN ANGELS, I was a little more organized and asked weeks, months, earlier, well before its June 1, 2026 publication date. I did so politely and with the understanding that they were probably too busy to do it, but they all did. One author who’d said she wouldn’t be able to blurb the book emailed later to say she’d begun reading it and wanted to blurb it. I’m not sure I got a higher compliment than that.
Each of the authors got a copy of the manuscript and I told them that there would be no substantial changes to come that might affect their opinions.
The blurbs were included in the book, most inside and one by Claire Booth on the back cover. My friend and cornerstone of Constellate Publishing Jill Blocker decided the positioning.
Afterward, when I had copies of the book, I asked a handful of people, friends and online tastemakers, who I provided either copies of the proof or copies of the book to. I stepped gingerly with my request here: “If I sent you a copy, would you consider reading it and possibly posting about it?” This was a step I didn’t take with THAT OCTOBER.
In the five days (as of today) since SEVEN ANGELS was published, I’ve encouraged people to post reviews on Amazon or other sites like Goodreads. And of course people I don’t know who might read the book might do the same.
It’s a ticklish process, for sure. You have to assume that the people you’re asking MIGHT like the book and be willing to say so publicly. If they don’t, though, at least they gave it a shot and shared their honest opinion.
Because years from now, if I’m lucky, someone might have an opinion. If it’s positive or negative or mixed, it’s still a sign that someone found the book and connected with it.
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.
So I’m scrolling on LinkedIn – yes, it’s come to that – and I see an ad for AI-generated headshots and I think mine came out pretty damn good, don’t you?
Of course, that’s Exeter from the classic sci-fi movie THIS ISLAND EARTH. My tan isn’t nearly that nice.
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:
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.
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:
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?
keithroysdon 