Tag Archives: THAT OCTOBER

It’s an e-book kind of day!

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It’s Labor Day and the beginning of fall – don’t argue – and the beginning of Spooky Season – that cannot be argued with – and it’s e-book day here on the ranch.

Just a quick note that THAT OCTOBER, my 1984-set high school crime novel, is available for quick and easy download beginning today on Kindle.

Here’s the link:

Also today, FIGHTING WORDS: BRUISERS, BRAWLERS AND & BAD INTENTIONS is out on Kindle.

The anthology, put together by writer and editor Scott Blackburn, features stories about fighting, fracases, brawlers, pugs and the sweet science, especially when it’s not so sweet.

My story, “A Fighting Life,” begins in 1948 and follows three young siblings – Marie, Peter and Saul – as they discover there’s money to be made, a nickel at a time, taking on other neighborhood kids in bare-knuckle challenges in vacant lots and abandoned buildings.

But besides my story, there are nine other great stories from some of the hottest authors today, including:

Saint Bullethead by Nick Kolakowski, narrated by Chris Andrew Ciulla

Where the River Breaks by L.S. Goozdich, narrated by Victor Clarke

Pure Wrath by A.M. Adair, narrated by Linda Jones

Fight Club by David Moloney, narrated by Chris Andrew Ciulla

Conor McGregor Was a Friend of Mine by J.B. Stevens, narrated by Michael Orenstein

Call Me Mina by Laura Brashear, narrated by Stacy Gonzalez

A Fighting Life by Keith Roysdon, narrated by Courtney Fabrizio

The Grit by Meredith R. Lyons, narrated by Suzanne Elise Freeman

Bourbon BrawI by Ashley Erwin, narrated by Matt Godfrey

The Cleaner by Jason Allison, narrated by Chris Andrew Ciulla

And what’s that “narrated by” element there? That’s because in addition to the e-book, which is available now, there’s an audiobook edition coming right away.

I got to work a little bit with Courtney Fabrizio, who narrated my story, and she is fabulous.

The e-book was upon its debut the Number One new release in martial arts books and it’s a firecracker.

Here’s a link:

2025 so far, so good … ?

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Don’t be fooled by that headline. 2025 is very much a shit show. I’m talking my writing year so far and that ONLY.

I published my 1984-set high school crime novel THAT OCTOBER in June and the reception so far has been pretty good. I have no complaints about how kind and generous people have been. If you’ve read it, please leave a review on Amazon. But buy it from one of the dozens of sites that sell it, especially bookshop dot org or Ink Drinkers Anonymous, the woman-owned, Black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

Other than THAT OCTOBER, I’ve been pleased to see a number of short stories published or purchased for upcoming publication, including in a future anthology that I can’t wait to tell you about.

In September, I go to my second Bouchercon, the world convention of mystery and crime writers and readers, and I’ll be on my second Bouchercon panel, with a hugely talented group of authors. This one is at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 3, the first day of Bouchercon. This Bcon is in New Orleans, which I’m pretty sure should be mild and breezy by September, right? Right?

But very nearly overshadowing all this is that I submitted, earlier today, a short story to the crime fiction genre’s preeminent market. Now I don’t have any great hope that the story will be published. There are a hell of a lot of great writers out there submitting stories.

But the submission was a goal of mine for 2025. Not to get a story published in that magazine, I will note. Nope. Just to submit a story to them again.

I subbed once before, a few years ago, and their rejection was so perfectly justified but so devastating that I didn’t submit to them again for several years. Hell, I didn’t submit anywhere for a year.

So aside from publishing THAT OCTOBER, and attending and speaking at another Bcon and winning a place in this cool anthology that’s coming up in just a few weeks, getting up the nerve to submit to the Big Show again was a 2025 goal realized.

It’s all gravy from here,

As Homer Simpson would say, “Mmmm … gravy.”

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.

THAT OCTOBER is set in 1984, and the echoes of Vietnam are almost as strong as the mystery

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BTJFXP Two soldiers comfort each other under the strain of combat in Pleiku, South Vietnam, 5/26/67.

Some folks who’ve read my novel THAT OCTOBER know there’s more going on than a murder mystery among teenagers in 1984. I won’t get too far into spoilers here, but there’s a point in the book when it becomes less about a killing in Indiana in 1984 and becomes about the echoes of Vietnam.

I knew from when I started writing THAT OCTOBER in 2021 that I’d make the Vietnam War a part of the book. I couldn’t write a book set in 1984 and ignore Vietnam. As one character, a grizzled old newspaper reporter, explains, the war had been over less than 10 years by that point.

People my age and even younger know that war was something a lot of us carried around most of our young lives. Our fathers and mothers had served in WWII and Korea and our brothers and sisters served in Vietnam. War was something we “played” in the backyard. But by 1984, Vietnam was the past.

That’s why THAT OCTOBER was my chance, maybe my only chance, to write about the ripples of the war in Vietnam, which had begun “officially” in 1955. To center a major character’s experience beginning in 1960 in Vietnam felt right.

If you read THAT OCTOBER, you’ll know what I mean. It might strike you as strange that at the end of the book a character gets a Purple Heart for their service in Vietnam, but the war – if often not top of mind – still had ripples in 1984 and still does today.

THAT OCTOBER makes its Kindle debut

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I’m not a stranger to my work being made available in different formats. Most – maybe all? – of my co-authored true crime books are available in e-book formats and “The Westside Park Murders” is available in an audiobook format from Audible and other platforms.

But there’s something neat about the e-book format of THAT OCTOBER, my 1984-set high school crime novel.

The book has been out in paperback since June 1 in an edition that shows off my friend and editor Jill Blocker’s beautiful interior design and my friend and artist Sara McKinley’s gorgeous covers. I’ve been really gratified by how good the response has been.

So last week I uploaded THAT OCTOBER to Kindle Direct Publishing and it drops, as the cool people say, on September 1.

The e-book is available for preorder now and I really appreciate the response so far.

Here’s the link:

Meet the characters of THAT OCTOBER: Sammi

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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.

That’s Sammi.

A cool thing: Finding THAT OCTOBER on Allstora, a LGBTQ+ supporting bookseller (RuPaul y’all!)

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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.)

Meet the characters of THAT OCTOBER: Toni

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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:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/that-october-keith-roysdon/1147324325

It should be obvious, but if you write, you’re a writer

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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.

You’re a writer.

The moral of the story is …

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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?

That’d be pretty damn twisted, huh?

Trouble, Start to Finish by Keith Roysdon