For the Newbies!

What have you gotten yourselves into?

• This is for anyone who stopped by Table 810 at the State Fair Book Fair today (or yesterday, or whenever you tried the QR code) - S’up?

• (I mean, current subscribers can read it too, but it might be a bit old hat, ya know?)

• If you bought one of my books or grabbed the free zines or bookmarks, thanks much. I figured I’d give you a better idea of this whole writing thing of mine.

• First off, I’m a professor at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, MN, teaching creative writing and lit. Born and raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast not far from New Orleans, where my folks now live, I’ve been “up North” now over twenty years, first in Michigan for a few before settling here.

• I started publishing short stories in grad school (the Center for Writers at Southern Miss, where I worked on the magazine Mississippi Review and got my PhD). My teachers there - Frederick and Steven Barthelme - gave me all the tools I needed.

• If that’s sound all hoity-toity and highfalutin’, just know I gave my heart to pulpy crime fiction long before then. I was devouring Hardy Boys in second grade, before discovering the even better Three Investigators series. From there it was all the classic private eyes and tragic noir antiheroes. I’d say my biggest influences are a lot of Jims - Crumley, Thompson, Ellroy, and Burke - and Walter Mosley. But towering above them all is Florida noir-master Vicki Hendricks, whose Miami Purity and Iguana Love and Voluntary Madness are all must-reads for real noir buffs (and she led me to Harry Crews, one of her teachers, another rural madman I revere).

• My first novel, Psychosomatic, was published in 2005. Since then, I’ve written sixteen more, all some sort of crime/noir/pulp nonsense.

• The most popular of the books are my Billy Lafitte saga, (I love calling it a “saga”) which were on display at the Fair. He’s a bad cop who, when given a second chance, got worse. The series is pretty much a manhunt with all of Billy’s pursuers willing to risk their lives and sanity to catch this bastard. The fourth, Holy Death, is the most recent (from 2016), but I’m currently working on the fifth after many false starts and detours.

• Second closest to my heart is the one-armed former Rez cop Slow Bear, who first appeared as a minor character in Worm before getting three novellas of his own published by Fahrenheit Press (Slow Bear, Slower Bear, and Slowest Bear). They’ve all been collected into one volume now called Ghost Dance. He becomes an accidental vigilante, tracking down human traffickers and giving them some gory justice the system isn’t willing to dish out. There’s more from him on the way, too.

• The rest are one-and-dones, or in some cases two-and-dones. Psychosomatic and The Drummer were the first two, if you want to see what a punk I was way back when. All the Young Warriors struck some nerves and went on to find a large audience. And so on. If you’d like to find all the books I wasn’t able to bring along today, check out Fahrenheit Press, or take a peek at my author page on Amazon.

• I’ve also got a short story collection called The Ticks Will Eat You Whole from Cowboy Jamboree Press. The title story was featured in Best American Mystery & Suspense Stories 2023, while the others appeared in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. You can find a great many of those stories online at my Linktree.

• Also, I also helped create/edit the online magazine Plots with Guns, which shut down ten years ago. I’m currently editor of an online lit mag called Revolution John.

• The art at my table and in the free zines is from a great artist named Steven Fain, who is doing amazing work you can find on Substack as well. We’ve got some more comic/zine projects planned for the future, and if your subscribed to us both you can get first dibs.

• Oh, and my next book is Trooper Down!, currently scheduled for October (fingers crossed) from Shotgun Honey Press, with the novel The Prison Nurse forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree in late Spring 2027.

• So thanks again for checking in. I hope you had a good haul at the Book Fair, and enjoyed some tasty brews. If you subscribe, you’ll be able to keep up with weekly (mostly) posts where I talk about writing, about art or music sometimes, about grilled or smoked meats, about bikes, tequila, and wine, about my misadventures in the publishing world, and the latest on Lafitte, Slow Bear, and other work.

• I’m also a grumpy curmudgeon, but once you get to know me it grates a little less.