Michael Wolf asked each of the authors to share a little bit about themselves, talk a little about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave, and tell us their thoughts about e-books. Today we talk to Anthony award winning author Simon Wood.
Tell us about yourself.
I’m an engineer by trade, but I’ve also been a racecar driver, a licensed pilot and an occasional private investigator. Over the last ten years, I’ve had over 150 stories and articles published. My short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and has garnered me an Anthony Award, two Anthony nominations and a CWA Dagger Award nomination, as well as several readers’ choice awards. I’m a frequent contributor to Writer’s Digest. I’m the author of WORKING STIFFS, ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN, PAYING THE PIPER, WE ALL FALL DOWN, TERMINATED and ASKING FOR TROUBLE. I do have a darker side to me. I write horror fiction under the name Simon Janus. Under my alternate identity, I’m the author of THE SCRUBS and ROAD RASH. Curious people can learn more athttp://www.simonwood.net
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
My story is a little unusual because it’s story about cops in San Francisco and they see the city a little differently from the general public. You see the Golden Gate bridge and see an iconic landmark. A cop sees the same and sees a place for people to commit suicide.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
My “hero” is a young San Francisco cop. he chasing down a suspect and the suspect sucker punches and strips him of his weapon and shoots him. Luckily for the cop, he’s wearing a vest, but despite surviving the incident, he feels he lost something and he can’t claim it back until he tracks down the perp to get his service weapon back.
Backpacking through Thailand inspired the story. They have tourist cops. It’s a prestigious job and well paid. Two things that will lose a tourist cop his job—losing his radio and/or service weapon. A tourist cop will kill first before losing his weapon. I thought there was a story.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
I embrace the changes. It would be churlish of me to think otherwise. The industry is changing. The public has voted with both feet. They like eBooks, so I’m on board. Personally, I like the flexibility eBooks give me. I’m not restricted by word count and page count, so I have a venue for short stories, novellas and novels. The reduced financial risk of producing an eBook means I can play with stories and characters that fall outside conventional norms.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
My current title is DID NOT FINISH. It’s the first in a new mystery series set in the world of motor racing. The follow up, HOT SEAT, will be out next spring. On November 15th, the paperback edition of my best eBook, THE FALL GUY, was released. It’s a crime caper about a down-on-his-luck guy who backs into a drug dealer’s Porsche and becomes indebted to the mob. I also get to play editor for the first time. I’m putting together an eBook anthology called Gravediggers. It’s about people who flirt with danger and it comes back to bite them.
If you want to read Simon’s short story “Officer Down” you can find it and 17 other great crime fiction shorts in West Coast Crime Wave. You can find West Coast Crime Wave at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble today.
Acme Thoughts Incorporated: My Future of the Book Conversation -
Here is Mike’s panel from GigaOM’s Roadmap conference about the future of publishing.
At GigaOM’s Roadmap event this past week, I had the pleasure of talking to both Richard Nash of Small Demons and Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling, about the where the book will go in the future. It may have only been half an hour, but we covered a lot of ground.
We talked about the future of the…
Michael Wolf asked each of the authors to share a little bit about themselves, talk a little about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave, and tell us their thoughts about e-books. Today we talk to Edgar award winning author Naomi Hirahara.
Tell us about yourself.
After graduating from college and spending a year in Japan, I worked at a small daily newspaper as a reporter and then editor while taking creative writing classes at UCLA Extension. I don’t know if it was hubris or if I was delusional, but I was committed to being a published novelist someday. Probably what fueled me more than anything was that I felt that I had stories to tell. Not necessary of my life, but of my parents’ experiences and my larger community’s collective experience.
My first mystery, SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI, took me fifteen years to write and get published. It didn’t start off as a mystery; it evolved into one. I was first attempting to write . a literary novel, but my prose was too simple and straight-forward, just as my journalistic training had taught me. Walking alongside me during this time were mystery authors and their books: Walter Mosley and his Easy Rawlings series, Barbara Neely and her Blanche White series. I began to see a place for my lead protagonist, Mas Arai, an aging Japanese American gardener who had survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima, in a mystery landscape. This turned out to be the perfect container for him, a passive character who needed a high-stakes situation to push him out of his dust-ridden house in Altadena, California.
The third novel in the series, SNAKESKIN SHAMISEN, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original. I remember walking back from a post-award party down a Midtown New York City street. It must have been past midnight. The streets were wet and shiny; the rain had ceased for an evening. Mas Arai had made it in New York!
I’ve published four Mas Arai mysteries — three with Random House and one with St. Martin’s. I’ve also had one middle-grade novel published with Random House’s imprint, Delacorte. Before all this, I’ve had a number of nonfiction books published by either small presses/reference publishers or my own press, Midori Books.
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
I’ve set my story in two places — Monterey Park, a Chinese American enclave in Southern California dating back to the 1970s, and Rowland Heights, a newer and wealthier Chinese immigrant community. I didn’t really delve into more stereotypical crimes with connections to Asian gangs. It’s more about a rivalry between two mothers-in-law — I thought the juxtaposition of the old and the new, poor and the rich, would be interesting.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
Mrs. Lin is an old-school immigrant from Hong Kong. I got her name from a curious fortune teller storefront in Alhambra, a town just south of Pasadena, California. Mrs. Lin’s Psychic Shop is a shoebox-shaped building, probably no larger than eight feet by ten feet. Every time I drive past it, I wonder what is inside. The story morphed from a more mystic angle to a very concrete, working-class one.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
I think the growth of e-books gives midlist authors who have somewhat of a following more choices. Our entire backlists were never carried extensively by the big-box stores. With the popularity of e-readers, people can easily access and purchase our earlier books.
In terms of self-publishing e-books, there are no obstacles now for someone determined to get his or her book published. For me, that means there’s another option if my book proposals are not accepted by New York publishing houses, which, I guess, now includes the Amazon imprints (!). Notice that I still consider the “Big Six (Seven?)” and independent presses part of the equation while some do not. I’ve worked in publishing in different capacities (as a publisher, too), so I know all the facets involved in producing a high-quality book. It’s hard work. It’s 24-7 at times, and creatively, I need rest to write.
Of course, any midlist author knows that you have to engage in some aspects of marketing even if you are published by another entity. But it’s a relief that there are other people working to get the book in libraries and on independent bookstore shelves. They are sending ARCs to reviewers, foreign publishers and contests. I still have a lot of readers who depend on print copies of my books. I have to offer that option so that my readers can go to a brick-and-mortar store to buy a book. (And yes, there are still some of those stores out there!) I have a lot of speaking engagements throughout the year, and people often want to buy a real, physical book at the event. I don’t know when a majority of my readers will change over, but it’s not quite now.
That said, I’m delighted to be part of a collection launched by a newbie e-book publisher. West Coast, let’s continue to represent! I do think e-books have decentralized publishing; it will be interesting to see if that affects content at all. While seeing the merits of being traditionally published, I’ve definitely dabbled in electronic self-publishing. I am a member of Top Suspense Group, a collective of suspense writers, all who have been traditionally published but some who have been experimenting with either e-publishing themselves or with the Amazon imprints. We released a couple of short story anthologies so far.
Digital technology in general has revolutionized possibilities for small publishing ventures. I’ve written two serials for pay for a website. I’m also planning to do something entrepreneurial in the audio book arena. Revenue streams are coming from a variety of sources, so authors need to be nimble and open to new possibilities.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
I’m currently working on a couple of projects: my fifth installment of my Mas Arai mystery series and a new middle-grade novel. Our next Top Suspense Group anthology, FAVORITE KILLS, will be released soon. My essay on some of the early Japanese Americans involved in the creation of the Japanese garden at Huntington Library will be included in a coffee-table book to be released by Huntington Press in celebration of the garden’s renovation and centennial year in 2012. You can visit my website, www.naomihirahara.com, for updates on my speaking engagements.
If you want to read Naomi’s short story “Mrs. Lin’s Art of Tea” you can find it and 17 other great crime fiction shorts in West Coast Crime Wave. You can find West Coast Crime Wave at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble today.
Jim Winter is a man of many talents. He’s been a standup comedian, a pizza delivery driver, salesman and a factory worker, and currently is a software expert for a large medical company in Cleveland, Ohio. But during all these career phases, actually from his childhood, Jim has always known he was a writer. It’s a good thing for us, because we love his short “Bad History” that is a part of West Coast Crime Wave, and we think you will too.
Jim took some time to interview me a month or so ago about our plans here at BSTSLLR at his popular blog, Edged in Blue, which you can read here (but only after you read my interview with Jim).
Enjoy!
Tell us about yourself.
I have been writing seriously for about 10 years, with occasional breaks for the odd career change, education, and divorce. I’ve always wanted to write since I was a kid. For a while, when I had no idea I was doing, I played in someone else’s sandbox while I figured out what kind of writer I grew up. When I decided to write about crime, I started with the web zines and published a story in 2000 called “A Walk in the Rain” in the original Plots With Guns. I published a novel set in Cleveland in 2005 called Northcoast Shakedown.
I currently live in Cincinnati with my wife and stepson and earn my living as one of the Evil Code Monkeys in the back room of a medical billing company.
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
Well, I’m not a native or resident of California, but after visiting the Bay Area in 2007 on business, I fell in love with San Francisco. It is such a beautiful city and reminds me a lot of New York and Chicago, only without the traffic problems. (If you can handle Lombard Street at rush hour, you’re in good shape.) But the place changed around every corner. The Bay Area is a microcosm of why people love California, only without LA’s smog and cult of celebrity. In my brief time as a single man a few years ago, I seriously considered relocating there to start over. The Bay has a hold over me that won’t easily be broken.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
Tony Bolin, aka Brian Selkirk, is an ex-con from back east trying to make a new start in the Bay Area. In an earlier story, he receives a visit from a former cell mate who entangles him in a bank robbery while driving down the 101 to LA. Selkirk solves his dilemma by killing the cellmate and using the death to fake his own. So when our story begins, he’s Tony Bolin, restauranteur. Things are good. He’s got a hot girlfriend, is helping the brother of a biker who took him under his wing build a chain of biker-themed sports bars, and seems to have buried his criminal past. In reality, the facade he’s built is pretty thin. That puts him in the crosshairs of a bitter former prison guard from San Quentin who wants the money from a heist up north. The major themes of both stories with Tony Bolin/Brian Selkirk are his struggle to go straight. In “Highway 101,” he’s doing it legitimately only to have someone from his past destroy everything out of greed. In “Bad History,” he’s rebuilt on a carefully crafted identity only to have someone else’s corruption step in his path. The thing is that Tony doesn’t have an undeserved sense of entitlement. He just wants to make his second chance work. It’s other people who think the world owes them that create chaos in his life.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
At this point in time, the publisher’s role is undefined because of ebooks. With a new technology, there are no really entrenched rules of the trade to go by, so both writer and publisher (quite often one and the same without the taint of self-publishing’s past) are free to make things up as they go along. As before, there is no guarantee of success, but it’s an exciting, freewheeling time to be a writer.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
I am bringing back Northcoast Shakedown in December as an ebook. After that, I plan to release the next two completed Nick Kepler novels, one of which was edited while the other was about halfway through the process. Currently, I have another novel, Road Rules, out as an ebook. In the meantime, I plan to write something for print that I’ve been working on off and on for about three years.
If you want to read Jim’s short “Bad History”, you can find it and 17 other great crime fiction shorts in West Coast Crime Wave. You can find West Coast Crime Wave at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble today.
One of our favorite book-bloggers and reviewers Elizabeth White takes a look at West Coast Crime Wave and comes away impressed.
From her review:
Michael Wolf founded digital publishing house BSTSLLR in order to provide authors with an “author-friendly, forward-thinking” outlet for their work, and BSTSLLR has come charging out of the gate with their first offering, West Coast Crime Wave.
Elizabeth calls the entire collection “well worth the price of admission”, but also points out some of her favorites.
So what are you waiting for? Check out the review to see what White had to say about her favorites and the collection as a whole!
If you’ve purchased West Coast Crime Wave, you probably have read David Corbett’s great short Returning to the Knife. Well, now you can also read David’s thoughts on WCCW over at Murderati, the popular blog written by a number of crime fiction authors.
Michael Wolf asked each of the authors to share a little bit about themselves, talk a little about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave, and tell us their thoughts about e-books. Today we talk to longtime newspaperman and author Jim Thomsen.
Tell us about yourself.
I spent twenty-four years in newspapering, as a reporter and an editor, with at least a few thousand bylined stories to my credit. But I’ve always had an interest in more narrative writing, both fiction and nonfiction, and where that came from was a story I probably should have waited years to read: “Helter Skelter,” by Vincent Bugliosi. I read my mom’s copy soon after it came out in 1976, when I was all of eleven years old, and the tale of the Manson family “creepy-crawling” through a murder spree gave me the creepy-crawlies as well. But it wasn’t the superficially morbid details that grabbed me so much as the desire to understand what makes a person turn to killing as a way to find his or her place in the world. What choices does a person make, or not make, to put them at one end or the other of a knife blade or a handgun? And there’s something about the cat-and-mouse game that takes place after a murder between a suspect and the police that fascinates me — the sprint to gather enough evidence before the suspect can wiggle away for good. Ever since, I’ve been drawn to well-told tales of crime, true or otherwise, that place character and motivation a little — but not a lot — ahead of plot. Now that my newspapering days are behind me, at the ancient age of forty-six, I’m going all in as a narrative writer. “The Ride Home” is my first-ever published crime story, and there is plenty more in the hopper.
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
It’s simple. Kitsap County has been largely ignored in crime fiction. Most authors of Seattle crime books look at this just-west-of-Seattle locale as strictly flyover country. That’s changed a bit, with South Kitsap author Gregg Olsen paying particularly close attention to the area in recent years, in his suspense fiction, his young adult novels, and the true crime books for which he’s best known. But there’s room for more, and I think Olsen, who’s been a good friend — almost a patron of mine — would be the first to agree. It’s a fascinating melange of cultures. There’s the land-poor folks whose families go back generations in the area, the largely transitory Navy folks who ensure most of the county stays middle-class through the submarine base, carrier base and shipyard, and the wealthier newer residents who make up most of the population of Bainbridge Island (home to a great many literary authors). I grew up on Bainbridge, but was strictly middle-class, and spent years living all over the county afterward. Beyond that, there’s abundant and yet somewhat desolate natural beauty, with lots of coves, inlets, stretches of woods, and ferries plying the waters. I’ve lived there on and off all my life, and the area’s pockets of pure inscrutable semi-rural weirdness still fascinate me to no end.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
I actually wrote the first draft of this story in 1998, long before “Breaking Bad” came on TV. But now that I’ve been following that program, I realized that the 16-year-old goth girl in my story reminds me strongly of Walter White. One, she’s almost as dumb as she is smart, and she’s very smart; and two, she learns that she has the capacity to be a serious criminal, and she’s freaked out that she’s not as freaked out by that as much as she thinks she should be. And three, her once-settled life has unraveled around her in a number of ways. Like Walter White, she can either deal with that, or she can not deal. She finds it within her to deal. Like any adult male writer would feel, I had a lot of doubts about my ability to write authentically in a teen girl’s voice, and I’m still not sure I pulled that off as well as I could have. But the few women I’ve let read the story gave me high marks, so getting that validation gave me the motivation I needed to redraft the story and bring her into sharper focus.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
The opportunities as as incredible as they are prolific! I want to be there in the front rank, marching squarely and pragmatically toward the future. I firmly believe that a writer should a) being able to publish whatever he or she wants as often as he or she wants; and b) have the fair potential to be fairly compensated for their work. That’s never going to happen in traditional publishing, so I have no plans to bother trying to shove my round pegs into their square spinchters. Of course, I believe that anything independently published — electronically or othewise — needs to go through the same quality-control torture testing that traditionally published fare gets. So I’m glad to see that the loudest voices in indie crime publishing — people like J.A. Konrath, Barry Eisler, Scott Nicholson and our own Simon Wood — calling for stringent standards in writing, editing, layout, design and marketing. And, if for no other reason, I’m glad to see us control freaks get our chance to step out. I would have a hard time living with a title or a cover design I didn’t like.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
Oh, lots of stuff. I’m polishing some more short stories for the writing-contest season, including one titled “A Splatter Of Trust.” My long-in-progress Kitsap crime novel, “The Last Ferry Of The Night,” continues its glacial plod to the finish line. And I’m planning to give true crime, sort of, a try, in the form of some long-form narrative-journalism stories of crime, punishment and redemption as gleaned from the files of Washington state’s Clemency and Pardons Board. The plan is to put out one of those a month on Kindle, Nook, Smashwords and elsewhere for 99 cents apiece. I hope to have the first of those ready to roll by year’s end. And, in between all that, I have a fairly steady stream of authors clients for whom I provide copy-editing and proofreading.
If you want to read Jim entertaining short story The Ride Home, you can find it and 17 other great crime fiction shorts in West Coast Crime Wave. You can find West Coast Crime Wave at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble today.
First thing you should know about Tom Hopp is that he is very likely smarter than you. I know he’s smarter than me. I mean, anyone who clones and patents, as Tom describes, ”human immune system hormone genes” and “produced the first commercially successful nanotechnology device” is probably smarter than most anyone, right?
But Tom is also a great storyteller, as anyone who has read a book or two from his Dinosaur Wars series can attest. I’ve have the opportunity to listen to Tom talk about biological warefare and other fascinating topics as a featured speaker MWA Northwest, as well as over beers a few times, so needless to say I was also very happy to get his short, “The Ghost Trees”, as part of West Coast Crime Wave.
Here’s what Tom had to say..
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
West Seattle is the navel of the universe. It’s the place where Chief Seattle’s Duwamish Tribe chose to dwell from ancient times until the coming of global corporate culture swept them away. I was raised in a housing project along the banks of that muddy old Duwamish River and probably picked up some of its industrial contamination on my shoes as a toddler. Now Seattle rain falls down gently on my head as if to wash me clean and remind me of those old days. I rarely avoid a drizzle. The very definition of a Seattleite could be “someone without the sense to come out of the rain.” I guess that includes me.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
Peyton McKean is a very smart guy. Some say he’s got the “greatest mind since Sherlock Holmes” and I don’t doubt it’s true. Like Holmes and I, he’s a biotechnology researcher. I remind you that Holmes, in his first adventure “A Study In Scarlet,” invented a biochemical test to detect blood stains. Peyton McKean works with DNA tests but don’t assume he’ll just swab some bullet or bloodstain or kitchen knife and cry, “Aha, we’ve got our man!” the way they do on TV shows. Dr. McKean is not so much a user of DNA tests as an inventor of DNA tests. When he’s summoned to a crime scene, odds are that something has gone terribly wrong with a DNA test and the master is needed to figure out why.
Like Holmes, McKean is usually accompanied by an able-bodied helper. Phineas (Fin) Morton is an ex-Iraq medical corpsman and now a medical journalist, who often gets swept up in McKean’s adventures as the driver of a midnight blue Ford Mustang and chronicler of McKean’s deeds. It’s good that Fin has had some combat experience. As often as not the two adventurers are cast into a life-or-death struggle with the bad guys before the crime gets solved.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
I would have to characterize my personal experience of e-book publishing as explosive. I write science fiction as well as mystery stories, and within three months of having released the Kindle edition of my Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall novel, a Hollywood director called me on the phone and told me he’d read my book cover-to-cover, loved it, and wanted to make a major motion picture out of it. I said, “Abda, abda, abda, O.K!” and signed over the rights as quickly as I could. Stay tuned.
Obviously, I’m a big advocate of the e-book approach to publishing. There’s nothing much wrong with paper publishing, but that dinosaur book languished for ten years as an overpriced paperback. Then three months as an e-book and wham! Not only are sales running amok at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com but I’m starting to actually make a little money at this. Before long I believe most authors will publish e-books first and then chat with some paper publishers as a second approach, not the other way around. It’s all good.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
I’ve been developing two separate lines of fiction stories. “The Ghost Trees” in West Coast Crime Wave is one adventure in my Peyton McKean Mystery series of short stories and novels. Others can be found at most e-book sellers, including “The Re-Election Plot,” about a faked Osama bin Laden tape and election tampering. That one is still very current, even if Osama isn’t. The about-to-be released “A Dangerous Breed” is my answer to Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Talk about yer scary dogs.
The other line is the aforementioned Dinosaur Wars series of novels dealing with space invaders who happen to be intelligent dinosaurs returning to claim their home world — our world — after 65 million years. Don’t prepare to be scared, prepare to be eaten! I’ve also been putting out short stories featuring the young heroes Chase Armstrong and Kit Daniels. Chase is featured in the recently released, “Something in the Jungle,” where he investigates a series of deaths in the jungles of Mexico’s Costa Verde coast. Kit gets her featured role in an up-coming adventure set at her ranch in Montana, entitled “Riding Quetzalcoatlus.” Check all this and more out on my blog if you’d like to keep abreast of future developments. I’m writing as fast as I possibly can and I’ve got lot of new stories in the works.
Oh, and — this shouldn’t be an afterthought — I do still have a couple of stories circulating on paper: “Blood Tide,” about a Duwamish Indian suspect and a murdered geoduck digger featured as the lead-off story in the anthology Seattle Noir, and the first Peyton McKean Mystery novel, The Jihad Virus. Paper can be nice, too.
If you want to read Tom’s story The Ghost Trees, check out West Coast Crime Wave at Amazon or at Barnes & Noble today.
West Coast Crime Wave Now Available on Nook -
Well Nook fans, what are you waiting for?
I asked each of the authors to tell us a little bit about themselves, about the story they contributed to West Coast Crime Wave and the city in which their story is set. I also asked them to share a few thoughts about e-books, as well as what the future holds for them in the coming 12 months.
Today’s conversation is with Doug Levin, a writer from Portland. I had known Doug through our shared interest in technology and crime fiction, but like so many of today’s interactions, it was an acquaintance based entirely on social streams and emails until we met face to face in Portland in September, where we were both attending the 2011 Willow Award ceremony honoring Phil Margolin for his contribution to the Northwest mystery community. Our editor Brian Thornton had already accepted Doug’s short “Bridget’s Conception” for the collection, but I had dropped the ball in telling Doug. Imagine Doug’s surprise, and my discomfort, as Brian told Doug how much we loved his short and was glad it was in the collection.
Well, Doug’s a great guy, and it all turned out, and we’re lucky to have him representing Portland in our collection West Coast Crime Wave. Enjoy.
-Mike
Tell us about yourself.
As a kid, I read Agatha Christie because my mother read her. Then I took to reading artsy and canonical literature, which I took too seriously and ended up with a Ph.D. in English from Yale University. My hope was to have a cushy academic job and write fiction in the summers, but that didn’t pan out because I couldn’t get a teaching job. I always liked the criminal and noir elements in traditional high-brow literature, and when I was washing out of academia, I read a lot of crime fiction and got caught up on the greats. I had dabbled in fiction writing in college and wrote a couple of half-finished and half-baked novels in the 1990s.
My first published story, “Fire Lines,” was meant to be a throwback to the pulp era and it was published in a collection of pulp-style stories called Measures of Poison in 2002. I got to appear alongside some really great writers such as Charles Willeford, James Sallis, George Pelecanos, James Crumley, Michael Connelly, and others. In 2004, immersed in Patricia Highsmith, I decided to get a little more serious and semi-disciplined about fiction writing. I wrote a handful of stories, and one called “Wilson’s Man,” sold to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (January 2008). EQMM published another, “The Docile Shark,” in December 2010. I wrote another unfinished novel about a whiny architect, and then I finally knuckled down and completed a heist, called Jailhouse Pale. I got an agent, Doug Grad, who took me on in part because we share the same first name. So far, the book has received some glowing and some respectful rejections from the Big Six, but no buyers.
Tell us what makes your city/location a unique and interesting setting for crime fiction.
Compared to gritty, ruptured east coast cities, Portland seems on first glance like an unlikely place for crime fiction. But it’s a city that has a significant criminal history, rough edges, and a bit of a Wild West spirit. It’s also a city that arguably feels bullied in its identity by Seattle to the north and San Francisco to the south. It’s also a city — forgive me — of slackers, creative types, business people, and semi-weirdos — and this makes for an interesting stew. For the most part, my Portland stories have been about odd or unfortunate characters, who maybe end up being of a more criminal bent than they expected or recognized.
Tell us a little bit about the story’s main character.
In “Bridget’s Conception,” Bridget is a young, friendly, spacey home health worker. She is also very pregnant and supports her idle husband. Bridget is a little mysterious too: it’s hard to know exactly how smart or observant she really is.
This anthology is an e-book from a new publisher. In general, how do you as an author see the opportunities in publishing changing with the growth of e-books?
I love the physical object of the book, and I hope it is able to co-exist beside e-books. That said, it is exciting to see the opportunities and dynamism emerging from e-books. For instance, in crime fiction, novellas and shorter novels used to be common, and they disappeared to a great extent. E-books will allow alternative forms and lengths to make a comeback. I hope that publishers large and small (and new) still have a curatorial role — even if there are more books and a greater variety available.
Tell us what’s in store for you over the next 6 to 12 months.
I have another short story, called “Sheltered Assets,” due out in the March 2012 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. I’m hoping to finish a second crime novel by the middle of 2012 or so. My first novel, Jailhouse Pale, has received a lot of warm rejection, but no takers… yet.
You can find Doug’s short story “Bridget’s Conception” in the mystery anthology West Coast Crime Wave.