Robert R. Peecher Jr.'s Blog, page 5

Great launch for Jackson Speed at the High Tide

Jackson Speed at the High Tide: Volume IV of the Jackson Speed Memoirs

In the past three years I’ve launched eight books or short stories – four Jackson Speed novels, a couple of Moses Calhoun short stories, Iron Curling Ale and Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings.

The launch of Jackson Speed at the High Tide has been the best so far.

The book went live on Amazon as a Kindle ebook last week and I made no announcement at the time. I was waiting for the paperback to be live before I started any promotions. Nevertheless, within a couple of hours of the book going live, someone in the United Kingdom bought one of the books!

If you think that doesn’t make me feel like the John Grisham of the War Between the States, then you are dramatically underestimating the value of the sale of one $3 ebook.

I’m still not sure exactly how so many people in the United Kingdom found the Jackson Speed books, but every time I get a royalty check in British pounds I am so grateful to my English speaking cousins.

Sales for High Tide have been surprisingly good these first few days, and I’m trying very hard to improve my marketing efforts. My hope is there may be some folks coming to see Jackson Speed for the first time.

If that’s you, I’ll offer a little background: Jackson Speed was born in the spring of 2013 while I reading Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War: A Narrative.” By a happy coincidence, I was splitting time between two books that May, Foote’s Civil War book and George MacDonald Fraser’s first Flashman novel. This was my third or fourth time reading Flashman.

I came across a passage – not more than a paragraph or two – where Foote described the efforts of the famous private detective Allen Pinkerton and “a female spy” who saved Abraham Lincoln’s life from an assassination plot prior to Lincoln taking office. Foote named the group planning the assassination as the “Blood Tubs.”

My imagination exploded. It was Fraser’s influence on me that did it. In an instant, I saw the entirety of Jackson Speed’s life form in my mind, and that morning I started writing the first Jackson Speed novel. That one was Jackson Speed: The Hero of El Teneria, and I introduced the lecherous young coward from the Mexican-American War in that book. It was followed up by the book that inspired the series – Jackson Speed and the Blood Tubs.

Volume III of the Jackson Speed Memoirs (Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike) leads directly into Volume IV – the latest in the series.

If you’re new to Jackson Speed, my intention was to write a series where you could pick up any book and start from there, and you certainly do not have to read them in the order they were written.

I suppose the books are popular in the United Kingdom because of the Flashman influence. It must be that the Brits just love a cowardly, lecherous scoundrel. No shame in that. I love them, too.

I’m pleased to say, though, that my domestic sales have picked up quite a bit over the past few months, and now that Jackson Speed at the High Tide is done and dusted, I’m working on Volume V – Jackson Speed in the Rush! This one will go back in time in Speed’s life, and readers will discover how he made his fortune in the California Gold Rush of ’49.

Texas Ranger, Forty-Niner, Pinkerton Detective, Yankee spy, Confederate officer, Wild West Gunslinger … Jackson Speed may be all these things, but if you read his memoirs you discover that he’s also a cowardly adventurer, a rascal, and a womanizer.

As one reader stated in a review, “The history is true and the fiction is fun!”

So check out the Jackson Speed novels if you like your heroes to be cowardly, and if you enjoy what you read, I’d love to hear from you!

Officially launched: “Jackson Speed at the High Tide”

“The home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg” photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, Civil War battlefield photographer.

When I was a small child I used to look through my father’s books about the War Between the States, in particular those that bore lots of photographs and maps. I would guess they were probably Time-Life books that I dragged out of the bookcase and sat on the floor and looked through. I remember the first time I saw the photo “The Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” a photo by battlefield photographer Timothy O’Sullivan.

I vividly remember the way that photograph captured my imagination. Maybe I was 5-years-old. Maybe six.

In the photo is a dead Confederate soldier in among the boulders of the Devil’s Den. His musket is propped against some stacked rocks – rocks that presumably the soldier put there to protect him and failed in their task. The lifeless body never seemed real to me.

Some years later, when I was a teenager, I visited Gettysburg with my parents. It was a stunning thing to me to be walking in among the rocks at Devil’s Den and find myself staring at the exact spot where the photo was taken.

I had spent so long when I was little staring at that picture of death that could clearly see the body on the ground, the gun propped against the stacked rocks. The stacked rocks, to this day, remain in place.

This is Gettysburg – a place that haunts the American conscious. It is remembered as the “Bloodiest Battle” of the War Between the States. When old veterans of the war held reunions, those reunions at Gettysburg were the most prominent. Presidents attended reunions at Gettysburg.

Gettysburg marked the time and place that the Confederacy was at its highest point – it’s High Tide – and it was the moment that the fortunes of war began to turn in favor of the Union.

Argonne in World War I, and Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa in World War II were worse than Gettysburg in terms of total American deaths, but the 3-day battle at Gettysburg saw 51,000 casualties and some 8,000 Americans killed. It was the “bloodiest” battle of the Civil War, though Sharpsburg (Antietam if you’re reading this from north of the Mason-Dixon Line) was the bloodiest single day battle.

But Gettysburg, for some reason that I don’t know I can even articulate, holds a place of prominence above all those in the hearts and minds of the American people. Perhaps the only battle that stirs our collective soul more than Gettysburg is Normandy.

When I sat down to write about Jackson Speed at Gettysburg, I knew I was heading into rough waters. If you want a fictional character to tear down your most revered places, Jackson Speed is the character to do it. And, truthfully, I doubt there are many people who revere Gettysburg more than I do.

So I went into the writing of “High Tide” with an internal conflict.

Also, you know I am a fan of George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman and you know that Flashman was a huge inspiration for Jackson Speed. In the Flashman books, Fraser often implied that there would be a “Flashman at Gettysburg” novel, but he did not live to write that tale. (Interestingly, I read an interview where Fraser said he really wasn’t interested in writing about Flashman in the American Civil War because the subject bored him!)

I’m certainly not suggesting that “Jackson Speed at the High Tide” is the Flashman book Fraser never wrote, but I will say that in writing “High Tide” I did feel I owed a certain respect to Fraser.

So I went into the writing of “High Tide” more than a little intimidated.

I’ll leave it to readers to decide if I managed to tell a story that entertains while respecting the revered status of Gettysburg and honoring the memory of Fraser and the character he created.

But I will say I’m pleased with the thing.

Heavily footnoted (there are 78 footnotes), I dug into my research pretty heavily. I cite Glenn Tucker and Shelby Foote in the acknowledgements, but I can’t imagine the numbers of books and articles I referred to in the writing of this book. One of the real joys for me was going to original sources. I read tons of material from people who lived in the town of Gettysburg – civilians during the battle. How fascinating that was! I went directly to Longstreet, Pickett, Doubleday, Oates, Chamberlain and many others to get their first-hand accounts of the battle.

Without intending to, I built a case that Ewell could have won the battle of Gettysburg for the South if he had pressed his advantage on the first day of the battle – at least, that was Speed’s opinion. Speed also spends a fair portion of the book defending Longstreet, and – as is his way – puts all the blame of Confederacy’s loss on Robert E. Lee for engaging the Federals at all.

Maybe the most fun I had was writing about the day Early’s troops came through Gettysburg a couple of days before the battle. They rode through town making a nuisance of themselves, and you’ll read where Speed has a conversation with a couple of Early’s men. It still makes me laugh and I’ve read it a dozen times to anyone who will listen (mostly my wife and children because they can’t escape me).

The promise I’ve always made to my readers is that the Jackson Speed novels will be historically accurate, and with the exception of the presence of Speed, I think you’ll find “Jackson Speed at the High Tide” is more accurate than your average textbook.

Can you learn something from reading this book? I promise you can. Even if you think you know Gettysburg, I can almost guarantee there is some historical fact in here that you’ll not have already known.

Can you find some entertainment from reading this book? I certainly hope so. If you have no sense of humor or you don’t care for a cowardly scoundrel, then this book probably isn’t for you. But if you enjoy novels that don’t take themselves too seriously, if you’re even slightly interested in history, and you can enjoy the tale of a rascal whose only interests are pretty women and not getting shot, then I think you’ll find that reading “Jackson Speed at the High Tide” is a worthwhile use of your time.

Also … in formatting the ebook, I learned how to create links for my footnotes. This was a huge discovery for me, because the footnotes add so much to the story (you should read the footnotes). Because something more than 90 percent of my sales are ebooks, I really wanted to figure this out for those readers. So moving between the footnotes and the body of the novel is a simple thing now. Though it’s time consuming, I may at some point try to do this for the previous books, but I will definitely do it with all future books.

As always, I hope you enjoy the book! If you do, please leave a review at Amazon.com. Reviews help me sell books. And if you want to get in touch with me, please do that, too. I ABSOLUTELY love to hear from the people who enjoy my stories. Every time I get an email from a reader who enjoyed one of my novels, it makes my day.

So, without further ado, I’m officially smashing the bottle of champagne against the bow of the ship “Jackson Speed at the High Tide.”

Whether its paperback or Kindle ebook, go and get you one of these and learn a little bit and have a laugh and enjoy getting lost in the world that plays out in my head!

Coming Soon: Jackson Speed at the High Tide

One hundred and one thousand, six hundred and thirty one words is the final word count on Jackson Speed at the High Tide (less footnotes and introduction). It tops out at a good 30,000 words more than any of the other Speed books.

I’ve finished the final edits this afternoon, and it is no lack of modesty that forces me to say it is a brilliant piece of fiction.

Fans of Jackson Speed have waited an interminable amount of time for this book, and you have my deepest sympathies. It has been an unbelievable challenge for me to get this book written and I have been as expectant as you. But, it is finally done and dusted!

And truthfully, I think you’ll find that Volume IV of the Jackson Speed memoirs was well worth the wait.

In the coming days I’ll have more information about the release date. I have to finish out some of the footnotes (there are 78 footnotes!) and the maps – which are a huge job – and then I have to do the formatting. So there is still work to be done, but the writing, edits and rewriting are complete.

My hope is to have the book published by July 1, which is the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and seems a fitting time to release the book.

Above you can see the cover for the book. I’ve written about it before, but the cover was designed by Alex McArdell who is an amazing and gifted illustrator. I encourage you to check out his other work. Alex did an amazing job with the cover and I’m beyond thrilled with the way it turned out.

Fans of Jackson Speed will know that Volume IV consists of Speedy’s adventures at the Battle of Gettysburg, and they will know, too, that our cowardly hero switched sides multiple times at that battle. Alex did a masterful job of capturing the spirit of the book – the Union coat pulled back to reveal a Confederate coat; Speed’s beloved slouch hat; the tempting Jenny Rakestraw clutching at the chest of a heroic Jackson Speed. He even managed to work in the cupola of the Seminary in the background. Oh! It is brilliant!

I am so excited to get this book into the hands of readers who have come to love Speedy the way I do. In High Tide, readers can join with Jackson Speed as he flees his way from one end of the three-day battle to the next, always looking to save his own skin and, wherever possible, get belly-to-belly with whatever beautiful young woman is available. Speed takes readers from the Seminary cupola on the first day through the streets of Gettysburg as the Army of the Potomac runs for the safety of the hills south of town; he takes them up Little Round Top where he comes face-to-face with the famed 20th Maine; and on the third day of the battle, Speed takes readers across the mile-long wheat field in Pickett’s Charge to the famous Angle where the Confederacy reaches its “High Water Mark.”

And throughout, readers are treated to the humor of Speed’s unique perspective and single-minded purpose of saving his own neck. This “picaresque romp through America’s bloodiest battle” truly is magnificent.

In the meantime, if you have not yet read Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike, you should. High Tide will pick up immediately where Orange Turnpike leaves off, and Orange Turnpike is where I introduce the character of the lovely Jenny Rakestraw – the woman for whom Jackson Speed deserts his way into America’s bloodiest battle.

Good news/bad news updates

It’s a good news/bad news week for me, and it seems I’ve been having a lot of those lately.

We’ve been getting regular pop-up thunderstorms just about every evening for the last week. It reminds me of the summer of 1994 when I was living in Milledgeville and attending Georgia College.

I had an apartment about four blocks from the campus and about eight blocks from the downtown bars. I went downtown most evenings to meet up with my friends and to listen to bands or to drink too much. I remember in the summer of ’94 having to plan my day around those pop up thunderstorms. If I left the apartment around 5 p.m., I could walk downtown without getting caught in the storm and grab a slice of pizza at the Brick for an early dinner. But if I delayed leaving my apartment, I had to find something to eat there and plan to walk in the rain if I was going downtown because every afternoon it was a steady downpour and lightning and thunder.

The storm would roll in around 6 p.m. and it would rain for an hour to three hours. You could almost set your watch by those pop up thunderstorms during the summer of 1994.

So far this summer, it’s just like that summer. Every afternoon we’re getting thunderstorms.

The good news is we need the rain. The bad news is, one of these afternoon thunder storms caused a power surge in our house. Though my computer is connected to a surge protector, it zapped the power supply on my computer. This has got to be the third or fourth time this has happened. I think the surge protector must be the problem.

The bad news is I had a lot of stuff on the computer that wasn’t backed up in other places. I thought it was, but it was not. I’ve got three Moses Calhoun stories that, at least for now, are just gone.

The good news is that I had just saved Jackson Speed at the High Tide on a flash drive, so I didn’t even lose any edits because I hadn’t touched the novel since saving it to the hard drive. I lost nothing there (except some time, as I had to set up a new computer).

So there’s good news and bad news aplenty to go around.

Meanwhile, here are some updates on all my work.

Moses Calhoun fans: It’s just bad news for poor Moses Calhoun. I’ve got to get someone to fix the power supply on the old computer and try to recapture some of those stories I lost. I’m hopeful this won’t be a problem because it’s happened to me before and nearly all my data was restored.

Jackson Speed fans: No worries, I’m moving right along with daily edits to Volume IV of the Jackson Speed Memoirs. And I’m enjoying reading it. It is heavily footnoted (I just entered footnote number 54), and so there is certainly an opportunity to not only get a few laughs from the story but to also learn something from reading it.

Here’s some more good news: Iron Curling Ale is available as an ebook now, and sales have been pretty decent. It’s different from my other stuff, but I think it is quite good. It has drug and drinking themes and foul language and I would describe it as a tragic love story, so if that’s stuff you think you can handle then I’d happily encourage you to check out this book. ICA is really more of a short story than a novel (only about 20,000 words). The ebook is nice enough, but the paperback is an awesome little book that you’ll love to own.

4 Things fans: It’s great news for you! If you read and enjoyed my collection of humor columns “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings,” you might be interested to know that my new weekly columns are now available on ConnectPal.com. For $1.99 a month you can subscribe at connectpal.com/robertpeecher where I am posting one new column each week plus occasionally going back into my archives to post some oldies but goodies.

And if you enjoy all of my books, I suppose the good news for you is that I’m writing more now than I have in a long time and should have more stuff to publish soon.

Rob’s weekly columns will be available at connectpal

Over the years a lot of people have told me they enjoy my columns and that my columns are the first thing they turn to in The Oconee Leader each week.

I know at least some people will be disappointed not to be able to read them any longer. And the truth is, I won’t know how to stop writing them. When Robert called Jean the other day panicked because he was stranded on the toilet, I was already thinking, “This is going to make a good column.”

So what I’ve done is set up an account at connectpal.com, and I’m going to sell my columns through a monthly subscription there.

Connectpal bills itself as the World’s Most Popular Content Marketplace. Neal Boortz and Andy Dean both have taken their radio shows to connecpal.com. In fact, Connect Pal was started by Andy Dean, and that’s how we found it.

It’s easy to subscribe to my columns. You can click here and go directly to my content page. Click where it says $1.99/month in red. You’ll be prompted to make an account and you’ll have to enter your billing information.

I am charging $1 a month for my columns, but connectpal has to make its money, so they are adding 99 cents. The total cost you’re billed is $1.99 a month. You can cancel it without any problem if you decide my columns aren’t funny any more.

If you were a fan of Neal Boortz or Andy Dean and didn’t realize their podcasts were there then you can easily subscribe to those as well. Boortz and Andy Dean both charge more than I do for their content.

Again, I want to reiterate what I said in this week’s paper to our advertisers and readers over the past nine years: We love you folks. Owning and operating The Oconee Leader in this wonderful community I love so much has been a true blessing to me, and I am humbled and grateful to have had the chance to do it.

And if any of you decide to follow me over to connectpal and subscribe to my columns I’ll be grateful for that, too.

Obviously, I’m not going to earn a living writing these columns and selling them for a dollar a month. I’m not sure what’s next for me professionally or for my family. We’re still just trying to catch our breath.

What we know for sure is that Jean is going to start creating stained glass art again. It’s something she used to do many years ago and something we’ve often talked about her doing again. Now she has a chance. She does beautiful work, and I’m happy that she’ll have the opportunity to do it again.

So if you’ve been with us all these years and you want to keep track of what we’re doing, you can check back here periodically where I post updates about the fiction writing I am doing or you can subscribe on connectpal to keep reading my columns and get some bonus content.

A primer on Rob Peecher’s fiction

As an independent author writing and selling books for fun, I often find myself tweeting or Facebooking links to my books with smart marketing phrases such as, “Please read my books!”

Last week I posted something about my books on Facebook, and a friend said something like, “What are your books about?”

I realized that while I might eat, sleep and breathe my books, a lot of people – if they aren’t paying particularly close attention – may not know anything about them.

So if you’re new to the world of Rob Peecher’s fiction, I thought I’d provide a primer.

Currently I have two separate series I’m working on: The Jackson Speed Memoirs and the Moses Calhoun Potboilers.

Jackson Speed

The Jackson Speed novels are set during 1800s America and hold themselves out to be the memoirs of a great officer from the War Between the States.

However, readers learn from the memoirs that Speed was truly a coward and a womanizer. His only motivations in life are getting into the dress of some Southern Belle and saving his own skin (often as not, from an enraged husband).

Jackson Speed, as a character in a novel is very similar to Harry Flashman of the classic George MacDonald Fraser series of Flashman novels. In truth, the more I write the less Flashmanesque Speed becomes, but I’ll never be able to deny the similarities between Jackson Speed and Harry Flashman.

The first Speed novel “Jackson Speed: The Hero of El Teneria” is set during the Mexican-American War and introduces readers to a young Speed who is just starting out on his path of roguish adventures.

Meticulously researched and footnoted, the Jackson Speed novels are a labor of love for me. I’m able to meld together the two things I most enjoy: Storytelling and History. I would hope these novels would appeal to most history buffs who enjoy fiction and I would also hope these novels would appeal to most rogues who enjoy history.

Moses Calhoun

Through the course of my career in newspapers I spent a long time covering what journalists would call the “cops and courts” beat. I had a pretty amazing career in newspapers in terms of the access I had to local police as well as the some of the stories I got to cover.

The Moses Calhoun short stories are a sort of manifestation of some of the things I witnessed covering the cops and courts beat with a little Southern Gothic thrown in for literary fun.

The stories are sort of like Robert B. Parker meets Flannery O’Connor.

Moses Calhoun is a grizzled, hard-boiled sort of deputy sheriff who returns to his hometown after a divorce and there he finds his town is overrun with meth heads and corruption.

These stories are very short. I like to write them in a few sittings. As I said, a lot of them are very loosely based on things I’ve seen.

Other Stuff

Outside of Jackson Speed and Moses Calhoun, I’ve published two other books.

“Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings” is a collection of the columns I’ve written at The Oconee Leader.

“Iron Curling Ale” began life two decades ago as a short story I wrote while I was in college. Some time ago, I began rewriting the story. It’s still very short – just 20,000 words – but it was also a labor of love. It has a lot of drinking and drug themes, the language is very rough and it’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes.

“Iron Curling Ale” is the story of a drunken, cross-country road trip. It’s a tragically beautiful love story, and I’m a big fan of this book.

Iron Curling Ale soft opening begins now

Iron Curling Ale is now available in paperback.

You can get it through my createspace estore. I was going to wait until May 11, but I have decided to do a “soft opening.” The ebook is not yet done and won’t be available for at least a week or more.

As I’ve mentioned, this was a short story I wrote about 22 years ago when I was in college. A year or so ago I dug it out of a box, dusted it off and started typing it in. I thought maybe I’d publish it, maybe with some other old short stories I have lying around, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with it.

But as I was typing it in, I decided Iron Curling Ale was not nearly as good as I remembered it being. The story was good, I thought, but the writing was poor. Not just poor in the way that I look back at something I’ve written and think, “Well, I could have rephrased that.” No, the writing was really poor.

So I stopped retyping Iron Curling Ale and I started rewriting.

While I wrote I put on my ear phones and pumped 1990s music straight into my head at ridiculously loud volumes, and I dug down deep into my memories and really tried to put myself back in the frame of mind of the 20-year-old who wrote the original story.

I won’t say the experience was magical, but it was mystical.

I’ll give you fair warning: This story is a little rough. If you know me from church or if you’re a fan of my newspaper columns about raising sons, I would encourage you to skip on by this story.

Iron Curling Ale is like nothing else I’ve published (except that the protagonist of the story is a sort of anti-hero, which seems to be the thing I enjoy writing best). The language goes beyond the drunken sailor scale. The plot of the story involves a lot of drinking and drug abuse and themes such as that, so it’s not the story I would read to my kids at bedtime.

Ultimately, for me, it’s a love story, and that’s also not something I would typically write.

Regardless of the rough language, the drinking and the drugs, I absolutely love this story. Iron Curling Ale, sitting ignored but not forgotten in a box all these years, has always been with me. This story is deeply, intimately personal to me, and I think a lot of what made it into this version is the result of the story sitting with me for so long.

Over the years, a 4000-word story grew flesh. It now totals out to about 20,000 words, so it’s still very short. And as a printed paperback, it’s ridiculously small. It’s like a fun-size candy bar. But I love it.

This rewritten version of Iron Curling Ale is what I wanted the story to be when I wrote it two decades ago. Honestly, I think it’s beautiful.

Here’s the back cover description:

All confidence, sex driven and alcohol fueled, Green has flunked out of college and lost his job as a pizza delivery boy. About all he has left is his 1979 Pontiac Grand Prix. But when he wakes next to a beautiful woman whose name he cannot remember, Green’s disposition turns hopeful. Somewhere in his subconscious, through a cloudy haze of dope smoke and a pool of beer, he remembers a sign with a missing letter S, and when Kim’s pregnancy test shows negative, the two embark on a cross-country quest to find something better, something stronger, something memorable. They’re looking for an ale that can curl iron. In the end, it’s never more than a moment.

Part angst, part tragedy, all love story, Iron Curling Ale has a back beat and should be read like a rock song.

Art, that shooting was Justified

If you’re like me, tomorrow night’s series finale of Justified will be bitter sweet. Oh, I’ve been eagerly anticipating this showdown between Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder for, what’s it been, five years? But knowing that this is it and there will be no more episodes of Justified, that’s just sad to me.

When the series first started, my oldest son and I were addicted. Until this season, our Tuesday nights were spent together watching nearly all the episodes. We talked about the show. Every Tuesday when Justified was in season, I would make the same joke at the dinner table in the hopes of getting Harrison excited for that night’s episode.

In my best Nick Searcy voice I would say, “Raylan, did you have to shoot that man?”

And then in my best Timothy Olyphant voice I would reply, “Art, that shooting was justified.”

It was a cheesy joke, but we enjoyed it at the dinner table. Tomorrow will be my last opportunity to make my joke, and I’m sure there will be a tear in my eye when I say to Harrison, “Art, that shooting was justified.”

This season Harrison and I have not watched many of the episodes together. As often happens to fathers of teenagers, I’ve lost out to time with his girlfriend. But we’re both still watching the show and I’ve told him if he wants to find his name in my will he’ll have to watch the series finale with me as it airs.

We’ve loved the show, and I think what we love so much about it is the Southernness of it. Granted, the show is set in Kentucky, and Kentucky is just barely part of the South, but hillbillys and rednecks are the same from the hollers of Kentucky to the lowlands of Georgia and all points in between, and I do truly believe that like no other show before it, Justified has accurately portrayed the characters of the South.

If Joelle Carter, the actress who plays Ava Crowder, wasn’t born and bred in the Southeast, I’ll eat Raylan Given’s hat. She may be the most convincing actress I’ve ever seen on television. I swear, I know this woman. I see her every day, all around me.

I might even believe Timothy Olyphant is from the South, too, but I looked it up and he’s from Honolulu. Weird. He must be from the south side of Honolulu. Nick Searcy, though, is from North Carolina, and it shows.

Granted, all of the characters are blown up exaggerations of Southern people – caricatures – but they are convincing caricatures (and television must be forgiven for its exaggerated characters, because if the characters on TV were all normal people like you and me who would watch?).

When I started writing the Moses Calhoun short stories a couple of years ago, Justified (more the TV show than Elmore Leonard’s books) was never far from my mind.

The stories are set in a rural Georgia county, the fictitious Williams County. If you’ve read the stories and you’re from Georgia, you might be forgiven if you think Williams County sounds an awful lot like Putnam County.

I worked in Putnam County for a decade. I worked at both the weekly paper there in Putnam County and at Macon’s daily paper as a bureau chief covering a six county region that included Putnam County.

In that time I became pretty good friends with the local sheriff, Howard Sills. Honestly, they should write a TV show about Sheriff Sills. In my career I’ve met a lot of cops in a lot of jurisdictions – city police, FBI agents, Georgia Bureau of Investigation folks, Secret Service, sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, detectives and investigators, even Border Patrol. I’ve never met another one like Howard Sills.

He was raised by a former District Attorney and spent countless hours of his youth doing essentially paralegal work for Big George Lawrence. Howard knows criminal law better than most lawyers I know. His sense of right and wrong is unmatched, and his commitment to locking up bad guys isn’t just his job, it’s his life.

As a sheriff, Howard has more murderers on Georgia’s death row than any other sheriff (or at least he used to … I know a couple of them have met their final fate so maybe his count of death row inmates is dropping). He’s also been instrumental in the prosecution of not just bad guys he’s locked up but also bad guys in other jurisdictions.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in his office and listened to phone conversations where other sheriffs or district attorneys have called him seeking advice on prosecuting a case.

He really is a phenomenal lawman and a pretty phenomenal person, too. I respect him more than just about anybody else I’ve ever met.

In the 10 years or so that I worked in Putnam County, I had unprecedented access to the sheriff’s office. I had the code to get into the back of the office and I walked in whenever I felt like it. There were many days when I walked into Howard’s office and sat for several hours, listening to every phone conversation he had through the course of that time. I could review every document in his office.

I rode with his deputies and hung out in the offices of his investigators. I listened when he talked strategy for prosecutions with the district attorney.

Literally, nothing happened in that sheriff’s office that I didn’t know about.

Howard trusted me, and I trusted him. That’s an unusual relationship for a law enforcement officer and a newspaper reporter. But I’ll say this, most any other reporter could have had the same access to Howard and his office. Yes, we were friends and probably most reporters wouldn’t get to drive his vehicle car with lights and siren going through downtown Macon while chasing a murder suspect (yes, that was fun as hell!), but Howard was always very open with all the press.

The Moses Calhoun stories are based in part in what I saw when I worked in Putnam County. I went into a lot of drug houses with Howard’s deputies and investigators. I went with them when they did surveillance on drug dealers. I was running behind one of his deputies who was chasing a suspect when the suspect turned and started shooting at us. I rode with them as they investigated murders and other serious crimes.

I saw a lot of the criminal justice system – good and bad and ugly. Of course, I also covered other sheriff’s offices and other crimes, and frequently because of my friendship with Howard Sills other sheriffs gave me access in deference to him.

When Sheriff Thomas Smith of Washington County, Georgia, was dealing with two murders within a month of each other, he would give a press conference for the Macon TV stations and other newspapers, and then he and I would go back to his office and he’d give me additional information he wasn’t releasing to anyone else. That wasn’t because Sheriff Smith and I were such good friends or had such a good working relationship (although, eventually we did), but it was because Howard called Sheriff Smith and said, “You can trust this reporter.”

So the Moses Calhoun stories are based largely around the things I’ve reported on. They’re not necessarily “ripped from the headlines” stories, but I’ve certainly borrowed from some of the actual cases I’ve seen.

So, if you’re like me and you’re mourning the loss of Justified, and you’re wondering where you’re going to find your Southern crime stories, I humbly suggest Moses Calhoun.

The stories are short and can probably be read easily from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night. The criminals are fun; Moses Calhoun is a tough Southern Sheriff’s Investigator and the plots are not too terribly far from some of the stuff I’ve witnessed.

If you’re a fan of Raylan Givens and are lost wondering what to do now that your Southern Gothic crime series is come to an end on FX, maybe give Moses Calhoun a chance.

In honor of the series finale of Justified, I’ll be offering the first of the Moses Calhoun stories for free for the next couple of days.

Iron Curling Ale cover release

Over the past few months I’ve been writing like a madman, working on a number of different projects. I’m poised now to start publishing like a madman, and I’m really excited to get some of these stories out there.

I can’t say that I’m more excited about one over another, but one of the projects I’ve been working on is pretty near to my heart and has been since 1993.

Some of my friends from college might remember a short story I wrote that year called Iron Curling Ale. I “published” that story on a Xerox machine and left it with copies of MoonCalf Press (who remembers MoonCalf?) down at Oz’s shop in downtown Milledgeville.

A year or so ago one of my friends from college, Donna Lastinger, said she had looked for her old copy of Iron Curling Ale and said she couldn’t find it. It just happened that about a month before that I’d found several old copies, so I went into a big box in my garage and dug through a bunch of old stories I had written in college and found the original Iron Curling Ale and sent it to Donna.

Then I started thinking that maybe I should publish Iron Curling Ale on Kindle just for fun.

But when I started to read it, I was appalled at how awful it was. Twenty-something years later, it wasn’t nearly the masterpiece I remembered it being. So I started rewriting it instead.

I don’t know that it’s any more a masterpiece than it was when I first wrote it, but I’ve put some meat on the bones, changed some things and tried very hard to remember who I was and how I saw the world in 1993 when I wrote the first version of this story. As I rewrote the story, I didn’t want to lose the voice of that 20-year-old.

I’m really pleased with the result. I think I managed to keep the spirit of the original story, but I reworked some of the things that I realized 20 years later didn’t work. I added quite a bit – it went from being about 5,000 words to being 20,000 words. I followed the original story – one does not look completely different from the other – but I fleshed out the parts that were lacking. Oh, and I gave Kim dark hair.

When I first wrote Iron Curling Ale, I thought what I wanted was a short story that felt like a rock song. I wanted my story to have that same emotion of barely restrained aggression that my favorite songs feel like. With that in mind, I broke the story up into sections (chapters, I guess we could call them) that I patterned after the parts of a song. It’s the sort of thing I might have tried to pull off 20 years ago.

I like the way it turned out, and I hope it works for readers.

It’s a pretty rough story with lots of foul language and some mildly graphic sex scenes and some violence and a lot of drinking and drug use and driving while intoxicated. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, you’re probably better off reading “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings” and ignoring the fact that I’ve written anything else.

As usual, my protagonist is a sort of anti-hero. I don’t know why all of the heroes in my stories have to be awful people. I have many friends with degrees in psychology, and perhaps I should spend some time working through some of these issues with them. Richard Page, Suzanne Bloom … I’m looking specifically at the two of you.

Anyway, I’m releasing Iron Curling Ale on Monday, May 11, but in the meantime I thought I’d post the cover so you can take a look at it and wait with anticipation for the release date of the awesome story behind it.

Second Moses Calhoun Potboiler scheduled to publish on Kindle today

For those following my work, and I’m truly humbled to say it appears there’s a fair number of you out there, you might have noticed several months ago I released a Kindle-only short story, the first in a series I’m calling “Moses Calhoun Potboilers.”

I haven’t written much (or maybe anything?) about Moses Calhoun on my blog, nor have I made any effort to market the story. I was waiting to comment on the Moses Calhoun Potboilers until I had a few stories published or close to being published.

Today I’ve hit the publish button on the second Moses Calhoun Potboiler, and I expect within a few hours it will be available for download on a Kindle or Kindle app. So I figured today was the day to make some comment about it here on the blog.

When I was in high school I was a huge fan of Robert Parker’s Spenser novels. Inspired by Parker’s novels, I used to write these very average short stories about a private detective. I wrote the stories solely for my own amusement. I enjoyed writing them, and I cast myself and my girlfriend at the time as the lead characters. I shared the stories with her. To my knowledge, we’re the only two people who ever read them, and I do not know if any copies still exist.

Sometime last year I started writing the first of the Moses Calhoun stories. I didn’t know if I was going to finish it or publish it or what I was going to do with it. I just knew that I was enjoying writing it, and as I printed pages for Jean to read, she enjoyed reading it.

So with no fanfare or grand announcement, I published the first Moses Calhoun story in August of last year.

I’ve continued writing the Moses Calhoun stories (I call them “potboilers” because I like that). In addition to the one publishing on Kindle today, I have three others in various stages of completion and I suspect I’ll be publishing those very soon. One of them is great. The others, I think, are pretty good.

This isn’t high literature here. I call them potboilers for a reason. They’re just fun stories that I enjoy writing. If we have to categorize them and make them sound more important than they are, I’m thinking of them as sort of Southern Gothic. They are set in the modern-day South and when I write the bad guys – usually meth addicts or other miscreants – I think of Flannery O’Connor.

Our hero, Moses Calhoun, is a good-guy lawman. He’s got a knack for catching criminals. He’s a simple sort of guy. Truthfully, in writing the stories, I have more fun with the miscreants than I do with Moses Calhoun. They’re more colorful. Calhoun is pretty much black and white.

I am weaving through the short stories an arc, and I suspect at some point I’ll release all of these together as one novel. The arc stories are titled “Interception” and will be released in a number of parts (Interception Part 1 should be published by the end of April). The other short stories are Calhoun’s adventures in the time periods between the arc stories.

I spent a decade in Putnam County, Georgia, covering the sheriff’s office there as a newspaper reporter. The sheriff, Howard Sills, is a good friend of mine and I’ve dedicated these stories to him (and to Jean) because Sills taught me so much about the criminal justice system. I saw him and his deputies investigate a lot of crimes, and much of what I learned from covering the sheriff’s office gets incorporated into these stories.

These potboilers are around 15,000 to 20,000 words and can be read in a sitting or two (depending how long you sit), so you don’t have to invest much if you want to give them a try. I’m pricing them at 99 cents which is as cheap as I can go on Kindle.

So that’s a little bit about Moses Calhoun and what I’m cooking up there. If you enjoy books like the Spenser novels or Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens stories or even Carl Hiaasen’s books, I think Moses Calhoun fits into the same sort of category, and you’ll probably enjoy these, too.

I’ll say this, also: I am working on one Moses Calhoun story, and when I get that published I’m going to have to insist you read that one even if you don’t read any of the others. It’s outrageously good, and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

If you’re a fan of Jackson Speed (and let’s be honest, Jackson Speed fans make up the entirety of my fans) and care nothing about other characters or other stories, don’t fret – Jackson Speed at the High Tide will be released very soon! I’m working on edits and rewrites, and that’s a lengthy process. But I promise I am working on it!