I love writing and I am very lucky to be a published author.

There is a question that pops up all the time on the writers groups on social media. It goes something like this, but there are many variants, “What is the thing you like least about being a writer?” I think my short answer is, there’s nothing about being a writer I don’t like.

As an author though…

The general consensus is that most of us don’t like marketing. That might be more true for Indie and/or self-published authors. They have to do it all themselves and it is a lot of work. Marketing for me consists of doing what the publisher tells me to do and posting stuff on line, on social media, maintaining a website, blogging here and going to the occasional convention or two per year. I could probably do more book signings but the day job gets in the way.

I enjoy these Substack’s but honestly have no idea when anyone finds my opinion about anything, interesting. I genuinely enjoy the conventions, they are a chance to hang out with fellow authors and friends. More importantly it’s a chance to meet and see fans. The social media is a necessary evil but I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of cool people and to maintain friendships with people I’ve met at conventions.

The other thing that authors seem to complain about is editing. It’s a long process and especially developmental edits, the ones that focus more on plot, tone and dialogue can be tough. It’s a little bit like have a critical older relative. They love you and support you but aren’t shy about telling you what you’re doing wrong. Copy edits aren’t bad but by the time they’re done I’ve read, reviewed and revised my manuscript something like six or seven times.

By that point, my book, is the last book, I ever want to read. Fortunately that feeling passes when box of Author copies arrive at my door. There is something magical about that, seeing all that hard work show up with my name on the cover and my ugly mug on the cover photo. I usually sit down with a copy and find a passage or two that I wrote and really like. That I am really proud of.

By far the best part of the experience is the fan interaction. My first series of books involved a protagonist who was a Vietnam Veteran. He fought in a very small, specialized part of that war.

Shortly after my first book came out a fan reached out to me on Facebook and told me that he’d read and liked my book. He’d been a Covey pilot (a forward air controller supporting Special Forces) and that he’d never seen his job mentioned in a work of fiction before. That was a pretty great moment. Over the years there have been a lot of great moments like that.

Fan interaction is the best.

I have been really lucky to have developed a readership outside of my circle of friends and family. When I first started out I was pretty sure that was going to be it. Fortunately seven years and eight published novels later I know better. Though, I am extremely grateful to my friends and family who have been incredibly supportive since I begun this.

From my good friend Cheryl who gives every manuscript a first edit so that no one learns just how bad my spelling and grammar really are. To my partner at work, Cyndi who tells everyone that she’s bought every one of my books but hasn’t read a single one. She assures me and them that she will read them all when she retires. There are many others too numerous to mention who offered words of encouragement when rejections came in. Or who came to signings or bought copies as gifts for people, etc. Or who have supported me in a thousand ways both great and small.

It’s hard to think about the worst part about being a writer/author when there are so many fans, friends, family and co-workers who’ve been there over the years. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the lesson that George Bailey learns at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. Pretty lucky to have learned that lesson the easy way.

_{Shameless plug for my current novel.}

I want to blame it on the fact that I am Gen X. Solidly Gen X, not a Baby Boomer or anything that came after X. The thing about being Gen X is that it means I am now getting to an age where I find myself talking more about retirement plans then weekend plans.

Change is inevitable and I view growing older as far preferable to the alternative. One sign that I am getting older is that I am more annoyed at things. Not Andy Rooney, of 60 Minutes fame, cranky, but it is a slippery slope. I saw someone yesterday who had American flag seat covers and it irked me.

I was going to write and rant about it. But that isn’t what anyone wants to read me write about. Besides I can’t do it half as well as my friend Kevin does at Mully's musings . He is genuinely funny whereas I would just sound like someone who is contemplating yelling at kids on his lawn.

I try to blog here, not because I think anyone outside of my immediate friends and family really care about what I am thinking about. No one is waiting with baited breath for the next installment of what fancy potato dish did Pete make this week or what bourbon is he drinking now. No one is clamoring for pictures of the red pepper risotto I make with Bonito flakes. Nor should they.

I am here because it allows me to talk about my books and writing. I write this semi-regular blog to connect with fans or fellow writers. Friends and family are a bonus. Unlike my social media platforms, I can write a little more here rather than having to parse my messages into character limits.

In order to promote my writing I spend a fair amount of time on the socials. They can be fun. They can be an awesome way to reach fans. They can be a lot of things. Not all of which are positive.

One place that I seem to gravitate to is the writing/writers thread on Threads. It is a neat spot, mostly populated by indie/self published authors though there are a bunch of traditionally pubbed like myself. It’s neat to see a writer of Ruth Ware’s stature chiming in on a thread that I might be on.

One theme that comes up a lot is how discouraging the process of getting published is. Writing is hard. It’s not working in a quarry hard but it is hard enough. The processes of agenting and querying are often cited two of the most demoralizing aspects of the process. Both involve near constant rejection, and that can be tough to deal with.

A lot of writers get told they’ve written a great story but it “isn’t a good fit” (or some other euphemism) for a certain agent or editor/publisher. God knows I’ve had my share of those emails. Many of the writers on Threads express frustration and even a desire to quit writing altogether.

I know/don’t know of their struggle. I was very lucky to get an Agent with my first attempt. My first manuscript, while roundly rejected found a publisher in the first round of submissions. Those two things are like winning lottery ticket level of uncommon. I’m lucky and I know it.

As a consequence when I see writers on Threads who seem to be demoralized I try to remind them of two things. The first of which is that Publishing is a business. It is very much like venture capital and it is about potential profitability. While someone may have written an absolutely brilliant story, that often isn’t enough. Publishers are looking to invest their money in hopes of big returns. Brilliant doesn’t always translate to profitable. That sucks.

The second thing I try to point out is this. Writing is a craft. It’s an art. It requires a lot of dedication and mild obsession. To that end writers should ultimately write for themselves and not worry about book deals.

I know, I know. Easy for me to say, having been published. That doesn’t make it any less true. Most writers start out as readers and are the first reader of anything we write. Don’t worry about being commercially viable. Write for you, not for what you think will sell.

Now it’s getting time for me to contemplate watching 60 Minutes or Matlock. Maybe I will go outside and yell at imaginary kids to get of my lawn. While I am not that old yet, I want to be ready for when that day comes. Or maybe I’ll pull up Mully's musings on Youtube and have a good chuckle or two.

Last summer I stopped at the local packie (package store, liquor store if you aren’t from here) to get a bottle of Whiskey. If you are curious it was either Powers Irish Whiskey or a decent bottle of bourbon. I am old enough now that I can afford good bourbon.

When not at work I tend to dress like an off duty lumberjack, jeans and a flannel or in summer like a middle aged beach bum, cargo shorts and a t-shirt. But after work I am usually in a suit, Navy blue or a shade of charcoal gray that is more coal than gray. Light blue or dark blue shirt depending. Brown or black shoes/belt as appropriate and tie to match. I tend to look like a cop or a surly undertaker.

I have been going to the same packie for almost twenty years. My Long Suffering Wife and I moved to our part of Rhode Island because we didn’t want to live in the city where I was also a cop. We ended up in a community that is friendly, with great schools and low crime rates.

On this particular day I stepped up to the cash register and said in my best Bufford T. Justice imitation; “Hello, nice lady.” Stac/y/ey/ie who has been working there longer than I have been going there said; “Hello, nice man.” This is our customary greeting after which we exchange polite inquiries about life and family.

Except not this day. This day Stac/y/ey/ie threw me a curve ball when she asked, “Don’t you ever take any time off?” I hemmed and hawed. Mentioning book conferences or a day or two here or there or my annual week off when we go to Block Island.

“Conferences don’t count. You should take more time off.” She said.

She’s right and I am still figuring out how to do that.

I have been going full tilt since February. The goods of publishing production smote me with a particularly tight deadline to write a novel. Then there was a round of unanticipated edits and then a round of anticipated edits. All while working a day job. And being a dad. And everything else that life throws at you. Drinks with friends, catching up old friends, family events all got back burnered, and hard.

Last week we went on our family vacation to Block Island. I had to take some editing with me but that was a few hours out of the vacation. There were a couple of attempts from work to call me but nothing so major that I had to call anyone. My face is a bit more sun weathered and I had a good time. I think I returned relaxed, so mission success.

I made Pommes Pave for everyone. My sister in law who like my Long Suffering Wife has celiac disease lamented that she couldn’t have lobster rolls anymore so I decided to make her one and one for everyone else who wanted one too. Fearless Leader’s wife, whom I think of as my sister, said, “These are good but that is a lot of work. I don’t see myself spending that much time and effort on a dish. Especially on vacation.” I see her point.

She’s right. The Pommes Pave is a two day process. The lobster rolls took hours to make. It was a lot of work. For me it is worth it. The look on Fearless Leaders face when he took that first crunchy bite of Pommes Pave or seeing my sister in law smile as she had her first lobster roll in years. That makes it all worth it. All the time and hard work boils down to those moments.

Over the years many people have said to me that they could never write a book. It’s the same drive. That look on a person’s face when they want to talk to me about one of my books or that first bite of an exquisite food item that I’ve made. They’re the same.

That’s why I do it. If it is worth doing it is worth overdoing. It’s worth sacrificing a little bit of vacation time to do it. Because, some day I won’t be able to anymore and when it is time to tally accounts, I don’t want to be confronted by “could haves” and “should haves”.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of our nation. It is a big deal. America means many things to many people.

This is my take on it and there are many, some I agree with and many I don’t. There are many political views and this isn’t one of them. There are many differing views and I believe that America is a big enough tent to shelter them all. I want to share my thoughts about America and what it means to me personally.

The short version is that I love America.

Okay, now for a little nuance.

I am biased. I love America the way that only the son and grandson of immigrants can. I don’t talk about it much in this forum. Here’s the backstory that led me to 24 years in the Army Reserve, three deployments, a year of active duty and twenty years in the cops. And it’s a doozy.

My maternal grandparents were born in 1915 and 1917. My grandmother was born the year of the Russian Revolution. They were from the Ukraine, now Ukraine, in and around Kharkiv, then Kharkov. They were born into one of the most repressive, totalitarian regimes in the history of man. One of the most utterly evil regimes in history.

My great grandfather on my grandmother’s side was arrested in the purges of 1937. His crime? He’d been a sailor in the Czarist navy.

My grandmother’s family, like all living in Ukraine suffered horribly during the Holodomor, when Stalin systematically starved the Ukrainians to death. Her stories, that she told me every, single, time, I saw her were the stuff of nightmares, literally. She would tell me, when I’d roll my eyes and the hundredth or thousandth retelling, “you Americans need to know this.”

In 2003 when I was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein was captured in his spider hole I called her via sat-phone. I remember three things about that conversation. One, was crouching down behind the wall because there was so much celebratory fire I was worried about catching a stray round. Two, her asking about the machinegun fire, she had heard plenty of it during the German occupation. Three, when I told her we got Saddam, she said, “He is cheap copy of Stalin.” She was thoroughly unimpressed.

My grandfather’s family were landowners and he was German to boot. When he met my grandmother in University and asked her out she refused. Her father had already been arrested, was in a prison, no doubt bound for the gulag. Just dating her would have opened my grandfather up to a similar fate. He was already on a list and was undeterred.

When the Germans invaded, the NKVD, a precursor to the KGB was actively looking for my grandfather. He and my grandmother were married and she was pregnant with my mother. They fled Ukraine, heading in different directions with an agreed upon rendezvous point for when and if things ever calmed down. He ended up as in Silesia, where he worked, not voluntarily, in a Wehrmacht controlled copper mine. I have the pipe he carved by hand of the German soldier assigned to guard him. My grandfather would proudly tell me; “The Germans never got an ounce of copper out of that mine when I was their geologist.”

The war ended and he made his way back to my grandmother and mother whom he’d never met. He was starving and survived by diving into rivers and harvesting crayfish to eat. He was so emaciated that when he finally made it to their rendezvous point my grandmother didn’t recognize him at first. It wasn’t until he started to whistle “their” song, that she knew who he was.

Life hadn’t been easy for her as a “guest” worker on a German work farm in occupied Poland. I knew it had been hard but had no idea until my oldest son Henry was born. I called my grandmother to tell her the news. She was 92 years old and overjoyed. She asked if my Long Suffering Wife was able to take time off from work. I explained that through FMLA she could take two or three months off. My grandmother’s reply was simple; “That is nice. When your mother was born the Germans gave me four hours to rest.”

My grandparents, mom and my great grandmother continued to move west as the Soviets kept moving west. They would try to stay a step ahead. If they were caught on the wrong side of the occupation they would be sent back to the Soviet Union. If that happened they would be killed. They were refugee’s, they lived in camps and then towns and eventually what was left of German city in the west. In1952, nine years after her birth my mother and her parents (and grandmother) arrived in America.

They ended up in Boston. My mom went to Catholic School, my grandmother went to work in a mill and my grandfather worked as a longshoreman. He unloaded sacks of sugar to be processed at the Domino Sugar plant/refinery in Boston. One of his pinkies was permanently bent at a forty-five degree angle because of this work. He also went to back to college to get his degree because he couldn’t prove he had one. Times were lean but not refugee lean, they weren’t Soviet lean and they certainly weren’t Holodomor lean.

When my grandfather secured his doctorate in geology he went to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as an expert in permafrost for more than two decades. First in Chicago and then later in Hanover, New Hampshire. He was a proud man and used, quite deservedly his title of Doctor. Don’t fucking tell me that someone with PHD isn’t a real doctor.

I grew up spending a great deal of time in their home in central Vermont. It was a modern home, a raised ranch that was reminiscent of ski chalet on 35 acres of forest and field. I stole their house as a setting for all the action for my fourth novel. It boggles my mind to think that people who almost starved to death were able to own enough land to raise enough vegetables on to get them through the year every year.

My grandparents loved America. Not some sort of performative or knee jerk reaction type of love. They loved America with the burning passion of people who had cheated death. Had cheated starvation and poverty and had done so with the help of a country that asked to be given the starving and the poor. America hadn’t just saved them but gave them the opportunity to thrive.

I love America. Not blindly. Not ignorantly. Not politically oriented one way or the other. I love America because I was taught what the worst of the other options looks like. I was shown that this is truly the land of opportunity. I won’t pretend or presume that it is easy or fair. It is just a promise of possibility. An opportunity.

That was what made America great for my family. It gave us a chance. That is why I love this country. It is not a blind sort of love. I can love my country and accept it isn’t perfect. I can love my country and recognize the problems. That love of a country born from the most radical social/political experiment of the 18th century is not a blind love but it is a passionate one.

Have a happy Fourth of July!

I spend time on social media promoting my books. I am on a bunch of different platforms. Lately I find myself on Threads a fair amount. I like that the Writing Thread has writers of all levels on it. There are a lot of newer writers and a lot of not so new writers. A lot of the new writers seek writing advice and it is genuinely nice to see the positive response from the community. This Substack is a result of my time spent there.

If you want to be a writer there is something I need to tell you. A guarantee I will make. While I can’t guarantee that you will get “good” reviews, I can guarantee that you will get “bad” reviews. For writers they are as certain as death or taxes.

That isn’t to say that your novel, play, screenplay, short story, poem, haiku, blog post etc. isn’t good. I am not saying that you haven’t spent time on it. Invested in it. Poured your heart and soul into it. Nor am I implying that your work hasn’t been edited to within an inch of it’s life…and possibly your sanity.

The simple fact is that you will not be able to please everyone. Unlike most other fields of endeavor, as a writer you are putting yourself and your art out there. There is a reason why I will never attempt to publish my whinny, angst ridden, introspective poetry. On the other hand my novels and short stories are out there in the wild fending for themselves. Somedays I think of them as children kicked out of the nest and other days I imagine them, naked and afraid on the Serengeti.

My first novel, The Off-Islander came out in 2019. Much like my 20-something year old self thought he was prepared for life, I thought I was prepared for the reviews. I quickly learned that I had a lot to learn.

The trades were for the most part kind to my Freshman novel. Kirkus Review was, as Kirkus often is, brutal. It’s a right of passage and now one of my favorite bad reviews is from them; “the only person surprised by the ending of this novel was the protagonist”. That is a strong contender to go on my gravestone.

What I wasn’t prepared for were the reviews from the general public. One blog stood out because the writer spent several paragraphs pointing out the very specific ways in which my book sucked. She had some fair points and some I felt weren’t. She ended with words to the effect that, she didn’t really read hardboiled PI fiction, as a feminist it wasn’t her favorite thing.

That review made me appreciate The Great Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times who declined to review the book. She told my editor that while she liked parts of it she felt that she’d rather not write a review than write a negative one for a first time author. She did review my second novel Back Bay Blues in her November 6, 2020 column, which was a career highlight for me.

Last Tuesday my eighth novel was released. Good and bad reviews instantly followed. I inadvertently read one of the bad ones. I usually don’t read them. There isn’t much point reading someone's thoughts about how much your novel sucks. The truth is that not everyone will like what I write or what you write.

After my first book came out I was stewing about some bad reviews as I ran errands. In my mind I had a debate with the reviewers where I tried to address their specific criticisms. I was also listening to National Public Radio. I forget which show but a writer came on and starting talking to the interviewer about bad reviews. He mentioned how he used to obsess about his bad reviews. Specifically the ones on platforms like Amazon and Goodreads written by regular people. Then he told the interviewer how he got over it. He looked at the person’s profile who left a negative review, to see what they did like. Most of the time isn’t wasn’t anything like what he wrote. He realized right then that he wasn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea and he was okay with that.

It was an “aha” moment for me.

I don’t read my reviews now. Well not the bad ones. I don’t recommend your read yours either. No good comes of it. The reviews aren’t meant to make you a better writer, they exist to sell books, sell the reviewers brand etc. If you want to improve your writing, write more. Read more.

I guarantee that will help your writing improve.

Pub Day. Publication Day, it is one of those great things that authors get to experience. It’s the day that your book, that thing you slaved over for months (in some cases years) writing, months editing is released to the public for sale. Pub day is when it goes from being a manuscript to being a book.

Pub day, which sadly has nothing to do with pubs, is in spite of that a good day. Tomorrow is the publication day for my eighth novel, The Driftwood Bones. It is the second book in my second series involving Massachusetts State Police Detective Tommy Kelly and Nantucket PD Detective Jo Harris.

I am very lucky to be able to write. Luckier still that people read them and the publisher keeps paying me to write them. Publishing is a hard racket to get into and frankly an even harder one to stay in. I’ve been luckier than most. I’ve also been very, very fortunate to have a supportive family.

I am extremely fortunate to have some of the best friends in the world. Friends who edit the books, friends who are early readers and friends who insist upon buying them. Friends who are willing to email me when they catch me putting the wrong sized engine in a 1978 Ford Maverick! Friends from work who have some of the most encouraging of the bunch I am fortunate for.

The only thing better than all of that are the fans. The ones who over the years have taken a time out of their busy lives to reach out to me. It is always nice to hear that someone likes your writing. I will always remember the first. He had read my first book, The Off Islander, and wrote to tell me that I was the first person who mentioned his job in Vietnam by name. He was a Covey Rider, a Forward Air Controller flying in a Cessna supporting Army Special Forces in Vietnam.

That’s part of what makes Pub Day great! If you count yourself among the aforementioned, thank you. I couldn’t do it without you.

A brutal deadline knocked me off my horse. Metaphorically speaking because I’ve only been on a horse once in my life, at dude ranch outside of Reno, Nevada. The closet thing I have to one is a quality, pre-owned Kayak. It’s an Ocean Kayak Prowler and is canary yellow.

Due to the gods of publishing and production schedules, when the ink was dry (actually they’re signed digitally) on the last contract, I had four months to write a novel. That’s not a lot of time. Especially considering I work full time, I am a father, Substacker (sounds so much cooler than blogger), a podcaster and have to do my share of book promotion.

My books are, give or take 80,000 words long. We measure books by words and not pages because as everyone who has ever written a term paper knows, font and spacing can do wonders to change a page count. Word counts keep us honest.

80K words equals a book of between 230-250 pages finished product, cover to cover. 80,000 words breaks down to 20,000 words a month. Now if you are Steven King, who says you should write 2,000 words a day you should be able to do that in ten days. That means one of my novels should theoretically take forty days to write. Theoretically. I mentioned the full time job thing, right?

I usually write about five hundred words a night. In a good night. On a great night I write a thousand. To put that in perspective if you’ve read this far you are a hair passed 250 words. My usual Substack posts run about 800 words and I usually write them on Sundays so that I can also work on my current manuscript at night.

This is both an easier and harder form of writing. When I am working a novel I rarely have writer’s block and when I do it passes fairly quickly. With this type of writing is more like a letter to an old friend the words require more turning, more crafting.

The problem with writing an 80,000 novel in four months is that there is only so much time. Deadlines are always a math problem, so many words written in only so much time. So many words a day equals so many hours at night in front of the computer. Which means many hours of not doing other things.

The camping and canoe trips are always the first casualties of my deadlines. I love them but they are time intensive. Not just the time spent on the water or at the campsite but also the time spent prepping and recovering. The second casualty was watching anything that involved an episode or a movie.

There were lots of cancelled offers of drinks with friends or at the very least everything was delayed. They were casualties too. Fred and I paused our recording episodes of our podcast Deported to Sweden w. Close friends intentionally didn’t call and left me alone so I could focus on meeting the deadline.

My Long Suffering Wife was very patient about my being cooped up in my office for hours every night. It would be so much harder to write, let alone meet deadline without her support. Both of my teenage sons were good about giving me space to write. Teenagers excel at that.

There was one other, huge sacrifice, that was made. It wasn’t mine. My good friend Cheryl has read and edited every manuscript. She is a busy lady with an important job and a responsibilities to boot. Every manuscript she takes two weeks and turns the slop of misspellings, comma splices, fragments, dialogue tags, dubious punctuation, and turns it all into something coherent that resembles an actual novel. She turned this latest one around in six days. A truly Herculean effort.

I started the novel in the dead of winter. Blizzards and flurries gave way to the rains of Spring and false spring. Now it is the beginning of summer and I am done. Conveniently in time to catch up on all the yardwork and home projects that were deferred for four months.

So in the immortal words of LL Cool J; “Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years.” At least that’s what it feels like, several years in a season and a half. You, faithful or new readers can expect something in this space on a weekly or near weekly basis.

Today most of America and a lot of Americans abroad are getting ready to watch the big game. Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen overseas will in the middle of the night or some god awful hour of the morning pack around a TV set to watch it broadcast by Armed Forces Network. Or stream it on a phone or a computer.

Across America millions of families and friends will gather for Superbowl parties. They will be marked by lots of delicious food and a lot of beer. The Superbowl is a BIG DEAL and it eclipses a lot of other things.

Here in New England it’s a very big deal this year as I am sure it is in the Pacific Northwest. I was born here and it will surprise no one that I am rooting for New England. It’s a safe bet that the region will shut down for a few hours tonight.

It snowed yesterday and was/is bitterly cold. The windchills here are crazy low and saw that this is the coldest winter in 30 years. It was cold yesterday when I was out snow blowing and shoveling. I am pretty sure that I lost feeling in my face at some point. My hands and feet weren’t far from it too.

Around the same time that I was clearing the driveway a fire broke out in my friend Sean’s house. Thankfully no one was hurt. Unfortunately the house and all in it was lost.

Sean is a combat veteran and dedicated public servant. We are cops and went through the police academy together. I would urge you to consider donating to a fundraiser for him and his family.

Help a hero

Thank you.

A few days ago while getting the mail I stopped to talk to my neighbors. They are retired from careers in education and like to share a cigarette outside. My mailbox is next to theirs, in front of their house which is where I run into them. They are in their early 70’s, have been together for decades and still are in love enough to share a cigarette on their smoke breaks. That’s pretty cool.

We talked about the upcoming snow storm which ended up dropping about 18” on our little patch of Rhode Island. We discussed the logistics of snow clearing and how long the storm was supposed to last. Since Andy Roark bought me a Husqvarna snowblower that is almost unkillable, I offered to help them out if the snow was bad. It was and I did. After all they’re not just neighbors but fans.

At one point during our mailbox, smoke break conversation, the wife asked; “Do you set your thermostat very high?”

I thought it was an odd question but answered; “Um not high but it’s comfortable in our house. Why do you ask?” I didn’t know if I was about to be dragged into some long standing dispute about the proper thermostat settings that seem to plague most marriages.

“We see your boys when they are getting on the bus.”

“Oh, yeah, sure.” I answered not really knowing where this was going.

“We noticed that you wear shorts and a t-shirt. No matter the weather.” She said.

Which isn’t exactly accurate, I don’t tend to do it big snow storms or downpours but I have been guilty of being outside as described when the thermometer is in the teens.

“Um yeah, that’s true.” I replied.

“Why?” She asked with rather genuine curiosity.

“Well, I can tell you because you guys are friends.” I paused for dramatic effect and answered partially, truthfully, “I do it so the neighbors all think I’m a little nuts.”

She laughed and said; “Oh, I get it.”

I am not sure she did because I wasn’t telling the “whole truth” as they in court. I don’t mind if the neighbors think I’m a little nuts. My son’s bus driver and bus monitor too for that matter. In reality they all probably think I’m just being stupid. I know that at times my Long Suffering Wife has thought as much.

Though she’s started playing along. She was on a work call and the person at the other end was explaining how he watched someone digging their car out from the snow and ice. He told my LSW, in a state of incredulity, that the man was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. LSW explained about my seasonally inappropriate clothing flexing on the neighborhood.

“He said what your doing is a Power Move.” She reported to me when I got home after work. I’ve never met her coworker but I suspect he might get me.

The thing is, as is often the case, the truth is a little harder to explain. I spent time in the Army, which seems to specialize in ensuring that one is cold, wet and miserable as often as it can. If not cold and wet, broiling hot is the word of the day. I used to go winter camping in the White Mountains and once camped in the Great Swamp Management Area in August. The mosquitos were torture. I go kayaking in the fall and winter too. These trips usually result with my ending up getting dumped in the river.

The point is that I have spent a portion of my life and leisure time being uncomfortable. I could blame 1st Sergeant Cliff Bondarek, sadly now deceased, who used to tell his troops, of which I was one. “You should make every effort to get out of your comfort zones.” It was great advice for soldiers and pretty good life advice.

I know that wearing shorts and a t-shirt in fifteen degree weather isn’t smart. I also know that most of my neighbors could care less what I wear as long as they don’t have to see too much of me. Can’t blame them for that.

I also know that at fifteen degrees I have a small window of time before the cold gets to me. Discomfort isn’t a big deal and I know that I am not likely to go hypothermic in the five minutes it takes to put my sun on the bus. Just like I know even if my finger tips hurt in the cold that I have a while before I have to worry about Frostbite.

That’s the funny thing about being human, we try to avoid discomfort. It’s an understandable survival trait. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable. Nothing wrong with it as long as you aren’t missing out on life’s rich experiences. Like Top Bondarek said, “get out of your comfort zones”.

Speaking of which, if you want to hear me and my friend Fred talk about writing, drinking, canoeing and life, Season 2, Episode one of the Deported to Sweden Podcast dropped! Check it out.

Winter doesn’t seem to have quite the same ferocity it used to. It might be an isolated trend over the last few years or maybe it’s a portent of something bigger. I certainly have my theories. I know there are a lot of people who don’t mind less cold and less snow. I am not one of them. After fall, winter is my favorite season, and it just isn’t the same without snow.

One of the things which I actually found that I liked when we bought our house in 2013 was dealing with the snow. The first couple of winters we lived here there was no money in the budget for a snow blower. I shoveled our long by suburban standards driveway. We got a lot of snow both winters and my back seemed like it was always sore. My Long Suffering Wife took pity on me and ordered an electric snowblower.

Somehow it worked out that the snow blowing, shoveling, car cleaning and driveway clearing happened at night before I’d head into work. There was nothing like starting a midnight shift in patrol, having been up for a few hours clearing snow. I have fond memories of that little, green snowblower, that a succession of polar vortex winters saw it shake itself to pieces. Fortunately, around the time that happened I had sold my first novel and the advance money paid for new, not environmentally friendly, Husqvarna snowblower. Or as we joke at home, Andy Roark bought it for me.

It’s snowing here tonight. It’s been snowing off and on all day but when the sun went down and the temperature with it, the snow started to accumulate. We’ve had a fire going in the fireplace all day. It was, with the exception of chores that needed to be done a lazy Sunday in our household. I can’t complain. It’s nice not to rush, not to worry about deadlines or what the next thing that has to be done is. There will be plenty of time for that tomorrow.

Today, I got to spend time just hanging out with my two teenage sons and my LSW. We didn’t do anything special. It was nice to be in the same space with no activity or need to do anything. Given the boys age and their growing up, I would say it was a luxury.

This is the first snow storm of the season that is offering any real accumulation. The weather report which started at 1-3 inches has slowly upgraded to as much as 5-6 inches. More locally depending upon where you are local. The plows have been rumbling by and I have been steadily adding logs to the fire.

It should come as a surprise to no one who reads what I write here or in my books, that there is a new potato dish in the oven. Pommes Dauphinoise is burbling away at 375. The whole house is filled with the smell of garlic and thyme. The dish is a more refined version of potatoes Au Gratin, no jokes please about the dreaded MRE side, potatoes au rotten.

The other day I was talking to a detective from another department. He’s in the National Guard and we were talking about how there is no miserable that compares to Army miserable. The times when you are in the field or on a deployment or pulling guard duty. The times that you are wet and cold, almost always sleep deprived. Many different types of misery rolled into one singular experience. It was the times like that which make me appreciate the night like tonight.

There is a saying in the Army, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. I.E. you might have the best plan in the world but when it goes live, it changes. And by changes I mean often goes to shit.

I had plans this weekend. None of them actually happened.

Saturday we were supposed to go to a holiday party, that used to be a Christmas party that the hosts permanently moved to January. The eggnog tastes just as good. We all appreciate it as it is a more relaxed time of year. Also it’s nice to have a party in January when we are all going through withdrawal from holiday parties. Unfortunately the family dog had to be put down and I can’t blame them for not wanting to host a party after losing a beloved family member.

Today I was supposed to meet my partner in podcasting Fred and start recording the 2026 season of the Deported to Sweden Podcast. Unfortunately Fred’s day job had other plans and he had to go in. Kind of a bummer since it had been a couple of months since we’ve gotten to hang out but the day jobs pay the bills and the podcast doesn’t.

The weekend instead of being a mad rush between chores and errands, cooking for the party and then podcasting turned into something else. I spent a lazy weekend with my family, enjoying their company. I caught up on my reading, I highly recommend Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, if you are a fan of Gothic horror. I managed to do some editing on The Driftwood Bones, which I highly recommend if you are a fan of Tommy Kelly. Even though the weekend didn’t go as planned it was still a good weekend.

I woke up this morning Sunday 1/11/2026 and realized that it was my 19th anniversary as a Providence Police Officer. I distinctly remember my raising my white gloved hand and taking my oath. It was the culmination of a lot of hard work and also the beginning of a new adventure.

I never had any real plan to be a cop. My plan had been the Army. I wanted to be an Active Duty officer, preferably an Infantry officer. My lackluster academic performance, and frankly, probably a lack of maturity, meant that instead I was commissioned as a Reserve Officer. When that didn’t work out I applied to a couple of departments, not knowing what else to do with my life but again, the lack of maturity thing got in the way.

I ended up working for a company that did trademark research, where I met my future Long Suffering Wife but otherwise it was unremarkable. It paid the bills and I was happy to be a 1990’s office drone. Yes, the movie Office Space spoke to a lot of us on a very deep level. A deployment, a layoff, another deployment and a year of active duty Stateside (CONUS) all followed.

During that tour of duty in 2005 my boss told me that he’d be happy to extend my orders as long as I wanted to stay. It was a great job but I was just an office drone in a uniform and I couldn’t see staying. My good friend Don, also a reservist and a Cop in Massachusetts, asked my plans and I told him I didn’t know. He said; “Pete, you’re 32. You need a job with a pension, like the cops.”

Those words stuck with me. In 2006 I applied to the Providence Police Department. That August I started the 64th recruit class and January 11, 2007 I was given, a front row ticket to the greatest show on earth. I had heard the phrase said of the job or possibly read it in a Joseph Wambaugh book After my first, bitterly cold night of Field Training, I knew it was the truth. I got home at seven in the morning as my FLSW was getting ready for work. I poured a drink and talked her ear off until she left. I was wired and stayed that way for most of my ten years in Patrol.

The last 19 years have been mostly good. There have been bad days. There have been horrible days. There have been times that I have laughed until the tears rolled down my face and there have been days when I wanted to cry or at least rage at the utter fucking unfairness of the universe. Quite standard stuff really. I have made lifelong friends, people whom I truly consider brothers and sisters, not unlike those whom I made while deployed. I have seen the best and worst that humanity has to offer. In short my career has given me what every other cop has been given or shown. “I wouldn’t change a thing”, as my friend Mark would say.

In the last 19 years there have also been a deployment, one marriage, two real estate transactions, two kids and the passing of both my father and father in law. It wasn’t all about the job. Life kept happening too. There is a life outside of work.

Being a cop has been a good job and it’s allowed me to provide for my family. It’s given me a host of fantastic and horrible experiences, which no doubt inform my writing. It also gave me the chance to do something more than just clock into a job in some office that I wasn’t happy with. It gave me a chance to have a job with some sort of meaning.

In a couple of years, I’ll probably hang it up and just write books for a living. I’ll get together with other retired cops and tell war stories about our glory days over beers in some dive bar. Until that time comes I will enjoy the show.

There was a time when New Year’s Eve meant I was going to a party. Usually one that required some level of dressing up. When my good friend Fearless Leader and his wife Mrs. Fearless Leader stopped having their annual NYE party, I started to throw one. The first was in my cramped apartment on Preston Street in Providence. Somehow we managed to pack a disturbing amount of loud, drunken people into a one bedroom apartment.

Over the next six or seven years we’d host off and on. We eventually moved to a two bedroom apartment in a three decker on Forest Street and the last one was held in a two bedroom condo, in an old mill building in Northern Rhode Island. We managed to add more people to the guest list each year. The years I was deployed we left the hosting responsibilities to others.

We had a tradition at the parties. A tradition that was rooted in pop culture. At some point before a deployment I had a lot of time on my hands and was watching reruns of the Avengers. If you are not familiar with the adventures of John Steed and Emma Peel, you should be. One thing that stuck out, besides Emma Peels famous leather cat suit, was the Champagne fountain. Steed would make a pyramid of champagne saucers and fill them by pouring champagne into the topmost glass so that it would overflow and fill the glasses below. Then he and Emma Peel would drink the stuff glass by glass.

It was a spectacle and it looked decadent, perhaps even classy. Who knows. I just wanted to do it. My friend Ellen, who listened to me talk about it so much that one Christmas she bought several cases of champagne saucers. Enough to make a pyramid that if memory serves requires five bottles of Champagne to fill. It was the spectacle that I had hoped and it was a hit at the parties.

All things change and like most people for us that change came with children. It’s not their fault, more resolute parents could have still had a party, still had the champagne fountain but I fear that we were not those parents. I still have the champagne saucers, miraculously we’ve never broken one. That says a lot because we are tough on glass in this house. I plan, at some point to have a party like that again. To again pour the fountain, that is my promise and not a resolution.

This year my long suffering wife wanted fondue for dinner. The hardest part of which was braving the Whole Foods parking lot on New Years Eve. Though to be frank it’s always like something out of Mad Max , even on the non holiday eves. I secured the prefab fondue and survived the parking lot. I had to stop at a second supermarket and made it home before dark. We had our fondue and drank our bottle of decent champagne and some how stayed up until the new year arrived.

I woke up a little late this morning, taking advantage of the holiday to sleep in. Unlike years past, think champagne fountain years, I didn’t feel any worse for wear. Which was good, it had snowed in the night and the driveway wasn’t going to shovel itself.

I am not one to make resolutions. I suppose at times I have said things like; “this year I’ll get back in shape” or “this year I’ll lose weight” but I wouldn’t consider those resolutions. More like they were vague goals, with no plan and even less intent. If you are the type who can make a resolution and stick with it, more power to you. I’m not that guy. I am a writer and have enough stuff that I can self criticize, I don’t need failed resolutions added to that list.

Nor do I sit there and say things like; “2026 is the year that I am going to…”. Nope, not me. Why? Because I just don’t believe in statements like that. 2026 is ripe with the possibility of both good and bad things. I might get that movie deal I’ve always hoped for or I might cross the street in front of the city bus at the wrong moment. Nope, no grand future pronouncements for me. No need to tempt fate either. The new year will bring what it brings, both good and bad. I hope that the good is very good and the bad isn’t very bad at all. That is all one can do.

As for you… well happy new year. I hope 2026 is your year.

I try to write this Substack once a week. It’s a nice way to reach out to friends, family and fans. I don’t think I’ve sold a single book because of this Substack but I have met some interesting people. My small, but loyal fanbase, read that as mostly friends and family, seem to like it.

I haven’t posted here for sometime. Earlier this month I had an editorial deadline to meet. Thomas and Mercer pays me and I do what they ask me to. They get priority over most things.

I usually try to post on the weekends. That way if I am actively working on a novel I can do both. The down side of a day job is that it cuts into my writing time. Though the kids seem to appreciate a roof over their heads, so I can’t complain.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the annual memorial dinner for a my late friend and mentor Mike. Mike was a cop’s cop and great guy. I was lucky to know him. He passed ten years ago not too long after he retired from the job. His death left a big hole in a lot of lives and we try to honor his memory every year by getting together. The dinner was nice and I wanted to write about it and about Mike. That was my Substack plan for last weekend.

Last Saturday man shot eleven college students, murdering Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov who were at a study session at Brown University. Providence Police and the Brown University Police immediately responded to the shooting scene. The wounded were quickly evacuated, as were the people in the building where the shooting occurred. The rest of the campus and much of the surrounding community went into lockdown and or sheltered in place.

Police officers from almost every law enforcement agency in the state responded to help. Federal agents from an alphabet soup of agencies descended on the scene. PPD officers who were off shift, or on vacation or not in patrol or SRU responded without being asked or told. Rescues (ambulances) from the Providence Fire Department and other cities arrived to transport the wounded. The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority buses arrived to help evacuate students. It was a massive, collaborative, undertaking.

For the next ten or so hours teams of police/law enforcement officers began clearing buildings. Once the buildings were cleared they would escort the students/faculty/staff out of the building and onto a RIPTA bus, or police van. From there they were transported to a safe, guarded location. Some buildings had handfuls of people, some had hundreds. It was, an epic undertaking, that went into the early hours of the next morning. My unscientific estimate is that hundreds possibly a couple thousand people were transported/escorted to safety by people who were the living embodiment of the Los Angeles Police Department’s motto, “serve and protect”.

I was amazed, looking around the makeshift command center, seeing cops from my job, many of them so young they looked like they should have been attending college not protecting it. Cops from around the state, from the State Police and federal agents. All weary from spending hours systematically clearing rooms and buildings. If you’ve never done it, trust me, even a small building is exhausting, never mind a college campus.

Looking around the room I felt an immense sense of pride. From the senior officers on my job who were directing operations, to the assembled cops from other jobs and Federal agents who came because that’s what we do. Orwell has a fancy quote about why people are able to sleep in their beds at night. My version is simpler. Some of us will willingly run toward danger to protect people. To save lives. Not for medals or ribbons, but simply because it is, on occasion necessary.

Later I went home. I was exhausted and wired like the old days when I was in patrol. I couldn’t sleep and is my way, poured a glass of whiskey. I stood in my kitchen trying to process the scope of what I had seen. The size and scale of the crime scene boggled my mind. It was thousands of square feet that would need to be meticulously searched. Hundreds of objects if not thousands that would need to be processed and catalogued. We had searched and secured a college campus that was nestled in a city neighborhood with tendrils that reached into that neighborhood. Hours and hours of painstaking searching. That would be just the beginning.

In the following days, our Crime Scene (BCI) people would continue to process the scene. The FBI would lend us the full weight of their support. PPD Detectives would sift through thousands, tens of thousands of tips, video clips and conduct what I am confident was the largest door to door canvass in the city’s history. We would continue to patrol the East Side, especially the area adjacent to Brown. Throughout all of it we receive continued support from other departments and the State Police.

Two days after the shooting at Brown, the murderer would go to Brookline, Massachusetts where he would murder Nuno Loureiro. The murderer, I refuse to name him, was identified and tracked to a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire where he had taken his own life.

There was a great deal of public criticism in the days following the campus shootings. Some from the media, most from the keyboard commando types. The vast majority of which by people who have no earthy idea about the size and scope of this type of investigation. Nor about police work in general.

Sunday morning, December 14th I stood in my kitchen. Tired and a little numb, whiskey in hand and thought about what I had just been a part of. My modest contribution to one of the largest and most horrific operation in my job’s history. We had saved lives because a Lieutenant made the decision to immediately evacuate the wounded students. We evacuated hundreds, if not thousands of students, with our sister agencies and with the help of RIPTA. It hit me then that what transpired that night was our Dunkirk. Not in the defeat of an army but the sheer scale of the effort made to save lives.

In the following days, there were a lot of keyboard commandos and internet experts who weighed in. In the end I realized that it didn’t matter what they had to say. What we did mattered.

Thanksgiving has come and gone. I am not sure the food coma has. Tomorrow or maybe today depending upon when you are reading this I will go back to work. I have no complaints, I like my day job. It’s been pretty good to me.

I try to write these on Saturday. Mostly because that gives me a lot of time to write both a Substack and work on whatever writing that is required to churn out a novel a year. But alas, the food coma hadn’t lifted by Saturday. Sunday I was moving sluggishly but groceries needed to be shopped for. Also, Fearless Leader stopped by, if you don’t know who that is, you should listen to the last two episodes of the Deported to Sweden podcast. He was both the special guest and host.

This year there was a lot of cooking leading up to the holiday. My test run of Potato Pave or 1,000 layer potatoes went well. It was a lot of preparation but it was worth it. It will become a holiday staple in our household. Perhaps it might even show up on canoe trip some day. Here it paired well with lox and broiled leek dipping sauce that I made. I am told that I raved about the sauce and was uncharacteristically immodest. It was that good.

My brother in law made the turkey this year. It was excellent, especially when paired with the gravy he made from scratch. There were carrots, green beans and two types of potato. One was mashed and the other one is a gratin that everyone but me raves about. I guess I am a bit of a contrarian. Or so I’ve been told enough that there’s probably some truth to it.

My Long Suffering Wife made her famous Leek and Camembert tart, which due to a snafu was actually a leek and cheddar tart, it was still good. Also the big surprise is that I found a stuffing that I liked. My mother in laws. This is no small news since have not cared for stuffing since Thanksgiving 1977 or 78 when shortly after bedtime I woke up and got sick. I’ll spare you the details.

You can see where writing a weekly Substack might have fallen by the wayside. It’s a miracle that the food coma lifted long enough for me to write this piece. I’d love to promise you that I will write again faithfully this weekend. I’ll try. But the food coma is going to be replaced by holiday parties and an editing deadline. You take the Kings schilling…well you get the idea. A deadline is a deadline. Until the next one dear readers.

As weekends go this one has been a pretty successful one for me. Yesterday I managed to make Pommes Maxim that was pretty good. Crispy top and bottom, buttery, creamy, potatoes inside. Today I had two Yukon Golds leftover and about a third that had been sliced up on the mandolin yesterday so I made another Maxim.

Before you assume that I have mad skills or am some sort of dare devil who doesn’t care for his finger tips, it’s a safety mandolin. Imagine a mandolin and a Slap Chop had a love child. The result of their unlikely union, involves a mandolin that rides mostly vertical via a double kickstand type of thing. The blade moves, attached to a long plastic plunger. You feed the potato into a recess while simultaneously pushing down on the plunger. It is a very effective vegetable guillotine.

This morning, think more like brunch time than crack of dawn. I cleaned the two potatoes and fed them into the vegetable guillotine. Vive La Revolucion! Robspierre would have been proud of my efforts. The newly sliced potatoes were layered in the pan, each layer brushed with clarified butter and seasoned. Then another layer, etc. The results was a Pommes Maxim that tasted pretty good and was an improvement on yesterdays efforts.

I was in a good mood for a couple of reasons. One there is the smell of snow in the air. For those of you from warmer climates I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It’s a mixture of cool temperature and slight dampness in the air that tickles the nostrils in just such a way. It is usually accompanied by grayish skies, the tinge of woodsmoke in the air and desire for mulled cider. You can add dark rum to yours. I won’t tell.

The other reason was that last night I started to put words down on the page. I’d been thinking about Tommy Kelly and his future endeavors. No, actually I’ve been obsessing over them. Have I mentioned that writing is obsessive? If I haven’t, take my word for it. No one would do this for fun and the odds of actually making real money at it are slim.

Last night instead of just thinking about plot points, or scenes or what the message of the book was meant to be, I did something that my agent might not approve of. I started a book not knowing if my publisher would even want it. Publishing is a business and Tommy’s future depends not on how smart or tough or well written, he is but how many copies he sells.

And here’s the rub. For a lot of us who write fiction, not all but I would imagine the majority of us, our characters (our books too) are our darlings. Usually it is our protagonist who is the most darling of all the darlings. But I like the supporting players and know all of their stories, even if they don’t get as much time on the page as the hero does.

I also know my villains. They aren’t exactly my darlings. The fun thing about the villains is that you can do so much more with them. Tommy has to be a good guy. A stand up guy. My villains don’t. They don’t have to play by the rules or even be nice. Though it is so much better when they are nice. There’s something scary about a villain that readers kind of like. That they can identify with.

But my heroes ARE my favorites. Writing Andy Roark was a lot of fun. Writing and reading as he got into fights, car chases, flashed back to Vietnam or shot it out with the bad guys was very entertaining. But I also loved putting him through the wringer. I would laugh with diabolical glee with each new thing I threw at him.

It got so bad that when I was writing Death at Fort Devens, I close the laptop for the night. Stand up and walk into the living room where my Long Suffering Wife would be seated. She’d look up from her phone or laptop as appropriate and I would gleefully say the following.

“Man, I really stuck it to Andy tonight. I mean I really fucckkked him tonight.”

She would reply with something characteristically supportive and go back to what she was doing and I would go off to the kitchen in search of food.

Today there was the smell of snow in the air. It reminded me that I have a date with Tommy Kelly. It’s a date in which I will meet him on Nantucket in the middle of winter. We have an appointment that will be several months long and will involve my putting him through the wringer. Tommy’s tough so it will be fun to see how much I can heap on him without breaking him.

I know who his villain is and he’s (or she’s) diabolical. Possibly the worst one yet. If I sound like a proud father then you aren’t wrong. My fictional children are my darlings, some of which I kill and others I just put through hell.

Just ask Andy and Tommy.

I write books. I write books and short stories and Substacks and blogs. I write a lot. Before I started writing books, I wrote, in no particular order, police reports, term papers, bad poetry and the occasional short stories that I’d show to three or four people. Now, I’m part of a podcast where we talk about writing. So yeah, writing is kind of a big deal in my life.

It’s not the only thing. My family is a bigger deal. My day job is a pretty big deal. Friends certainly count as a big deal. The Army used to be a big deal in my life. Cooking, camping and paddling are big deals too. Ask me about the Pomme Maxim I made yesterday. I dare you.

The thing of it is that writing is a process and something of an obsession.

I wish I could go back in time and pinpoint the exact moment when words became so important to me. Not the spoken word. Speech is a necessity of daily life and survival. We learn that when we learn to ask for food or comfort as children. For all but a small few there is little art to the spoken word.

It might have been high school when I was introduced to Shakespeare. It could have been sophomore English class when we read The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Though it just as easily have been reading a paperback from the free book section of the Providence Atheneum. It might have been in college when I took a writing class.

Maybe it had nothing to do with books and school. Maybe it was when I started to write and receive letters. Basic training, something technically called Infantry OSUT, One Station Unit Training. OST was basic training and advanced individual training combined into one long, sometimes painful stay at Fort Benning, Georgia where we were taught how to be Infantrymen (it was decades before the Army opened Combat Arms jobs to women).

That’s when and where I started to write letters. Letters to family. Letters to friends. Letters to girls that I hoped would, on the strength of my written words, in messy, spidery cursive, realize that they wanted to be more than friends. It didn’t pan out that way but I have no complaints.

Later during college, away at ROTC Advanced Camp, I think they call it something more leaderly sounding now, letters home to my then girlfriend. They were love letters of a sort, probably more complaining about my day to day and missing her than lascivious or romantic. Certainly nothing too romantically exciting.

Later on the deployments there were more letters. Few people can appreciate a letter more than a deployed soldier. Even in this day of Zooms, emails, instant messaging et cetera mail call is or it least it was when I was last deployed seventeen years ago, a thing to look forward to. Certainly there is nothing that can compare to getting a love letter from your sweetheart when you are in some unpleasant foreign country where a significant portion of the population wants you dead. I was lucky in that I never got a “Dear John” letter.

My oldest son is in high school. He doesn’t know how to write in Cursive. They stopped teaching it years ago. I don’t know how to tell him that a love letter that’s just printed isn’t the same. That being said, if anyone his age is actually writing love letters or poems instead of sending eggplant emojis and dick picks I’d be pretty impressed. And yes, it’s weird to write, “my son” and “dick pick” in the same paragraph.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing today. Not about love letters or even non amorous letters. I’ve been thinking about what I was going to write here, in this space. A friend of mine once told me she viewed blogging as though she was corresponding with her readers. So in that sense, today, I was thinking about the letter I was going to write to you dear reader.

Fortunately for you, it gets typed. No horrific misspellings or dropped words for you. No trying to decipher my atrocious hand writing. A number of friends and family have over the years. I don’t know how they pulled it off. I imagine they were a lot like Alan Touring, slumped over pages, slowly puzzling what each word was. Eventually filling in the letter bit by bit until they could read the whole thing in one sitting. I can only imagine how many migraines I am responsible for.

I was thinking a lot about writing today for another reason. I am about to start a new novel. In what, I can only describe as an ill conceived idea, I am going to start the third Tommy Kelly novel. Writing it on spec, not knowing if my sales of Cold Island will be good enough to justify a third book in the series. You see it doesn’t matter. Lately I’ve been thinking about TK3 and I know the story. I know who the bad guy is and what his motivation is. In short I’ve become obsessed with a story I have yet to write. That is kind of how this writing gig works.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to conjure up another serial killer to terrorize my childhood hometown. Who hasn’t done that? Right?

Friday night I pointed my trusty but not sexy Subaru north toward Dedham, Massachusetts. Every year for the last twenty plus years the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America has their annual convention, Crime Bake there. It’s a chance for writers, editors, agents, marketing folk and writers who’ve yet to be published to meet. To talk about writing and publishing. It’s a pretty good time.

My only complaint about the timing is that my friend and fellow veteran Jay, hosts a veterans’ day party every year at the Pawtuxet Athletic Club. Going to Crime Bake means missing it.

I went last year because I knew that I had been ignoring the Conventions and had to step up my game. Crime Bake seemed smaller and a good place to get an idea what the convention game is all about. Last year’s crime bake had the added bonus that I could hang out with my good friend and fellow writer Roberta Gately. She’s a nurse and a writer, and has spent time in a lot of the same scary places I have. She’s also spent a lot of time in scarier places than I have. It’s nice to have a battle buddy who you don’t have to explain your dark humor too.

Sadly Roberta couldn’t make it this year.

I checked into the hotel and found out that you can teach old dogs new tricks. In this case it was that I could use my phone, through the hotel’s app, as my room key. You could even share your digital key which made the PI writer in me wonder about the role of technology aiding in infidelity. That’s probably another topic for another time.

I stopped in at the hotel bar for a drink and bite to eat. I made a couple new friends and decided that an early night was the order of the day. I retired to my room to read more about the complex history leading up to the battle of Diem Bien Phu. Yep, that’s what middle aged military history geeks do on Friday nights.

I was up early Saturday morning, no worse for wear from my time at the hotel bar. At breakfast I found a seat at a table with an aspiring writer and literary agent. The agent, Tara Gelsomino, One Track Literary Agency turned out to be from Rhode Island also. After trying to figure out who we knew in common, we talked shop. It was fascinating to learn more about the business side of the publishing industry. I have the luxury of just writing the books and letting my own agent Cynthia worry about that stuff.

Then I went to a panel where the Lori Rader Day was one of the panelists. She was also the conference’s guest of honor and a truly hilarious speaker. I was sitting at a table with a nun, who writes cozy mysteries. She was originally from Rhode Island, and yes, we played the “who do you know” game.

Also at our table, among others, was an English woman who bore a striking resemblance to Emma Thompson. She was retired and lived on a canal boat, which is one of the coolest things I’ve heard in a long time. They were part of a writers group that meets weekly via zoom to encourage and hold each other accountable.

The luncheon meal was a box lunch to be consumed while watching two prominent local authors interview Lori Rader Day. Other than the sandwich in my box lunch being wet it was a great lunch. Unfortunately repeated viewing of National Lampoon’s Vacation, have taught me to distrust wet sandwiches and it was returned to the box uneaten.

Toward the end of lunch I began looking at the program to see what was next. What panel or event would catch my eye. I didn’t see anything. There was literally nothing that looked interesting.

Then something weird happened. I just didn’t want to be there anymore. While all the speakers were good and the people were nice, I was sick of hearing writers talking about writing. Moreover I was sick of hearing myself talk about writing.

Then it struck me. I was in the wrong place, with the wrong people. They were perfectly nice, smart, funny, people but I wasn’t where I should be.

At 1730 (5:30 pm) I walked into the Pawtuxet Athletic club in Pawtuxet village. Immediately, I knew I had made the right decision.

There were a number of friends there, some who I served with in peace time and others with whom I had served in war. There was a lot of hugging and back slapping. Lots of drinks shared and funny stories told. I am, undeniably a writer but now I was with my people. Where I belong.

I was when I was a kid for the obvious reason that it meant school was out. Summer was equated with time spent on the beach, snorkeling every chance I could. It meant days pedaling my bike to the far ends of the island that I lived on. It was warm nights, fireflies and movies at the Dreamland theater which wasn’t open year round. There was also ice cream from the Juice Bar and slices of pizza consumed sitting on a bench by Steamboat wharf. In short is was everything a small town kid could hope for.

In high school and college summer meant no school but it also meant work. Picking up extra shifts in whatever restaurant or menial job I was working to scrape together money for school. It also meant Basic training in Georgia, ROTC advanced camp in North Carolina which taught me a thing or two about heat and humidity in the summertime South.

After college, at the first of a few boring office jobs, I was struck by the fact that I had aged out of summers off. Now it was all work, all the time except for ten or so vacation days, holidays and whatever sick time I used when not actually being sick. Summer was now just another season that I spent most of my time not enjoying while I sat in a cubicle.

In the summer of 2000 I lived through the Southern European heat wave while wearing body armor, a helmet and toting a rifle around. The rifle came with a couple hundred bullets and my web belt had a knife on it. I thought that was bad until three summers later when the Army decided that I was needed, urgently in Iraq. The summer of 2003 even up North seemed impossibly hot. Five years later the summer was a little cooler but it still felt like I was deployed to the inside of a Pizza oven. Dave Portnoy would have approved.

Now I am older and summer is great because it means more time with my children. We take a week off and go to Block Island as a family. I get to enjoy a week off and not think too much about work or writing books. Or drive to my mother in laws for a Saturday or Sunday by the pool.

But summer isn’t the same as it was when I was living on Nantucket. Neither am I for that matter.

Now, I like the Fall. I feel like my skin fits me better in the cool weather. Summer is usually an essay in discomfort whenever I am not in air conditioning, which isn’t very often. I push the boundaries of my neighbors patience by seeing how long I can go without mowing my lawn just to avoid the heat. Summer and I are like a couple that had a passionate romance decades ago and still run into each once and awhile. We’re polite to each other but the love is nothing more than a nostalgic memory.

October came bringing cool weather, a brief heatwave and the slow march toward winter. Now the morning frost is a common things. Halloween was a couple of nights ago. We escorted Captain Chaos around the plat (neighborhood if you aren’t from New England), where if you’d seen him you would have assumed he was a tiny politician running for reelection.

Then November struck. Saturday was a chance to ease into the chores that keep a home and family running. Saturday night was a chance to have take out from the new Mexican Restaurant the next town over. It also meant a fire in the fireplace and a glass of whiskey in hand. Not a bad life.

This Halloween brought some changes. This was the first year that we didn’t start trick or treating by going to my neighbor Joan’s house as we have every Halloween since we moved here. Joan has moved and the house recently sold. No more chances to chat in the driveway or the mailbox. No more gleaning little details about what the plat was like when she first moved here with her late husband Fred. No more watching her fawn over my sons whom she adores.

I went to bed last night with knowledge that when I woke up this morning the clocks would have been set back. As changes go, it’s not one I mind very much. Actually I don’t pay it much attention. The days will grow shorter and the nights longer until they won’t, then we will be on the other side of the equation. That’s just how things are, as changes go it’s not the worst one this year. I hope that Joan is well in her new home, she is certainly missed.

If you’ve read anything I’ve written or listened to the Deported to Sweden podcast then you probably know that I used to spend a lot of time in bars. I have a favorite bar The Wild Colonial Tavern in Providence, RI. I have been going there since it opened at the end of the last century. I’ve known the owner Maurice Collins long enough that he sports me to the occasional drink. It’s a tradition that started when I’d stop for a drink right before each deployment and he’d pour me a Middleton’s, neat.

I didn’t grow up in Providence exactly. I moved here when I was 13 in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s second term. Providence was much grittier and in some ways cooler town then. It was a city of industry except that the industry was dying off leaving just the huge red brick mills as a mute testament to it’s once great industrial might. Buddy Cianci hadn’t made his comeback yet and the mob was very much a feature of the city.

Providence also had a vibrant music scene. Lots of local clubs like The Rocket, The Living Room, Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel (just referred to as Lupos) to name a few. In high school I was too much of a geek to even think it possible to go to the clubs in search of punk rock or local bands. I had friends who did which I only found out years later. Is it possible to be retroactively jealous?

When I was in my twenties and I started going to shows. I saw George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers in the new Lupos. To this day it’s one of the best shows I’ve seen.

The clubs tended to move and you can tell a person’s age by which location of Lupos or the Living Room they could say they were in. I caught the last twenty minutes of a Warren Zevon show at the Met Cafe. He played seven out of eight of my favorite songs of his in that twenty minutes, a solid win.

There were smaller clubs and bars that had music too. Snookers (an upscale pool hall in the Jewelry district at the time) had the Green Room. I saw a lot of local or smaller bands play in the Green Room back in the day. To this day Fred, Deported to Sweden’s chief interrogator, still raves about a band called Galub Jamun. Yes, named after the awesome desert in Indian cuisine. The Customs House Tavern had a live three-piece jazz combo on Saturday or Sunday nights.

The point is for short money you could go to a bar or club, have a few beers and see a decent band play for short money pretty much every weekend. There were huge shows at the Civic Center (sorry AMP it’ll never be anything else to me) the Kinks even recorded part of their awesome live album, One For The Road there. But there is nothing like being in a smaller venue, club or bar and catching a show.

Yesterday, was Saturday night and I went to a show. At fifty-two I found myself trying to remember how one dresses for such things. My long suffering wife did her best not to laugh at me when I asked her if I looked hipster enough. Apparently I passed muster and I was cleared to leave the house.

I met up with some friends a Nick-a-Nees, which wasn’t one of the bars I used to frequent in my misspent youth. I’d been a couple of times but never enough to be a regular. Fearless Leader and his wife and a bunch of mutual friends were already there.

To quote Fearless Leader who was looking around at the crowd which was decidedly in its’ sixties; “This is what the crowd would have been like at the Rocket in 1986 if someone had handed you special glasses that aged everyone you looked at.” It was a whose who of Rhode Island Rock and Roll Royalty.

Musicians and groups were rotating in and out in three and four song sets. I would have parted with a lot of my hard earned cash to listen to them in the 1980’s but not last night. For a group of diverse musicians the odd thing was that each set started out with a variation of the same dedication which I can sum up as; “This is for Bob. We miss you.” Or they would dedicate sets to Bob’s wife Michelle.

I know his wife because she had dated a close friend of mine before she and Bob were got together.

Bob passed away unexpectedly last spring. I didn’t know Bob. He was by all accounts one hell of a human being and a fantastic drummer. I might have seen him live if I’d gone to those clubs in High School. I wish I had.

You can tell a lot about a person by who speaks for them after they’re gone. Who speaks for them and what they say. Last night I saw a number of very talented musicians come out to remember Bob. I didn’t know Bob, but I found out that he left a huge impact on a lot of people. Those people came out to share some of their stories and songs. I can’t imagine a better way to be remembered.

I didn’t write anything last week because I was on the water with a group of friends. We took advantage of the long weekend to paddle and camp. We are an eclectic group some of us are veterans, there are a couple of engineers, a couple of writers, an artist and a teacher. Some of us check a couple of the aforementioned boxes simultaneously.

We’ve, for the most part known each other for years, if not decades. This year we were joined by PJ a retired British soldier who had some great stories and was generally a lot of fun. We were also joined by Todd who was on the December trip almost two years ago.

Todd is an experienced paddler and outdoorsman. He is also one hell of a cook, more on that later and he is a writer. Todd writes a blog The Fish Wrap and has a substack of his own. I recommend both. For the most part he writes about fishing and being on the water.

Me and Todd down by the schoolyard, sort of.

He has also started to get a lot of recognition because he’s been writing about another topic. Cancer. Specifically his battle with mutated cells. He writes about a very personal and I imagine, scary thing, with great candor. He also manages to write about it with a great deal of humor and does not take himself too seriously. You should check it out.

We put in Saturday for the short and what should have been uneventful paddle to our first campsite. The campsite was on a small island that we camp on frequently. The river was low due the months of drought and there was a lot of exposed deadfall. To get to the island we had to traverse a swift current that tended to push the canoes and kayaks toward a downed tree.

I watched the others cross it and when it was my turn I started into the current and dug deep on my right. Which dipped my kayak just enough for the current to knock it out from under me. Net result was an impromptu swim, a lost item or two and my friends being very amused. I have no ego on the water and whenever I tend to the river humbles me but quick.

We made it on shore and scoped out places to set up our camp. Soon multi-colored tents were set up and a campfire was started. I was on the hook for dinner that night and decided that Italian Hot Beef sandwiches were what I was going to make. A couple of days of prep and starting with good ingredients turned out a reasonable facsimile.

The next day with a Nor’easter bearing down on us we did something uncharacteristic and broke camp early, well early for us. With a minimum of dawdling and malingering we paddled down river. We were making good time and though the river was shallow it was worlds better than last years Kayak Drag through Worcester. It was common to bump against barely submerged rocks or to even get hung up on them. We only had one small set of rapids between us and camp…what could go wrong?

With the end of the mild rapids in sight I got hung up. Now there are a lot of techniques to free oneself. Using your paddle to gently, so as not to overcorrect and go swimming, push off. Or stick a foot int he water and push off. Or you can scoot forward and thrust your bodyweight forward with your hips. It looks ridiculous but works if you have enough water no excess of pride.

While I was hung up two of my friends who were ahead of me stopped to watch as I used this maneuver. I was hung up better than I thought but each thrust of my hips inched the kayak forward. I kept repeating the move, growing more frustrated with the river each time and as a consequence the words coming out of my mouth grew increasingly foul.

My two friends watched with the usual combination of amusement and horror at my pelvic thrusting. I saw Todd effortlessly paddle over to them in his canoe, of which he was the sole occupant. They had a brief conversation and when I finally managed to extricate myself the river carried me to my two friends who were laughing very hard.

Apparently there had been a brief discussion about going to help me. My friends had reassured Todd that they absolutely had no intention of it and continued to laugh at the show I was putting on. In there defense I didn’t need help. He informed them that they were; “terrible people” with mock seriousness. Which may or may not be true.

You call that a flask, this is a flask!

We camped that night and Todd proved that he too was a terrible person. He made fish cakes friend in butter. The fish was a stripped bass that he’d caught earlier in the week. They were fantastic! I’ve woken up more than a few nights since the trip thinking about those fishcakes.

Then he doubled down on his terribleness by serving us a venison stew he’d made. He had grown the potatoes in his garden and he’d killed and dressed, the deer we were consuming. Does that make him terrible? No. What makes him terrible is that I will have to wait months, if not a whole year to have his cooking again. That’s terrible.