Nuggets
Excerpt From the Book - Rage Matters | Chapter 1
It’s uncanny how the hairs on the back of a neck can be so accurate in warnings of impending danger. The closer Scott got to his house, the more he felt something was wrong. Turning onto his street, he thought the lights looked uncomfortably close to his house. As he approached his house, a police officer signaled for him to stop, validating his worse fear.
What Motivated Me to Write | Requisite Evil
The award winning Requisite Evil is the novel that unleashed my creative senses. I used to travel a lot for work. One rainy night in a hotel room I was watching a SyFy movie and couldn’t help thinking, “Man, I should take a stab at writing something like this.” I fired up MS Word and got to it. I already knew I wanted a good vs evil type thing, so I made up a couple of character names and off I went.
I wanted the opening scene to be in a creepy wooded area, and after some research, found a perfect spot in Chisholm, MN. It called for an area with an old makeshift shack where the first murder would take place. The scene needed to be shocking and leave the reader pissed off enough to want the killer caught ASAP.
After writing that scene, the pages sat untouched for over a year while I farted around trying to find the time to write. Once I did, the words kept coming and wouldn’t stop. It surprised me with the levels of emotion that emerged from the pages coming to life. I remember having an overwhelming feeling to keep going until a first draft was complete.
Requisite Evil is based on one of my unpublished works, and I didn’t publish it for years. In fact, I published three other novels before it. I think it’s a good story. It’s a thriller, it’s a love story, and comes with a paranormal twist. No matter how it’s received, good, bad, or otherwise, this work will always occupy a special place in my heart.
Scene from the book | Rage Matters, Chapter 14, Scene 10
Billy Dee Odoms is the star of this scene. He described a murder scene during a police interrogation. He told a most unbelievable story, which was told to him by a dying friend. Billy narrated a horrific situation that his friend found himself in the day after picking up a girl at a bar. He told the officers about a densely wooded area where his friend found fresh graves, body parts, and a stream just beyond the tree line the killer used to preserve fresh kills. It was there his friend discovered something so horrifying, the memory of it traumatized him for the rest of his life.
I used this scene to fill in the blanks of a cold case. Billy described details which forced a renewed investigation into a stream of horrific unsolved murders. It was a powerful scene, as told by a reluctant friend of a guy who happened upon the gruesome discovery. I wrote this scene in part to provide legitimacy to an old wives’ tale. It was a bit of a challenge to have Billy provide such gruesome details without turning off the reader. Hopefully, I accomplished that.