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New Day Dawning
I waited a month to write this post.
A month after I finally retired from DEA, ending a nearly thirty-year career as a federal agent.
I can still remember my first day on the job like it’s yesterday, scared shitless, carrying a badge and gun for the first time, in Los Angeles.
I loved every new minute of it then, and every minute after.
DEA has a mandatory retirement age, something I was already staring down the barrel of, so whether I left last month or next March, I was facing the end. I’ve been blessed to have a career I loved so much; it exceeded every dream, every expectation. But as I told my three daughters, loving a career so much can be a curse too. Every decision, every choice, I’ve made for the last thirty years have revolved around my career, around that badge and gun.
It’s been a tough life at times for all of us.
Often ex-cops and agents struggle with their identity, their worth, their purpose after they retire. Maybe I will too, but fortunately, I’ve been preparing for this moment for a while…I can finally pursue full-time my other great love — writing.
After six published novels and my screenwriter and consulting producer credits on Paramount’s LAWMEN: BASS REEVES, I get to wake up every day and focus only on creative work. It’s a weird and wonderful feeling, although now that I have the sort of infinite writing time that I always dreamed about, I find myself a little uncertain how to wrangle it. I want all these new unfettered days to be productive (obviously, I want to write a lot), but I also don’t want to burn myself out, something I never had to worry about before, since I could never grab enough hours as it was.
It’s truly a nice problem to have.
But the short term my plan is to keep churning out novels and short stories, as well as screenplays. I’m also going to continue to pursue some TV and film work. I’m no longer a federal agent who also writes, I’m only a writer now, who was once a federal agent.
And my first event as a “full-time author” is ThrillerFest in New York later this summer. My last novel, Call the Dark, made the cut for an ITW award, and I couldn’t be happier. I’ll be the guy at the bar both BEFORE and AFTER the awards ceremony, drinking beer and bourbon, and looking for some career advice…
…for the first time in thirty years…
Lawmen: Bass Reeves
Due to the WGA strike these last few months, I wasn’t able to talk much about this project, but I was thrilled to be involved as both a writer and consulting producer on the upcoming LAWMEN: BASS REEVES show that will be out November 5th. While I contributed to the overall story and worked on all the episodes, you’ll want to pay particular attention to Episode 4, since it’s my first “solo” screenwriting credit. I worked with an amazingly talented and generous group of writers, and learned a tremendous amount (screenwriting is much different than novel writing). This sort of work will never replace my love of novels, but I enjoyed it quite a bit, and look forward to having another chance to work on something like this again! Last week I went to LA for the premiere of the first two episodes, and it was unbelievable to see my work come to life on the big screen.
Call The Dark
Tuesday, September 19th will see the release of my sixth book, CALL THE DARK, seven years after my debut – THE FAR EMPTY.
Honestly, the two books couldn’t be more different. Hell, I couldn’t be more different, both as an author and maybe as a person.
Most of my novels have been driven by characters I’d fallen in love with or themes that I’d always wanted to explore. THE FAR EMPTY and the two other books in the Big Bend/Chris Cherry trilogy (HIGH WHITE SUN and THIS SIDE OF NIGHT) examined the “weight of the badge;” the burden and the responsibility that comes with carrying them, and whether you can continue to be a “good” person in a bad world. Chris Cherry and America Reynosa were already strongly fixed characters in my mind when I wrote those books, before I even wrote the first word, and they lived and breathed in that series, animating much of what others would call “plot.”
LOST RIVER was about the opioid epidemic and rural America. It was about my home state, about homecomings, and things I’d seen and experienced as a federal agent while working here. It was personal in a way that even the Big Bend books weren’t, and I had Trey Dorado’s voice in my head for weeks, and the character of Van Dorn reflected a type of agent and personality I’d encountered in my long career.
THE FLOCK, which was less a crime novel and more a topical thriller – more topical than I first imagined since I wrote during the pandemic – was a thematic exercise for me. I’d always planned to write a novel about a cult, very much wanting to raise questions about faith and belief, and the limits of both. I’d been fascinated by how someone’s truth is often mutable, and the way the media can and sometimes defines our truth. The aging Elise Blue, a character I loved writing, reflected a lot of my concerns about both aging and parenting.
CALL THE DARK is very different from those previous books. I wrote it after tossing away 100 pages of another book I was writing (okay, writers never quite “toss pages away,” we just save ‘em and hope we can make them better). CALL THE DARK didn’t start with a theme I’d long wanted to explore or even a character I’d been thinking about or a character’s voice in my head, it started with an image—a striking image of a small plane crashing on a remote mountainside during a late night snow storm; a fiery wreck observed by a lone woman, who’s burying…something…in the frozen ground.
Who that woman is, why she’s out that mountainside in the middle of the night, and what she’s burying, were things I only discovered while writing. This book has more of a cinematic, high-concept feel maybe than anything I’ve done (maybe that was because while I was writing it, I was also writing on the upcoming LAWMAN: BASS REEVES cable series). While it deals with some of the themes I always return to again and again (family, choices, guilt) it’s not a message book. I do hope it’s entertaining and thrilling, though. It’s a very different book for me, but again, I’m a different person too, a different writer. The longer I walk this path, the more novels I get under my belt, I’ve come to learn that each book is a process in and of itself; each new novel is a new exploration, a new journey. Each one is surprising in its own way, even if you don’t end up where you thought you would.
It took me several months to get that young woman off that mountain. Hopefully it won’t take you that long to pick it up and find out how I did it.
JTS