"A Monster Of All Time" by J. T. Hunter

GUEST POST and GIVEAWAY

A Monster Of All Time:
The True Story of Danny Rolling, The Gainesville Ripper

by J. T. Hunter

A Monster Of All Time by J. T. Hunter is currently on tour with Partners in Crime Virtual Book Tours. The tour stops here today for a guest post by the author, an excerpt, and a giveaway. Please be sure to visit the other tour stops as well.

Description

Ambitious, attractive, and full of potential, five young college students prepared for the new semester. They dreamed of beginning careers and starting families. They had a lifetime of experiences in front of them. But death came without warning in the dark of the night.

Brutally ending five promising lives, leaving behind three gruesome crime scenes, the Gainesville Ripper terrorized the University of Florida, casting an ominous shadow across a frightened college town.

What evil lurked inside him? What demons drove him to kill? What made him “A Monster of All Time”?

Excerpt

Prologue

January 1987
Parchman, Mississippi

The prisoner raged in his lonely cell.

“When they let me out of here,” the prisoner swore to himself, “I’ll make them all pay.”

Years of condemnation and contempt had taken its toll, breaking him down, eroding his spirit, destroying all sense of hope. Now only the anger remained.

***

Cast into the bowels of Parchman Prison, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, the prisoner had suffered daily torments during his confinement, each day falling deeper and deeper into despair. Raw sewage regularly seeped into his cell through the floor and flowed from a broken drain down the hall, flooding the cramped 8 x 10 feet concrete space with a revolting grey-brown liquid and an unrelenting stench.

Kept in this torturous isolation, his besieged brain had betrayed him, replaying the grievous moments of his life, all of the humiliations and feelings of helplessness, every piercing word, and every raw, painful memory. It was a constant reminder that the world had always been a hurtful place of violence, animosity, and aversion, never one of empathy or understanding.

Desperate to escape the unrelenting torment, he retreated ever deeper into the labyrinth of his own mind, creeping ever closer to madness. It was in that maze of insanity that he found himself. Or rather, something found him.

In the bleak, all-encompassing darkness, something whispered his name.

Faceless and formless, the voice seemed to emanate both from the impenetrable blackness surrounding him and from the shadowy depths of his own consciousness. The voice soothed and seduced him, its language both alien and familiar. It promised the strength to survive whatever nightmares awaited the remainder of his confinement. It offered the tools of revenge for his present condition, for all of the wrongs committed against him in the past, and for the scorn and mistreatment yet to come. Most of all, it promised the power to make others feel the suffering he had so long endured.

Then a name imprinted itself into his brain, uttered from an unseen shape in the darkness, or muttered from the murky depths of memory.

“Gemini,” an eerie voice proclaimed. “I am Gemini.”

At that moment, an infernal compact was crafted, a devil’s contract offering redemption for the damned, a demonic covenant accepted regardless of the terms. Caring nothing for the consequences, the prisoner embraced the assurance of vengeance, pledging revenge for the countless injuries inflicted upon him. Just as a cold, uncaring world had robbed him of his humanity and stolen years of his life, he would take the lives of others in an equal and equitable proportion. A new sense of purpose washed over him, bringing with it a rebirth, a recognition of what he needed to do.

And now he waited, marking the days with hidden malice, the bitter darkness of his cell matched only by the malevolence of his twisted, tainted soul.

[Want more? Click below to read a longer excerpt.]

Praise for the Book

“A vivid and compelling account of the Gainesville Ripper, who terrorized Florida over four days in August 1990, and what happened after his arrest. JT Hunter brings his lawerly eye to a bizarre case that has largely been forgotten, following investigators as they chase the state's biggest monster since Ted Bundy.” ~ Maureen Callahan, writer at New York Post

“Well-researched and deftly told with chilling detail. Should be on every true crime fan bookshelf.” ~ Steve Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Monster and Bogeyman

“An impressive and riveting account of one of the most prolific serial killers.” ~ The Boston Globe

“Compelling and well-written.” ~ True Crime Book Reviews

“With A Monster of All Time, JT Hunter has crafted a deep and sobering analysis of the heinous crimes carried out by the Gainesville Ripper. Citing firsthand sources, Hunter examines each crime scene in chilling detail, the sharp investigators who cracked the case, and the gripping courtroom drama that brought justice to the victims of one of America's most notorious serial killers.” ~ Gary McAvoy, author of And Every Word Is True: What the Nye Files and Hickock Letters reveal about Kansas, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and the Clutter family murders

Guest Post by the Author

The Strangest Cases

Truth really can be stranger than fiction, especially in the realm of true crime. Most everyone knows about the shocking cases of Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, and the BTK Killer. But there’s no shortage of lesser-known cases that are equally bizarre. During my time as a true crime writer, I’ve come across a lot of strange cases. Here are just a few.

The Vampire Next Door

My first true crime book, The Vampire Next Door: The True Story of the Vampire Rapist, chronicles the story of John Crutchley, dubbed the “Vampire Rapist” by the media due to his propensity for drinking the blood of his victims. He would abduct women and keep them tied up in his house where, over the course of a few days, he repeatedly raped them and drained their blood through surgical tubes. When he had his fill, he killed them by strangulation. Yet, in public he wore the mask of a hard-working family man with a wife and young son. Stranger still, he had a white-collar job with top secret security clearance at the Pentagon while working as a computer programmer on weapons communications systems for the U.S. Navy! 

A New Breed of Serial Killer

Israel Keyes, the new breed of serial killer whose story is detailed in my book, Devil in the Darkness, similarly hid his dark side behind the mask of a doting father and hard-working business owner. Indeed, after he was finally caught, Keyes gloated to investigators about how he had been able to fool everyone he knew for over a decade. Keyes used the entire country as his hunting grounds, burying “kill-kits” containing the tools to commit his crimes in multiple states, often years before returning to dig them up and use them. Investigators caught up to him only by a strange twist of fate: when he went to the car rental company to exchange the car he had been using, the only cars available were the same make, model, AND color as the one he had. A Texas Highway Patrolman spotted the car shortly thereafter and arrested Keyes. The identical car that Keyes was driving before had been recorded by a security camera and the FBI, Texas Rangers, and Texas Highway Patrol were all looking for it. But for the fortuitous lack of inventory at the rental car facility, Keyes might very well still be out there killing today!

Finding Love on Death Row

The love story explored in Death Row Romeo is another strange case. While on death row for the murders of several women, serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin met Rosalie Martinez, the wife of a prominent Tampa lawyer. Rosalie had four daughters at the time. She enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, living in an upscale suburb, driving an expensive car, and hosting parties at her home for the political elite, including the Governor of Florida. She wore designer clothes and expensive jewelry and her daughters all attended an exclusive, private school. But she gave all of that up after she met Bolin while working as a sentencing specialist on his case. She subsequently married “Bolin the Butcher” in her apartment as a camera crew from the news show 20/20 recorded the event. Bolin attended the ceremony by telephone from his death row cell. She became a widow in 2016 after the State of Florida executed Bolin by lethal injection.

Connecting a Very Cold Case to a Famous True Crime Case

As the back jacket of my book, In Colder Blood (FREE), begins: “Two families, mysteriously murdered under similar circumstances, just a month apart. One was memorialized in Truman Capote’s classic novel, In Cold Blood. The other was all but forgotten.”

The first crime is the well-known quadruple murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, on November 15, 1959. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith confessed to those murders after a jail-house informant linked them to the crime.

The second crime is also a quadruple murder, but one that few know about. On December 19, 1959, the Walker family - a father, mother, son, and daughter - were killed in their own home in Osprey, Florida. The method of killing and the isolated location of the home was remarkably similar to that of the Clutter family murder.

The Walker family murder remained unsolved for over half a century, passing from detective to detective over the decades. In 2007, a new detective took over the long-cold case. Armed with a fresh perspective, Detective Kimberly McGath pored over the case files until she became convinced that Hickock and Smith murdered the Walker family in similar fashion as they killed the Clutters. Multiple witnesses saw two men matching Hickock and Smith’s descriptions in the area at various times prior to and after the Walkers were killed, and Detective McGath developed a plausible theory as to how the Walkers could have encountered the two fugitives. Based on McGath’s detective work, Hickock and Smith’s bodies were exhumed in December 2012 to extract DNA samples to test against DNA recovered at the Walker crime scene. Due to the age and condition of the exhumed bodies, the test results were inconclusive.

---

Every true crime case is strange in its own way. Just when I think I’ve seen it all, I come across a new case and discover that I haven’t. That’s what keeps all of us true crime aficionados coming back for more.

About the Author

J. T. Hunter is an attorney with over fourteen years of experience practicing law, including criminal law and appeals, and he has significant training in criminal investigation techniques. He is also a college professor whose teaching interests focus on the intersection of criminal psychology, law, and literature.

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"Smuggler" by Nicholas Fillmore

INTERVIEW and GIVEAWAY

Smuggler

by Nicholas Fillmore

Author Nicholas Fillmore stops by today for an interview and to share an excerpt from Smuggler. You can also read my review and enter our exclusive giveaway for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift card.

Description

When twenty-something post-grad Nick Fillmore discovers the zine he’s been recruited to edit is a front for drug profits, he begins a dangerous flirtation with an international heroin smuggling conspiracy and in a matter of months finds himself on a fast ride he doesn’t know how to get off of.

After a bag goes missing in an airport transit lounge he is summoned to West Africa to take a voodoo oath with Nigerian mafia. Bound to drug boss Alhaji, he returns to Europe to put the job right, but in Chicago O’Hare Customs gents “blitz” the plane and a courier is arrested.

Thus begins a harried yearlong effort to elude the Feds, prison and a looming existential dead end. Smuggler relates the real events behind Orange is the New Black.

Book Video

The author reads an excerpt from Smuggler.

Excerpt

The New Black

Claire called at some point. She’d taken off on another trip without telling me. She needed me to pick up some money in Chicago and bring it to Brussels. As usual the feeling I might be missing out on the action compelled me to drop everything and go to Europe again.

Claire was still pissed that I’d “left her in Bali.” I thought she was losing it. She’d wasted considerable money dragging a lot of people on vacation. Now she had gotten too many personalities involved—new girls she wanted to sleep with. The last thing I was interested in was people’s personalities in the middle of a smuggling trip. And I was irked to learn that she’d sent Brad and Ted, my people, down to Jakarta without telling me. Alhaji had said we should wait, so what were we doing in Brussels all over again?

Claire had this new girl with her, Temper, a 23-year-old Smith grad and general pill who worked as a waitress at a local pub. She’d tagged along on the last trip with Claire; the whole $20,000 Bali diversion, I suspected, was to impress her.

Temper could have been a smuggler: by day blonde ponytail, pearls, little cocktail dress from Bergdorf’s—except at night something Irish came out: a streak of orange hair, a sharpness of tongue. She called me a pussy once.

Now she hung around the hotel room while Claire and I talked business, the two of them edging onto the bed every few hours to commence their lovemaking.

Cries, moans, little shrieks escaped their throats as they tussled to see who was on top. Claire finally went down on Temper, who whimpered like a Japanese porn actress before she came. Claire sat up with a triumphal look; Temper whipped her hair around, a look of hot shame on her face.

Afterwards, Claire gazed out the hotel window as Temper jogged across the sooty, cobbled square in spandex and splashy cross-trainers, ponytail swinging jauntily. Claire ground out her cigarette.

“Her and that goddamn ponytail,” she muttered.

I had no idea women this way could be so adversarial.

All this was just a distraction. The halcyon days of money and hotels and the belief that we’d found an “out” from the drudgery of low wages, meaningless toil and rules were collapsing under their own weight(lessness) and some vaguely felt second act in which we might be called upon, if only by our own brains, to speak for ourselves, not legally or ethically, but existentially—as we all must—was being wheeled into place. You could smuggle drugs or whatever, but refuse the hand of fate….

We were still in Brussels, waiting on Alhaji’s call. Everyone was drinking in a discotheque across the square. Claire and Temper and Zane and some new boy who kept holding out the sleeve of a sweater for me to touch were sitting on barstools at a high table filled with drinks.

I couldn’t seem to get properly drunk, couldn’t find that sweet spot and was on my fifth drink now; and the faces around me were grinning … as if to assert their reality … against my own. Against my own! I lurched forward, rocking the table. A goblet of wine stood on edge; everyone’s attention fastened on the glass like a roulette ball or a spinning bottle. Then the table rocked back the other way and the glass stood on its other edge. The table rocked a third time and the glass flipped over and the wine shot straight onto this boy’s sweater, blood staining a field of heathers. “Oh!” he cried, like he’d been struck. “Oh!” the others cried. I sat there nodding, a grin slowly taking shape on my face.

Later that afternoon I walked, drunk, through the Musee d’Arte Moderne in Brussels, down a winding white hallway to some inner recess. In a corner, behind glass, a little ventriloquist’s dummy in baggy pants and jacket sat before a brass bell. For minutes on end he just sat there with his feet sticking out in front of him, like he’d been knocked down in the street. Then something seemed to stir inside him and the doll’s torso jerked forward an inch and its metal head—bang! struck the bell producing an unexpectedly bright peal like the bell of a steamship. A little placard read, “Attempt to Raise Hell.” Dennis Oppenheim. American.

A small group waited in anticipation for it to happen again. Just as a couple turned to walk away, bang! the bell clanged again. I stayed for another half hour listening to the intermittent clanging; the little brute kept at it, as if he had a mind of his own—as if, in spite of whatever wind-up mechanism controlled him, he was determined to carry out this errand he alone knew the meaning of.

When I arrived back at the hotel, Claire was arguing with some guy in the hallway whom she’d picked up at the disco then had second thoughts about. He stood there, aggrieved, long hair and ripped jeans, trying to push his way back into the room. I was in the process of telling him to fuck off when he spit right in my face. I stood there blinking as he ran down the three flights of stairs to the street. Then I ran after him and caught him fumbling with his keys in front of the hotel.

He turned to face me.

“Get the fuck out of here,” I screamed.

He looked back at me stupidly, long hair hanging in his face.

“You better get the fuck out of here,” I said in a tremulous voice. For a second it looked like he was going to spit again, and in an access of rage I grabbed him and threw him bodily down onto the sidewalk. He grabbed his hip in pain and scampered into his car, revved the engine insanely, and peeled out on the cobblestones.

Back in the hotel room, Temper was sitting on Claire, pinning her wrists. From behind you could see their pubic mounds touching. I poured myself a Grand Marnier and sat on the couch. Temper pretended to clear her throat and let hang a loogie over Claire’s face.

***

Heroin was coming; I didn’t know when. For some reason Claire was being cagey. She didn’t know, either. So I went on auto-pilot, certain that this thing didn’t work without the two of us pulling together—as much as she wanted to believe or I wanted to believe or anyone else wanted to believe otherwise.

Claire and I worked well together, not that we necessarily complimented one another. Our relationship was based more on a mutual recklessness. We drove one other, achieving a kind of collective force. (When I told her I wanted to get out on the last trip, she went along out of habit, until Alhaji reeled us back in to do the transit job and Claire came to her senses and started jamming through couriers again, redoubling her efforts in Indonesia and refusing to come home. I’d faltered. I’d said No.)

Claire had no intention of quitting. Whether she was unswayed by reason, like me, or had in fact envisioned some end zone in which she might simply drop the ball and walk away after running up the score, I don’t know. Most likely she was just caught up in a moment that was impossible to sustain, or let go of.

We never did quite know what to do with the money. How to hide it. So we each invested in a project that was dear to us. I dumped money into Squid magazine. Claire restored a carriage house on some friends’ property outside Brattleboro, Vermont—and I suppose I was jealous in a way: while Claire was building equity, I was speculating.

On top of that, Claire was always calling in a panic: The contractor needed more money or he was going to walk off the job. The roof was half-finished and it was going to rain. She needed cherry cabinets or marble counter tops or dry river stones for the fireplace—they had to be dry for twenty years. So I “lent” her the money without complaint. Invariably, in a matter of weeks or months we’d be abroad again, lining up another payday.

You always needed more money. That was the way the world worked, the criminal world as well as the straight world. It was this belated realization that we were involved not in some kind of counter-culture, but another business that organized human endeavor in the service of capital, that rankled.

The trip turned into a long waiting game. This was the worst part of the job. You could run out of money after a week or two waiting for some bags that might never show, all the while trying to keep nervous, suspicious people happy. In the midst of this, Claire and I started to bicker. She mentioned the old term “god’s work.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We’re smuggling heroin!” I shouted at her.

“That’s not what this is about!” she yelled right back, without missing a beat.

“Oh, right, this is humanitarian work we’re doing, I forgot.”  

“You shut up,” she said through clenched teeth.

After that we retreated to separate corners. Claire and Temper whispered conspiratorially. I buried my head in a book.

Finally Alhaji called and said that the only way he could get us bags was in transit. So, on the appointed day, Temper, Claire and I along with a couple other couriers went to the airport in Brussels. We were at a far end of the transit lounge standing against a wall.

A familiar-looking African in a Fila baseball cap came over with another guy, put the bags down and lit a cigarette.

“Hey, how are you guys doing?” he said, smiling.

“Good, good, man,” I said, trying to strike the casual note. “How was the trip?”

“No problem. Alhaji says to call from the other side.”

The people we met in transit were usually pretty competent; Africans who took the bags as far as was safe, usually Western Europe, Brussels in particular. These were Alhaji’s people. They inspired calm, unlike when the bags got farmed out in Jakarta to sweating persons who looked like they’d been on a plane for about 23 hours.

As the two Africans walked away, we looked down at the suitcases. Two bags. Three couriers.

Temper stepped forward. Claire shook her head, No, gesturing for the other two to grab the bags—not so much out of a desire to protect Temper, it seemed to me, as to keep her in her place, and Temper responded with all the choler of the little sister who’s been told she can’t hang out with the big kids.

She hissed. She stamped her foot.

Claire assumed an attitude of wounded dignity.

They argued back and forth in plaintive tones, fists clenched at their sides.

“Tell her to shut up,” I finally said to Claire, the two of them looking up, blushing. And I decided right then and there that I’d had it with the whole fiasco.

Safely stowed aboard the plane, we made our way back to Chicago without further incident, came through customs, took a cab into town, checked into a hotel and made the exchange.

Everyone was dancing at Octagon: Ted shaking dice and showing his ass, Brad in high heels arranging invisible gothic tresses, and Temper stomping in puddles. I couldn’t seem to make my feet move. Claire wasn’t talking.

I went out on the street and looked at the single-story brick buildings. Low clouds scudded off the lake, and the light shifted, turning everything sepia.

If you’d asked just then what I thought I was doing standing out on the street drunk like that in the middle of the afternoon, I would’ve said without irony or self-deception that it wasn’t me.

—You got the wrong guy, pal.

[Want more? Click below to read a longer excerpt.]

Praise for the Book

“Smuggler tells the real story behind Orange is the New Black. The story is a good one and is well written along with being a good moral lesson. It would work for both memoir readers and true crime readers.” ~ Valerity (Val)

“Filmore weaves a hypnotic tale of drugs, crime, prison, and existential angst against a backdrop of poetic Cape Cod nostalgia and international intrigue. An instant classic.” ~ Z. Goode

“Interesting read with a moral undertone. The book starts glamourous and slow and then accelerates into a dark world where actions have consequences. Nigerian gangsters, black magic, international travels, heroin smuggling, moral justifications and a descent into the inevitable. Excellent writing, believable characters, somehow short on action and long on minor details, but all in all an interesting read narrated by a very competent writer.” ~ Santiago D.

“Nicholas needs money badly since the rent is due, but he struggles with his conscience. It’s international drug smuggling after all. Plus there’s a lot of risk involved, depending on the country it could be as high as death. It’s quite a dilemma, the money is insanely good. The situation soon gets hairy and turns out to really be about smuggling heroin.” ~ Alycia C.

My Review

By Lynda Dickson

Nicholas falls into the heroin smuggling business almost by accident, as it seems like a good way to make easy money quickly. So it begins, but things eventually start to fall apart. Good times are followed by increasing paranoia, friendships turn to rivalries, and romance is ruined by lies. Feeling that things are coming unstuck, Nicholas becomes more and more reckless, until his inevitable arrest. The second half of the book covers the time he spends behind bars, the array of interesting characters he meets in various government facilities, and his eventual release.

This isn’t your usual run-of-the-mill true crime story but a work with true literary style. The author is obviously well-educated and has a tremendous vocabulary, although there are a few minor editing errors. The current-day story is interspersed with reminiscences of his “criminal” activities as a child, which serve to humanize him, as does his relationship with his girlfriend L (to whom the book is dedicated). Even though we know that Nicholas will eventually get caught, the story is still suspenseful because we don’t know when it will happen or under what circumstances.

I would have liked more of an idea of the passage of time, as the period over which Nicholas performs his criminal activities and the length of his imprisonment aren’t made clear. I was surprised at one point to discover he spent four years in prison before he was even sentenced. While the story is very well-written, it feels a bit light-hearted given the subject matter. I would have preferred some more introspection from the author on the impact of his actions on those around him and, perhaps, some indication that he regrets his actions, further to his feeling of the loss of six years of his life. I get the impression he’s holding back, which may be a coping mechanism and, therefore, understandable.

An engrossing cautionary tale for our times.

Warnings: coarse language, criminal activity, drug use, excessive alcohol consumption, LGBT themes, sexual references.

Some of My Favorite Lines

“… she composed herself not in sentences or in paragraphs but in chapters …”

“… I understood that we’re always attempting to pass ourselves off in one way or another (with the exception of the impossibly stupid and well-born, who go through life with apparent ease).”

“I awoke halfway through the front door, flat on my back, feet resting on the threshold, of a cold, Catholic Sunday morning in Massachusetts, December light the color of bricks bruising my face.”

“… we muddled through with a good deal of ambivalence between us, and things unsaid, like unexploded mines overgrown with weeds.”

“The tragedy of our lives is not its flaws, but the longing for some perfection held briefly in our hands.”

“I sat there now before the bottles and mirrors swallowing a regret lodged in my throat.”

“Words, words, words. I went through books at a prodigious rate. Four, five a week. The words just went right through without any particular sensibility to oppose them.”

“… you hoped to find a Signet Classic or two on the woeful little carts they rolled through the unit, in order to lose yourself on some heath in wind and rain at midnight—to lay your mind against a shape, a curve of thought or sensibility, and to be ennobled, yes.”

Interview With the Author

Nicholas Fillmore joins me today to discuss his new book, Smuggler.

For what age group do you recommend your book?

Adult.

What sparked the idea for this book?

Six years in prison.

Which comes first? The character's story or the idea for the book?

A series of unfortunate, real-life events lead me to the idea for the story. (Or vice versa.)

What was the hardest part to write in this book?

Deciding how to frame an unsympathetic protagonist (myself). He's not simply an anti-hero; merely a frustrated idealist … who suspects himself of having reasons. Phillip Lopate's introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay provided some ideas for working this out, especially his observation that the “plot” of the personal essay consists in watching how far the narrator can descend past psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty. Camus's The Fall and Orwell's narrative essays, like “Shooting an Elephant”, helped me find a rhetorical ground to tell those reasons, you know, to locate myself in the wrong - as did some schoolboy faith in the sacred import of books … and the belief that a successful artistic gesture might absolve one of all sins in the end.

How do you hope this book affects its readers?

I hope it challenges people to look at their own stuff. The corollary to Lopate's idea about the confessional element in personal essay is that the reader is finally able to recognize a fault in himself, initially located safely elsewhere ...

How long did it take you to write this book?

I've been working on it, on and off, since 1990-something. It started as screenplay, but there was too much inner territory to convey. So I decided on narrative non-fiction. Still, I tried to limit the narrator out of distrust of the narrator, letting him back in in queer ways: the objective correlative of the scene in the museum in Brussels (see video above), projecting myself onto the ventriloquist dummy. Of course there’s a risk of coming off unrepentant. Of failing to be apologetic. But you can’t live like that. That’s the human condition. Hence the Camus quotation at the beginning of the book: “We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.”

What is your writing routine?

Burning the midnight oil, man.

As for process, which is more interesting, I’m a very recursive writer; I read stuff over and over to get at an idea or rhythm. Reading oneself is really important, in order to connect all the unconscious motifs lurking in the text.

How did you get your book published?

After a few brushes with publishers big and small, I did it myself. (I'm actually second or third to market with this book, and Orange is the New Black seems to be taking up all the air in the room.) I'm an old hand at desk-top publishing, so the learning curve wasn't too steep(besides mobi files and weird halftone screens on my pdfs, but that’s another story).

What advice do you have for someone who would like to become a published writer?

Find a job that doesn't tax you physically, emotionally, and intellectually so that you have something left to give after you've finished the dishes and sat down at your desk.

What do you like to do when you're not writing?

Walk around, read, drink coffee.

What does your family think of your writing?

I think that they respect my passion for it.

Please tell us a bit about your childhood.

I grew up in the suburbs in the 70s playing backyard sports, riding bikes, listening to the radio, and dreaming of the great world beyond ...

Did you like to read when you were a child?

Yes. I had a near-complete set of Hardy Boys and used to look up at the gold-engraved spines of the great books on my father's shelf with reverence, though I was by no means precocious and didn't get around to reading those things until much later.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

In college really. My roommate was an English major and I took some classes, though I started out a Poli Sci.-Econ major. At some point a Professor, who was a S. Korean political dissident, impressed upon me that meaningful social change comes from cultural change. Coca Cola and Levi’s had as much to do with the fall of the Berlin Wall as Reagan. And I began to see in literature something more than just words ... though, of course, radical writing has more to do with radical poetics than radical politics; that's a writer's primary obligation: to remake the world through the imagination. And I guess writing turns out to be central to me somehow.

Did your childhood experiences influence your writing?

I was a dreamy kid, given to long, inward afternoons ... even if I was playing street hockey at the time.

Which writers have influenced you the most?

Conrad, Babel, Dostoyevsky leap to mind. Shakespeare. Much of 20th century American poetry. Stevens and Frost, I guess, are the Beatles and Stones of my literary canon. I also studied with Charlie Simic, whose early object poems really blew me away.

Do you hear from your readers much?

Not yet!

What can we look forward to from you in the future?

I'm working on a family romance of sorts called Sins of our Fathers, which attempts to imagine inner events of family characters over several generations. Personal historical fiction.

Thank you for taking the time to stop by today, Nicholas. I look forward to reading your next book!

Thank you, Lynda!

About the Author

Nicholas Fillmore attended the graduate writing program at University of New Hampshire, was a finalist for the Juniper Prize in poetry and co-founded and published SQUiD magazine in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Fillmore is currently at work on Sins of Our Fathers, a family romance. He is a reporter for Courthouse News Service, lecturer in English at Hawaii Pacific University and publisher of iambic Books.

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Enter our exclusive giveaway for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift card.

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