On WritingOctober 14, 20266 min read
Why I Write Villains I Actually Like
Every villain I've written has at least one quality I genuinely admire. That's not an accident. It's the only way I know how to make them real.
Read →Randy Smith
The Dispatch
Observations, opinions, and the occasional confession.
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Behind the BookSeptember 29, 20268 min read
The Office as Crime Scene
Performance Review started as a joke. Then I spent a week in a real corporate offsite and realized I wasn't writing satire — I was writing documentary.
Read →On Writing
Why I Write Villains I Actually Like
Every villain I've written has at least one quality I genuinely admire. That's not an accident. It's the only way I know how to make them real.
6 min readRead →
Behind the Book
The Office as Crime Scene
Performance Review started as a joke. Then I spent a week in a real corporate offsite and realized I wasn't writing satire — I was writing documentary.
8 min readRead →
On Writing
On Silence in Fiction
The most important line in The Quiet Before isn't spoken by anyone. It's the pause before the sheriff answers a question she already knows the answer to.
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Behind the Book
Small Towns and Long Memories
I grew up in a town that remembered everything and forgave nothing. That's not a complaint. It's a research methodology.
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Observations
The Problem With Likeable Protagonists
Readers say they want someone to root for. What they actually want is someone interesting enough to watch make mistakes.
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I spent three years convinced that plotting in advance killed spontaneity. Then I wrote myself into a corner so deep it took two months to find the exit.
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Other Bad Ideas
Notes on Corporate Absurdism
There is a specific kind of meeting that exists solely to schedule another meeting. I have attended hundreds of them. They are the purest form of modern horror.
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Behind the Book
Lake Harrow and the Real Lake
Below the Surface is set on a fictional lake in a fictional county. The lake is real. I changed the name to protect the guilty.
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