Today’s interview is with indie author Dixon Rice, author of The Assassins Club.
LQ: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
DR: I’ve been a storyteller all my life, which accelerated when I became a father. I told my kids bedtime stories, which they urged me to write down, and some of them eventually got published in local or regional magazines. After that, my writing habit went totally out of control.
I have been an Army intelligence analyst, insurance salesman, bookkeeper, shoe salesman, accounting firm office manager, paint & hardware salesman, and a soccer referee and referee instructor for the past 20 years. The last couple of years, I’ve been full-time caregiver for my wife, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease.
LQ: What does your writing process look like?
DR: While my kids were growing up, I usually started writing about 10 pm and kept at it until my forehead hit the Escape button. I discovered in recent years that I get my best writing done early in the morning, before the cranky Editor in the back of my head wakes up, and starts telling me what awful crap I’m writing. If I can work up a good head of steam, once my Editor wakes up, I can ignore him and keep writing despite his insistence that I’m not good enough, not smart enough, and not experienced enough.
LQ: What was your favorite book to write so far?
DR: For more than 20 years, I’ve been writing Montana is Burning, about a firebombed abortion clinic in rural Montana in the early 1970s. The main character, Paul Longo, is a troubled detective who came to Montana seeking peace and redemption, only to find himself in charge of the politically-charged abortion clinic investigation a month before elections.
I taught myself how to write a novel by writing Burning and plan to pull it off the shelf and polish it for querying, once I complete my current WIP.
LQ: Who is your favorite character to write about?
DR: I enjoy writing about characters on the fringe of society. Paul Longo in Burning is hiding from a haunting incident in his past while trying to solve a sensational crime. He is a fish out of water, a born-again Christian and big-city detective now surrounded by profane, hard-drinking cops in a county with more livestock than voters.
There are two MCs in The Assassins Club, a crime thriller also set in Montana during the 1970s. Tyler Goode is a young man who “accidentally” becomes a serial killer. Chapters alternate in the POV of Tyler and a disorganized, second serial killer. He thinks he’s Jesus, but mostly he’s just crazy.
My WIP, tentatively titled Marduk, also has two MCs, an ancient god and a 12-year-old boy.
LQ: Who are your favorite authors?
DR: I enjoy crime and mystery novelists who create quirky characters and tell unusual stories, sometimes with multiple POVs. They include:
Robert B. Parker – Spenser and Paradise series, among others
Richard Price – Inner city stories such as Clockers & Lush Life
Elmore “Dutch” Leonard – Best known from the Justified TV series
Craig Johnson – the Walt Longmire series
Walter Mosley – The Easy Rawlins series and others
For a change of pace, I like a light RomCom, especially:
Indie bestselling writer Kathy Dunnehoff, author of The Do-Over & Back To U
Caprice Crane, author of Stupid And Contagious & Forget About It
Finally, impossible-to-categorize Max Barry, author of Company, Lexicon & Syrup
LQ: Have any of them influenced your work?
DR: The above authors taught me how to write tight, exciting dialogue, by their example.
LQ: How are you doing during the current pandemic?
DR: Surprisingly well. I started a novel-writers critique group a number of years ago, and we’ve smoothly transitioned to Zoom and exchanging chapters by email. I’m also involved in Toastmasters and Rotary, which are both Zooming along.
I am caregiver from my wife, who has been valiantly fighting Parkinson’s Disease for the past eight years, and our lifestyle has become steadily more stationary as time has gone by.
LQ: What are you currently working on?
DR: In my prehistoric paranormal WIP, the god Marduk has been ignoring mankind in the Tigris-Euphrates for generations. When he steps in to save a clan from starvation, he gets involved with human beings, and “catches” emotions from them.
At the time of the story, about 7,000 BC, human males were mating and fighting by about 12 years of age, so what we consider a child in modern times was an adult back then. Shad is a loner within the small village of Ur until his father becomes Marduk’s first priest.
Shad and Marduk are both friendless until they team up, and Marduk shares some of his powers with the boy, such as mindreading. They are both tested when the jealous god of a neighboring clan sends his warriors to destroy Ur.
LQ: Anything else you would like to share?
DR: The Authors of the Flathead (here in Montana’s Flathead Valley) has been holding a writers conference for the past 39 years, and was looking forward to making a big splash with the 40th conference this fall. Hopefully, we can get it going again in 2021 or, like the Las Vegas conference and some others, find a way to go online.
Good piece about you Dixon, it’s interesting to hear the backstory of others, especially authors and to get a feel for what drives writers. We all have such different lives and abilities, yet it is so hard to understand how other people think. Cheers