JB Roth

Taps may be one of the most recognizable pieces of music ever written. Its solemn, mournful, yet dignified melody moves one’s heart, echoing across the tombstones of the fallen. It did so again this week across the county as we celebrated Memorial Day. It is all of twenty-four notes long.

Brevity has a way of making itself heard across the arts. Green Eggs and Ham used only fifty different words. Dr. Seuss wrote it on a bet, and with all its repetition, the whole book barely reaches 800 words.

Writers are not normal people. We don’t count pages; we count words. And while I don’t compete with Dr. Seuss, my own work tends to run short. I don’t want you feeling out of breath before you crack the cover. They land in the low 80,000s—just under the genre average of about 90,000. Then there are books like Don Winslow’s The Cartel, which I read earlier this year—nearly 200,000 words. It is quick and punchy in style and a great read, sure, but boy, it was still a long haul.

What do you prefer to read? Do you favor a story that’s quick on its feet, or the heft of a solid doorstopper?

The Pulitzer winners came out earlier this month. Good for them. It’s a fine prize, one of the best. Still, I won’t be lining up to buy the books. Pulitzer fiction usually leans toward the highbrow, and that’s not where my tastes lie. This year’s winner, the jury said, is a “tour‑de‑force … told in a single sentence.” A whole novel wrapped up in one sentence. Impressive, sure. But I don’t feel like reading it. Sorry.

I’ve tried award‑winners that fit closer to my tastes. I’ll confess something here—something I may regret. I’ve often come away disappointed. That’s no knock on the juries. I even have a theory about it. (I tend to have theories.) They read so many entries that the one which stands out—the odd, the never‑seen‑before—rises to the top of their list. And yet, the most original story is not automatically the best, the most entertaining, or even the most interesting. It can be, but not necessarily. Yet it will surely be the book jurors remember, the one that sticks in their mind after wading through a mountain of others. And that, I believe, is how it wins.

A writer’s small pleasure. A new journal. A new chapter. A world open to infinite possibilities.

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? You’ll forgive the silence, I hope.

Writing a book is not so much a steady march as it is a series of rises and falls. There are moments of bright clarity followed by stretches of doubt. There are days when the work seems to carry you along, and quieter, nearly still days when the words never seem to move, like an airliner waiting out a storm on the tarmac. The pen, for all its promises of new places to discover, refuses to take flight.

If you haven’t heard from me in a bit, it’s likely I’ve been in one of those stretches—navigating the necessary stillness that attends any honest effort to create.

But fear not. I am doing well. See, those moments are not interruptions to the process. They are the process. It is true in every profession. Whether one labors at a desk, a bench, or a field, the rhythm is much the same: energy and lull, confidence and questions, motion and pause.

And with a little luck, the effort of pushing through will be rewarded. A finer book will emerge on the other side—a bit more considered, a shade more true, so that when it makes it into your hands, it will be more enjoyable for it.

Hard to believe we introduced Coop to you two years ago! Have you finished his latest adventure in Fractured? If not what are you waiting for?

Writers live their life in multiple timelines—an occasionally untidy arrangement. As I press into your hands the just-published Fractured (do enjoy it—it is available wherever books are sold), I am sending Coop’s third adventure, Dark Alleys, into the publishing world, and I have made some headway into volume four of the series.

In fact, I have reached a familiar if rather ghastly place in that fourth story. I am between a quarter to a third of the way through, going by the usual length of my books, and confidence has now quietly excused herself, allowing the jitters to barge in.

See, this is the time when I squint at the horizon and wonder, “Is there a whole book in there? Or did I spend so many hours starting a story to nowhere?” I spend much time pacing, taking long walks, sitting with a thousand-mile stare—as much time, really, as I do with pen or keyboard in hand. It is part of the creative process.

I know deep within me that the story will take shape. The previous three books did, and they went through the same melodramatic fit of existential doubts. What is happening now is akin to painting partial images on puzzle pieces that will eventually form a whole—though even I don’t know what the whole will represent. Future scenes play out in my head. Snippets of dialogues drift through my mind like overheard conversations in a club where I don’t quite belong. While I still first-draft by the seat of my pants, without an outline, those images and sounds turn into flickering beacons in the night pointing in a general direction.

And one day, there’ll be a road there after all for us to travel together, all 280 pages or so of it.

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams … will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes.” I didn’t write that. Neil Gaiman did. I wish I had. The lines are both elegant and provocative. And they truly capture the power of good fiction.

I’ve often said that one of the reasons I enjoy writing fiction so much more than the legal briefs I used to pen is that, when writing to judges, I had to tell the truth. Now, I get to make stuff up. That freedom does not make the task easy. I’ve also quipped that fiction is harder to write because it has to be believable, while truth is often stranger than anything our imagination can devise.

Even so, I love both writing and reading fiction because of the amazing power it holds. The events in a story may never have happened, but imagined moments can carry the deepest emotions and the most compelling ideas. A good book takes readers not only to distant lands and maybe different times, past or future, but also to unexplored corners of their own minds.

And fiction does not have to be of a literary bend to achieve such high status. Some of the most striking insights are tucked away—a sentence here or a paragraph there—in unassuming genres for the lucky reader to discover. Then comes this beautiful moment: the reader pauses, the book slips lower onto their lap, and a quiet thought takes shape—"Hmmm, I wonder…” And it may just be something which will linger long after facts are dust and ashes.

Thank you for a wonderful time celebrating Fractured last night!

As January drew nearer to the calendar’s next page and the month’s last weekend arrived, the fair City of Tampa celebrated Gasparilla. The city was properly overrun by pirates, eye-patched and swashbuckling, fighting the coldest Gasparilla on record with a flagon of rum. Arrr, mateys and scallywags!

And don’t ye go thinkin’ this is a little local shindig. The Gasparilla parade is the third largest one in the United States, trailing only the mighty Macy’s Thanksgiving and the Rose Parade’s flowery armada, but leaving New Orleans’ Mardi Gras and Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day marooned in its wake.

The festivities owe their name to the great pirate Jose Gaspar, the Spanish officer turned traitor who made Tampa his den of villainy in the late 1700s, long after the golden age of piracy. From there, he plundered merchant ships in the Gulf and earned himself the nickname “The Last Buccaneer.” (The Bay’s football team has not forgotten that salty dog either.)

But here’s the rub. Jose Gaspar probably never existed. He never lived and breathed, let alone set foot or peg leg in Tampa and terrorized the high seas. But much like the jollier St. Nicholas or the immortal Count Dracula, a legend was born, and who among us cares if they ever truly existed? The story’s the thing!

So I propose to you, my fellow pirates, that the City of Miami should resolve to hold a Cooperilla parade. Who could be more deserving than our own private investigator to rally the masses in unapologetic revelry. You can help do him justice. Yes, you! Descend one and all, cutlass in one hand and flintlock pistol in the other, and demand your copies of Blunt Force and Fractured. Together, we shall make history—or at least a darn good legend.

Have you read how it all started?

5/5 ⭐ | Blunt Force by JB Roth Cooper Malone has been working on commercial private investigative (P.I.) cases, background checks, and paper pushing cases for too long.  He’s seen dead bodies in the Army, but does he have t…