📚 Up Close & Personal with 'Words Kill' David Myles Robinson @dmrobinsonwrite #upcloseandpersonal

Up Close & Personal is one of The Writer’s Life newest features. Here we feature authors who don't mind spilling the beans and telling what it's really like to write, get published and sell that book. Today's guest is David Myles Robinson, author of the suspense novel, WORDS KILL. You can visit David's website at davidmylesrobinson.com.

On Writing…

I’ve always loved writing. In college I worked as a reporter for a minority newspaper in Pasadena, CA. I also did freelance work for a number of magazines in the early 70s. But when I talked with my creative writing teacher at San Francisco State College about becoming a writer versus lawyer, he appropriately pointed out the significant financial considerations. Needless to say, I became a lawyer. I was a trial lawyer for thirty-eight years in Honolulu before retiring and publishing my first book, Unplayable Lie, a golf-related suspense novel. Since then I have published seven more novels and one adventure travel memoir.

On Being Published…

Obviously, it was thrilling to be published the first time. Since my first novel was golf related, the agents who accepted my queries and read the ms. felt it would be a hard sell. I was eventually accepted by a small, but traditional publisher, Bluewater Press, LLC.

My latest novel, Words Kill, is a true labor of love as it is something I’ve been working on for several years, even as I continued to write and publish other novels. It is kind of an historical fiction saga, which begins in the late 60s and ends present day. Set substantially in San Francisco (Haight Ashbury) and Berkeley, the suspense thriller touches up many of the important events of the era, including racism, domestic terrorism, the Vietnam War, etc.

On Publishing Industry…

My first several books were published by a small traditional publisher. I was subsequently accepted by a literary agent for my novel, The Pinochet Plot, but when she was unable to sell it to any of the large publishing houses, she referred me to an independent hybrid publisher located in Santa Fe, NM. Based on her recommendation I changed publishers.

On Marketing…

Frankly, marketing is the hardest part for me. I write for the sheer pleasure of writing and if I find an audience for my work, that’s great. I’m simply too old and too lazy to spend my retirement years churning away at the various ways to market my books. I have hired marketing people, and have spent a small fortune on them, but although my books have garnered great reviews, the sales have been only moderate. Social media is probably the best marketing tool I have utilized so far. This includes book tour blogs such as this.

On Goals and Dreams…

My plan for the future is identical to the best tip I can give aspiring authors: keep writing.

Title: WORDS KILL
Author: David Myles Robinson
Publisher: Terra Nova Books
Pages: 250
Genre: Thriller / Suspense

BOOK BLURB:

Famed reporter Russell Blaze is dead. It appears to be an accident, but after Russ’s funeral, his son, Cody, finds a letter in which his father explains that the death may have been murder. It directs Cody to Russ’s unfinished memoir for clues as to what may have happened. The opening words are: On the night of October 16, 1968, I uttered a sentence that would haunt me for the rest of my life. The sentence was, “Someone should kill that motherfucker.”

As Cody delves into the memoir, a window opens into a tragic past and thrusts the still-burning embers of another time’s radical violence into the political reality of the present. History that once seemed far away becomes a deeply personal immersion for Cody into the storied heyday of the Haight: drugs, sex, war protesters, right-wing militias, ground-breaking journalism—and the mysterious Gloria, who wanders into his father’s pad one day to just “crash here for a while until things calm down.”

Cody discovers aspects of his father’s life he never knew, and slowly begins to understand the significance of those words his father spoke in 1968.

Words Kill is a story of loss, violence, and racism; love, hate, and discovery. It is a story of then … and now.