About Rod Lindsey, Author of Troubleshooter
I sometimes get
asked when and how I became a writer.
Occasionally I even get asked why.
I
was a mediocre artist and photographer before I gave it all up to spend my
creative energy becoming a mediocre writer.
Initially, mediocrity was an okay benchmark for me in all these
endeavors because everything was done very selfishly – to please a very limited
audience…mainly me. I could always
squint up my eyes and see it as I meant it to be. Writing doesn’t work like that. While these other creative efforts produced
tangible objects that could be appreciated in passing, even if imperfect, writing
was entirely different. Like music, it
must be consumed, expressed, or both. And
mediocrity ruins it for me as surely as a couple of rancid bits in the quiche. The reason it took me so long to publish my
debut novel is simply because my writing wasn’t good enough before now.
Storytelling is a skill that can be
learned and I was a slow learner. Having
a worthwhile story to tell is altogether something else – it haunts you and
taunts you. I had the stories, and felt
the need to express them. But would I
have started down this path of becoming a novelist if I’d known ‘worthwhile’
meant a serious commitment of time and energy for roughly 40 years of my life? Probably.
I’m hardheaded that way. I
certainly believe that Troubleshooter was a worthwhile story – only the readers
will tell.
I don’t think I became a storyteller. I
think I always was one – I simply never gave up being one. I was the kid who laid-out and graded (with
my Tonka road grader) God-only-knows how many miles of roads in my father’s
long gravel driveway so the other kids in our gang could play, the one who
created the virtual sheriff’s office, the card table general store; I’ve never
quit being that kid at heart. I became a writer – and that’s a long
story of missteps and stumbles, and overriding determination.
My life has largely been about
reinventing myself, the first time being when I walked away from a novice
creative job at Hallmark Cards to join a crew of laborers on a large commercial
construction site in Kansas City . I stayed in construction for roughly 30 of
the next 38 years, earning my nickname, Beamwalker, doing exactly that –
walking beams. I was a laborer,
carpenter, superintendent, and contractor, ultimately becoming a vendor to the
industry. Along the way I became a
freelance photojournalist and photo studio owner catering to the Capitol Hill
crowd in Seattle, winning first place in Seattle’s first (and only)
International Erotic Art Show.
A battle-scarred refugee of the
oh-so-fickle agent-at-the-door traditional publishing skirmishes, I came into
the self-publication fray precisely at the cusp of industry-wide change thanks
to the meteoric ascent of e-pub. It’s
precisely the same paradigm I encountered in photography with film vs. digital,
hand-colored vs. Photoshopped, and this time I’m on the train with the rest of
them. I published Troubleshooter on Kindle in April, and it’s now out in trade
paperback at Amazon and select indie bookstores.
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