Primer For Lone Star Crime Scene Cleanup, or Smiley’s Funeral Home, Crematorium and Bowling Alley
A rather morbid title, I know. Bear with me.
Hank Cooper, of Lone Star Crime Scene Cleanup, has been with me for a long time. As well as Mr. Robert Dievs and James (formerly Dudley) Brackington, who will come along a little later in this tale. Smiley is a newer addition to the family, though just as important.
I arrived back home in Tennessee in early 2020 from traveling around Europe, sailing across the Atlantic and spending several months working as a dockhand and hotel receptionist in the Caribbean. My return home was due solely to the escalating nature of the Corona virus. Otherwise I might still be in the Caribbean, spending every dollar I made polishing chrome super-yachts on Antiguan Cigarettes (Hillsboroughs are the best).
I worked that summer as the head chef of a local burger restaurant (through a strange and fortuitous set of circumstances), and capped it off with a failed attempt to canoe down the Ohio river from Cincinnati to New Orleans.
After a brief rearrangement of priorities, I decided I would go to university after all, despite years of protestations and my strongly held belief that the business model of all American Universities is to put children in debt by stealing money from their parents.
But one interesting thing did come from my time at University and before: Two thirds (If I’m being generous) of a really terrible book. I’d begun writing it even before I’d left for my European adventure, and continued by bits and pieces here and there. When I departed for Knoxville, Tennessee to earn that most prestigious of degrees (Creative Writing), I picked it up again, this time with a little more commitment.
The story concerned a lonely man named Hank Cooper, living in a Hotel in Waxahachie, Texas. His journey was inspired by a friend of my father’s who owned a real business in the 80’s called Lone Star Crime Scene Cleanup. He really was a crime scene cleaner, and he really did do it all by himself.
Beyond that though, the story is a complete fiction. I don’t know my father’s friend, and he likely doesn’t know me, but learning that crime scene cleanup was a real business, run by real people, was to me, a fascinating and kind of horrible concept.
And so I wrote. And wrote. Until my story was entering the final stages of its life, and then…
Audience holds their breathe in anticipation*
I dropped it. I dropped the ball. I got lazy and I stopped. I could blame plenty of other things, but that’s closer to the truth. I got lazy.
I urge anyone who’s been working on a piece of art of any length: Finish it! Put it behind you! Just finish!
I did not finish my book. Not only did I become lazy, but I was also ashamed somehow, both of what I hadn’t written, and of what had. It has no ending, I told myself. And even if it did, no one would want to read it.
Maybe that second part is still true. But I’d be damned if I didn’t finish what I’d started. Absolutely not gonna fly.
Fast forward three years, and I’m nearing the end of a one year contract teaching High School English in Okinawa, Japan. It was one of those moments when you look up from what you’re doing and wonder: how did I get here? What am I doing? Is this… is this what I want to do? The answer for me was complicated. Yes and No. So helpful, I know.
What those questions did lead me back to though, was writing. I began with 500 words a day. Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. After two weeks I bumped it up to 750, with the occasional day of going over that goal (and sometimes under, I won’t lie).
Within three months and some change, I had a book. A finished book. It was not about Hank and Smiley and Robert Dievs, but about America, and an evil cat. It was called The Desert Daily.
I signed a contract with Line by Lion publishing, a Louisville publishing house, in October of 2024, and the novel is set to release around April of this year.
But, where, you might ask, does this leave Hank Cooper and Smiley’s Funeral Home and Bowling alley? Well. Upon the completion of the Desert Daily, I did not drop my daily writing habit. In fact, I commited to increasing my daily goal. At first to 1000 words a day, and then finally, up to 2000.
This change was inspired partially by On Writing, by Stephen King, a fantastic book, even for those with no interest in writing, but also because (and I agree with Mr. King here) I felt like anything under a thousand wasn’t moving fast enough- like I was losing my story.
I stuck with this commitment (with some interruptions, I will admit, due to moving back to back America from Japan) and by the end of four months, I had a draft of Hank’s Lone Star Crime Scene Cleanup. I promptly stuck the draft in a folder full of other dead things on my hard-drive and forgot about it.
I’m well into my third novel now, which promises to be as long as the first two put together, but I haven’t forgotten Hank Cooper, or Smiley, or James Brackington. I think it’s time to finally put a period on the sentence I started all those years ago.
I will be releasing chapters of Hank’s Lone Star Crime Scene Cleanup every day. Maybe two times a day, if I feel It’s warranted. I make no promises concerning quality, though I can say, I will always give you the best I can. One man’s trash, another man’s treasure, isn’t that the way it goes? The chapters will be edited as I go along, and- who knows- maybe I’ll add some things in, though I suppose you, sweet constant reader, will not be able to tell.
If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate your time, truly, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Hank’s journey as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Sincerely,
Ferg
