Writing in Maine

It’s National Lighthouse Day! Few images are as evocative as a lighthouse standing sentry on a rocky shore, the guardian of mariners and passengers as they navigate the formidable currents, fierce storms and shifting shoals of America’s coastal and inland waterways. Although their form and appearance vary according to region or the body of water they guard, the lighthouse remains one of the most recognizable images of the maritime world. You can find many of these historic and majestic buildings on public lands across the country. Just follow the light.

Photo of the Bass Harbor Head Light at Acadia National Park in Maine by Aaron Chen (www.sharetheexperience.org).

Photo of the lighthouse at Yaquina Head Outstanding Natural Area by Jeff Clark, Bureau of Land Management - Oregon.

Photo of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina by Michael Sprill (www.sharetheexperience.org).

Don’t Feed The Trolls On Your Social Networks

In a perfect, fairy-tale world, all the visitors to your social media accounts would be well-mannered princes and princesses who politely comment on your posts and tweets. Unfortunately, this is the real world, and sooner or later you’re going to run into a few nasty, unpleasant creatures: Internet trolls. Internet trolls are (often anonymous) people who love to make negative comments and fuel online arguments. 

Rude, critical, and abusive comments can be especially tough for writers like you who have worked so hard to put your best foot forward and share your work with the world. 

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.” —Ernest Hemingway

“We can’t all be saints,” says John Dillinger in the epigraph of Chris Holm’s new thriller, THE KILLING KIND. And what a boring world it would be, one full of saints. At least on the page, it’s much more exciting to have men like the (anti-)hero of THE KILLING KIND, hitman Michael Hendricks, who has the distinction of being a hired gun who only kills other hitmen. 

Over at The Life Sentence, Holm talks to TLS editor Katrina Niidas Holm (and what’s better than a married couple talking about crime fiction?) about hitmen, what went into creating THE KILLING KIND, and his pop culture influences. 

Here are some highlights. 

“I like hitman novels. I like hitman fiction in general. For whatever reason, I tend to be more attracted to hitman stories in film.”

In Bruges

John Wick

“One of my all-time favorite writers is Donald Westlake; he’s an absolute master of crime fiction. And my favorite Westlake books are the ones he wrote under the pen name Richard Stark, the Parker books.”

“I’m not sure what it says about me, but Parker books are my comfort food.” 

“When I need to remind myself why I love writing crime fiction, why I love reading crime fiction, [these] are what I pick up.”

“I wound up creating a character who, rather than serving with him in Afghanistan, spent a lot of time in Central and South America working for the CIA in the drug war. It’s a minor detail, and that character’s background doesn’t weigh heavily on the story, but I’m positive it was influenced by the fact that I was reading Don Winslow at the time.”

“Alexander Engelmann is my take on a gleefully irredeemable sociopath in the vein of Hannibal Lecter.”

“My rough-hewn Southie hitman, Leon Leonwood, might look completely at home in The Departed.”

“In [my] Collector series, Sam Thornton is a man who made a literal devil’s bargain to save his dying wife, and ends up in servitude to hell. […] [Michael] was sent to Afghanistan, where he discovered that he had a knack for killing, if not always the stomach for it — and now he’s haunted by the things he’s done. Sam and Michael are kindred spirits. They’d likely get along if they could manage not to kill each other.”

“I spent some time in an infectious disease Ph.D. program at the University of Virginia. I dropped out when I decided I wanted to become a writer — which puts me in good company, since Edgar Allan Poe dropped out of the University of Virginia as an undergrad. Hopefully I’m not found wandering the streets half-dead a few years from now.”

If this isn’t enough to get you excited about THE KILLING KIND, check out what some other writers that we at The Life Sentence admire had to say about the adventures of Hendricks and company:

And Kirkus liked it so much that they gave it a coveted starred review.