JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD

In March, I turn 60 years—and this is the 60th blog posting on my website. So, I’m going to take a break from this writing project, at least for a while. Until I return, I’d like to leave you with some thoughts from my artist-in-residence ventures in 2019 at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Homestead National Monument, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. At each location, I wrote daily meditations using some creative constraints. I won’t bother you with my “rules” (

The 2019 “Six-Word Mystery” contest sponsored by the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Mystery Writers of America drew more than 200 entries from ten states and three countries. The results of this year’s competition were decided in December, and the winner is… me! By the slimmest of margins, my numerical noir finished on top. Sex, violence and justice combined to pique the imagination of the judges and voters: 36D, .44 magnum, 20 to life. I thought that toxic tales might be f

Lethal Fetish is now available (via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Pen-L) . And real controversy may be hot on fiction’s heels! The day after the book was released, my publisher asked whether it should be tagged as “containing adult content” (to warn/discourage youthful readership). This had never occurred to me. The question was whether parents would be upset if their kid read a story involving sex (violence is evidently okay). The concern was not hypothetical; another Pen-

During my artist’s residency at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in the Chihuahua Desert, I crafted set of daily meditations. These are catalyzed by the sources of religious inspiration adopted by Unitarian Universalism: Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. Savoring Guadalupe Mountains National Park means harmonizing with daily and seasonal patterns: the cool

I recently spent two weeks in Grand Teton National Park on a writing retreat. I’d been there before, but this time I adopted a contrarian perspective. My project became finding the most iconic views—and then looking away to truly see this marvelous place. Then, the question became one of writing constraints. Sticking with the iconoclastic tactic of focusing on what one is not supposed to be observing, I chose death. To described the anti-sights, I decided to use exactly

One of my favorite endeavors in the course of writing is research. I relish digging into maps, photos, magazines, and recordings to capture the place and time of a story (San Francisco in January of 1981). And so for Lethal Fetish, I pursued some strange and compelling topics—with excerpts from the book—including: 1980s culture Video games: “images of jumping frogs, frenzied gorillas, and a yellow ball wandering through a maze.” Computer technology: “Carol regaled me with t

While my stories will not be among the great works of the 21st century, every so often I nail a sentence—or so I like to tell myself as a way of continuing to write. Maybe I’m like one of the million monkeys pounding away at a typewriter, but here are a few lines that strike me as pure Riley from my next mystery, Lethal Fetish... With regard to Carol (Riley’s girl-Friday who actually runs Goat Hill Extermination): Carol grabbed a handful of my graying hair, looked me in the

Writers are numerically confused and quantitatively torn—or maybe just hypocritical. We decry the unwillingness of people to read novels along with their affinity for Tweets. On the other hand, writers love to craft aphorisms, microessays, haikus, six-word memoirs and flash fiction (“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—Hemingway). So, how does one find the right number of words? Perhaps Antoine de Saint-Exupery had it right: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is noth

People have been enjoying the notion of the micro-mystery that I introduced in my last blog posting, so I’m announcing a contest for anyone to email their six-word mysteries to me (lockwood@uwyo.edu). A panel of distinguished writers will select the winners who will receive copies of full-length mysteries (and of course, one of the prizes will be a signed copy of POISONED JUSTICE). Entries will be accepted for six weeks and the winners will be featured on this website. You

As I conduct research for my next mystery book, I’ve been delving into the events that shaped America in 1981. Exploring how life looked at that time helps to contextualize the current state of the world. Today, we’re convinced that international politics are an unprecedented disaster and domestic conflicts are tearing apart the nation. While things look pretty grim in 2015, let’s consider what was happening 35 years ago. In January, 53 American hostages were finally relea