The Night I Decided to Become a Novelist

By Brad Walseth

I was working outside at a lumber mill that dark and frozen winter in 1978, when the temperatures reached 70 below. The wind howling down Hellgate Canyon chilled the air so much that my shaking hands could barely scratch out the lines I was scrawling with a pencil on a scrap of notebook paper I always kept in my pocket for when inspiration struck. My father worked 30 years in this world, but as I stood shivering in the darkness, I knew this wasn’t the career for me.

Growing up high in the mountains, I lived in the cultural Mecca that is Missoula Montana and spent much of my youth reading in the library, fishing, chasing butterflies, watching TV (The Waltons, M*A*S*H), playing basketball and music (bass), attending music concerts, foreign films, and Planet of the Apes and Marx Brothers marathons. Later, I hitch-hiked around the Western U.S., like my hero Jack Keroauc, before returning to go to school. My undergrad years at the University of Montana (BA English Lit 1984) were among my best of my life, albeit the poorest, as I played in bands like the Rust and Smuts, Black Lace, The Rebates and Ernst Ernst, wrote reviews for the school paper and DJ’d for the school radio station. These years were also colored with sadness as I lost both my father and younger brother Dan to cancer.

My wife Melody and I relocated to Chicago on 1989, hoping for better job prospects, and I immediately fell in love with the city. For all its issues, and there are many, it is still a vibrant and exciting place to live. Of course, I actually live in the suburbs, or should I say beyond the suburbs, in another state in fact, just across the border in the picturesque little town of Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, where we raised a daughter and two sons.

Despite being admittedly mediocre at math, my first job in Chicago was as a stockbroker in a boiler room — scenes of which later made it into my novel The Courier.

I made the transition into corporate communications, attended Northwestern University, co-owned a restaurant and bar (and lost my shirt), and endured a brief tenure in the US Postal Service, before becoming an award-winning writer and editor for Custom Woodworking Business, Wood and Wood Products and CLOSETS magazines.

Throughout all my adventures, I followed my goal (like my hero John Boy — with a sardonic touch of Hawkeye Pierce) of becoming a published writer. I wrote screenplays, short stories, poetry, lyrics and even a musical stageplay (hey, Stephen Sondheim, give me a call!). Beginning in 2000, I started writing music reviews for Concertlivewire.com. This lead to me writing a weekly column for the website called The Musicurmudgeon. I also wrote and co-produced a mockumentary—Hug the Shrugs— about a garage band who accidentally burn down their garage and have to become a “carport band,” which was a hit at the 2004 Black Point Film Festival before dying a painful death from lack of funding for promotion.

In 2006, I started Jazzchicago.net, which became in very short time, one of the top Jazz websites in the world, and perhaps the first to feature video. As Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, photographer, Web designer and primary writer and interviewer, I had the opportunity to meet and interview many of the top luminaries of the Jazz world, even befriending legendary Jazz producer Teo Macero for the last two years of his life. Meanwhile, one of the top radio stations in Chicago, WNUA, asked me to produce and co-host the popular weekly radio show “Jazz Chicago Style.”

With the economic downturn, I was laid off from the magazines, closed up Jazzchicago.net and stopped broadcasting when the radio station switch to an all-Latin format, so what do I decide? but to write another novel. Starting with just the opening line of the book, I began on a journey without any preconceived idea of where it was going to lead. And what dark and dangerous paths it ended up traversing! Along the way I threw in some the angst I had felt hearing news stories of “throwaway kids”—kids whose parents had basically thrown them away—ones who live on the streets and whose deaths garner nary a trickle in the news and are soon forgotten—into a crime/psychological thriller/love/coming of age story. The resulting novel, Crystal Falls released September 1, 2014 on Satalyte Press.

Honestly, this story is not for everyone. I have found that drug use seems to elicit a stronger sense of revulsion than serial killers skinning old ladies alive. As for inquires into religion, politics, literature, well...what was I thinking anyway? But it isn’t all darkness I swear—I mean one character is killed by a Canadian Goose (!?!?), and there is plenty of action, blood, suspense and murder involved, so you can ignore the extraneous stuff if you want. Just don’t expect Miss Marple to make an appearance.

Novelist Brad Walseth lives near Chicago. His short stories and reviews have appeared in numerous nationwide publications. You can purchase Brad's latest book "Crystal Falls" here.

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