First off, a very Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. And if you’re offended by the “C” word, I’m not sorry. I’m actually offended by the politically and culturally correct crowd who can’t say Christmas. Having worked in different levels of government, I’ve experienced these onion skins. I don’t know what makes these twits tick, but how anyone gets upset by hearing “Christmas” seriously baffles me. For example, some idiot city councilor in Victoria, British Columbia near my home recently got his knickers knotted because somebody gave him a potted poinsettia and he made a big deal because that was too close to Christianity for him. “F” him, I say.

Enough of that rant. So, 2018 was a busy writing year for me, though you wouldn’t know it by the sheer number of books I didn’t publish. This was a swing time where I did an enormous amount of research for forthcoming projects. I also wrote a pile of commercial website content pieces for my daughter’s writing agency. And, from time to time, I managed to pen a few blog posts. But most of this year was prepping for whatsup in 2019. Here’s what’s about to happen with Garry Rodgers and the DyingWords brand in the coming year.

The biggest news—by far—is that Adam Croft is taking me on as a personal understudy. If you don’t know who Adam is, he’s one of the world’s top-selling crime & psychological thriller writers. At one point in 2018, Adam Croft held the #1 best-selling spot on all of Amazon, right ahead of JK Rowling. Adam will work with me on all parts of my indie writing business from craft to marketing. This will take my writing career to an entirely new level, and I am absolutely honored to be one of five select students Adam will tutor.

Another interesting venture is entering the CBC Books 2019 Short Story Competition. My piece is The Old Stone Butter Church. It’s inspired by an epiphany experienced inside an abandoned 140-year-old stone church on southern Vancouver Island. The first prize is 6-grand in cash plus a 2-week writing residency at the prestigious Banff Center for Fine Arts. Wish me luck. The coin will help offset Adam’s fee for tolerating me.

The Lindsay Buziak murder is one of Canada’s highest-profile unsolved homicides. It’s also one of the most solvable, given the circumstances. Someone knows something and they’ll eventually talk – as long as the suspect tree shakes. Eleven years ago, Lindsay was a vibrant 24-year-old Victoria, B.C. real estate agent stabbed to death while showing a vacant high-end house. There is no doubt Lindsay Buziak’s death was a planned killing and the case is as murky as a pail of used engine oil. The suspect list reaches from her beefcake boyfriend at the scene, his mother, one of Lindsay’s closest friends, into an international organized crime cartel, and upward to the highest levels of a corrupt government scandal. This year I’m helping to shake the suspect tree with a proposed book on the case facts called Someone Knows Something – The Shocking Story of Lindsay Buziak’s Unsolved Murder.

I’m almost finished the manuscript for Sun Dance – Why Custer Really Lost the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This started 2 years ago with a root cause analysis for a blog post. I found an angle to one of the most researched and written-about North American historical events that no one seems to have dug into. That’s the psychological impact Chief Sitting Bull’s sun dance ceremony had on psyching his warriors to annihilate the U.S. 7^th Cavalry in 1876. It covers the events leading to, during, and the fallout after this famous event. I’m out of the rabbit hole now and will shop Sun Dance to traditional publishers.

Continuing on my based-on-true crime books like In The Attic and Under The Ground, I’m 2/3 of the way through the manuscript for From The Shadows. It’s about a family of 6 — 3 generations — who were savagely murdered with their bodies concealed. It resulted in one of Canada’s most-encompassing homicide investigations. From The Shadows should be ready for indie publishing in the spring of 2019. If anyone’s interested in a free advanced reading copy (ARC) in digital form, give me a shout.

Next up for 2019 are two more based-on-true crime books where I was involved in the investigations. One is On The Floor which is about the most cold-blooded execution murders I ever saw. The husband and wife owners of a gun store were robbed of a horde of assault weapons and handguns, then laid on the floor and shot in the back of their heads. On The Floor follows the investigation through the biker world and the Asian drug triads before ending in an extraordinary gunfight with the perpetrators. Watch for On The Floor in the summer of 2019.

Beside The Road is next in line. It should be ready in 2019’s fall. Carrying on in the based-on-true crime theme, this story captures a bizarre case where we found a decomposing body down a bank beside a road. This case ticked off all the forensic investigative aid boxes before identifying who it was and the one-in-a-million cause of death. Beside The Road is the weirdest homicide I ever experienced.

If there’s time left, I have a bunch of working titles on the list. There’s no material shortage out there and it makes for great based-on-true crime stories like By The Book, At The Cottage, Behind The Badge, Off The Grid, and Through The Ice. Realistically, these are 2020 or 2021 undertakings because of another previous project taking shape from a 2018 effort.

This year I developed an outline for a screenplay. It’s suitable for a 10-part series, and it’s based on an emotion-evoking true crime investigation I headed. The working title is The Battered Woman. It follows the path of a battered wife’s fight against “the system” after she repeatedly shot her passed-out husband and evoked the battered woman syndrome defense. We’ll see where this goes.

That’s a wrap on an ambitious agenda. I still plan on doing a blog post every second Saturday morning and will keep experimenting with topics. It seems my pieces on analyzing high-profile events are the most popular. However, I have a few interesting guests in the lineup for interviews. Stay tuned to find out who.

Merry Christmas, everyone! May you have more Christmas eats and drinks than humanly healthy. May you have good Christmas times with great friends around you. And may my books make you sleep with one eye open—at 3 am on Christmas morning—when Billy Ray slips down from your attic with his ax.

~Garry