Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

My Writing Secret Weapon

For as long as I’ve been writing—over 20 years pro­fes­sion­al­ly now—I’ve col­lect­ed arti­cles on writ­ing, hand­writ­ten snatch­es from books on writ­ing, exam­ples from great authors,…

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Engaging Novels About a Detective

The oth­er day, after pub­lish­ing the sec­ond nov­el in the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series—The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent—I pulled a giant plas­tic crate labeled “Dako­ta Stevens…

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The Rich Are Different is Now Available

The sec­ond book in the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series by Chris Orcutt, The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent, is now avail­able for Kin­dle on Ama­zon. In Feb­ru­ary, I…

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The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe: An Interview with Jeff Bennington

Greet­ings, read­ers. Today, for the first time in the his­to­ry of my blog, I’m mak­ing some­body else the focus. Today I’m going back to my…

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Chris Orcutt’s Barbaric Yawp

“I sound my bar­bar­ic yawp over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whit­man, Leaves of Grass THE OTHER DAY, I wrote that I was going to “take it…

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You Don’t Need a Kindle to Read A Real Piece of Work

Friends, Romans, Coun­try­men: I’ve received dozens of mes­sages from would-be book-buy­ers who say, “I’d love to read A Real Piece of Work, but I don’t…

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His Pen Was Quick

On July 17, Mick­ey Spillane, cre­ator of the infa­mous Mike Ham­mer PI series, died. He was 88, and by all accounts he lived a pret­ty cool life.

In addi­tion to writ­ing sev­er­al best­selling nov­els that read­ers adored, Spillane played a mys­tery writer on the 70s TV show Colum­bo, appeared in sev­er­al com­mer­cials for Miller Lite beer, and mar­ried a hot sec­ond wife, Sher­ri Manilou, who posed for the cov­er of his nov­el The Erec­tion Set.

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