Workshop on self-publishing by cop turned novelist

WINDHAM―The question is easy for Rodney Carpentier III, a career law enforcement officer leading a workshop on self-publishing at the Main Street Community Center in Windham this weekend.

“What if you were an adopted kid who went looking for your birth parents, only to find out your mother was the unknown victim of a cold case murder?” Carpentier asks.

It is a plot idea he developed while working a midnight shift and his answer inspired Our Lady of the Overlook, the first in a murder mystery trilogy that also includes Quiet Whispers of the Overlook.

Hatching an idea is one thing. Then there is sitting down and putting it on paper and finally, the ultimate conundrum: how to get it in print?

Carpentier explains all that and more in “Self-Publishing 101,” designed for writers who are new to the self-publishing world and for those already working on a manuscript.

The seminar covers every essential: the editing process, hitting publishing conventions, connecting with others in self-publishing, formatting tips, free software options and guidance on printing your book.

“Walk away with practical knowledge, actionable steps and the confidence to take your writing from draft to published work,” Carpentier says.

Carpentier is a lifelong writer of stories, poems, songs and now, novels.

“As a kid my mom and I would try to plot whodunits on Sunday afternoons. In middle school my friends and I tried to develop our own superhero comic book and in college I wrote song lyrics for my pop-punk band Gone Ashley,” he explained.

“But I’ve had a novel stuck in my head for the last 20 years and it’s about time for me to let it all out,” Carpentier says, leading to the creation of characters based on reality and then some.

His first novel, Our Lady of the Overlook, tells the tale of Mike Ellis, “a rookie cop in a rural Catskill Mountain town working in the shadow of his dead father, the former chief of police,” he writes.

“When a true crime podcaster comes to town, Mike is drawn into a cold case murder investigation that his father began. As Mike begins to sort through the case, he stumbles into a modern-day murder case that has similar elements,” Carpentier writes.

“A young woman. She’s been strangled. A cop named Ellis.  And of course, the Overlook,” he continues. “Can Mike reconcile the relationship with a father he doesn’t truly know and solve two murders separated by four decades?”

To say more would be giving it away, and perhaps Carpentier will reveal the unknown, this weekend. What is known is that he will share his personal and professional pursuit of being a published author.

He has, by virtue of his job, also been a storyteller throughout his long law enforcement career, working in various roles: on patrol, as a fraud and computer crimes investigator and as a first line supervisor for a sheriff’s office in the Hudson Valley.

He also previously worked for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, meeting some high profile inmates like David Berkowitz and Arthur Shawcross.

“I have written factually about the mundane to the maniacal. I have told my peers, my bosses and juries about what I have seen and done, what I’ve investigated and what I’m able to prove,” Carpentier said.

“It is a procedural and clinical style; something I have brought over to my fiction writing. So, at this crossroad of my life and my career, well into my 40’s and in the downswing toward retirement,” he added. “I am going to live out my dream of being a writer.”

If that sounds like a novel idea―pun intended―then “Self-Publishing 101” takes place on Saturday, February 28, from 1-3 p.m. For more information call 518-734-4168 or go to mainstreetcenter.org.

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