Milk in My Coffee by Eric Jerome Dickey

What are some of your favorite films?
As many movies as I watch, and you want a list? I'll keep it short. For the most part, I love my movies suspenseful and dark. Anything by Hitchcock. Any classic noir. Any movie where Bogart has a gun. Any movie with a femme fatale. A short list: Carl Franklin's One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress, The Killers (either version), Thelma and Louise. Cool Hand Luke, anything with Audrey Hepburn, A Raisin in the Sun, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And I love the erotic: Lolita, The Lover, Emmanuelle, The Red Shoe Diaries (the original Showtime movie, not the spinoffs). Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, Heat with Al Pacino, and others. I'm just getting warmed up...

What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
Blues (John Lee Hooker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, BB King, Robert Jones out of Michigan, and many others), anything by Nina Simone, Mase, T.I. out of ATL, Chante Moore, Kina, Pru, Alicia Keyes, Usher, Beyonce, Kanye West, Janet, Inobe out of ATL, Ashanti, Joe, yada yada yada... Trust me, just like with the movies, you don't want the whole list.

Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
A fifth of Jack Daniels. Pack of Djarum. Maybe some one-point-fives. A stripper reading to me from the Bible. My Prozac prescription. My stack of bills as motivation. An eight-by-ten glossy of The Dalai Lama. J Kidding.

Point blank, in between doing laundry and sweeping the floor, I write as much as I can. That sums it up. Whenever, whereever. There are no rituals, just discipline. I've written at the car wash, at hotels, at coffee shops, on airplanes. A laptop and a controlled environment are all I need.

Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
I had at least three years of rejections. At least. It takes years to become an overnight success, I also lost around five thousand dealing with a publishing company, that was back when I was younger in the biz and very naïve, that ordeal ending up in arbitration as the FBI was shutting the publisher down. Never pay anyone to read your work. There are a lot of con artists out there.

If you could choose one new writer to be "discovered," who would it be?
Sorry, I have to pick two: Keith Lee Johnson and Travis Hunter. Both are excellent writers and neither gets a lot of press.

What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
While you wait, work on improving your writing skills. That's the key to making this a career. Read books on writing, learn how to write a scene, dialogue, characterization, suspense, erotica, mystery, understanding elements of each, study both good and bad writing, learn from what others have done, but in the end have your own style. Don't try to be the "next" anybody. Be you, be original, and be good at what you do.