Our Lady of the Overlook: 18 Years in Law Enforcement Built Fiction That Feels Real/R.L. Carpentier

He did not research his characters. He watched them for eighteen years.R.L. Carpentier spent nearly two decades in law enforcement, watching human beings at their most vulnerable, most desperate, and most revealing. He watched the ones who did the right thing and the ones who did not. He watched the ones who surprised him and the ones who broke his heart. And the voices of all of them stayed with him long after the cases closed.Then he went to the mountains.Not as an escape. As a homecoming. The Catskill Mountains of New York, small towns, rural communities, landscapes where everybody knows everybody and the land itself becomes a character in every story told inside it. He completed the Catskill 3500s, climbing all thirty-five peaks over three thousand five hundred feet. He and his wife traversed the twenty-four mile escarpment trail in a single day.This is not a writer who imagines his settings. This is a writer who has walked every inch of them.His debut novel, Our Lady of the Overlook, is the first book in a trilogy of small town mysteries and crime procedural fiction set in the Catskill Mountains. And it is built on one of the most honest creative commitments a novelist can make.The plot is made up. But the people living inside it are completely real.In this episode of Beyond the Draft, Rodney opens up about what eighteen years of watching real human beings under pressure taught him about fiction. About how he takes real people and transforms them into characters without losing the truth of who they are. About what a small mountain town gives a crime story that a city never can. About why he committed to a trilogy before the first book was even out. And about the creative code he refuses to break, only writing from what he has truly lived, truly seen, and truly walked.This conversation is for every writer who has a life full of real experience they have not yet trusted themselves to put on the page.R.L. Carpentier just gave them permission.🎙️ Host: Imma📚 Guest: R.L. Carpentier / Law Enforcement Veteran /Catskill Hiker /Debut Crime Fiction Author📖 Our Lady of the Overlook: R.L.Carpentierwriter.comBeyond the Draft/ Where the real story begins after the writing is done.Your words have power. Your story matters. Keep writing.