July 24, 2025 • 49 mins
Welcome to another episode of The First Responder Playbook! This week, host Brent sits down with Rodney Carpentier, an active law enforcement officer with nearly 20 years of experience in New York State. Rodney’s career has taken him from state corrections to patrol and investigations, and recently he climbed the ranks to lieutenant. But that’s not all—Rodney is also a published mystery writer, weaving his first responder experiences into gripping stories.
In this episode, Rodney shares his unconventional journey into law enforcement, how an English major ended up working in corrections, and the valuable life and leadership lessons he’s picked up along the way. From memorable stories about infamous inmates to the power of legacy in police work, Rodney gives listeners a behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to succeed in this field.
Plus, he dives into his budding career as an author, revealing how late nights, true crime podcasts, and a need for creative expression spurred him to write his debut mystery novel—and how he’s balancing the challenges of indie publishing with life as a first responder.
Whether you’re interested in a career in law enforcement, love a good leadership story, or just want to hear how someone can be both a top cop and a novelist, this episode is packed with insights and inspiration. Tune in to hear Rodney’s story and learn what it really means to bring your whole self—and all your unique skills—to a life of service.
Want to be a guest on The First Responder Playbook: Insights on Leadership and Training? Send Brent Colbert a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1748037097521814b71b1b454
Rodney's book:
https://www.rlcarpentierwriter.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Guys, welcome to the first responder playbook. It is my pleasure to welcome
Rodney Carpentier to an episode tonight with
us. Rodney is a former law enforcement officer,
mystery writer, a man of many
talents. Rodney, give yourself a
good proper introduction. All right, so I'll just clarify
(00:23):
one thing. I'm actually still active law enforcement. About
to hit 17 years. So I have in New York State. We retire at 20,
so I have about three years left. I have been in law
enforcement for, well, counting my corrections time.
I've been, I've been in just, just about 20 years and I've gone
from correction officer to sheriff's office where I
(00:46):
worked patrol for a number of years, became an investigator, got involved
in computer forensics and financial crimes
before making sergeant, which I was the patrol sergeant for
just shy of 10 years. I worked
all three shifts, moved into an administrative role about a year
ago and recently within the last two weeks,
(01:09):
I got promoted to lieutenant. Still, still doing the administrative stuff, but
kind of the next level up. In the meantime,
back in 2022 I was working one of those midnight
shifts as a sergeant and it was kind of slow and I came up with
an idea to become a. I came up with an idea
for a book and I ended up writing it.
(01:31):
And about two and a half years later I released it. That's awesome.
Was law enforcement always the goal? No,
I was, I was an English major in college studying
literature. There was this kind of far fetched
dream of becoming a lawyer, but the more
lawyery stuff I took pre
(01:55):
law type things, I'm like this, this isn't it. So
I didn't really kind of know what I was doing. I graduated at 22
or yeah, I graduated 22. I got married and we
moved to LA and looking for work in Los
Angeles in 2004. There wasn't a lot, you
know, I was working for like, you know, 10 or 11 bucks an hour. I
(02:18):
had student loans I was trying to pay off and
they had a big banner over one of the streets over
Hollywood Boulevard actually said join the lapd. So I
said, hey, why not? So I started going through their process and
that kind of inspired me to look more into the profession. Read
(02:38):
a fabulous non fiction book by
a New York City police officer called Blue Blood by Edward Conlon.
And that kind of, you know, romanticized it a little bit, but
also was very gritty and very real about what the job entailed.
I became more and more interested. We kind of
(02:59):
decided to leave California when I
and you know, dropped out of the LAPD. Process. When I got back to New
York in 05, I started taking civil service tests.
And a year, a year or so later, that's when I got picked up by
state corrections. And it's all kind of, you know, been. Been going since then,
so wasn't the initial goal, but it was, it was
(03:20):
still early on thing. That's awesome. I,
I can relate to that a little bit because my degree is not in
criminal. My original bachelor's degree is not in criminal justice. And
I never wanted to really be in law enforcement either. And then it just kind
of hit me and, you know, here I am, gosh,
14, 15 years later, counting my dispatch time. So
(03:42):
some of the things that once it finally hits you, you're like, man, I'm addicted.
I'm staying. Yeah, it's, It's. It's weird. You know, I hate to
say I fell into it, but I, I kind of. I kind of did. It
wasn't, you know, I work with a lot of, you know, young
kids now, especially in my role as, as a sergeant and
lieutenant. And some, some people
(04:03):
dreamed about this their entire life. And, you know, they prepped and they
came from those families. We recently hired a young man.
He's like 22 years old. And I'm like, oh, I remember that.
But he's, He's a legacy. His. I think his
uncle's a police chief in one of. One of the cities in the county. His
dad was a police officer. His brother
(04:26):
works for one of the towns, and so
we picked him up at the, at the sheriff's office. So he's kind of, you
know, his cousin actually works for us also. He's. He's a sergeant. I worked
with his cousin for years. So it's. It's interesting to see kind of the legacies,
but then also the people that just kind of fell into it, like our,
Our. Our chief, our chief deputy right now. She started in the nypd,
(04:49):
but prior to that she was a.
She was going to college in New York City and actually has a Master of
Fine Arts in dance. But she kind
of, you know, she kind of had some more conservative leanings than
a lot of her classmates. And she's like, I don't want to be, you know,
in this. So she looking for a job. She wound up in the
(05:11):
nypd. Did that for a couple years, took the test results. She actually
started at the. So about a year after I did,
and I worked with her. She's very smart, she's
tenacious, and she's worked all the way up to chief. And you know,
and so again it's, you know, she kind of fell into the job and here
she is running, you know, a department of, you know, 100, 110
(05:33):
people. That's awesome. Yeah, you gotta love stories like that.
Can you talk about your time in state corrections? I mean, sure, A lot of
times those are the worst of the worst. And corrections
doesn't get the spotlight it deserves, but the, it really teaches you how to
interact with people. Yeah, it was definitely one of those things.
When I was interviewing originally with the sheriff's office, a lot of
(05:57):
the, a lot of the people I was, I was interviewing with that had kind
of were at the investigator slash sergeant level at the time had started at the
county jail. So they kind of had that corrections background. And so when I
spoke about that, it was definitely one of those things that kind of get me
a foot in like, you know, I wasn't a criminal justice guy, but you know.
Yeah, interacting with people and having to use the skill,
(06:18):
your interpersonal skills, because when you're a CEO, you don't have
necessarily all those tools on your belt that you do as a police officer.
It's probably changed a little bit now, but for the most part, no, it's just,
you know, you're in a housing unit, you know, Saturday morning you got
to get everybody up and cleaning and, and before the sergeant comes through and yells
at you, you know, the only thing you have is, know,
(06:40):
sheer will and you know, come on guys, you know,
but having that, having that presence and building that respect and that rapport. Yeah, you
rely a lot more on, on your mouth than you do your hands or your
tools. So. But my experience state corrections
started at a facility
called Solomon Correctional Facility. It was a max. We
(07:03):
had actually had a couple of well known
New York state inmates. First was Arthur Shawcross. He was
a serial killer operating in the Rochester area back
in the 80s. He,
he had finished out his, he finished out his sentence there. He passed away
while incarcerated just after I got on.
(07:26):
And another one we had, there was David Berkowitz. The Son of Sam
killer was one of our, was one of our inmates too. Met him a bunch
of times because being the new Jack while I was there, I
got stuck. My first, my first two week assignment was in Visit
Frisk. So every day I had to bring everybody in
and at the end of the day I got to see everybody out. So
(07:48):
you know, you know, you learn, you learn a lot about life that way too.
But you know, Berkowitz was in. I Think like I said, I had
that, had that for two weeks maybe.
And he came in probably a good six or seven of the. Of the 10
days I was in that rotation. So. And we had a couple
other guys there. There was a mafia killer by the name of Mean Joe
(08:10):
Sullivan was there. So you meet some interesting people in
correctional, in the correctional world. And also while I was
there, there was uh, a singer songwriter
around the same time. Uh, he was very popular. He was popular in the
American Idol scene. His name is Gavin DeGraw. Yeah, he had,
(08:31):
he had a song because Wanna Be or I Don't Want to Be. And
the first line of the song is I don't want to be a prison. You
know, I don't want to be a prison guard. Or, you know, I'm nothing but
a prison guard's son. His family were all prison guards at Sullivan Correctional
Facility. There were a large
contiguous. So he was, he was from New York and uh, his family worked there.
(08:52):
But my stint at Sullivan was actually only about two or three weeks long.
There was another facility that was actually closer to where I was living at the
time. So I moved to a facility called Mid
Orange, which was a medium a. Whereas we had
two rows of razor wire fence,
but it was actually an outside facility. We had
(09:15):
cottages, we had the Puppies Behind Bars program.
We had. I mean it was, you know, we called it Camp Cupcake we
call, you know, it was. It was not a Max Max prison. There were a
lot of older inmates there. There were.
We had a lot of guys that were in for vehicular manslaughter
based on like, you know, like a DWI kind of situation. So you
(09:38):
didn't have like hard hardcore people
there. I had, I was local so
I, I kind of. The first year year I was there,
I kind of monopolized the. The fact that I could come in at different times.
I was, I was flexible. So I, I would get,
you know, I got chances to go on trips because in
(10:02):
New York State one of the big things. Because a lot of the
employees of state corrections all live up in the, the northern and
western part of the state, but a lot of, a lot of our facilities are
in a southern tier down towards New York City. So these guys have to
commute and a lot of them will
do swaps, so they'll do twos and fours, fours and eights. Some.
(10:24):
I knew a guy who basically swapped work the entire winter so he could
have the summer off because he worked at a racetrack. So they could do, they
could do all these Things, but I was the, you know, so they were, they
were kind of set on their schedules and things like that. Whereas me being a
local guy, you know, the sergeant could call me up the day before and say,
hey, you want to work six two tomorrow? You know, yeah, I got you boss,
no problem. So I, you know, I was, I was one of those
(10:48):
Swiss army knives for a little bit, multi tools for them.
Then I took a bid. I started getting serious about becoming a police
officer. So I took a bid in our yard tower, which was
a solo post. You basically didn't even enter the facility. Like I came
in. I was one of the few guys that actually changed into my uniform at
work. A lot of guys just drove in in the uniform. So I would go
(11:09):
in, I would change, I would walk upstairs, I check in with the sergeant, make
sure he knew I was there. I'd go downstairs, I would see
the, the, the armory guy. He'd hand me my,
my.38 and my, my chemical weapons.
I would see the outside roundsman and he would drive me out to my post.
I'd crawl up there and I wouldn't see anybody until the, the afternoon guy came
(11:31):
and got me. So I, you know, unless the sergeant came out or, you
know, there was some kind of random inspection but typically didn't happen.
So what I would do, I had a big old lunchbox because I would
have to bring all my supplies because nobody was bringing me anything. And I, at
bottom of that, I'd hide all my study books for civil service tests. So I
sat up there for about six months and I studied my butt off.
(11:54):
And I wound up. So I took the county test and getting a
95 on that. I took the New York State police test. I did
not do so well on that. I don't to this day I don't know what
happened, but you know, fate. I got a 70 on that.
But it was a different, different kind of test the way that they, the. The
questions that they had on that. So after, after I took those
(12:16):
tests, I wanted to change a pace. So I bid
a role as the disciplinary officer. So I
worked directly for a lieutenant and who was kind of a hard ass.
And my job was to collect
the disciplinaries from the, the, the chart sergeant every
day the, the. And I would bring them up, but I have to
(12:39):
serve them. And then we would randomly do hearings, you know,
lieutenant come in, you know, you know, with, you know, with
an itch in her butt. And she'd be like, all right, give me some people.
And you know, we'd call a bunch of people and we'd do hearings. We'd have
to, you know, I was responsible for that, but working for her was
very beneficial. She. She took care of me at times. We had a pretty
(13:01):
good working relationship. And as the, you
know, as the spring came into summer, I started. I
got canvas and I started going through the background investigation and everything. So I told
her what I was doing. I said, hey, listen, you know, I'm not going to
be here much longer. She's like, that's okay. She goes, when you're ready to
go, let me know. Let the scheduling lieutenant know, but,
(13:22):
you know, whatever you have to do. So I got a call for
an interview in September, on September 11, actually,
of. Of 2008.
The interview was maybe 10 minutes long. And Chief's
like, all right, so go get your medical done. So
got my medical done. And I called him back. I said, hey, I'm all set.
(13:44):
He goes, I said, should I be putting in my notice? He goes,
yeah, like, okay, so it's my credit. I went to work
that weekend. I went in on Saturday and filled out all my, all my
slips to take off the, the two weeks pretty much. I
banged in sick on Sunday. I went on Monday. I did my job for about
an hour and a half till a scheduling lieutenant came in and
(14:07):
turned everything. And he goes, so when do you want to leave? I said, about
10 minutes ago and never looked back.
That's awesome. When you got hired at the sheriff's office, did you go directly into
a patrol position? Yes, police academy first.
We have a six month academy, so that was
basically September through February. Yeah. And then went straight to
(14:29):
patrol. And I worked as. As
a patrol deputy. I worked all three shifts. In New
York, the sheriff is responsible for a ton. We do
because we run the jail, obviously, but we also do all the civil process and
serve the process of the court. So I kind of fell into doing a lot
of that stuff as opposed to the more proactive,
(14:51):
you know, kind of interdiction stuff we had. We had a bunch of guys that
did that, but nobody else was doing the other stuff. So I kind of fell
into that or taking the walk in complaints. So I started
kind of doing more of that stuff. And
2012, I got picked to move into investigations
and I kind of started doing, you know, I got what I call the
(15:12):
mystery box. The. Our chief, who was an
investigator at the time, she had started a case on patrol that was just what
we call bad check complaint. Somebody wrote a check, couldn't cash it. And it
was connected to a couple of different things. And she actually
parlayed that into what ended up being like a large mortgage
fraud ring. And around the same time, we had a
(15:35):
task force with the FBI that was doing,
doing narcotics work and stuff. So they actually were starting up a white
collar unit. So they moved her over there. And when they did that, all her
open cases kind of went into the mystery box. And when I got there, the
sergeant says, he goes, you could have that. I'm like,
cool. So I had to kind of dig through there and
(15:57):
figure out what I had and, and
kind of pick out, you know, pick out what I was going to do with
the different cases and stuff. And I had to get creative.
So what has been, what has been your favorite assignment so far throughout your
career? I really enjoyed being a sergeant and a
patrol sergeant. I'm. Midnight hours
(16:20):
weren't great for me, but I learned a ton about
being, being a supervisor, being a leader
from that group of people, because it was an older group
for the most part. I was probably the, you know, fourth or fifth
youngest on that squad. So they had, they had a lot of
experience, but they were also kind of trying to lay low and, you know,
(16:43):
just hang out. And then I had a couple of really active
guys that were, that, you know, every night they're, you know, they're pulling over,
you know, 10 to 11 cars a night, you know, trying to. One guy was
a huge DWI guy. So I, I, I learned a lot from
that because again, like I said, I wasn't a big interact,
proactive patrol, patrol deputy. But
(17:05):
now, now that I had to kind of, you know, deal with what they were
doing, I needed to kind of step up my game to make sure that I
was, I was able to articulate what they were doing, which my investigative
background helped because I was able. Okay. You know, I would just kind of show
up and be like, hey, what do you got? And, you know,
they'd tell me and, you know, we'd kind of talk through things to make sure
(17:25):
we're all on the same page, you know, and then the
other, the other guys trying to get them motivated, I would, I, you know, we
didn't have lineup some nights. Some nights I would just be like, hey, get your,
get in your car. We're going down to. We had a, we had a
unincorporated area that didn't have a local police department right outside of
one of our cities. So I'm like, hey, let's go down there and pull some
(17:46):
cars over for two hours, you know, 11 o' clock to 1 o' clock in
the morning. You know, let's just, let's just, let's just do that, you know, write
a couple of tickets, you know, show some activity. And then I said, then you
guys can go relax, go check some parks and stuff. But let's, let's go
kind of hammer it for a little bit, you know, I tried. You know, it
wasn't always successful, but I tried. But I really enjoyed being. I really, really enjoyed
being a sergeant. Yeah, that. I've worked
(18:10):
with some guys like that and they're like, I actually had a really good sergeant.
I loved him to death. I always told
him. He always told me he was off reading policy somewhere and
I knew where he was at. He was at the sports complex studying that
policy. But I always knew that, you know, when I would
stumble in, I like being proactive at the time and, you know,
(18:32):
I'd stumble into something. I always knew he would be there to back me up
when it mattered, you know. And so I learned pretty
quickly that in law enforcement it takes a mix of
everybody, because if you have, if you have a. Just
a group of straight proactive people, well, then
the rest of stuff's getting neglected and not getting done. And so it
(18:54):
really, truly does take a mix of all kinds of people to have a successful
shift department. Everything. I, I
totally agree with that. We went, I went to a leadership class
here and I loved it because they, the, the guy basically used nothing but Band
of Brothers references, which I loved. I was like, I know that.
And he actually had a relationship, I think, with Richard Winners and
(19:17):
stuff. Like, he had interviewed him and talked to him at some point. So it
was really, it was really, really cool. But he made a point, he said, because
he was, he had retired as a lieutenant and he had, he
had a similar kind of situation. What I had was, uh, he was running a
midnight shift and he had a bunch of young guys that wanted to go be
proactive. He wanted. And he had a couple of older guys that just kind of
(19:38):
wanted to get to retirement. And the boss came to him and said, you
know, hey, we're not getting enough parking tickets out on this
shift. He's like, okay, no problem. So he
went to the older guys and said, hey, you guys are going to go write
parking tickets. And he's like. And they're like, yeah, sure, no problem.
That, you know, no worries. So they came back to him, you know,
(19:59):
three months later, and we're like, okay. So we, we see that the
parking tickets went up but you know, you know, officers A, B and C have
all the parking tickets and D, E and F have all the arrests. He
goes, yeah, what's the problem? You know,
and so, you know, he kind of had to have that fight. So
it definitely have to have a mix. And because, you know, all people are different,
(20:22):
you got to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. Like I had, I
had a female deputy that worked for me on midnights. She was like, mom,
you know, she took care of everybody and
she, she wasn't going to go over, pull over cars and write tickets and do
all other stuff. But she, outside of work, she was
a social worker. She had a social work background. She was
(20:44):
at the time on our crisis negotiation team. So I knew when I had
a difficult person to deal with, she was going
to be able to go there and, and, and talk and be that communicator.
You know, I had, I had a tactical guy who was kind of on his
way out of being t. You know, being. Being on the, the TAC team, but
he still had that background. And I knew if I had a situation we had
(21:08):
to clear, clear, you know, clear a building or something, you know, I was going
to lean on him. So, you know, just finding, finding. Finding the right
people for the. Right, for the right things. It's awesome. I love
it. How did you
decide that you wanted to write a book? Like, how did you end
up going down that route? I know you said your English major. Yes. Has it
(21:30):
always been kind of something you'd wanted to do?
Theoretically, yes. It's something I always wanted to do. I,
I've always had an imagination. I've always had
ideas for stories. I'd write things when I was a kid, but I didn't really
have the background in the structure and stuff. And to me,
Price, you know, stupidly, when I was in college, I, I
(21:53):
saw, I, I studied the literature. I didn't really take a lot of creative writing
classes. I ended up taking, I think, one or two creative writing
classes, which I, I did well in both of them and
produced some, you know, some interesting stuff. But I never, I never studied
how to write, but I wanted to be a writer. So in
college I came up with this idea and I've been running. I started running with
(22:15):
it while I was. When I wasn't studying up in the yard tower. I was
also working on this book and I wanted it to be something, but
I didn't have quite the motivation. It was kind of more of a
side hobby past the time and,
you know, I figured basically there's always, there's always time for that.
And the, the
(22:39):
difference was in 2022, my father passed away
in April, just after his birthday, right before Easter.
It, it was a shock when it happened, but it wasn't surprising. Like, he had
had poor health for a number of years. So
it was about a month later that I was working at midnight shift and I
(22:59):
came up with this, this idea and I had a log line. And the log
line was I'd been listening to a ton of true crime podcasts because
again, on midnights for a long time I listened to classic rock radio. Then I
moved to sports talk radio. And after a while I moved over to
podcasts. And that's how I got into podcasting too. We got a lot of times
best on overnight. Yep. And so
(23:23):
I started listening to true crime podcasts. So I, I, I had a
couple that I really, really liked. And again, this
idea popped in my head. It was basically like a true kind, it was like
a true crime podcast idea. It was, you know, what if you
had grown up your entire life knowing you were, you know, knowing you were adopted,
but at that time in your life when you wanted to find out what, what
(23:44):
your, who your real parents were and what your past was really
like, you did one of those DNA tests and it came back and you
know, you know, it wasn't that, you know, your, your, your ancestors were serial killers.
It was that your mother was the unknown
victim of a cold case homicide. And what does that do? And
so like I said, It's 2 o' clock in the morning. It was, I won't
(24:07):
use the Q word, but it was rather uneventful. Like
even though even the radio was, was nothing was chirping.
And I, I, this idea popped in my head and I was, I was on
a double, actually. I had worked the whole sea line and it was work.
I gone into the overnight and I was doing the
head bobs and yo, this idea popped in my head and I'm sitting at my
(24:28):
desk, I was supposed to be going through reports and I was like, I need
to write this down. So I got a blank piece of paper out and I
just, you know, it was like the old days when like, oh, I got this
idea, let me put it down. And so I started writing it out, started working
on it, started creating some of these characters. And
while I was doing it, that's, that's when I kind of get the inspiration that
as interesting as that log line was, it was going to be more interesting if
(24:51):
I Put it from the perspective of a police officer,
you know, because that's, that's what I know. I know, I know cops.
I know how it would work. You know, and again, a local guy, not, you
know, not a FBI agent, not a, you know, high placed, you know,
super technical, super trained guy. I said, give me a rookie, give me
a guy who's brand new to this, and put him in the
(25:14):
middle of it somehow. So, and that's what I did. So I created my
character Mike. And he's, he's, he's that legacy guy. His,
his dad was the police chief. His dad passed away
about seven years before the beginning of where the book begins.
And they didn't have a very good relationship. And now
he's trying his hand at law enforcement because he doesn't know what to do. He's
(25:36):
24. Completely lost him. And so I was like, you know, that was very much
me at the time. Like, I have no idea what the heck I'm doing. And
when I wound up starting, you know, starting to work in law enforcement
and, you know, he finds out that, you know, we have, we have
this, this whole log line background of the cold case. Well, he finds out that
his dad was the first officer on scene. You know,
(25:57):
you know, and, and for, you know, it's been 40 years since this all happened.
And now, you know, True Crime Podcaster is, is one of my, one
of the major characters in, in the book. And so he introduces this
idea and, you know, so now Mike's got to figure
out, you know, well, how did I not know about this, about my dad? You
know, yeah, we have a great relationship, but figured I would have known this.
(26:18):
And so he starts looking into it, and
then he stumbles upon his own murder case.
Wow. And he's the first officer on scene. And there's a lot of parallels
and, you know, where does he go from here? And that's, that's where
the, the novel, you know, it kind of grew out of that.
I love that. And I was reading your bio.
(26:41):
It's a series of three books. It's, it's going to be. The first
book came out last October, second book's coming out the end of
August, and the third book,
I have about one and a half scenes written so
far. So. But I'm aiming for next spring. I,
I'm learning the whole marketing end of things. Trying to, trying
(27:03):
to time it just right so that I can capitalize
on a couple of, a couple of different things that are happening. Like I'm releasing
the Second book right around, there's a big conference of mystery
writers in New Orleans that I'm going to. So I'm releasing it just before
that happens. It's the, a couple days after Labor Day, so I'm
getting that out right around then so I can bring those books with me to,
(27:25):
to the thing. It's, to the conference. There's a lot of readers that go to
that. So hopefully I can kind of build up something there. And then
in New York we have in this, in the fall,
specifically spring in the fall, we have what are called street fairs, where,
you know, vendors are just out on the street. I've done a couple of warm
up ones back in June and
(27:48):
a couple weeks ago, but in, in September with the, the foliage
and all this stuff, all these different communities have, have their stuff and
they have people from New York City and from all over the place that are
coming to, to these areas. So,
so I definitely want to have the second book out for that and then the
third book I want to get out for the springtime so that I can hit
all those spring shows too. So I love that. How long
(28:11):
does, does the process take of writing one of these
books? All right, so the first one,
I started writing in 2022 and I
thought I knew what I was doing, but again didn't take a lot of creative
writing classes. So I, I had to go find those books that were on a
shelf somewhere. I dragged them out and I'm learning, I'm reading and I'm reading and
(28:32):
I'm reading and I'm like, all right, I kind of get this. So I'm
writing and I'm doing some stuff. And then
I went back to podcasts and I found a ton of podcasts with professional
book coaches and all these different people. And they
described the whole process of what I needed to do. I was like,
so I'm starting to learn the process learning about how to write.
(28:54):
And there was one specific podcast because I was having problems
structuring the story and a specific
podcast did a multi part episode, multi part episodes
on a certain structure called Save the Cat. It's, it's
basically a storytelling method that are used a lot for movies
which spoke to me and when and it basically the.
(29:17):
The host did comparisons between the
writing of the Hunger Games and how
this structure worked with the Hunger Games. I'm like, okay, I saw those movies,
you know, and, and how, and how that works. So that really spoke to me.
And so once I had that, I structured the book. So I lost a lot
of time doing that, but I had the ideas. So I finished
(29:40):
writing in the fall
of. So I started writing at 22. I finished the first
draft at the end of 2023, and all the
podcasts and professionals that I had listened to
had said, all right, you got to take a month off. You got to put
it away for a month because you're too close to it. You need to put
(30:01):
it away, set it down, and go back after a month. So I went
back after a month, and I started editing, and I'm like, okay, crap, this is
terrible. So I'm going through and fixing things, and,
you know, I really. I really got hung up after a while on
the first scene of the book. I'm like, I don't want it to start here,
but it has to start here if you want it to all work out. And
(30:22):
I'm hem and hauling going back and forth. So I finished. I
finished the second draft, and I gave it a little bit of breathing room,
and I did a third draft. And then I'm like, okay, what am I doing
here? So you kind of get to a
path that deviates at this point, so you can go what's called the traditional
route. And what you do is you send what are called query letters out
(30:44):
to agents. You got to find an agent first. That's how
this typically works. And it can take a long time
to find an agent. And you basically send. Send a
letter and say, you know, hey, I have this book, yada, yada, yada. And if
they're interested, they'll say, all right, send me, you know, 10
pages, 100 pages. Send me whatever. And they'll read it, and they'll say, okay,
(31:06):
I think I can sell this. I'll sign you.
And then you go through the whole process where they'll contact all their
contacts in the publishing houses, and they'll try to sell that book. And,
you know, depending on your luck, your luck, your talent,
the quality of your agent and everything, you can get in a bidding war, and
you can get a lot of money for them to buy your book and to
(31:28):
do everything, But a lot of that's out of your hands, right?
And sometimes with publishers, you know, they. You know,
they may not like your title, so they'll change the title. They have their
own book design, their cover designer, so they'll design your cover. You know, they might
give you, you know, give you, like, you know, hey, what do you think of
this? You like this, right? Okay, good. You know, kind of thing. But again,
(31:49):
I do. I haven't Worked with, with that. But this is kind of the, the,
the stories I got. So I was like, I really don't
want to do that. And at the same time, I have
a partner of mine, I've worked with him. He's got six months less than
me on the job. He started right after me. He's a,
an established horror writer, and he's. And he's been doing it
(32:11):
since probably the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. So he's got,
you know, you know, almost, almost a decade in, in this.
And he. So I started, you know, you know, kind of, you know,
getting in his ear because right around the time I finished,
he, he got hurt. He got hurt on a job. So
he was on light duty working a desk. I'm a patrol sergeant. My
(32:34):
desk is right next to what we call the, we call it the cog, the
communications area. So I just
kind of, you know, I pick his brain every once in a while. Ask him.
And he said, he goes, you can go traditional, but you're gonna have to wait.
Or you can do what he did and go indie
publishing or self publishing. And, you know, you can make a lot of
(32:56):
your own decisions and stuff. So I was like, that's. I think that's it. I
think that's what I want to do. I want to have some control over this.
I want to do this. So I went on a website called
Reedsy, and it's kind of a,
A, A place where you, you know, professionals can put up, put
the, put up there, you know, advertise for themselves and writers can kind of. And
they kind of play the middle person between them. So I found an
(33:19):
editor. She lives in Ohio. No, not Ohio.
Excuse me, Missouri. So I liked what she
had. I liked some of the reviews. So, you know, sent her the manuscript and
she was fabulous. You know, she, she checked with me every week. She's
like, okay, I'm this far in. I like what I'm reading so far. I like
this, this and this. I'm like, okay, cool. Some feedback.
(33:42):
And it took her about five weeks to finish up.
And so she sent me all the corrections. And then
I got those corrections like, holy.
I have pictures from last summer when, when I was going through it
and I just had, I had. For, for some reason I wanted to write it
(34:03):
down. So I went through all her notes and I wrote things down like, you
got to fix this and you got to do this. And after a while, I
just started going through the document. In the meantime, I
found another professional that does book
Covers and worked with her. I told her what I wanted, so she's like,
okay. She sent me two proofs. My wife and
(34:24):
daughter and I were on vacation and she. I got the email while we were
walking around Salem, Massachusetts. And so I was like,
oh, hey. So I showed him the first one. They're like.
And then I showed him the second one, the one I liked. And they go,
yeah, that's it. And it was, it was love at first sight. Like, I had
zero, zero corrections with it. She nailed, she nailed it. So
(34:47):
then part, then part of the editing contract
that I had, she. She also did a
like a 90 minute Zoom call with me, which, where I got to ask her
anything. So I asked her about that scene that I wanted to move. She's like,
no, it works. Leave it alone. I'm like, okay, cool. And, you know, she just
kind of really talked it up and gave me so much positive stuff. I was
(35:08):
like, this is great. Okay, cool. So I finished all the edits, then
I found a
proofreader. And this guy was, this guy was awesome. Like,
he was so, like, he, he, he was like a
type A personality that just was like, you know, I'm here, I'm
doing this. You know, he took it on like a personal challenge that he was
(35:31):
going to do this. And he worked so quickly. Like, he's like, oh, it's going
to take me three weeks. He was done in like nine days. And,
and you know, he didn't. And his, his rates were really good too.
I just got done working with him on the second book and basically
he was, he, he was completely done before the first payment even got to him.
And I was like, okay, cool.
(35:52):
So, so I had a finished manuscript, I had a cover, I had everything. And
I'm like, all right, now I have to self publish this. I still don't have
the confidence. So last year I went to
a yearly conference called Killer Nashville.
Kind of splurged. My, my wife and daughter took a girls
trip and went to India. So I, I
(36:15):
couldn't, I couldn't go. I couldn't take that much time off of work, um, with
that stuff I had going on. So they went on a girls trip. So they
were away. So I'm like, I'm gonna go to this conference. So I went
there and I met so many great writers and
editors and people. And I'm. And after doing that and talking to
people, they had breakout sessions all over the place. And I did a lot of
(36:35):
the business oriented stuff of, you know, how do you act Like a professional
writer. How do you, you know, how do you do the taxes, end of things?
So I did all the business stuff and I was like, all right, I'm ready.
So at that conference, I decided I was going to release the book on October
29th. I just made the decision. I said, send it,
you know, because if I don't, I gotta, I just gotta, I just gotta do
it. If I don't, if I don't do it now, it's not gonna happen. So.
(36:58):
And you know, it's been kind of a roller coaster ride ever since.
I love that. Where, where can I get the book at? So you can get
at my website if you'll
bear with me a second. This is the book. It's called Our
lady of the Overlook. It is available on
my website directly from me, where you can also Pre order the second book.
(37:24):
And that is rlcarpentierwriter.com.
you can get it there. I'll personalize it, I'll sign it. I throw a
bunch of really cool swag in there also.
Or you can go to Amazon, whereas it's available there for
paperback and ebook, if you're an ebook person. I do
(37:45):
not have an audiobook yet, which is sad because I'm a huge. Yeah, podcasts,
audiobooks, you know, so it's kind of sad that I don't have an audiobook
yet. But working on that, that's, that's, that's definitely in
the works again because I, I did things so quickly. After I
made that decision. I learned again. I, I had to just send
it and learn, learn, you know, Learn, learn what I did wrong. I knew I
(38:08):
was going to do a trilogy, so first book was kind of, you know,
haphazardly released. This one's a little bit better and I'm
hoping by the third one I have, I had kind of have my.
Everything kind of smoothed out a little bit more. So
it's awesome. So I gotta touch on. Yeah. Because you brought it up
earlier. Who's your sports teams?
(38:30):
My sports teams used to be. Because I fell out
of. I fell out of professional sports after
Covid and everything in 2020 and
2021, I just stopped watching all that stuff. And
at around the same time also, we, we moved and when we did, we cut,
we cut cable, so we only have streaming, so can't get all
(38:53):
the sports. But I grew up a huge Yankees fan. I've
been watching Yankees since 1994, so I've
always been a Yankees fan. I never really
had a football team. I appreciated the way that
the Patriots played, obviously, you know, they won a ton,
but, you know, you know, but I was never, like,
(39:16):
a huge Patriots fan. Like, you know, I, I, I, I used to watch.
Well, before I got into fantasy sports, I used to watch football
basically on Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl. Like, I never paid
attention to it. So. But then my, my partner from
patrol, older guy, he
brought me in on fantasy baseball and fantasy football. And then I
(39:39):
watched every week. I knew, I knew everything that was going on, but I
never had, But I never. But I never. But I never had a team in,
in football. Grew up. We, where I
grew up in Albany, New York, we had the Devils farm team for
hockey. So I guess I was kind of a Devils fan. Like, I knew all
those guys, you know, before they, before they reached the, the
(40:02):
NHL. And I was never a big
basketball guy at all. You know, it's funny,
growing up in Oklahoma, I've never really
asked my bro this, but he was a huge Yankees fan. And
98, 99, I was 10 or 11. And that's when
I, you know, of course, the kid of the 90s. I grew up a King
(40:23):
Griffey Jr. Fan. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But once I started
really, like, developing, like, my own fandom,
I, I think it's just, you know, I gotta poke the bear with my brother
a little bit. I grew up a huge Mets fan, and
I love my losers. Yeah. And,
(40:44):
you know, still to this day, we're actually talking about trying to go down to
New York in September and watch going to a game in Yankee Stadium and
a game at Citi Field, because neither one of us has ever been. Oh,
no. Okay. Yeah, I've been. I've been to the new. Oh, I went to the
old Yankee Stadium a bunch of times. Been to
the new stadium. We used to go. A bunch. A bunch of us from,
(41:07):
from the job used to go down every opening day.
It was kind of a tradition. We rent a bus and we'd. We'd
tailgate and, you know, get just
disgustingly drunk. Yep, it was terrible.
And then I've been to Citi Field once. Friend
(41:28):
of my wife's, um, is a huge Mets fan, and for her
birthday one year, they, they. I think they. I don't know
if it was a suite or just like, like a group of. A group of
seats all together for her birthday. And, and we got invited along, so I was
like, all right, I'll go.
Yep. I, it's just one of those things, like, you know, my
(41:49):
brother's older than me, so I think I always had to like the opposite teams
growing up. Oklahoma, he's, you know, college football's king.
Oh, absolutely. Yep. And he loves the University of Oklahoma, and I'm a big
Oklahoma State fan. And so, like, there's not one team that we
agree on. Like, it was college football
is funny. We, I, I, I did computer forensics
(42:12):
for a while, and the Secret Service has a program
where they have a school in Birmingham, right outside of
Birmingham, Alabama. So, yeah, I've actually, I've actually had a partner of mine go through
that. Okay. Yeah, so we went down there, uh,
so I went down there for a couple classes, but we did our month long
class and we all got there. And we're from all over
(42:34):
the, the country, obviously, and it was, it
was August, so you're just in that preseason mode. Yeah. And,
you know, we're from all over the place and everybody's talking. Actually, we had a,
there was a guy from Durant, Oklahoma. It was in my
class, and a bunch of guys from Texas.
(42:54):
Our class, our class president was from Washington State, so we
called him, we called him the Cougar. But then me
and my buddy from New Jersey are like, what do we have?
Rutgers. We don't really have,
we don't have a big college football team up by us. And
ironically, the, the guys from Indiana were not Notre Dame fans,
(43:18):
which I thought was ironic, you know, but maybe. It was their team.
You know, I don't remember now. I don't know, maybe, maybe like Ohio State or
something. Yeah, or Indiana, you know? Right.
You know, but they were not Notre Dame fans.
My cousin who actually lives in Oklahoma, ginormous
(43:38):
Notre Dame fan. Like, he's got, he's got, he's got the Fighting Irish tattoo on
his arm. Like he's a huge Notre Dame fan. So,
you know, it's funny, I think they're kind of like the
Yankees or like the Lakers and that they're kind of a national
brand. Yeah. And my roommate actually is a huge Notre
Dame fan, you know, and he lives in Oklahoma, so it's kind of funny how
(43:59):
that works out. But we, so we, we went to, we went
to the University of Alabama. While we were there, we got, we got, we got
a hookup through their campus police. So we got to go in the locker room,
we got to see Joe Namath's locker. We went through,
we went out on a field. We didn't meet Nick
Saban, though. So we did, you know, so that was
(44:21):
cool, that was a really cool experience. So we did a lot of Fun stuff.
And then again, it was preseason for the NFL, so we actually drove to
Atlanta and that was the only NFL game I've ever been to. We saw,
I don't even know who the Falcons played, but we had, we had decent seats.
Yeah, but we, we did that. And then
a couple thing we did a couple times was the Birmingham Barons are
(44:43):
right there. So we, we went there. I got to see my Michael Jordan, the
Michael Jordan jersey that they had there. Yep. So.
But yeah, it was a cool experience to experience other sports because, you know, mostly
a bunch of guys, you know, all locked together. What are we going to do?
Oh, yeah, you're going to talk sports. So
what I want to. As we start to kind of wrap up, I want to
(45:03):
ask you one thing. If you could give
advice to somebody who wants to get in law enforcement, what's your one piece of
advice you'd give them?
I would say, depending on where they're starting at.
I honestly don't recommend the criminal justice background.
(45:23):
Have, have a different skill, have a different
point of view that you're coming from. You know, I,
you know, I've seen guys vary from. Again, I was English major, so,
you know, so they, they tap that ability because I, I proofread everything
for my sergeant, you know, my first, the first sergeant I had,
I proofread everything for him and now, now he's my boss again. He's the captain.
(45:47):
He's the captain, I'm the lieutenant. I'm still proofreading things for him
when he doesn't use AI. So having that skill,
you know, of being able to write, it helped me as a, as a supervisor.
It helped me, you know, helped me articulate things as an investigator where I had
adas telling me, you know, hey, I, I read your complaints.
Your complaints are fabulous. Like, I don't have to worry about, you know, I see
(46:09):
your name come across and I know everything is going to be good. I'm like,
well, thank you, you know, or, you know, having that skill to teach, to
teach younger deputies or deputies that don't. Didn't
have quite the, the writing skills to help them learn
how to articulate and how to use, you know, some of the proper grammar. But
like our sheriff, he started out, he, he worked, he worked,
(46:32):
he worked his way from corrections up to. He retired as a captain and
then came back, got elected three years ago to, to
sheriff. He was an electrician. Wow. You
know, so having, having other skills
that you bring to law enforcement, law, you know, the academy and,
you know, FTO and All those things will teach you how to be a cop.
(46:54):
If you have the ability to bring something else. There's.
I think that's helpful. I agree wholeheartedly. My,
my bachelor's degrees in geography, so. Yeah. Yeah.
And I can't think of a way that helps, but I'm sure it does. You
know, in some strange way I. Can, I got a lot of useless knowledge
up here. Yeah, My, my fellow
(47:16):
lieutenant has a psychology degree. Like, he goes, you know, and he's like, the only
thing I could have done was probably this. Because it's, you know, it's,
it's, it seems useless. But if you, you apply those things, you
learn, you know, or, and, and definitely don't
either start in corrections and learn how to talk to people or
(47:36):
have a different job for a couple years, you know, military or,
you know, something where you're acting with
people, something where you're, you're working hard. Don't,
don't just bring something to the job. Don't,
don't think the job's going to bring you everything. Because I've seen a lot of
smart young folks who come to the job and don't have any other
(47:58):
life experience and it takes them a while to get
into it and they're like, oh, well, I took criminal justice and I, you
know, I know everything. It's like you don't know everything because you don't
have any experiences. You know, bring, bring, bring something else to the job.
I agree wholeheartedly. Working everybody get in contact with you at. If they
want to reach out. All right, so Again, website is
(48:21):
www.rlcarpentierwriter.
you can reach me at R.L. carpentier
III or the, the Three Eyes, the Roman numeral. So R.L.
carpentier Three Eyes gmail.com. that's the direct way to
get a hold of me on email. I'm also on Facebook at
trying to remember what the latest moniker was, but I think it's R.L. carpentier, debut
(48:44):
author, which I have to change because going in my second book. So now I
have to have to say something else. I don't know what that'll be. And I
think somewhere near them on Instagram. I'm not really good with the social media
stuff. Everybody says you have to be, but I'm not great at that. But
the website's the major way if you want to follow me on Facebook. I do
post like I post post the reveal of the, of the second book
(49:06):
when I got the proof copy the other day. So every once in a while
and through my website you can get on my mailing list which
other than last week I, I send out every week and I'm,
it's basically just kind of, you know, vomiting onto the screen a little
bit like, hey, I did this this week. What did you do? You know, so
I have a couple of regular things I do with that but I keep people
(49:27):
posted pretty much on what's going on. You know, writing wise, life
wise and professional wise also. I love it. Well, when
the second book gets closer, you're welcome back and we can talk about that
second book. Alrighty. All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate
you Brent. Check, check him out. Check his book out and give him,
give him some support. I'm all about helping other first
(49:49):
responders out. Give him support, support on his book and check
his book out. Have a good night. Good night.
Guys, welcome to the first responder playbook. It is my pleasure to welcome
Rodney Carpentier to an episode tonight with
us. Rodney is a former law enforcement officer,
mystery writer, a man of many
talents. Rodney, give yourself a
good proper introduction. All right, so I'll just clarify
(00:23):
one thing. I'm actually still active law enforcement. About
to hit 17 years. So I have in New York State. We retire at 20,
so I have about three years left. I have been in law
enforcement for, well, counting my corrections time.
I've been, I've been in just, just about 20 years and I've gone
from correction officer to sheriff's office where I
(00:46):
worked patrol for a number of years, became an investigator, got involved
in computer forensics and financial crimes
before making sergeant, which I was the patrol sergeant for
just shy of 10 years. I worked
all three shifts, moved into an administrative role about a year
ago and recently within the last two weeks,
(01:09):
I got promoted to lieutenant. Still, still doing the administrative stuff, but
kind of the next level up. In the meantime,
back in 2022 I was working one of those midnight
shifts as a sergeant and it was kind of slow and I came up with
an idea to become a. I came up with an idea
for a book and I ended up writing it.
(01:31):
And about two and a half years later I released it. That's awesome.
Was law enforcement always the goal? No,
I was, I was an English major in college studying
literature. There was this kind of far fetched
dream of becoming a lawyer, but the more
lawyery stuff I took pre
(01:55):
law type things, I'm like this, this isn't it. So
I didn't really kind of know what I was doing. I graduated at 22
or yeah, I graduated 22. I got married and we
moved to LA and looking for work in Los
Angeles in 2004. There wasn't a lot, you
know, I was working for like, you know, 10 or 11 bucks an hour. I
(02:18):
had student loans I was trying to pay off and
they had a big banner over one of the streets over
Hollywood Boulevard actually said join the lapd. So I
said, hey, why not? So I started going through their process and
that kind of inspired me to look more into the profession. Read
(02:38):
a fabulous non fiction book by
a New York City police officer called Blue Blood by Edward Conlon.
And that kind of, you know, romanticized it a little bit, but
also was very gritty and very real about what the job entailed.
I became more and more interested. We kind of
(02:59):
decided to leave California when I
and you know, dropped out of the LAPD. Process. When I got back to New
York in 05, I started taking civil service tests.
And a year, a year or so later, that's when I got picked up by
state corrections. And it's all kind of, you know, been. Been going since then,
so wasn't the initial goal, but it was, it was
(03:20):
still early on thing. That's awesome. I,
I can relate to that a little bit because my degree is not in
criminal. My original bachelor's degree is not in criminal justice. And
I never wanted to really be in law enforcement either. And then it just kind
of hit me and, you know, here I am, gosh,
14, 15 years later, counting my dispatch time. So
(03:42):
some of the things that once it finally hits you, you're like, man, I'm addicted.
I'm staying. Yeah, it's, It's. It's weird. You know, I hate to
say I fell into it, but I, I kind of. I kind of did. It
wasn't, you know, I work with a lot of, you know, young
kids now, especially in my role as, as a sergeant and
lieutenant. And some, some people
(04:03):
dreamed about this their entire life. And, you know, they prepped and they
came from those families. We recently hired a young man.
He's like 22 years old. And I'm like, oh, I remember that.
But he's, He's a legacy. His. I think his
uncle's a police chief in one of. One of the cities in the county. His
dad was a police officer. His brother
(04:26):
works for one of the towns, and so
we picked him up at the, at the sheriff's office. So he's kind of, you
know, his cousin actually works for us also. He's. He's a sergeant. I worked
with his cousin for years. So it's. It's interesting to see kind of the legacies,
but then also the people that just kind of fell into it, like our,
Our. Our chief, our chief deputy right now. She started in the nypd,
(04:49):
but prior to that she was a.
She was going to college in New York City and actually has a Master of
Fine Arts in dance. But she kind
of, you know, she kind of had some more conservative leanings than
a lot of her classmates. And she's like, I don't want to be, you know,
in this. So she looking for a job. She wound up in the
(05:11):
nypd. Did that for a couple years, took the test results. She actually
started at the. So about a year after I did,
and I worked with her. She's very smart, she's
tenacious, and she's worked all the way up to chief. And you know,
and so again it's, you know, she kind of fell into the job and here
she is running, you know, a department of, you know, 100, 110
(05:33):
people. That's awesome. Yeah, you gotta love stories like that.
Can you talk about your time in state corrections? I mean, sure, A lot of
times those are the worst of the worst. And corrections
doesn't get the spotlight it deserves, but the, it really teaches you how to
interact with people. Yeah, it was definitely one of those things.
When I was interviewing originally with the sheriff's office, a lot of
(05:57):
the, a lot of the people I was, I was interviewing with that had kind
of were at the investigator slash sergeant level at the time had started at the
county jail. So they kind of had that corrections background. And so when I
spoke about that, it was definitely one of those things that kind of get me
a foot in like, you know, I wasn't a criminal justice guy, but you know.
Yeah, interacting with people and having to use the skill,
(06:18):
your interpersonal skills, because when you're a CEO, you don't have
necessarily all those tools on your belt that you do as a police officer.
It's probably changed a little bit now, but for the most part, no, it's just,
you know, you're in a housing unit, you know, Saturday morning you got
to get everybody up and cleaning and, and before the sergeant comes through and yells
at you, you know, the only thing you have is, know,
(06:40):
sheer will and you know, come on guys, you know,
but having that, having that presence and building that respect and that rapport. Yeah, you
rely a lot more on, on your mouth than you do your hands or your
tools. So. But my experience state corrections
started at a facility
called Solomon Correctional Facility. It was a max. We
(07:03):
had actually had a couple of well known
New York state inmates. First was Arthur Shawcross. He was
a serial killer operating in the Rochester area back
in the 80s. He,
he had finished out his, he finished out his sentence there. He passed away
while incarcerated just after I got on.
(07:26):
And another one we had, there was David Berkowitz. The Son of Sam
killer was one of our, was one of our inmates too. Met him a bunch
of times because being the new Jack while I was there, I
got stuck. My first, my first two week assignment was in Visit
Frisk. So every day I had to bring everybody in
and at the end of the day I got to see everybody out. So
(07:48):
you know, you know, you learn, you learn a lot about life that way too.
But you know, Berkowitz was in. I Think like I said, I had
that, had that for two weeks maybe.
And he came in probably a good six or seven of the. Of the 10
days I was in that rotation. So. And we had a couple
other guys there. There was a mafia killer by the name of Mean Joe
(08:10):
Sullivan was there. So you meet some interesting people in
correctional, in the correctional world. And also while I was
there, there was uh, a singer songwriter
around the same time. Uh, he was very popular. He was popular in the
American Idol scene. His name is Gavin DeGraw. Yeah, he had,
(08:31):
he had a song because Wanna Be or I Don't Want to Be. And
the first line of the song is I don't want to be a prison. You
know, I don't want to be a prison guard. Or, you know, I'm nothing but
a prison guard's son. His family were all prison guards at Sullivan Correctional
Facility. There were a large
contiguous. So he was, he was from New York and uh, his family worked there.
(08:52):
But my stint at Sullivan was actually only about two or three weeks long.
There was another facility that was actually closer to where I was living at the
time. So I moved to a facility called Mid
Orange, which was a medium a. Whereas we had
two rows of razor wire fence,
but it was actually an outside facility. We had
(09:15):
cottages, we had the Puppies Behind Bars program.
We had. I mean it was, you know, we called it Camp Cupcake we
call, you know, it was. It was not a Max Max prison. There were a
lot of older inmates there. There were.
We had a lot of guys that were in for vehicular manslaughter
based on like, you know, like a DWI kind of situation. So you
(09:38):
didn't have like hard hardcore people
there. I had, I was local so
I, I kind of. The first year year I was there,
I kind of monopolized the. The fact that I could come in at different times.
I was, I was flexible. So I, I would get,
you know, I got chances to go on trips because in
(10:02):
New York State one of the big things. Because a lot of the
employees of state corrections all live up in the, the northern and
western part of the state, but a lot of, a lot of our facilities are
in a southern tier down towards New York City. So these guys have to
commute and a lot of them will
do swaps, so they'll do twos and fours, fours and eights. Some.
(10:24):
I knew a guy who basically swapped work the entire winter so he could
have the summer off because he worked at a racetrack. So they could do, they
could do all these Things, but I was the, you know, so they were, they
were kind of set on their schedules and things like that. Whereas me being a
local guy, you know, the sergeant could call me up the day before and say,
hey, you want to work six two tomorrow? You know, yeah, I got you boss,
no problem. So I, you know, I was, I was one of those
(10:48):
Swiss army knives for a little bit, multi tools for them.
Then I took a bid. I started getting serious about becoming a police
officer. So I took a bid in our yard tower, which was
a solo post. You basically didn't even enter the facility. Like I came
in. I was one of the few guys that actually changed into my uniform at
work. A lot of guys just drove in in the uniform. So I would go
(11:09):
in, I would change, I would walk upstairs, I check in with the sergeant, make
sure he knew I was there. I'd go downstairs, I would see
the, the, the armory guy. He'd hand me my,
my.38 and my, my chemical weapons.
I would see the outside roundsman and he would drive me out to my post.
I'd crawl up there and I wouldn't see anybody until the, the afternoon guy came
(11:31):
and got me. So I, you know, unless the sergeant came out or, you
know, there was some kind of random inspection but typically didn't happen.
So what I would do, I had a big old lunchbox because I would
have to bring all my supplies because nobody was bringing me anything. And I, at
bottom of that, I'd hide all my study books for civil service tests. So I
sat up there for about six months and I studied my butt off.
(11:54):
And I wound up. So I took the county test and getting a
95 on that. I took the New York State police test. I did
not do so well on that. I don't to this day I don't know what
happened, but you know, fate. I got a 70 on that.
But it was a different, different kind of test the way that they, the. The
questions that they had on that. So after, after I took those
(12:16):
tests, I wanted to change a pace. So I bid
a role as the disciplinary officer. So I
worked directly for a lieutenant and who was kind of a hard ass.
And my job was to collect
the disciplinaries from the, the, the chart sergeant every
day the, the. And I would bring them up, but I have to
(12:39):
serve them. And then we would randomly do hearings, you know,
lieutenant come in, you know, you know, with, you know, with
an itch in her butt. And she'd be like, all right, give me some people.
And you know, we'd call a bunch of people and we'd do hearings. We'd have
to, you know, I was responsible for that, but working for her was
very beneficial. She. She took care of me at times. We had a pretty
(13:01):
good working relationship. And as the, you
know, as the spring came into summer, I started. I
got canvas and I started going through the background investigation and everything. So I told
her what I was doing. I said, hey, listen, you know, I'm not going to
be here much longer. She's like, that's okay. She goes, when you're ready to
go, let me know. Let the scheduling lieutenant know, but,
(13:22):
you know, whatever you have to do. So I got a call for
an interview in September, on September 11, actually,
of. Of 2008.
The interview was maybe 10 minutes long. And Chief's
like, all right, so go get your medical done. So
got my medical done. And I called him back. I said, hey, I'm all set.
(13:44):
He goes, I said, should I be putting in my notice? He goes,
yeah, like, okay, so it's my credit. I went to work
that weekend. I went in on Saturday and filled out all my, all my
slips to take off the, the two weeks pretty much. I
banged in sick on Sunday. I went on Monday. I did my job for about
an hour and a half till a scheduling lieutenant came in and
(14:07):
turned everything. And he goes, so when do you want to leave? I said, about
10 minutes ago and never looked back.
That's awesome. When you got hired at the sheriff's office, did you go directly into
a patrol position? Yes, police academy first.
We have a six month academy, so that was
basically September through February. Yeah. And then went straight to
(14:29):
patrol. And I worked as. As
a patrol deputy. I worked all three shifts. In New
York, the sheriff is responsible for a ton. We do
because we run the jail, obviously, but we also do all the civil process and
serve the process of the court. So I kind of fell into doing a lot
of that stuff as opposed to the more proactive,
(14:51):
you know, kind of interdiction stuff we had. We had a bunch of guys that
did that, but nobody else was doing the other stuff. So I kind of fell
into that or taking the walk in complaints. So I started
kind of doing more of that stuff. And
2012, I got picked to move into investigations
and I kind of started doing, you know, I got what I call the
(15:12):
mystery box. The. Our chief, who was an
investigator at the time, she had started a case on patrol that was just what
we call bad check complaint. Somebody wrote a check, couldn't cash it. And it
was connected to a couple of different things. And she actually
parlayed that into what ended up being like a large mortgage
fraud ring. And around the same time, we had a
(15:35):
task force with the FBI that was doing,
doing narcotics work and stuff. So they actually were starting up a white
collar unit. So they moved her over there. And when they did that, all her
open cases kind of went into the mystery box. And when I got there, the
sergeant says, he goes, you could have that. I'm like,
cool. So I had to kind of dig through there and
(15:57):
figure out what I had and, and
kind of pick out, you know, pick out what I was going to do with
the different cases and stuff. And I had to get creative.
So what has been, what has been your favorite assignment so far throughout your
career? I really enjoyed being a sergeant and a
patrol sergeant. I'm. Midnight hours
(16:20):
weren't great for me, but I learned a ton about
being, being a supervisor, being a leader
from that group of people, because it was an older group
for the most part. I was probably the, you know, fourth or fifth
youngest on that squad. So they had, they had a lot of
experience, but they were also kind of trying to lay low and, you know,
(16:43):
just hang out. And then I had a couple of really active
guys that were, that, you know, every night they're, you know, they're pulling over,
you know, 10 to 11 cars a night, you know, trying to. One guy was
a huge DWI guy. So I, I, I learned a lot from
that because again, like I said, I wasn't a big interact,
proactive patrol, patrol deputy. But
(17:05):
now, now that I had to kind of, you know, deal with what they were
doing, I needed to kind of step up my game to make sure that I
was, I was able to articulate what they were doing, which my investigative
background helped because I was able. Okay. You know, I would just kind of show
up and be like, hey, what do you got? And, you know,
they'd tell me and, you know, we'd kind of talk through things to make sure
(17:25):
we're all on the same page, you know, and then the
other, the other guys trying to get them motivated, I would, I, you know, we
didn't have lineup some nights. Some nights I would just be like, hey, get your,
get in your car. We're going down to. We had a, we had a
unincorporated area that didn't have a local police department right outside of
one of our cities. So I'm like, hey, let's go down there and pull some
(17:46):
cars over for two hours, you know, 11 o' clock to 1 o' clock in
the morning. You know, let's just, let's just, let's just do that, you know, write
a couple of tickets, you know, show some activity. And then I said, then you
guys can go relax, go check some parks and stuff. But let's, let's go
kind of hammer it for a little bit, you know, I tried. You know, it
wasn't always successful, but I tried. But I really enjoyed being. I really, really enjoyed
being a sergeant. Yeah, that. I've worked
(18:10):
with some guys like that and they're like, I actually had a really good sergeant.
I loved him to death. I always told
him. He always told me he was off reading policy somewhere and
I knew where he was at. He was at the sports complex studying that
policy. But I always knew that, you know, when I would
stumble in, I like being proactive at the time and, you know,
(18:32):
I'd stumble into something. I always knew he would be there to back me up
when it mattered, you know. And so I learned pretty
quickly that in law enforcement it takes a mix of
everybody, because if you have, if you have a. Just
a group of straight proactive people, well, then
the rest of stuff's getting neglected and not getting done. And so it
(18:54):
really, truly does take a mix of all kinds of people to have a successful
shift department. Everything. I, I
totally agree with that. We went, I went to a leadership class
here and I loved it because they, the, the guy basically used nothing but Band
of Brothers references, which I loved. I was like, I know that.
And he actually had a relationship, I think, with Richard Winners and
(19:17):
stuff. Like, he had interviewed him and talked to him at some point. So it
was really, it was really, really cool. But he made a point, he said, because
he was, he had retired as a lieutenant and he had, he
had a similar kind of situation. What I had was, uh, he was running a
midnight shift and he had a bunch of young guys that wanted to go be
proactive. He wanted. And he had a couple of older guys that just kind of
(19:38):
wanted to get to retirement. And the boss came to him and said, you
know, hey, we're not getting enough parking tickets out on this
shift. He's like, okay, no problem. So he
went to the older guys and said, hey, you guys are going to go write
parking tickets. And he's like. And they're like, yeah, sure, no problem.
That, you know, no worries. So they came back to him, you know,
(19:59):
three months later, and we're like, okay. So we, we see that the
parking tickets went up but you know, you know, officers A, B and C have
all the parking tickets and D, E and F have all the arrests. He
goes, yeah, what's the problem? You know,
and so, you know, he kind of had to have that fight. So
it definitely have to have a mix. And because, you know, all people are different,
(20:22):
you got to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. Like I had, I
had a female deputy that worked for me on midnights. She was like, mom,
you know, she took care of everybody and
she, she wasn't going to go over, pull over cars and write tickets and do
all other stuff. But she, outside of work, she was
a social worker. She had a social work background. She was
(20:44):
at the time on our crisis negotiation team. So I knew when I had
a difficult person to deal with, she was going
to be able to go there and, and, and talk and be that communicator.
You know, I had, I had a tactical guy who was kind of on his
way out of being t. You know, being. Being on the, the TAC team, but
he still had that background. And I knew if I had a situation we had
(21:08):
to clear, clear, you know, clear a building or something, you know, I was going
to lean on him. So, you know, just finding, finding. Finding the right
people for the. Right, for the right things. It's awesome. I love
it. How did you
decide that you wanted to write a book? Like, how did you end
up going down that route? I know you said your English major. Yes. Has it
(21:30):
always been kind of something you'd wanted to do?
Theoretically, yes. It's something I always wanted to do. I,
I've always had an imagination. I've always had
ideas for stories. I'd write things when I was a kid, but I didn't really
have the background in the structure and stuff. And to me,
Price, you know, stupidly, when I was in college, I, I
(21:53):
saw, I, I studied the literature. I didn't really take a lot of creative writing
classes. I ended up taking, I think, one or two creative writing
classes, which I, I did well in both of them and
produced some, you know, some interesting stuff. But I never, I never studied
how to write, but I wanted to be a writer. So in
college I came up with this idea and I've been running. I started running with
(22:15):
it while I was. When I wasn't studying up in the yard tower. I was
also working on this book and I wanted it to be something, but
I didn't have quite the motivation. It was kind of more of a
side hobby past the time and,
you know, I figured basically there's always, there's always time for that.
And the, the
(22:39):
difference was in 2022, my father passed away
in April, just after his birthday, right before Easter.
It, it was a shock when it happened, but it wasn't surprising. Like, he had
had poor health for a number of years. So
it was about a month later that I was working at midnight shift and I
(22:59):
came up with this, this idea and I had a log line. And the log
line was I'd been listening to a ton of true crime podcasts because
again, on midnights for a long time I listened to classic rock radio. Then I
moved to sports talk radio. And after a while I moved over to
podcasts. And that's how I got into podcasting too. We got a lot of times
best on overnight. Yep. And so
(23:23):
I started listening to true crime podcasts. So I, I, I had a
couple that I really, really liked. And again, this
idea popped in my head. It was basically like a true kind, it was like
a true crime podcast idea. It was, you know, what if you
had grown up your entire life knowing you were, you know, knowing you were adopted,
but at that time in your life when you wanted to find out what, what
(23:44):
your, who your real parents were and what your past was really
like, you did one of those DNA tests and it came back and you
know, you know, it wasn't that, you know, your, your, your ancestors were serial killers.
It was that your mother was the unknown
victim of a cold case homicide. And what does that do? And
so like I said, It's 2 o' clock in the morning. It was, I won't
(24:07):
use the Q word, but it was rather uneventful. Like
even though even the radio was, was nothing was chirping.
And I, I, this idea popped in my head and I was, I was on
a double, actually. I had worked the whole sea line and it was work.
I gone into the overnight and I was doing the
head bobs and yo, this idea popped in my head and I'm sitting at my
(24:28):
desk, I was supposed to be going through reports and I was like, I need
to write this down. So I got a blank piece of paper out and I
just, you know, it was like the old days when like, oh, I got this
idea, let me put it down. And so I started writing it out, started working
on it, started creating some of these characters. And
while I was doing it, that's, that's when I kind of get the inspiration that
as interesting as that log line was, it was going to be more interesting if
(24:51):
I Put it from the perspective of a police officer,
you know, because that's, that's what I know. I know, I know cops.
I know how it would work. You know, and again, a local guy, not, you
know, not a FBI agent, not a, you know, high placed, you know,
super technical, super trained guy. I said, give me a rookie, give me
a guy who's brand new to this, and put him in the
(25:14):
middle of it somehow. So, and that's what I did. So I created my
character Mike. And he's, he's, he's that legacy guy. His,
his dad was the police chief. His dad passed away
about seven years before the beginning of where the book begins.
And they didn't have a very good relationship. And now
he's trying his hand at law enforcement because he doesn't know what to do. He's
(25:36):
24. Completely lost him. And so I was like, you know, that was very much
me at the time. Like, I have no idea what the heck I'm doing. And
when I wound up starting, you know, starting to work in law enforcement
and, you know, he finds out that, you know, we have, we have
this, this whole log line background of the cold case. Well, he finds out that
his dad was the first officer on scene. You know,
(25:57):
you know, and, and for, you know, it's been 40 years since this all happened.
And now, you know, True Crime Podcaster is, is one of my, one
of the major characters in, in the book. And so he introduces this
idea and, you know, so now Mike's got to figure
out, you know, well, how did I not know about this, about my dad? You
know, yeah, we have a great relationship, but figured I would have known this.
(26:18):
And so he starts looking into it, and
then he stumbles upon his own murder case.
Wow. And he's the first officer on scene. And there's a lot of parallels
and, you know, where does he go from here? And that's, that's where
the, the novel, you know, it kind of grew out of that.
I love that. And I was reading your bio.
(26:41):
It's a series of three books. It's, it's going to be. The first
book came out last October, second book's coming out the end of
August, and the third book,
I have about one and a half scenes written so
far. So. But I'm aiming for next spring. I,
I'm learning the whole marketing end of things. Trying to, trying
(27:03):
to time it just right so that I can capitalize
on a couple of, a couple of different things that are happening. Like I'm releasing
the Second book right around, there's a big conference of mystery
writers in New Orleans that I'm going to. So I'm releasing it just before
that happens. It's the, a couple days after Labor Day, so I'm
getting that out right around then so I can bring those books with me to,
(27:25):
to the thing. It's, to the conference. There's a lot of readers that go to
that. So hopefully I can kind of build up something there. And then
in New York we have in this, in the fall,
specifically spring in the fall, we have what are called street fairs, where,
you know, vendors are just out on the street. I've done a couple of warm
up ones back in June and
(27:48):
a couple weeks ago, but in, in September with the, the foliage
and all this stuff, all these different communities have, have their stuff and
they have people from New York City and from all over the place that are
coming to, to these areas. So,
so I definitely want to have the second book out for that and then the
third book I want to get out for the springtime so that I can hit
all those spring shows too. So I love that. How long
(28:11):
does, does the process take of writing one of these
books? All right, so the first one,
I started writing in 2022 and I
thought I knew what I was doing, but again didn't take a lot of creative
writing classes. So I, I had to go find those books that were on a
shelf somewhere. I dragged them out and I'm learning, I'm reading and I'm reading and
(28:32):
I'm reading and I'm like, all right, I kind of get this. So I'm
writing and I'm doing some stuff. And then
I went back to podcasts and I found a ton of podcasts with professional
book coaches and all these different people. And they
described the whole process of what I needed to do. I was like,
so I'm starting to learn the process learning about how to write.
(28:54):
And there was one specific podcast because I was having problems
structuring the story and a specific
podcast did a multi part episode, multi part episodes
on a certain structure called Save the Cat. It's, it's
basically a storytelling method that are used a lot for movies
which spoke to me and when and it basically the.
(29:17):
The host did comparisons between the
writing of the Hunger Games and how
this structure worked with the Hunger Games. I'm like, okay, I saw those movies,
you know, and, and how, and how that works. So that really spoke to me.
And so once I had that, I structured the book. So I lost a lot
of time doing that, but I had the ideas. So I finished
(29:40):
writing in the fall
of. So I started writing at 22. I finished the first
draft at the end of 2023, and all the
podcasts and professionals that I had listened to
had said, all right, you got to take a month off. You got to put
it away for a month because you're too close to it. You need to put
(30:01):
it away, set it down, and go back after a month. So I went
back after a month, and I started editing, and I'm like, okay, crap, this is
terrible. So I'm going through and fixing things, and,
you know, I really. I really got hung up after a while on
the first scene of the book. I'm like, I don't want it to start here,
but it has to start here if you want it to all work out. And
(30:22):
I'm hem and hauling going back and forth. So I finished. I
finished the second draft, and I gave it a little bit of breathing room,
and I did a third draft. And then I'm like, okay, what am I doing
here? So you kind of get to a
path that deviates at this point, so you can go what's called the traditional
route. And what you do is you send what are called query letters out
(30:44):
to agents. You got to find an agent first. That's how
this typically works. And it can take a long time
to find an agent. And you basically send. Send a
letter and say, you know, hey, I have this book, yada, yada, yada. And if
they're interested, they'll say, all right, send me, you know, 10
pages, 100 pages. Send me whatever. And they'll read it, and they'll say, okay,
(31:06):
I think I can sell this. I'll sign you.
And then you go through the whole process where they'll contact all their
contacts in the publishing houses, and they'll try to sell that book. And,
you know, depending on your luck, your luck, your talent,
the quality of your agent and everything, you can get in a bidding war, and
you can get a lot of money for them to buy your book and to
(31:28):
do everything, But a lot of that's out of your hands, right?
And sometimes with publishers, you know, they. You know,
they may not like your title, so they'll change the title. They have their
own book design, their cover designer, so they'll design your cover. You know, they might
give you, you know, give you, like, you know, hey, what do you think of
this? You like this, right? Okay, good. You know, kind of thing. But again,
(31:49):
I do. I haven't Worked with, with that. But this is kind of the, the,
the stories I got. So I was like, I really don't
want to do that. And at the same time, I have
a partner of mine, I've worked with him. He's got six months less than
me on the job. He started right after me. He's a,
an established horror writer, and he's. And he's been doing it
(32:11):
since probably the end of 2018, beginning of 2019. So he's got,
you know, you know, almost, almost a decade in, in this.
And he. So I started, you know, you know, kind of, you know,
getting in his ear because right around the time I finished,
he, he got hurt. He got hurt on a job. So
he was on light duty working a desk. I'm a patrol sergeant. My
(32:34):
desk is right next to what we call the, we call it the cog, the
communications area. So I just
kind of, you know, I pick his brain every once in a while. Ask him.
And he said, he goes, you can go traditional, but you're gonna have to wait.
Or you can do what he did and go indie
publishing or self publishing. And, you know, you can make a lot of
(32:56):
your own decisions and stuff. So I was like, that's. I think that's it. I
think that's what I want to do. I want to have some control over this.
I want to do this. So I went on a website called
Reedsy, and it's kind of a,
A, A place where you, you know, professionals can put up, put
the, put up there, you know, advertise for themselves and writers can kind of. And
they kind of play the middle person between them. So I found an
(33:19):
editor. She lives in Ohio. No, not Ohio.
Excuse me, Missouri. So I liked what she
had. I liked some of the reviews. So, you know, sent her the manuscript and
she was fabulous. You know, she, she checked with me every week. She's
like, okay, I'm this far in. I like what I'm reading so far. I like
this, this and this. I'm like, okay, cool. Some feedback.
(33:42):
And it took her about five weeks to finish up.
And so she sent me all the corrections. And then
I got those corrections like, holy.
I have pictures from last summer when, when I was going through it
and I just had, I had. For, for some reason I wanted to write it
(34:03):
down. So I went through all her notes and I wrote things down like, you
got to fix this and you got to do this. And after a while, I
just started going through the document. In the meantime, I
found another professional that does book
Covers and worked with her. I told her what I wanted, so she's like,
okay. She sent me two proofs. My wife and
(34:24):
daughter and I were on vacation and she. I got the email while we were
walking around Salem, Massachusetts. And so I was like,
oh, hey. So I showed him the first one. They're like.
And then I showed him the second one, the one I liked. And they go,
yeah, that's it. And it was, it was love at first sight. Like, I had
zero, zero corrections with it. She nailed, she nailed it. So
(34:47):
then part, then part of the editing contract
that I had, she. She also did a
like a 90 minute Zoom call with me, which, where I got to ask her
anything. So I asked her about that scene that I wanted to move. She's like,
no, it works. Leave it alone. I'm like, okay, cool. And, you know, she just
kind of really talked it up and gave me so much positive stuff. I was
(35:08):
like, this is great. Okay, cool. So I finished all the edits, then
I found a
proofreader. And this guy was, this guy was awesome. Like,
he was so, like, he, he, he was like a
type A personality that just was like, you know, I'm here, I'm
doing this. You know, he took it on like a personal challenge that he was
(35:31):
going to do this. And he worked so quickly. Like, he's like, oh, it's going
to take me three weeks. He was done in like nine days. And,
and you know, he didn't. And his, his rates were really good too.
I just got done working with him on the second book and basically
he was, he, he was completely done before the first payment even got to him.
And I was like, okay, cool.
(35:52):
So, so I had a finished manuscript, I had a cover, I had everything. And
I'm like, all right, now I have to self publish this. I still don't have
the confidence. So last year I went to
a yearly conference called Killer Nashville.
Kind of splurged. My, my wife and daughter took a girls
trip and went to India. So I, I
(36:15):
couldn't, I couldn't go. I couldn't take that much time off of work, um, with
that stuff I had going on. So they went on a girls trip. So they
were away. So I'm like, I'm gonna go to this conference. So I went
there and I met so many great writers and
editors and people. And I'm. And after doing that and talking to
people, they had breakout sessions all over the place. And I did a lot of
(36:35):
the business oriented stuff of, you know, how do you act Like a professional
writer. How do you, you know, how do you do the taxes, end of things?
So I did all the business stuff and I was like, all right, I'm ready.
So at that conference, I decided I was going to release the book on October
29th. I just made the decision. I said, send it,
you know, because if I don't, I gotta, I just gotta, I just gotta do
it. If I don't, if I don't do it now, it's not gonna happen. So.
(36:58):
And you know, it's been kind of a roller coaster ride ever since.
I love that. Where, where can I get the book at? So you can get
at my website if you'll
bear with me a second. This is the book. It's called Our
lady of the Overlook. It is available on
my website directly from me, where you can also Pre order the second book.
(37:24):
And that is rlcarpentierwriter.com.
you can get it there. I'll personalize it, I'll sign it. I throw a
bunch of really cool swag in there also.
Or you can go to Amazon, whereas it's available there for
paperback and ebook, if you're an ebook person. I do
(37:45):
not have an audiobook yet, which is sad because I'm a huge. Yeah, podcasts,
audiobooks, you know, so it's kind of sad that I don't have an audiobook
yet. But working on that, that's, that's, that's definitely in
the works again because I, I did things so quickly. After I
made that decision. I learned again. I, I had to just send
it and learn, learn, you know, Learn, learn what I did wrong. I knew I
(38:08):
was going to do a trilogy, so first book was kind of, you know,
haphazardly released. This one's a little bit better and I'm
hoping by the third one I have, I had kind of have my.
Everything kind of smoothed out a little bit more. So
it's awesome. So I gotta touch on. Yeah. Because you brought it up
earlier. Who's your sports teams?
(38:30):
My sports teams used to be. Because I fell out
of. I fell out of professional sports after
Covid and everything in 2020 and
2021, I just stopped watching all that stuff. And
at around the same time also, we, we moved and when we did, we cut,
we cut cable, so we only have streaming, so can't get all
(38:53):
the sports. But I grew up a huge Yankees fan. I've
been watching Yankees since 1994, so I've
always been a Yankees fan. I never really
had a football team. I appreciated the way that
the Patriots played, obviously, you know, they won a ton,
but, you know, you know, but I was never, like,
(39:16):
a huge Patriots fan. Like, you know, I, I, I, I used to watch.
Well, before I got into fantasy sports, I used to watch football
basically on Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl. Like, I never paid
attention to it. So. But then my, my partner from
patrol, older guy, he
brought me in on fantasy baseball and fantasy football. And then I
(39:39):
watched every week. I knew, I knew everything that was going on, but I
never had, But I never. But I never. But I never had a team in,
in football. Grew up. We, where I
grew up in Albany, New York, we had the Devils farm team for
hockey. So I guess I was kind of a Devils fan. Like, I knew all
those guys, you know, before they, before they reached the, the
(40:02):
NHL. And I was never a big
basketball guy at all. You know, it's funny,
growing up in Oklahoma, I've never really
asked my bro this, but he was a huge Yankees fan. And
98, 99, I was 10 or 11. And that's when
I, you know, of course, the kid of the 90s. I grew up a King
(40:23):
Griffey Jr. Fan. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But once I started
really, like, developing, like, my own fandom,
I, I think it's just, you know, I gotta poke the bear with my brother
a little bit. I grew up a huge Mets fan, and
I love my losers. Yeah. And,
(40:44):
you know, still to this day, we're actually talking about trying to go down to
New York in September and watch going to a game in Yankee Stadium and
a game at Citi Field, because neither one of us has ever been. Oh,
no. Okay. Yeah, I've been. I've been to the new. Oh, I went to the
old Yankee Stadium a bunch of times. Been to
the new stadium. We used to go. A bunch. A bunch of us from,
(41:07):
from the job used to go down every opening day.
It was kind of a tradition. We rent a bus and we'd. We'd
tailgate and, you know, get just
disgustingly drunk. Yep, it was terrible.
And then I've been to Citi Field once. Friend
(41:28):
of my wife's, um, is a huge Mets fan, and for her
birthday one year, they, they. I think they. I don't know
if it was a suite or just like, like a group of. A group of
seats all together for her birthday. And, and we got invited along, so I was
like, all right, I'll go.
Yep. I, it's just one of those things, like, you know, my
(41:49):
brother's older than me, so I think I always had to like the opposite teams
growing up. Oklahoma, he's, you know, college football's king.
Oh, absolutely. Yep. And he loves the University of Oklahoma, and I'm a big
Oklahoma State fan. And so, like, there's not one team that we
agree on. Like, it was college football
is funny. We, I, I, I did computer forensics
(42:12):
for a while, and the Secret Service has a program
where they have a school in Birmingham, right outside of
Birmingham, Alabama. So, yeah, I've actually, I've actually had a partner of mine go through
that. Okay. Yeah, so we went down there, uh,
so I went down there for a couple classes, but we did our month long
class and we all got there. And we're from all over
(42:34):
the, the country, obviously, and it was, it
was August, so you're just in that preseason mode. Yeah. And,
you know, we're from all over the place and everybody's talking. Actually, we had a,
there was a guy from Durant, Oklahoma. It was in my
class, and a bunch of guys from Texas.
(42:54):
Our class, our class president was from Washington State, so we
called him, we called him the Cougar. But then me
and my buddy from New Jersey are like, what do we have?
Rutgers. We don't really have,
we don't have a big college football team up by us. And
ironically, the, the guys from Indiana were not Notre Dame fans,
(43:18):
which I thought was ironic, you know, but maybe. It was their team.
You know, I don't remember now. I don't know, maybe, maybe like Ohio State or
something. Yeah, or Indiana, you know? Right.
You know, but they were not Notre Dame fans.
My cousin who actually lives in Oklahoma, ginormous
(43:38):
Notre Dame fan. Like, he's got, he's got, he's got the Fighting Irish tattoo on
his arm. Like he's a huge Notre Dame fan. So,
you know, it's funny, I think they're kind of like the
Yankees or like the Lakers and that they're kind of a national
brand. Yeah. And my roommate actually is a huge Notre
Dame fan, you know, and he lives in Oklahoma, so it's kind of funny how
(43:59):
that works out. But we, so we, we went to, we went
to the University of Alabama. While we were there, we got, we got, we got
a hookup through their campus police. So we got to go in the locker room,
we got to see Joe Namath's locker. We went through,
we went out on a field. We didn't meet Nick
Saban, though. So we did, you know, so that was
(44:21):
cool, that was a really cool experience. So we did a lot of Fun stuff.
And then again, it was preseason for the NFL, so we actually drove to
Atlanta and that was the only NFL game I've ever been to. We saw,
I don't even know who the Falcons played, but we had, we had decent seats.
Yeah, but we, we did that. And then
a couple thing we did a couple times was the Birmingham Barons are
(44:43):
right there. So we, we went there. I got to see my Michael Jordan, the
Michael Jordan jersey that they had there. Yep. So.
But yeah, it was a cool experience to experience other sports because, you know, mostly
a bunch of guys, you know, all locked together. What are we going to do?
Oh, yeah, you're going to talk sports. So
what I want to. As we start to kind of wrap up, I want to
(45:03):
ask you one thing. If you could give
advice to somebody who wants to get in law enforcement, what's your one piece of
advice you'd give them?
I would say, depending on where they're starting at.
I honestly don't recommend the criminal justice background.
(45:23):
Have, have a different skill, have a different
point of view that you're coming from. You know, I,
you know, I've seen guys vary from. Again, I was English major, so,
you know, so they, they tap that ability because I, I proofread everything
for my sergeant, you know, my first, the first sergeant I had,
I proofread everything for him and now, now he's my boss again. He's the captain.
(45:47):
He's the captain, I'm the lieutenant. I'm still proofreading things for him
when he doesn't use AI. So having that skill,
you know, of being able to write, it helped me as a, as a supervisor.
It helped me, you know, helped me articulate things as an investigator where I had
adas telling me, you know, hey, I, I read your complaints.
Your complaints are fabulous. Like, I don't have to worry about, you know, I see
(46:09):
your name come across and I know everything is going to be good. I'm like,
well, thank you, you know, or, you know, having that skill to teach, to
teach younger deputies or deputies that don't. Didn't
have quite the, the writing skills to help them learn
how to articulate and how to use, you know, some of the proper grammar. But
like our sheriff, he started out, he, he worked, he worked,
(46:32):
he worked his way from corrections up to. He retired as a captain and
then came back, got elected three years ago to, to
sheriff. He was an electrician. Wow. You
know, so having, having other skills
that you bring to law enforcement, law, you know, the academy and,
you know, FTO and All those things will teach you how to be a cop.
(46:54):
If you have the ability to bring something else. There's.
I think that's helpful. I agree wholeheartedly. My,
my bachelor's degrees in geography, so. Yeah. Yeah.
And I can't think of a way that helps, but I'm sure it does. You
know, in some strange way I. Can, I got a lot of useless knowledge
up here. Yeah, My, my fellow
(47:16):
lieutenant has a psychology degree. Like, he goes, you know, and he's like, the only
thing I could have done was probably this. Because it's, you know, it's,
it's, it seems useless. But if you, you apply those things, you
learn, you know, or, and, and definitely don't
either start in corrections and learn how to talk to people or
(47:36):
have a different job for a couple years, you know, military or,
you know, something where you're acting with
people, something where you're, you're working hard. Don't,
don't just bring something to the job. Don't,
don't think the job's going to bring you everything. Because I've seen a lot of
smart young folks who come to the job and don't have any other
(47:58):
life experience and it takes them a while to get
into it and they're like, oh, well, I took criminal justice and I, you
know, I know everything. It's like you don't know everything because you don't
have any experiences. You know, bring, bring, bring something else to the job.
I agree wholeheartedly. Working everybody get in contact with you at. If they
want to reach out. All right, so Again, website is
(48:21):
www.rlcarpentierwriter.
you can reach me at R.L. carpentier
III or the, the Three Eyes, the Roman numeral. So R.L.
carpentier Three Eyes gmail.com. that's the direct way to
get a hold of me on email. I'm also on Facebook at
trying to remember what the latest moniker was, but I think it's R.L. carpentier, debut
(48:44):
author, which I have to change because going in my second book. So now I
have to have to say something else. I don't know what that'll be. And I
think somewhere near them on Instagram. I'm not really good with the social media
stuff. Everybody says you have to be, but I'm not great at that. But
the website's the major way if you want to follow me on Facebook. I do
post like I post post the reveal of the, of the second book
(49:06):
when I got the proof copy the other day. So every once in a while
and through my website you can get on my mailing list which
other than last week I, I send out every week and I'm,
it's basically just kind of, you know, vomiting onto the screen a little
bit like, hey, I did this this week. What did you do? You know, so
I have a couple of regular things I do with that but I keep people
(49:27):
posted pretty much on what's going on. You know, writing wise, life
wise and professional wise also. I love it. Well, when
the second book gets closer, you're welcome back and we can talk about that
second book. Alrighty. All right. I appreciate it. I appreciate
you Brent. Check, check him out. Check his book out and give him,
give him some support. I'm all about helping other first
(49:49):
responders out. Give him support, support on his book and check
his book out. Have a good night. Good night.
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