Defiance Press: Rick, your journey to becoming a novelist is absolutely fascinating. Most writers don’t start their careers at 63 after working security on an ice road. Can you take us through that pivotal moment when you first picked up a pen to write fiction?

Rick Steeby: Well, boredom is the short answer, but there’s a longer story that shows how God – or coincidence, though I don’t much believe in coincidence – has a sense of humor. I took a temporary job on the North Slope as security on the ice road to Spy Island. Picture this: six weeks in a pickup truck, twelve hours a day, monitoring traffic and coordinating with Island Dispatch. I stopped all trucks heading for the island, checked their weight, and noted all vehicles coming or going. Some days I might have four trucks and a handful of light trucks or SUVs. That’s it.

With all that time on my hands, I drew pictures, read books, and listened to talk radio. A retired Anchorage Police friend, Wayne Vance, had written five books after leaving APD. He loaned me a copy of each, and I read all of them in short order. Now, I’m not saying I am competitive, but I thought, “How hard could it be?”

Defiance Press: That’s quite a leap from reading to writing! What happened next?

Rick Steeby: I started a short story written by hand in a notebook on that ice road in March 2015. Three years later, it had become a 100,000-word manuscript! It was the first of thirteen novel-length manuscripts I would write, with Gold Miner’s Daughter being lucky number thirteen.

But here’s the thing that really gets me about this whole journey – it’s a full-circle story. In 1975, after leaving the army and needing employment, I started work on the Alyeska Pipeline Construction as a security guard. I ended up with a six-week tour guarding pipe in a storage yard with sections so heavy it required two giant cranes to lift one piece. Good union job, but it was mid-winter and minus 55 degrees. I worked night shift with no one coming or going or attempting to pilfer any pipe.

Defiance Press: So boredom struck twice in your life, decades apart?

Rick Steeby: Exactly! Bored out of my mind in 1975, I started reading. At the time, I had sworn off reading anything I didn’t have to for staying employed – this was right after high school graduation. But to stay awake during those long, cold nights, I read everything in the camp library. Got completely hooked on reading ever since. Twelve years later, I’d be diagnosed with dyslexia – the testers couldn’t believe I was reading fifty novels a year by then!

So there I was, forty years later, bored again on the Slope, and this time boredom caused me to become a writer. Until that moment, I had no inclination to write. It’s like my life came full circle.

Defiance Press: You mentioned you’d written for other purposes before fiction. What was that background?

Rick Steeby: Oh, I’d been writing since first grade in 1959, though my teachers through high school might dispute the quality! As a Military Police Officer, I wrote reports and learned to type. As a security officer on the pipeline and later with the Anchorage Police Department, I wrote similar reports. When I was a detective with APD, I wrote them on a MAC Plus – I owned and used one of the first word processor programs.

I also relied heavily on twenty years of writing speeches for Toastmasters. That experience taught me structure and how to communicate clearly, which became invaluable when I started taking writing seriously in 2017 after being forced to retire from my construction company.

Defiance Press: What advice did you receive when you decided to pursue publishing?

Rick Steeby: I had some incredible connections through a remodeling client who was a retired Admiral. He knew Rick Campbell and Brad Thor and actually gave me their phone numbers! Later, I met Jenny Milchman and Craig Johnson at book signings. All of them offered the same advice, and I’m going to name-drop here because their words shaped my entire approach.

They told me: “It’s different for everyone, but if you plan to get rich off writing, then look for other work. If you plan to publish something worth reading, then prepare to write eight to ten books and spend a fortune on classes, computers, and editing. Then something might come along.”

Defiance Press: That sounds like it could be discouraging advice.

Rick Steeby: If that advice sounds harsh to you, then ignore it. It sounded reasonable to me, and ten years later, with thirteen manuscripts under my belt, I already have a book being published with Defiance. Since signing with you folks, I’ve written one follow-up book and started the third, with ideas – what-ifs – for future stories.

The key is perseverance. I have a quote I attach to my emails from Orson Scott Card: “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.” As a former police officer, I indeed saw people’s lives change in an instant by random occurrence. When it comes to crime fiction, the headlines offer unlimited resources.

Defiance Press: Looking back, what surprises you most about this journey?

Rick Steeby: The first surprise was that I actually finished a novel. But beyond that, I think about how many times writing made me laugh out loud or made me sad – emotions that would last for days. The most profound experience came from characters discussing child abuse. Even though I wrote about it two decades after leaving my job as a detective investigating those cases, it still haunted me. Writing about it actually helped me process some of those experiences.

I also discovered that I had natural instincts for storytelling that I never knew existed. Twenty years of Toastmasters helped with structure and public speaking, but the actual craft of creating characters and weaving plots – that was something I had to learn, and I’m still learning.

Defiance Press: Any regrets about starting so late in life?

Rick Steeby: None whatsoever. I needed all those life experiences – the military, police work, the pipeline, construction, even the struggles with dyslexia – to have the stories I want to tell. I write what I know, and I know a lot about Alaska, law enforcement, and the kind of people who make extraordinary choices in difficult circumstances.

At 72, every day is a gift that gets more valuable as time goes by. I feel I can write enough to do as many as four books a year, although since I don’t need them to feed me, one or two good ones seems like a better target. Of course, with AI, I might become obsolete before long, but until then, I’m going to keep telling stories about the Alaska and the people I knew.

Experience the beginning of Rick’s publishing journey with “Gold Miner’s Daughter” – coming soon from Defiance Press and Publishing.