By Corey Miller a.k.a. C-Murder

People always ask me what made me want to become an author. First of all I was behind bars facing a life sentence so I didn’t know what the future held. But I knew one thing: I had to get on my grind. I had to get my hustle on. Plus I like to express myself and put my words out there. Since I couldn’t do it in music, I said let me do it with a book. I had been doing a lot of studying and reading a lot of books. A lot of people don’t know I was an honor student in school. I read about 500 books since I’ve been locked up. So I felt like it was time for me to get started, to become an author.

The first thing I did was I started reading a lot. Sometimes I read a book in one day. So I started getting real interested in everything about books. And I just started feeling the flow and how different authors express themselves in a book. I learned a lot by just hands-on experience. Whatever I’m doing, I learn quick. So that was the first process, just reading and getting interested.

Then I’m like All right, let me just try writing. But I’m my biggest critic. So then I said, I need some info on this. I need a book that can teach you how to write a book and write a novel, and all about publishing. I wanna know everything about the game, ya heard me? So I got all that information through the library. So then I’m sitting down, reading it all and getting the game in my head. One of my favorite authors, Dean Koontz, even wrote a book on how to write a novel. His was crucial cause I liked how he put his words. But I still wanted the urban crowd. So it’s me mixed with Koontz—that’s how I feel. And that’s how it all started.

Writing Death Around The Corner from prison took me two years. I wrote everything out by hand in notebooks and then mailed them out to be typed up on a computer. It could have been done before that, but sometimes there’s so much happening on the tier and so much going on in your case and your personal life that you just have to chill. And then Katrina hit—the storm. I sent out a lot of chapters that were lost when all the mail got shut down. So once we came back from Katrina, and the mail started rolling, I called and said, Look for the mail! And the Post office said Call this number and go on this website, cause it’s all just sitting in crates out in the sun. So four months later I got all them chapters back. Then I just finished the last of the chapters right then and there. And that was it.

I chose the title Death Around The Corner because every day I was locked up I kept hearing about people getting killed—young dudes. Three murders one day, four murders, five murders. There was just a lot of brothers getting killed. So I said it looks like everybody has to watch their back. It’s serious out there. Death is so close—right around the corner. Everybody can relate to it, from my hood to your hood. Anywhere. So that was the theme of the whole book.

Daquan starts out how we all start out—innocent. Just a little boy happy for the little things in life: going to school, playing in the grass, having fun on the see-saws at the park. Then at five years old, he has his first sight of tragedy, and it all goes downhill from there. This is a story for all those people that society gives up on. There’s millions and millions of Daquans out there. You can just drive through the hood to see a snotty nose with a Pamper, no parents at home, no parks to play in, abandoned. There’s millions and millions of Daquans in the wiorld. Not just black, but white and everything else, South America, Asia, Africa.

Once you read the book you will understand where I’m coming from. It’s just the life of a young black man growing up in the hood with  the odds against him. So anybody can get it. Death is always right around the corner. And with all my books that I write, I’m gonna make sure they have a crucial, crucial twist that nobody would think about. Cause I be thinkin’ about some other things sometimes. You’ll just have to keep reading to learn more about that.

And if you love this book, get ready for Tru Publishing cause we got a lot more heat coming for ya. So peep game.

Peace