Interview With Author R.L. Frazier
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Well, here is my bio:
R. L. Frazier was born and raised in Oklahoma. He has spent his adult life as a writer, singer, songwriter, and musician, and occasionally, landscaper, desk clerk, warehouse worker, fork-lift operator, customer service representative, salesman, and pro-shop attendant. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. He has been published in Waxing and Waning – a Literary Journal, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. He was most recently a finalist for the Moon Meridian Novella Award, and a semi-finalist for the University of New Orleans Lab Prize. His debut novel, The Mike Khepri Mysteries, will be published by April Gloaming Publishing in October, 2026.
More casually, I was enrolled in graduate school which I intended as a springboard to teach and write novels. Although I never stopped writing fiction or poetry, an offer to front a blues and R&B band resulted in a thirty-year delay in starting my writing career in earnest.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The Mike Khepri Mysteries. I was inspired by the metaphor of the dung beetle in ancient Egypt – Khepera/Khepri, the god the Egyptians believed pushed the ball of the sun through the boundless night. I was also inspired by growing up in rural and small town Oklahoma and the experiences that forged me, so I set a Southern Gothic version of Don Quixote in the state where the main character and the Sancho Panza character also have to play out these Egyptian and Greek Mythology inspired “cases” filled with magical realism and noirish elements. The book is “out there.”
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Yeah, I don’t have a set schedule, I get an idea, then I write in a fever, then I can’t let go of it if I want; every story is like an exorcism.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, John Kennedy Toole, Henry Miller, Garcia-Marquez, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, James Jones, Cervantes, J.P. Donleavy.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a collection of stories centered around a small-town museum in Oklahoma and the Black Seminole curator who runs it and has to acquire all the pieces and fend off the ignorance of the locals who don’t understand their significance.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
r.l.frazier on Instagram is the best method. My website is rlanefrazier.com.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Be true to yourself and things will work out eventually. Think of rejection as nourishment.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
“The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man.” – Saint-John Perse
What are you reading now?
Three Theban Plays, Sophocles
What’s next for you as a writer?
My novel comes out in October, hopefully by then I’ll be 30% through with the next one; just trying to stay healthy and fit so I can keep up with the sport of writing: it’s combat.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
100 Years of Solitude by Garcia-Marquez, Ulysses by Joyce, The Iliad and Odyssey by Homer
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