Why I Started Mind’s Edge Publishing
Someone once asked me why I didn’t publish my novels under a publishing company’s name.
My question was simple.
Why would I put someone else’s stamp on books I’ve spent decades writing?
What would I gain?
Nothing
It didn’t make sense.
“Why can’t I use my own trademark?”
“You can.”
So I did.
That’s how Mind’s Edge Publishing was born.
I’ve been writing novels for decades. It’s in my blood. I launched my website in 2014 and use it to sell my books.
People ask, “Don’t you want to sell more books?”
Sure. I’d like to make some money. But I really don’t give a damn about chasing bestseller lists or building some carefully manufactured author brand. I don’t do book signings. And if I give someone one of my novels, I don’t come back a week later asking, “Well? What did you think? Huh? Huh?”
The book belongs to them now.
Making money is fine—as long as it doesn’t become an obsession or leave people bruised along the way. Publishing can be a game that’s more expensive, more artificial, and more ruthless than Monopoly.
Talent is a gift from God.
So God gets His cut.
I give back to charities whenever I can.
Do I want my writing to earn money?
Of course.
But that’s never been the reason I write.
Writing is an addiction.
Cut me, and I bleed ink.
It’s also therapy.
When I write, I disappear into another world. I climb inside my characters’ heads. I walk their streets. I hear their conversations. Sometimes that’s hard as hell.
It’s also one of life’s greatest joys.
When I sit in front of a blank computer screen, I don’t see an empty page.
I see a movie.
The characters start moving. They begin talking. I simply try to keep up.
Music helps.
A chase scene demands one kind of soundtrack. A love scene demands another. Before long, the music and the words take over, and your fingers start dancing across the keyboard.
The funny thing is that I often think I’m taking my characters somewhere.
Instead…
They take me somewhere else.
I can’t explain it.
No, it isn’t ghosts or goblins.
It just is.
Maybe it’s a little like quantum entanglement. Scientists struggled to explain it for decades. Even Einstein questioned it. Yet in 2022, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for proving key parts of it.
Look it up. It is mind boggling.
Some things are simply real before we completely understand them.
That’s what writing feels like.
So what is Mind’s Edge Publishing?
It isn’t some company promising you’ll become a bestselling author for $19.99.
Noooo.
That’s the kind of nonsense sold by dream merchants and scammers.
If someone asked me how to become a writer, my advice would cost exactly zero dollars.
Read novels.
Then read hundreds more.
Write.
Then write some more.
Research everything.
For example, while writing Crusher’s Funeral, I discovered the word crackhead didn’t exist in 1970. So I couldn’t use it. The correct slang was junkie. One word. One small detail. But getting it right mattered.
Research isn’t a chore.
It’s an adventure.
You’ll learn history, language, culture, publishing, contracts, formatting, marketing—and you’ll probably get burned once or twice by people selling shortcuts that don’t exist.
There aren’t any.
Dickens wasn’t created overnight.
Neither was Shakespeare.
Creative mastery is earned one page at a time.
I write four or five hours every day because I love it.
Not because I have to.
Because I can’t imagine not doing it.
If you’re dreaming about writing a novel, don’t wait for permission.
Don’t wait until you’re “ready.”
Start.
Write one page.
Then another.
Ask questions.
Accept criticism.
Keep improving.
Most importantly…
Keep going.
There are no shortcuts.
Who’s Behind Mind’s Edge Publishing?
I’m Raul Hernandez.
For more than three decades, I worked as a newspaper reporter in four newsrooms across two states, chasing real headlines before turning to crime fiction and dark comedy. Journalism taught me to listen, observe, question every
thing, and never waste words. Those lessons found their way into every novel I’ve written.
During more than 30 years as a newspaper reporter, I met plenty of people who would eventually find their way into my novels in bits and pieces. Some tiptoed. Others with sharp elbows on street corners. Some came from the cop beat. Others handed me their quotes under oath in a courtroom.
I usually plucked out the good quotes. Lifted them from all walks of life during my years of reporting. Wrote them on a piece of paper and stuffed them in my pocket a few years later, voila, they became a gold mine for my novels many years later.
Not only to mine for quotes but character descriptions, mannerisms and quirks.
The Tough Guy Quotes
The best quotes, however, came from tough guys on the witness stand. I mean two-legged pit bulls, not street punks playing gangster. Most of the pretenders cried when the stakes got real. But the prison gang members. They delivered lines you couldn’t invent. Cold eyes. Flat voices. You could almost feel the ice running through their veins.
The name behind Crusher’s Funeral, my novel available as an audiobook, came from an unusual kind of encounter.
I was in the crowded locker room at the former downtown Gold’s Gym in Santa Barbara. A tattooed guy sat on a bench, loud and obnoxious, while everyone around him tried to pretend he wasn’t there.
Then he spotted my sneakers.
“Sir, do those come in men’s colors?” he asked, laughing at his own material.
I stared at him.
He introduced himself, gave me his real name, then supplied his street credentials.
“They call me Crusher.”
Okay. In a battle of wits, I sized up this mammoth of a brute as an unarmed combatant.
“Crusher, how long have you been stomping on aluminum cans?” I asked and smiled.
“That’s funny.” he said and laughed.
He got a laugh. My character got a funeral.
Years later, I named a character Crusher.
Side note: Looking for an alias for a character – go to court and look at an indictment for racketeering involving gangs or cartel members. The names all come with aliases.
FEMALE CHARACTER QUOTES
My novels are also stitched together from the voices of the women who shaped and enriched my life—girlfriends, co-workers, and relatives, especially my aunt. I dedicated my novel, The Rivera Girls, to my Tia Maria. Much of the first chapter is about her: the two-room apartment on Magoffin Street in El Paso, her toughness, the occasional swear word, and the comic books she read to me. That fed my runaway imagination.
I was a relentless and restless kid with a thousand questions. “Who washes Superman’s cape?” I’d ask. “Why did people walk so fast back then?” I said after watching an old newsreel. “And when did they slow down?”
“I don’t know, they just did,” she said.
No, much later I found the reason. It was the highly flammable nitrate film. Seriously, check it out.
Then there was Janet.
“I swear to God I won’t go out drinking and playing pool during the week,” I pleaded after she slammed the door in my face.
“I don’t believe you,” she shot back, “and neither does God.”
Snatched that baby and put it in my book, Stepping on the Devil’s Tail.
Years later, I needed another quote, a good one, for a female character in The Serape Notebook, and I was drawing a blank. So I called a female friend who became a good friend.
“Go to Alaska with me.”
Long pause.
“When?”
“This weekend.”
“No, it’s too cold… besides, there isn’t a serious Neiman Marcus to go shop.”
A few words changed, more added and boom. I had the solid quote I was looking for.
The world of the printed word
Today, I publish the news through my federal courthouse website, CJNotebook.com, while spending four or five hours a day doing what I’ve loved for decades—writing fiction.
When I’m not behind a keyboard, you’ll usually find me in the gym, rowing like a man trying to outrun his own deadlines.
I’ve written several novels, including Crusher’s Funeral, Stepping on the Devil’s Tail, The Dead Sea Bar and Grill, The Rivera Girls, and The Serape Notebook.
Mind’s Edge Publishing isn’t about building an empire.
It’s about building stories.
It’s about creating the kinds of novels I would have wanted to read when I was a kid.
It was the comic books and mi tia that stirred my imagination. It was fellow wordsmiths who lived in newsrooms and novels that taught the fine points of writing good stories.
If these stories make you laugh, make you think, or keep you turning pages long after you should have gone to bed, then Mind’s Edge has done exactly what it was created to do.
That’s the art and beauty of weaving a tapestry of words.
If I can help, send me an email at cjnotebook@gmail.com