Writers are constantly at work writing the next big ideas and also getting them published to the wider world.

October was an especially busy month for Santa Cruz author Vinnie Hansen, as he re-released his 2022 thriller One Gun and published a short story in a Grateful Dead-inspired crime anthology.

Writing is not something Hansen planned early on. She grew up in rural South Dakota and, after spending a summer in Europe, went to Southern California to stay with her older brother, who suggested she try community college.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this in South Dakota,” she said.

Hansen took a night course in creative writing, which fueled a love of the form. Her writing was heavily inspired by her own childhood, which she said was very cathartic.

“I had a lot of trauma growing up,” she said. “I grew up in poverty and had a lot to process and try to get out. I wrote about those experiences and it was healing.”

This inspired Hansen to pursue a degree in creative writing. In graduate school, she had to teach a book-length thesis and attempted to write her first novel.

“I found that I had a lot of difficulty with plot, but I’ve always read mysteries and I could see that mysteries have this structure,” she said. “That turned me on to crime fiction.”

Hansen later moved to Santa Cruz and taught English at Watsonville High School for 27 years while writing constantly. She has published many short stories, the seven-part Carol Sabala mystery series, and the novel “Lostart Street,” which takes place in the village of Soquel in the early 1980s. She received the Police Academy of Writers’ Golden Donut Award in 2015 for her short story “Bad Connection” and was a two-time finalist for a Claymore Award.

Hansen’s latest novel, “One Gun,” was first released in 2022 by independent publisher Misterio Press. After landing a deal with Maryland-based indie publisher Level Best Books for his next book, “Crime Writer,” he was told they wanted a two- or three-book deal.

“They really wanted companion books or a series,” she said. “I didn’t have a book or companion series in mind for ‘Crime Writer,’ but I had already written ‘One Gun.’

Level Best Books engaged in a two-book deal, which resulted in the re-release of “One Gun” under the Level Best umbrella. The story was inspired by a real-life incident where Hansen and her husband returned home from shopping to find a burglary in progress. Her husband chased the thief down the street, which caused the thief to pull a gun and threaten to kill her husband.

“Once he started running again, my husband — thinking he couldn’t shoot him while he was running — continued to chase him until he dropped the things he had stolen from our house,” she said.

The police arrived and arrested the thief, but the gun was not on him.

“It’s just that this story wouldn’t make the novel,” Hansen said. “What really stuck with me was the idea of ​​’What happened to that gun?’ That gun is there, waiting somewhere. The cops never found him, so where did he go?'”

That idea became the basis for “One Gun”, in which the couple Vivi and Ben Russo go through a similar predicament and try to find the gun so that the thief can be charged with armed robbery, but it ends up in the hands of two young men who find her first.

“‘One Gun’ became the story of that gun and my idea of ​​where it went out into the community,” Hansen said.

“One Gun” takes place in the fictional city and county of Playa Maria, which is heavily inspired by Santa Cruz, and will also appear in “Crime Writer,” due out in 2025.

In addition to the “One Gun” re-release, Hansen also had a story featured in the anthology “Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead.” She was invited by editor Josh Pachter because of her many stories, which have been published in publications and anthologies such as Black Cat Weekly, Santa Cruz Ghost Stories, and Santa Cruz Weird. She also had experience turning songs into short stories, such as the psychedelic hit “96 Tears” by the rock band Question Mark and the Mysterians for a crime fiction anthology inspired by one hit wonders.

For “Friend of the Devil,” Pachter attempted to compile a collection of stories inspired by a song on the album by the iconic band The Grateful Dead. Writers such as James DF Hannah, Kathryn O’Sullivan, Paul Awad and Pachter himself created stories named after songs such as “Shakedown Street”, “Touch of Grey” and of course “Friend of the Devil”.

Although she was a fan of the song “Ripple” at the time and plays keyboard with a ukulele group that performs Grateful Dead songs at Harbor Beach, Hansen doesn’t consider herself a Deadhead, so she deferred to her granddaughter, Holly, to determine which song should he choose. After being given a few recommendations, she settled on “Dire Wolf” from their 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead”. The country-tinged crime ballad written by Robert Hunter told the story of a man who plays cards with the titular missing wolf and was also inspired by the Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in the Bay Area shortly before the song be written.

Hansen said she was drawn to the refrain “Please don’t kill me” and thought it might work as a crime story. The story is about a woman named Carrie Cunningham who plays keyboards in a band called Dire Wolf who had a minor hit called “Maybe” written by Cunningham. When the song has a viral revival, Cunningham’s singer and ex-boyfriend John takes all the credit and receives all the revenue, prompting Cunningham to seek revenge against him.

As a keyboardist, Hansen enjoyed writing a character with that ability.

“I’ve wanted to use that knowledge for some time to have a main character who plays keyboards,” she said. “Thinking about how the tool could be used to kill someone was an intriguing problem for me.”

Hansen hopes that those who read the “Devil’s Friend” anthology will have fun, like a Grateful Dead concert.

“I can see that the audience for that book is really Grateful Dead fans and anyone who likes crime fiction,” she said.

For “One Gun,” she hopes readers will think more about the guns in their community.

“I’ve tried really hard to avoid being preachy about it, but I just want people to think about when a gun is present, how it increases the dangers for people anywhere near the gun,” she said.

For more information on “The Devil’s Friend”, go to Downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-friend-devil/. For more information on “One Gun”, go to VinnieHansen.com.