WAYNESBORO – Dick Walsh, a former Waynesboro Rotarian and resident of the area from 1982 to 2021, described his growth as a writer and his experience in writing a book, “The Hitchhiker Deception,” which has just come out on Amazon, in a talk to Waynesboro Rotarians last week.
Walsh said he did a lot of writing during his career in the legal profession, but fiction writing was a completely different enterprise. He has drawn on his 1950’s experiences as a child in Dickson City, north of Scranton, for inspiration.
Joining a writer’s group in a Florida retirement community has been a great help for his writing, he
said. He combined with six other members of the group to write “Murder of a Beer Buddy,” a comic mystery. In “The Hitchhiker Deception,” his intent was to deliver a positive message and make the protagonist, a young man named C,J. Lockhart, a likable individual.
Walsh said the novel’s settings include the Scranton area, Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia. He said it is a
struggle for him to include some aspects of sexual love and profanity in his writing, but he feels it is sometimes necessary for realism. He uses AI at times to help clean up his writing but said he tries to avoid becoming too dependent on it.
When he’s not living at the The Villages in Florida, Walsh resides in Mechanicsburg, where he moved to be closer to his children and their families.
