John D. Nesbitt

Trouble in the Labor Camp

2012-01-25T14:08:00.000-08:00

I am very pleased to announce that a novella of mine entitled Trouble in the Labor Camp has been published as an e-book. The producer is Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery, a sister imprint of Western Trail Blazer, which has published other e-book fiction of mine in the last year.

Trouble in the Labor Camp is a little over 27,000 words, very standard for novella length, about mid-way between short stories (which often end at 5000 words) and novels (which often begin at 50,000 or 60,000 words). As for content, it is representative of one kind of work I have been doing lately in the short and middle-length range—fiction in the mystery/hardboiled/noir style. I call it retro/noir because it is retro in style as well as in the time in which it takes place and because it is noir in its world view.

The setting of this story, as with other pieces I have written in this mode, is rural California of the 1960's. I knew this setting at first hand when I lived in small towns and worked in the fruit fields for several years as I was growing up. As I mentioned in earlier entries here—about a short story entitled “Boom-Boom,” about a novella entitled Dead for the Last Time, and about a prize-winning story entitled “At the End of the Orchard,” I wrote a collection of stories with this setting a few years back, and now, more recently, I have been working with a harder kind of realism that reflects the bleak prospects of doing field work and living in labor camps. The hard realism and the bleak outlook, as suggested above, are characteristic of noir fiction.

In Trouble in the Labor Camp, Morgan Cross is an itinerant farm worker who hopes to move up in the world. In order to do that, he has to try to avoid the kind of trouble that the migrant life lends itself to. As the title implies, trouble comes his way. This story not only has a wealth of realistic detail from a time and place now gone by, but it also has a realistic view of life, in that people do not always defeat their enemies and win romantic happiness. On the other hand, this is not what some people call naturalistic fiction, in which characters are crushed beneath the wheel.

I am very proud of this modest achievement. I feel that I do justice to the world of fruit fields and labor camps, which not many people that I know of have written about since the time of Steinbeck. Also, I am glad to have success in writing middle-length fiction, and I am grateful that recent technology has opened up possibilities for fiction between the typical maximum lengths for short fiction and the typical minimum lengths for novels. So my thanks to Rebecca J. Vickery for venturing into this kind of publishing.

This novella is scheduled to be available in printed form a little later on. Right now it is available as an e-book with Smashwords and Amazon. I hope a few people read it and enjoy it.

Gather My Horses Video

2012-01-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Once again with the help of my son, Dimitri, I have produced a short video to promote my writing. This one features my horse Pal (the palomino), who helps me introduce my most recent western novel, Gather My Horses. We had a little difficulty producing this video because Pal kept moving around, but we finally got one that got the basic message across. My thanks to Dimitri and Pal for this one. It is an interesting process, and I look forward to continuing with these little promo pieces as more work comes out.

To see this short video, you may go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CJTHPE3wHA&feature=related

Song of Pierre Video

2011-12-29T10:56:00.000-08:00

With the help of my son, Dimitri, I have come up with a brief video to promote my short story "Song of Pierre." Pierre was cooperative, too.

To see this short (one-minute) video, you may go to YouTube at this address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-aP0kSncI

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to post another video before long.

Song of Pierre

2011-10-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

A short story of mine entitled “Song of Pierre” has been published by Western Trail Blazer, an innovative publishing venture that publishes short stories, novellas, and full-length novels and collections in e-book and print format. This is the same publisher that produced my short story “Rose of Durango” and my collection One Foot in the Stirrup. As I expressed in an earlier post, the people at Western Trail Blazer are very professional and courteous, and I am happy to see my short story offered through their program.

“Song of Pierre” is a western story with a blend of young-adult adventure and fantasy. The story’s narrator is a boy named Dinky, an orphan who does odd jobs in the town of Bonnet. He gets into a strange series of events when he agrees to do some work for Cactus Pete. The old desert rat wants Dinky to crawl through a hole to fetch some stashed gold, but things go wrong when Dinky gets down in the tunnel.

I have to admit one indulgence in the story. The donkey, Pierre, is based on my own black burro of the same name, and the original Pierre appears on the cover of this work. I hope to do more with Pierre, not only as a good pal but also as a character in another story.

I also hope to see more of my work brought to the public by Western Trail Blazer.

“Song of Pierre” is now live on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/97179

It is available on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Song-of-Pierre-ebook/dp/B005WKM43O

Done by Friday

2011-10-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

In a post a while back (11/18/09), I mentioned that I was working on a collateral text, consisting entirely of supplemental exercises, to go along with the Blue Book of Basic Writing, a textbook I have developed and used for several years in my basic writing courses. This secondary text is entitled Done by Friday (reference to Robinson Crusoe explained in the Preface), and like my other textbook/course manual works, it has been published by Endeavor Books.

I would like to express my appreciation for Dan at Endeavor Books, as he has worked with great patience and consideration as he has made these books available to students (and others) at very reasonable prices.

Understanding Fiction 2

2011-10-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to report that Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, has published Understanding Fiction in book format. This volume is a textbook/manual I have put together for my college classes in introduction to literature and studies in the short story. I give a fuller account of this textbook in my post of December 18, 2009. Since that time, I have added some material, most significantly discussions of Emma, Great Expectations, The Age of Innocence, Of Mice and Men, and The Big Sleep.

In my earlier post, I wrote, “I hope that within the next year or so I will have this work in book format. I do not aspire to market it commercially, as I composed it mainly for use in my own courses. However, it could be of interest to someone (a reader or writer of fiction) who wanted a basic explanation of how fiction works. If someone was interested in this work in its present form, I would be happy to answer any inquiries.” I am very gratified to see the work in book format, and my offer to answer inquiries is still good.

Robert Roripaugh article

2011-10-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

For those who are interested in Robert Roripaugh, the literature of Wyoming, and similar topics, I would like to mention that I recently had an article published on Roripaugh in the Wyoming State Historical Society's online encyclopedia. The address is
http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/robert-roripaugh-wyoming-poet-laureate?page=show

In addition to providing basic information about Roripaugh and his career, the article has a photograph of Roripaugh, links, and a useful bibliography (including references to some of my previous work on this worthy author).

This is my second article for this online encyclopedia. The previous one was on Owen Wister.

Chugwater Charlie

2011-10-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

For those who like to keep up with new collections of western material, I am happy to report that High Hill Press of Missouri has brought out Volume I of Cactus Country, a gathering of western fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and artwork. The larger part of it consists of fiction, including a short story by yours truly. “Chugwater Charlie” takes its place along with the works of prestigious writers such as Jory Sherman, Johnny D. Boggs, Max McCoy, Rod Miller, Cotton Smith, and Dusty Richards. Dusty also played a major role in helping make this collection a reality.

As always, I am happy to see my work appear in print and become available to more readers. My thanks to Lou Turner and Dusty Richards for putting this collection together.

Owen Wister Article

2011-08-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

For those who are interested in Owen Wister, the history of the western novel, and similar topics, I would like to mention that I recently had an article published on Wister in the Wyoming State Historical Society's online encyclopedia. The address is http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/owen-wister

In addition to providing basic information about Wister and his role in shaping the western novel, the article has photographs, links, and a useful bibliography.

Boom-Boom

2011-07-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that Mysterical-E, an e-zine, has published a story of mine. The story, entitled "Boom-Boom," is in the retro/noir mode that I have been working in for fiction set in the fields and small towns of California in the 1960's. This story starts out in a small town (not specifically Orland but similar to it) in the Sacramento Valley, goes up to Medford, and comes back down to the other side of the valley for scenes near such places as Chico, Durham, and Gridley. A person who doesn't know those places or what they were like back then might still enjoy this story about working-class drifters and one guy with a conscience. Here is a link to the story:

http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=current_issue&body=toc

By the way, this e-zine is the same one that published "Dead for the Last Time," also set in the 1960's in a small town like those mentioned above. It was published in two installments, Winter 2009-10 and Spring 2010.

Both of these pieces are longer than the typical magazine story. "Boom-Boom" is 11,000 words, or about 35 pages in a paperback, while "Dead for the Last Time" is a novella about twice that long. Readers can enjoy either story at no cost.

Gather My Horses

2011-07-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Dorchester Publishing of New York has recently released my western novel entitled Gather My Horses. This is my nineteenth traditional western novel and the last one I did with my great editor Don D’Auria before he left Dorchester. The book was supposed to come out as a mass-market paperback in October of last year, but because of changes at the publishing house, the book came out simultaneously in trade paperback and e-book in June of this year.

I planned and wrote this novel a couple of years ago, and it was an all-around good experience. I wanted to write a story about a packer, as I had done a little bit of packing with horses myself and was interested in learning more. I also wanted to place the story around Chugwater and Bordeaux, places north of Cheyenne near the foot of the Laramie Range.

I went on two field trips to do my research into locale. On my first trip, I hooked up my little camper to my old black pickup (my newer pickup had to go in for radiator work) and headed south and west of where I live. I renewed my familiarity with some of the country down around Bear Mountain and then went up and over the rim, across the flats, and down to Chugwater. From there I went up to Slater and Bordeaux, and I found a piece of public land where I spent a peaceful evening in the landscape where my novel would take place. (This is always a good method for me, to spend at least one night in the setting for the story.) The next day, I went up into the Laramie Range, taking notes and snapping pictures as I did the day before. I was familiarizing the area where my main character would go with his pack string. I went west, north, and back east, seeing quite a variety of country with plenty of nice sites for scenes in the story. That evening I camped on the plains again, near Gray Rocks Reservoir, and the next day I took back roads toward home.

I felt that I missed something, though, so a couple of weeks later I went out on a day trip. My son, Dimitri, went with me and took the pictures. This time I found what I was looking for, and that was a vision of the place that would be the center of my story. I found it where the road goes down from the flats toward Bordeaux. That spot gave me the opening scene for the story and a focus for me to hold things together.

For the packing part of the research, I was sorry not to have the time and the help to go on a pack trip, so I made do with a few experiments at my own place with my own horses. I also did background reading on packing, wrangling, and that way of life. As is my preference, I read works based on the writers’ personal experiences.

On the smaller topic of wheat-threshing, I did the more obvious kind of research, reading up enough to know how wheat was harvested and how the sacks were managed. I don't actually have a scene on this in the novel, but my heroine is a sack-sewer and talks about her work, so I tried to avoid any big mistakes there.

As another part of my research, I practiced by hand some of the things that my main character does. I got out my Dutch ovens and tin pie pans, got a bed of coals going in my campfire pit, and followed the procedure that I narrate for making biscuits (somewhat tinny and smoky tasting). I also tinkered around with some of my canvas-mending materials (nice big needles, plus a thimble mounted on a leather strap that goes around one's hand), and I experimented once again with splicing rope. All of these things, I hope, have their proper places in the narrative.

The story line itself is, I hope, an enjoyable one about a man with a conscience who runs afoul of land barons who want to push around the small operators. I also tried to maintain romantic interest by having my protagonist meet and become interested in a young woman who has a bit of spunk to her.

As always when a work of mine goes out into the world, I hope readers enjoy it. The last time I visited with Don D’Auria, before he and Dorchester parted ways, he told me he thought this book had a little extra something to it. I said I thought so, too. I hope we were right.

Dutch and the Hired Man

2011-05-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2011 issue of Emerging Voices is now out, and it has a short story of mine entitled "Dutch and the Hired Man."

This is one of those odd stories, a little off-center, that sneaks up on a person and demands to be written. The narrator is a kid who is four years old at the beginning of the story and six years old at the end. In the company of his hired man, Three-Fingered Jack, the kid drinks whiskey, smokes cigarettes, swears, saddles his horse, and rides with Jack when they go after the sheepherders. In the story, the kid does not figure out why Jack calls him by his mother's name, Dutch. Damned if I know, either, but I have fun reading this story.

I wrote about Emerging Voices and its guiding light, Janet Craven, in an entry here last year, on June 16, 2010.

For a sample of some of the past contributions, including a short-short story of mine in last year's issue and a non-fiction piece the year before, see the site at this address:

https://wncc.net/students/activities/student_publications/

One Foot in the Stirrup 2

2011-05-16T10:12:00.001-07:00

I am happy to report that Western Trail Blazer has published my short story collection entitled One Foot in the Stirrup as an e-book. As I mentioned in an earlier post (July 9, 2009), the short stories in this collection range from my first published piece of fiction, a story entitled “West of Dancing Rock,” published in 1978 by a pulp magazine called Far West, to a couple of other gunfight stories, to a couple of heartfelt stories, to a closing piece that edges into irony and parody. I first brought out this book myself in 1995, and I sold it along with my traditional westerns. When the first printing sold well, I re-set the type and procured a new cover for a second edition. Not long after that, the book appeared in a hardcover large-print edition. This book has done well for me and has gotten a good reception in several places.

The e-book edition is now live on Smashwords and Amazon, and I am pleased to see this collection of western stories available to new readers in a new format. Western Trail Blazer is the same company that published "Rose of Durango," and I am happy to continue working with the good people there.

Interview with Booklife

2011-04-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

Two good things in one day could spoil a guy and make him forget about the evils in the world for a few minutes.

The first two things in my inbox this morning were the announcement from Rebecca J. Vickery that "Rose of Durango" was up on Smashwords (see previous post) and a notification from Jeremy Jones that the interview I did with his blog entitled Booklife was now posted.

For those interested in reading interviews by a good variety of writers, Booklife is a very good blog to visit. And, of course, anyone interested in my work and what I may have to say about it might like to look at this interview. Here is a link to it: http://booklifenow.com/2011/04/with-intelligence-a-conscience-and-the-ability-to-act-john-d-nesbitt-on-writing-the-west/

My thanks to Jeremy Jones for inviting me to be featured on his site. And my thanks to any of you who drop in here.

Rose of Durango 2

2011-04-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

My short story "Rose of Durango" has been published by Western Trail Blazer, an innovative publishing venture that publishes short stories, novellas, and full-length novels and collections in e-book and print format. I was very happy to learn of this company, thanks to my good friend and fellow writer Matt Mayo, and I began corresponding with the owner, Rebecca J. Vickery, about prospective submissions. I have found Rebecca to be courteous, prompt, cooperative, and professional with this story and with other possibilities I have discussed with her. I feel as if I am writing a letter of recommendation, and maybe I am. I have great praise and esteem for her and her enterprise.

"Rose of Durango" had a short career with muted glory in the Amazon Shorts program. The story may have sold a few copies at Amazon, but not enough to generate a royalty statement, so I felt that I was seeking a new life for the story when I submitted it to Western Trail Blazer. I'm glad the story has been met with success.

For more comments on the story and on the Amazon Shorts program, an interested person could look at the September 17, 2009, entry I made here. To recapitulate briefly, however, I could mention that "Rose of Durango" features a character named Jimmy Clevis, who narrates the story as he narrates the three novels in a mini-series I wrote. Jimmy is a good-natured cowboy who becomes an amateur detective when he gets into one jam after another in Red Wind Crossing, Rancho Alegre, Raven Springs, and now "Rose of Durango."

This story is now live on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51957

It is available on Lulu at http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/rose-of-durango/15364937

and Western Trail Blazer is at http://westerntrailblazer.yolasite.com/

This story should also be available at some of the other outlets such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble before long.

I also hope to see more of my work brought to the public by Western Trail Blazer.

Interview

2011-03-17T10:52:00.001-07:00

Larry Sweazy has a blog that may be of interest to readers and writers of western and mystery. The blog includes interviews, and the most recent is of my humble self. If you are interested, please go to: http://larrydsweazy.blogspot.com/

Wyoming Writers Contest

2011-02-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

Deadline: Hard copy entries much be postmarked by April 9, 2011.

Entry fee: $10.00 for each entry from members of Wyoming Writers, Inc., $15.00 for non-members. Member fee for poetry is $10.00 for 3 poems, non-members $15.00 for 3 poems.

Non-members are encouraged to join the organization: information and membership form are available on www.wyowriters.org. Contest entry forms are also available on the web site, and from flyers in libraries and bookstores, and in the WyoWriters newsletter. You may photocopy an entry form.

No limit on the number of entries, but there is an entry fee for each manuscript and every 3 poems.

Include one check for the total amount. No entry fees will be refunded.

Eligibility: The contest is open to all writers. All works must be the unpublished, original work of the sub-mitter. All works must be in English. Work accepted or under consideration for publication elsewhere, or entered in another contest simultaneously is not eligible. Work that has previously placed or received an honorable mention in a Wyoming Writers, Inc. contest is not eligible. Work may be submitted to other contests or for publication after the contest deadline.

Categories: Adult Fiction: (No horror or erotica) 3000 words maximum.

Fiction for Children/Juveniles: 3000 words maximum

Non-fiction: Personal experiences and Memoirs. 3000 words maximum

Non-fiction: Articles and Essays., 3000 words maximum

Traditional Poetry: 28 lines maximum; up to 3 poems per submission

Free Verse Poetry: 28 lines maximum; up to 3 poems per submission

Prizes: First place: $50, Second place: $30, Third place $20. Each will get a certificate. There will be no Honorable Mentions. Winners will be notified the latter part of May. Winner will be announced at the WW,Inc. 2011 Conference to be held at the Ramada Plaza Riverside, Casper, WY June 3-5, 2011.

Manuscript preparation

Cover Sheet: Each entry must be accompanied by a cover sheet on 81/2" X 11" paper that includes the following information:

(1)Category entered
(2) Title of work
(3) Word count or number of lines
(3a) for prose, number of pages.
(4) Author's name
(5) Author's address
(6) Author's telephone number

NOTE: this will be the Author's only identifying information and will not appear anywhere else on the entry.

Use Standard manuscript format; double-spaced with 1 1/2" margins all around. Start the first page halfway down the page. Title and page number must appear on each page (header). Times New Roman or Courier font required. Do not staple. Use paper clips to keep manuscript together. No binders.

Poetry entries: Poems may be single-spaced, but margins should be at least 1" from paper edges. Keep poems to one page each. Do not exceed the 28 line maximum for each poem. Do not use all caps. Times New Roman or Courier font required.

All Entries: Must be on ordinary 81/2" X 11" white paper. No unusual fonts. Keep copies of your work as entries will not be returned.

Send entries to: Ms Chris Williams/WW,Inc. Contest, 3229 NW Gumwood Ave., Corvallis, OR 97330

Manuscripts not following the above format, or exceeding the word or line limit, or have the wrong category noted will be disqualified.

For questions please e.mail Phyllis Dugan, Contest Chair, phdugan@silverstar.com

One-Eyed Cowboy Wild and e-books

2011-01-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

Although there are some writers still out there who refuse to adapt to a word processor, most of us have made the transition. Even I, known to some of my friends and relatives as being somewhere between a troglodyte and a Luddite, got with it and learned to use a computer. When I saw that it was (a) inevitable and (b) valuable for my own selfish purposes, I quit clinging to my wretched typewriter. More recently, even though I am put off by prophecies about the death of the printed book, the death of the western, and the death of smaller creatures such as the apostrophe and capitalization, I can see the obvious. Authors need to be willing to participate in e-publishing, for the same reasons (a and b, above) that the foot-draggers (like myself) had to get hip to word processors.

I was actually more receptive to e-publishing than I was to converting to a computer. I first started submitting short stories to e-zines over ten years ago. As I imagine other writers have felt, seeing one’s short story on a website does not give quite the same glow as seeing it in print, especially in a nice magazine or anthology, and when an e-zine or website ceases to exist, there is no souvenir in the form of a contributor’s copy. All the same, it’s nice to know that one’s work is reaching readers it might not have done otherwise, and with the case of short stories, one might still find another outlet.

I will admit that I resisted the idea of e-books as first editions or as the only format for a novel, and I disliked the smug, superior prophecies mentioned above. But as long as my publisher was selling subsidiary rights for e-books, I had no objection. Again, I thought I might be reaching additional readers, and in one of my royalty statements, I even saw a sale, one time, of one e-book. If I ever get another royalty statement, maybe I will see more sales. But the listings were out there. Three of my early westerns appeared on FictionWise, an early format that appeared on the Barnes and Noble site. Since then, four more titles have shown up as Barnes and Noble Nook Books, and five have shown up on Amazon as Kindle books.

Having seen these editions advertised, I thought I should take some initiative myself. I submitted my first published novel, One-Eyed Cowboy Wild, for consideration with Uncial Press, a publisher that does almost exclusively e-books. The editor, Judith B. Glad, is a tireless promoter of her press, her writers, and her products. I thought I was going to have just another e-book reprint, but she gave the work a full edit. It seemed a bit strange to me, to be editing and revising a work of fiction that had already had a life of its own for sixteen years in hardcover, mass-market, and large print, but I went along (perhaps with a bit of foot-dragging) with her suggestions. For one thing, I felt I should cooperate with someone who took that much trouble to work with me, and for another, I thought I needed to learn once more to adapt. I am convinced that the end product, while not departing from the original story line, has a stronger narrative style.

Now I am waiting to see in what outlets this version will be available. For anyone who is interested in this area of publishing either as a writer or as a reader, here is the address of the notice on the Uncial Press website:

http://www.uncialpress.com/One-Eyed-Cowboy-Wild.html

Here is the address for the page on the MobiPocket website:

http://m.mobipocket.com/en/eBooks/eBookDetails.asp?BookID=387648

Reprints of Note

2011-01-10T10:47:00.000-08:00

Because production and book releases have gotten drawn out with Dorchester, I am a while waiting for my next traditional western original to come out. Gather My Horses was originally scheduled for release in October, but now it is scheduled to come out as an e-book in April and as a trade paperback in June. I very much look forward to seeing this book in print.

Meanwhile, I am happy to see other work of mine in reprint. My two most recent traditional westerns, Not a Rustler and Stranger in Thunder Basin, have been released in large print editions by Thorndike. These books are in hardcover and will see most of their distribution in the library market, which is very satisfactory to me. I am happy to see my work in durable format, and I am happy to reach as wide a range of readers as possible.

Between the release of Stranger in Thunder Basin in October and Not a Rustler earlier this month, I had the additional pleasure of seeing Twin Rivers, an early novel of mine, released as a small hardcover in the Black Horse Westerns line published by Robert Hale of London. I submitted Twin Rivers to Hale on the basis of a recommendation of friend and fellow writer Matthew Mayo, who has had three novels published with Hale. I appreciate his recommendation, and I am gratified, again, to see my work gain in distribution and be available in a durable edition.

Night Falls at Lonetree

2010-12-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

“Night Falls at Lonetree” is a short story of mine that has been published as a shirt-pocket book with Treble Heart Books. When I heard Treble Heart Books publisher Lee Emory mention the shirt-pocket line at a WWA session, I thought I would like to see something of mine in that format. So I wrote what I thought was a tight, 5000-word story, and I submitted it. Lee Emory has been very gracious to work with, and I am pleased to see my story under its own cover.

As I wrote this story, I worked with an idea that had presented itself to me while I was working on story lines for various works. Several years back, I knew of a case in which a young woman from a good upbringing had married a young man who had been in trouble with the law. Her motives were kind and charitable, as she gave the young man the benefit of the doubt and believed she could help him make a better life for himself. As it turned out, he brought her enormous grief and trouble, and her parents (who were friends of mine) were relieved when she finally got detached from the fellow.

I decided to write a story about a young woman who had a little bit better judgment before getting entangled further. At the same time, I thought it would make a better story if the young man was not necessarily destined to get into more trouble. Deep down, I thought that in the real-life story, the young man did not deserve the innocent and charitable girl to begin with, and then he dealt her a terrible injustice when he dragged her into his trouble-prone life. What we can’t do in real life, we can sometimes do in fiction, and that is to keep the guy from ruining the girl even if he does have, in his mind, the best of intentions to reform.

Although it’s not a happy story, I hope it is just. Of course, I leave it to readers to decide whether they agree with my sense of appropriate rewards.

This story is available at Treble Heart Books, either as a download or as a physical, shirt-pocket -sized booklet. Below is a link to the Treble Heart Books website. Those of you who are writers might be interested in seeing other pages of the website in order to see what kind of work THB puts out. As I mentioned above, I have had a very good experience working with Lee Emory, and I hope I have the opportunity to see something else of mine published with her company.

http://www.trebleheartbooks.com/SDNesbitt.html

Hap

2010-11-23T07:49:00.000-08:00

“Hap” is a short story I wrote for the Law of the Gun anthology edited by Russell Davis and Martin Greenberg and published by Kensington in November of 2010. The unifying idea of this collection is that each story is based on a character, historical or fictional, who lives by the gun or is a gunfighter in some way.

I chose to write about a fictional character who is on an undisclosed mission to get even with a stock detective. In the late 1800's in Wyoming, a stock detective was often a hired killer brought in openly or hired quietly by the big cattlemen, for the purpose of rubbing out undesirable small operators. I have written about this topic in some of my full-length westerns, but I had not exhausted my contempt for hired killers (and those who paid them) by the time I had the opportunity to write this story. After I wrote “Hap,” I dealt with this theme a little more fully in my novel Not a Rustler, which came out in February 2010.

One of my technical challenges in writing this story was to maintain an aura of mystery about the mission of the main character. In order to do achieve this purpose, I decided to stay outside of the character’s point of view even though the entire story would take place in his presence. It worked all right for me. I thought the method maintained tension, supported the stoic nature of the main character, and helped suspend the final disclosure until the last line of the story.

I suppose I could offer a word of explanation about the title. I took the word “Hap” from a famous poem by the same title, written by Thomas Hardy. The word means chance or fortune, and I believe in my story it takes on the related meaning of fate by chance as well as by design. As will become evident in the story, it is also a shortened form of someone’s name.

For the time setting, I found it natural to set this in the 1890's, when Frank Canton (who is mentioned by name in the story) was doing his back-shooting work in the Powder River country and when Tom Horn was doing his dirty work in southern Wyoming. For the geographical setting, I placed this story in the area between the Hat Creek Breaks and the Cheyenne River, an area from fifty to a hundred miles north of where I live. I like the area very much and have traveled there many times, both to hunt deer and antelope and to gather impressions for stories. I hope to go back there again and see what stories rise from the landscape and present themselves.

Dorchester and the Doldrums

2010-11-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

It’s been a little while since I made any entries here, and the longer the time goes on, the more difficult it is to take the first step toward getting back. But here I am, with a bit of commentary about one thing that helped get me off this track for a while.

For the last thirteen years, the main outlet for my published work has been Leisure Books, which is part of Dorchester Publishing. I began with the company when Don D’Auria was bringing the westerns line back to life. Our excellent relationship began when he acquired One-Eyed Cowboy Wild as a mass-market paperback reprint and Black Diamond Rendezvous as a paperback original. From that point on, we would do fifteen more paperback originals and another reprint. I thought we were on the crest of the wave at the Western Writers of America convention in June, when Don and Leah received the Lariat Award for their contributions to the western genre and when I received my second Spur award in paperback original. At that time I had a book that had gone through editing with Don, plus two more under contract. One was written and in the pipe, and I was beginning to write the other when Dorchester dropped the bomb.

The story of Dorchester’s vicissitudes is pretty well known to many people by now, so I won’t rehash all the details, but on August 6 of this year, a fellow writer called me up and asked me if I knew that Dorchester was cancelling its mass-market lines. I certainly didn’t, but I was able to find a news item to that effect on the Internet. According to the report, Dorchester was changing from mass-market format to e-books and POD trade paperback. For the next few days, the news and reaction to it showed up in various places, including some author blogs that were not, shall we say, genteel in their comments. Writers were scrambling to try to get their rights back on some works, and those who had recent books out reported that they could not get copies.

Within the next few days, I heard from Don and got an update. The plan was to move forward and into a new market. Basic loyalty (which many other authors also expressed) told me to hang in there. So I continued working on my manuscript.

Then on August 20, another Friday surprise hit the air. Without much warning, Dorchester let Don and Leah go. According to earlier reports, the company had dismissed its sales staff, so now it looked as if it was running on a skeleton crew. Writers were referred to the one remaining editor, who was, as the saying goes, up to his ass in alligators. But he was courteous and prompt about answering questions, and in spite of the uncertain air about the whole upheaval, I got a few little details taken care of.

During this time, I continued to work on my manuscript, which was a curious undertaking. I had it under contract, and I was writing it according to the synopsis I had submitted to Don. But I had no certainty that the work would get produced by Dorchester, as the contract had never been countersigned and returned to me (which meant no advance yet on either book), and in fact I was trying to get the rights reversed. My writing on this manuscript reminded me of an analogy made by Frederick Crews in The Random House Handbook, which I used for many years in the college composition course. Commenting on the futility of writing when one does not have a clear notion of one’s reader and assumes a ‘nonexistent relationship,’ he wrote, “It is almost like composing love letters ‘to whom it may concern’ and mailing them off to ‘Occupant’ or ‘Boxholder.’”

So I finished the manuscript, had the rights to it and the previous one returned to me, and went in search of a new relationship. I have had a couple of possibilities come around, but I have always been superstitious about talking about any of this kind of business until the work comes out in published form, so I will leave it at that. I am also revising the selfsame manuscript that I wrote in a curious vacuum.

I can remember earlier periods in my life, back when I used to write regular letters and mail them to family and friends. When I was going through a difficult or dying relationship with a significant other, I didn’t write anyone until I had something definite to write about. Sometimes my wait entailed long periods of time and tied me up so that I didn’t want to write anyone about anything. That is how it has been with my posting here. I was stuck in a nonexistent publishing relationship, composing a long letter to no one in particular, and it had me tied up.

Things have gotten better, though, and I can’t complain about Dorchester’s treatment of me. At my request, the company reversed the rights on the two works I thought I should try to salvage, adjusted the release date of the one work I still had with it, and paid me the second half of the advance on that work. It has been an odd time to go through, though, and I will not forget the hollow feeling of writing a three-hundred-page manuscript according to a relationship that no longer existed.

Writing the West With Dusty Richards

2010-07-22T13:17:00.000-07:00

The WWA convention last month in Knoxville saw the debut of a new book by Dusty Richards. As many of you know, Dusty is a long-time writer with many successful novels and notable awards to his credit. His new book, Writing the West With Dusty Richards and Friends, is a how-to volume on writing western fiction. It includes sixteen short chapters written by Dusty on the craft of writing and on the business of submitting and marketing one’s work. In addition to those chapters, Dusty has included shorter chapters written by a few of his writing acquaintances. Jodi Thomas writes about “Romancing the West,” Mike Kearby does “Writing the West for the Young Adult Reader,” Jory Sherman covers “Writing the Mountain Man Novel,” your humble blogger discusses “Writing the Traditional Western,” and John Duncklee writes about “Mistake Awareness: Situations to Avoid When Writing the West.” The book is also graced by illustrations by Michael Andrews.

With this variety in the contributions, many writers are bound to find something useful as well as interesting. At a little under 200 pages, this is not a long book, and at $15.95 it is not an expensive one, either. If you are interested in writing western fiction, you might want to check it out.

Western Writers of America 2010

2010-07-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

This year’s Western Writers of America convention took place in Knoxville, Tennessee, from June 22 to June 26. In spite of the oppressive, humid weather, it was a good event. The most valuable part of gatherings like that, at least for most people, is the renewal of friendships, the making of new friends, and the face-to-face contact of networking. WWA has a genuinely good feeling in the atmosphere.

The culmination of the conference is the Spur Awards Banquet, which takes place on Saturday night. This year’s banquet had me dazed, as I was accepting two awards–one in original mass-market paperback novel, and one in short fiction. Leisure Books, the publisher of my western novels, was receiving the Lariat Award for contributions to western literature. Editors Don D’Auria and Leah Hultenschmidt were on hand to receive that award and also the Spur for my novel Stranger in Thunder Basin. They appear in one photo, and my wife Rocio appears with me in another. I would like to express my special thanks to these people who offer me so much support and encouragement.

I would also like to thank Gary Lovisi, the editor of Hardboiled magazine, who published my short story “At the End of the Orchard.” Gary was unable to make it to the convention, but he wrote me to say that he was very pleased with the award.

My thanks to Jennifer Smith-Mayo for these fine photos. She and her husband, Matt, a fine writer and good friend, appear with me in one of the pictures. Matt was a finalist in the short fiction category, and I think we can expect to see more of him in the future.

And finally, I would like to express my appreciation for the support and encouragement I have received from the faculty, staff, and administration of Eastern Wyoming College. As I told my supervisor, when I am off carousing in a distant city, being famous for a few minutes, I do not forget the people who helped me get there.

Wyoming Writers

2010-07-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Almost a month ago, during the first week of June, I attended the annual Wyoming Writers conference. This year it was held in Cody, Wyoming, which is always a pleasant place to visit.

Wyoming Writers is an upbeat organization of members who live mostly in Wyoming, though we have quite a few members who live in other states. Ours is an organization that is open to all levels and all genres, so we have some writers who are just getting into this world while we have others who have been around for a while and have quite a bit of experience. As with just about any activity or shared interest in Wyoming, our conference is an open, friendly gathering with a wholesome sense of community. Writers in our group are very willing to share experience and information with one another.

We also have good panelists. This year we had Max McCoy as our headliner. Max is a top-notch writer of fiction and nonfiction as well as a professor of journalism at Emporia State University. He gave good workshop sessions and a terrific keynote speech at Saturday’s banquet.

Also on the program this year were Robert Roripaugh and his daughter, Lee Ann. Together they gave a presentation on Heart Mountain, an interment site for Japanese Americans during World War II. Separately, Robert gave sessions on fiction writing, while Lee Ann presented on poetry.

In addition to these highly popular panelists, we had two agents in attendance. We usually try to have three panelists and two people from the agent/editor world.

Our conference next year will be on June 3, 4, and 5 in Casper, Wyoming. We are already beginning to line up panelists and agent/editor folks. For more information about Wyoming Writers, visit the website at http://www.wyowriters.org

Endeavor Books

2010-06-18T09:09:00.000-07:00

Endeavor Books is a small publisher located in Casper, Wyoming. For several years it was an independent publisher and printer, but now it is a division of Mountain States Lithographing.

I first started working with Endeavor Books in the 1990's when the company did print jobs for projects I was working on, such as a literary magazine we used to publish at Eastern Wyoming College, textbooks I wrote for my college courses, and my own publishing projects when I brought out my first four collections of short stories. In those days I worked with Dan Hashberger and Bruce Studer, two very personable fellows. As time went on, they also brought out work of mine under their own imprint. When Bruce’s health took a serious downturn with cancer, Dan kept up the business by himself, but after Bruce’s death, Dan eventually found it feasible to merge with Mountain States.

For the past several years I have worked with Dan in his location at Mountain States. He has continued to be flexible, cooperative, and efficient. In addition to bringing out another collection of my short stories, he has produced subsequent editions of my textbooks and is now producing the first book edition of my workbook for basic writing. These teaching materials have been a great development for me in my daily work, as they have helped me maintain efficiency in my course management and they have allowed me not to be dependent on the big textbook publishers. Furthermore, the cost for the students has always been half or less than half of what a comparable book from a larger textbook company would cost.

Beyond my own experience with Endeavor Books, I know that Dan has worked very well with other people in this part of the country. For several years Wyoming Writers, an organization I belong to, published its annual anthology of contest winners through Endeavor Books, and I have known several fellow writers who have had a good working relationship in bringing out projects with Dan. Furthermore, in 2004, Wyoming Writers recognized Endeavor Books with the Arizola Magnenat Award for dedicated service to writers.

And so I take this moment to express my appreciation of Dan Hashberger and Endeavor Books, who have done so much to help writers, readers, and students in our region.

For a look at Endeavor Books’s website, see http://www.endeavorbooks.com/

Emerging Voices

2010-06-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

Emerging Voices is a journal of literature and art produced by students and staff of Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. WNCC is a neighboring college of Eastern Wyoming College, where I work, and coincidentally, the sponsor of Emerging Voices, Janet Craven, is the sister of Dee Ludwig, the Vice-president of Learning here at EWC. So we are a community of friends across the state line from one another.

For more than ten years now, I have submitted poems, personal experience essays, and short fiction pieces to Emerging Voices, and the staff has often picked something of mine for the annual edition. When my schedule has permitted, I have gone over to Scottsbluff (less than an hour’s drive) to enjoy the reading and reception for the year’s issue.

For several years I have been impressed with how well Janet Craven has inspired students and community members to write, to submit to the magazine, and to read their work. She dedicates a great deal of time to working with students at the college, encouraging them and guiding them through their own writing and through editing the magazine. She also works tirelessly at inviting submissions, keeping in contact with contributors, and sending out notices about other events in the area. In addition to scheduling the annual reception and reading, Janet organizes other reading events at such places as local coffee shops and the Scotts Bluff National Monument.

For a sample of some of the past contributions, see the site at this address:

https://wncc.net/students/activities/student_publications/

If you get the red badge with the cross on it, just continue to the website. There you may click on past issues of Emerging Voices, and if you are so inclined, you could drop Janet a line at her e-mail address on the first page of the student publications site. She deserves appreciation for all the good work she does.

Paddle Your Own Canoe

2010-06-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

The most recent anthology of writings by Western Writers of America is now available through all of the regular retail and online sources. Roundup!, edited by Paul Andrew Hutton, features fiction selections by Elmer Kelton, Matt Braun, Richard Wheeler, Dusty Richards, Cotton Smith, Johnny Boggs, Andrew Fenady, and others. The anthology also has poetry and non-fiction pieces.

I am proud to say that a story of mine made it into this collection. "Paddle Your Own Canoe" is a short story of about 6000 words. Like other fiction I have been working on in the past few years, this story is set in rural California in the 1960's and is characterized by what I think of as a hard realism. The main character in this story does field work and lives in a cabin court, the kind of working-class housing that was common at that time. The crisis in the story develops when the main character meets a slick character who is wiser in the ways of the world.

This is not a hard crime story like some of the others I have written in this vein, as there is no murder or other violence, but it does portray the hard world that these people live in, and there is a dispiriting theft that I think is right in scale with this world. As I have mentioned in earlier entries here, I have a great fund of experience to draw from when I write this kind of story, and I feel that I have an insight that some readers might find interesting.

I was very glad to have my story included in this collection. Not only does my work appear in prestigious company, but it also contributes to an inclusive sense of what Western American literature can be. So, to the editor Paul Hutton and to the selection committee (which Hutton mentions in his Preface), I give my thanks.

Literary Influences, Part Two

2010-05-07T07:30:00.001-07:00

Having cited the three main influences on my development as a student and writer of fiction, I thought I might go on to discuss the topic in more variety. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have read a little bit here and there, as most people in my world have done. Most of us still have big things we haven’t gotten to, and most of us have gone off on our own paths of interest, but there is a core of literature that many of us share. I will mention a few highlights that are probably on other people’s lists as well.

In my undergraduate education at UCLA, I had good instruction in the reading of poetry, mainly British poetry, and I believe that has helped me in all other reading. For the most part, I enjoyed everything I read. My sophomore-level survey courses, plus a junior-level course in the reading of poetry, introduced me to a wide variety of poets from John Donne to Thom Gunn. In my upper division course work I had courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, authors whose work I had read before; reading it again, in upper-level courses with serious professors in a memorable atmosphere of dedicated learning, fixed those works even more solidly as part of my basic literary experience.

During that time I also read Dryden, Pope, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, and Austen in various courses, and all of that work has stayed with me as well. I think I have always felt the responsibility to learn everything in my field and related to it, an impossible undertaking as one comes to understand, but every time I was exposed to a new period or a new genre of literature, I felt compelled to read more in that area and to learn more about it. And so I took a couple of courses in Victorian fiction, in which I developed an acquaintance with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy. Then toward the end of my stay at UCLA I took a course in American literature, which introduced me to James, Crane, and Wharton, plus others who have held less interest for me, such as Whitman and Dickinson.

In between the survey courses and seminars, I took a course in Greek literature in translation, taught by a Classics professor, and there we read the Iliad and the Odyssey. What a world that opened up, as I learned about the oral tradition, the formulaic constructions in the hexameter line, the overall structure of epic, and the timeless content of the stories themselves. We also read a few Greek lyric poets, and I developed an appreciation of the epigram.

During the years of graduate school, time stretched out. Through an assistantship I discovered teaching, so I did not read with the same intensity as before, but over a stretch of years I read more in just about everything I studied as an undergraduate, plus I read deliberately in the major novelists of Britain and America, plus many of the minor novelists. More Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Hardy; excursions into Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Waugh; works by Scott, the Brontes. Also during this period I did my first reading in authors I would return to often in later years, such as Cooper, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Cather, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. I had also read Faulkner and Steinbeck all along.

When I did the work for my doctoral dissertation in the western novel, another world of literature opened up for me. I discovered and read what were the standard authors at the time: Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Emerson Hough, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Conrad Richter, Ernest Haycox, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Frederick Manfred, and Jack Schaefer.

When I went into full-time teaching, I tried to keep reading broadly, and in my first ten years at Eastern Wyoming College I discovered Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Raymond Carver, and others who were the top fiction writers of the 1980's. During this time, as part of my teaching work, I found myself reading some of the same traditional authors time and again, many of whom I still read, and I have come to understand what it means for a work to stand the test of time. Some works continue to come alive, not only with the passing of time but with successive readings. To this day, there are stories by Stephen Crane, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and Eudora Welty that do not grow old no matter how often I read them. The same goes for poems by Robert Browning, A.E. Housman, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, and of course the bard himself, Shakespeare. Some novels hold up very well (provided that I do not read them more often than every two years), and sometimes I am surprised that when I go through O Pioneers! or The Great Gatsby one more time, the work is just as good as ever. I do not read The Age of Innocence or Great Expectations quite so often, but they, too, are always great novels. I regret that I cannot say that for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If I have not read it for ten or twenty years, it is still tiresome before I get halfway through it. The same goes for Shane, while in contrast, I never tire of The Sea of Grass or The Big Sky.

In a way, this seems like just a long list of books and authors I have read, but I have mentioned mostly those that I have read seriously and that have been part of a coherent experience. Even at that, I have left out a few strays, such as John Barth (what smart-aleck lit major didn’t read him in the 1970's?), Albert Camus (thanks to the great French instructors at UCLA), and E.L. Doctorow (once you’ve read Welcome to Hard Times, the western novel isn’t the same). Then there are authors of lesser literary rank such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who also go into the larger mix.

In addition to all of the above, there are influences that not everyone would grant are literary, such as Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and Ian Tyson. I would be hard put to explain how the works of these artists have intertwined into my reading of other works or into my thinking about how experience can be represented.

If I were to look for common denominators in all of this, I would say that most broadly I value form and style, structure and technique. Of course those features are empty if there isn’t some real content, some feeling for human potential and human failings, that rings true in a way that every writer should want her work to do. John Barth once wrote, "Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique, but it’s only the technique we can talk about." For analytical purposes I agree with that statement, so that I can say, for example, that in The Sea of Grass or The Great Gatsby I value the role of the narrator, the use of figurative language, the idea of what people aspire to and what they end up with. For less analytical purposes I can say that there is something in me as a reader and as a writer that would not be there if I hadn’t spent melancholy hours listening to "Gates of Eden" and "Desolation Row," and later, "Back to the Barrooms" and "Summer Wages." And, although there are people who resent McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a western film, there is something in Leonard Cohen’s music that connects with the first time I heard Judy Collins sing "Suzanne," at about the time I first read Oedipus Rex and was getting a glimpse of the world beyond the farm and ranch life I grew up in.

Literary Influences

2010-04-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

My sense of literary influence is rather broad. In the course of my undergraduate and graduate education I read all of the major novelists of Britain and America, plus many of the minor novelists. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the western novel, and in my teaching and writing career I have studied numerous short story writers plus many novelists I did not read the first time around. And in the midst of all of this, I have maintained a fondness for the two great epics of Homer. In order to discuss the most significant influences, I would have to cite three, as I could not pick two of the following to the exclusion of a third. As it turns out, one of my writers is British, one is American, and one is Canadian.

Of the writers I have found most inspiring, I must say Dickens has touched me the most deeply. He grew up poor, as I did, and he conveys a sense of the absurdity of situations that we grow up in, have no power to change, and really have no power to leave behind. There is something in Dickens that speaks irrationally and truthfully, for me, at least, about how our lives are shaped. After reading some of his work in grade school and high school, I began to develop a literary appreciation of Dickens when I read Hard Times in college. From there I chose to read Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and Bleak House. I have gone back to read Great Expectations several more times, a few years in between readings, as I have taught it in introduction to literature courses. I have also gone back to re-read Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House, both of them very big books.

I always find Dickens enthusiastic about life in spite of the circumstances that hem us in; in addition, I always enjoy the pure pleasure of using language liberally. Many of my stories about working in the fields in California reflect my belief, reinforced by Dickens, that poverty and influences of the past are fit subjects for serious fiction. As for the pure revelry of using language to deal with absurdity, Dickens’ influence is most evident in Adventures of the Ramrod Rider, perhaps a few of the stories in I’ll Tell You What, and a character here and there in my westerns (most notably, Rove in Black Hat Butte).

Of the twentieth-century writers, I have spent more time with American authors than with British. Although writers such as Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck are central to my experience, I have felt more affinity with A.B. Guthrie, Jr. He impressed me with his literary craftsmanship at about the time I was developing my own craft as a fiction writer. I have admired his prose style, his use of imagery, his evocation of landscape, and his meticulous execution of narrative point of view. I have also appreciated his sense of form, especially in plot resolution, in which he offers negotiated endings rather than melodramatic or slam-bang endings with a protagonist solving problems with conclusive violence. The influence of these aspects of his work might be evident in several of my short stories in One Foot in the Stirrup, Antelope Sky, Seasons in the Fields, and Shadows on the Plain. The influence is probably stronger in my earlier traditional western novels and in my contemporary western novel Keep the Wind in Your Face.

In my later traditional westerns, say from For the Norden Boys onward, I have worked with more definite endings and more assertive protagonists. In some, hearkening back to Black Diamond Rendezvous, picking up Man from Wolf River, threading through the Jimmy Clevis novels, and on through Stranger in Thunder Basin, I am working with an aesthetic that includes irony akin to Dickens as well as the stylistic influences of Guthrie.

These authors have two common features that I find motivating and that I aspire to achieve. One is a sense of form. Although Dickens has a reputation for having created some of the "shaggy, baggy monsters" of Victorian fiction, I find Great Expectations impressive in its plot, its pacing, and its internal structuring devices such as foreshadowing and image systems. As suggested above, I find the same qualities in Guthrie, especially in The Big Sky. The second feature is the great ability to maintain different levels of interest--the narrative or suspense level, the level of thematic seriousness, and then the level of intricate image systems and supporting word choice. I do not presume to have achieved such success, but I do find these two authors inspiring in these ways.

In short story writing, I most admire Alice Munro. Although I cannot presume to write up to her level, I consider her work as exemplary of the greatness that short fiction can aspire to. As with Guthrie, I admire her ability to work with negotiated and indeterminate endings. Always subtle and articulate, Munro writes about the importance of everyday relationships, and she conveys a clear sense that fiction does not need to be flamboyant. Such stories as "Dulse," "The Turkey Season," "Accident," "Bardon Bus," and "Prue" imply an aesthetic that resonates with me. In my own work, I figure that if something is more interesting than picking squash, it should be all right for a story, and it doesn’t always matter what happens to the squash. Munro’s stories reassure me in this line of thinking, and a story such as "Labor Day Dinner" seems even to make an indirect statement (and pun) about deus ex machina endings. Some of Munro’s stories (such as "Bardon Bus" and "Prue") also have interesting internal structures, as they are not written in a straight line.

I cite the above stories from The Moons of Jupiter because I have been through the collection a few times, but I would also like to mention indisputable masterpieces such as "Friend of My Youth" "Carried Away," and "Open Secrets." Munro writes stories that, as models of excellence, tell me it is all right to write the kinds of stories I want to write. Once inspired, however, I have gone on to write stories that are perhaps too subtle or flat for their own good, as they do not distinguish themselves right away in a pile of unsolicited manuscripts. Still, I have faith in this kind of story, and some of my most successful stories in Antelope Sky, Seasons in the Fields, and Shadows on the Plain were written after I had studied the work of Alice Munro.

These, then, are the writers whom I cite as having influenced me as a fiction writer and as a writer of the regions where I have lived. Beneath the surface differences of time and place, these writers all connect--with me, at least--as examples of the potential we hope to strive for.

Dead for the Last Time

2010-03-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

The second (and final) installment of my novella "Dead for the Last Time" is now appearing in the most recent issue of Mysterical-E magazine. Here is the address for this issue:

http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=current_issue&body=toc

While you are there, you can also check out the story by my good pal and fellow writer Larry D. Sweazy.

2010 Spur Awards

2010-03-22T11:48:00.001-07:00

The results for the 2010 Western Writers of America Spur Awards are now public. I am very pleased to report that I made the list.

My novel Stranger in Thunder Basin won the Spur Award for Best Mass-Market Paperback Original. This is a great development for me, as I won in the same category last year with Trouble at the Redstone and was a finalist the year before with Raven Springs. All three of these novels have been published by Leisure Books / Dorchester Publishing. For commentary on Stranger in Thunder Basin, see my earlier post here. (Use the search box above.)

In addition to winning in Mass-Market Paperback, I had the stunning surprise of also winning in the Best Short Fiction category. My short story "At the End of the Orchard," originally published by Hardboiled Magazine, won here. This story, about 9000 words, is a mystery/noir piece set in a peach orchard and labor camp in the 1960's. For commentary on this story, see my earlier post here. (Use the search box above.)

Each of these awards is a great honor for me, and together they mark a milestone that will be important long after the initial euphoria is gone. I would not have made it this far, of course, if it were not for the people who have seen fit to publish my work--most notably, in this case, Don D'Auria of Dorchester Publishing and Gary Lovisi of Hardboiled Magazine, but also all of the other editors and contest judges who have published my work and given me encouragement. I also would like to express my appreciation of readers, friends, and fellow writers who read my work and take interest in it. Thanks to all.

Dead for the Last Time

2010-02-26T14:25:00.000-08:00

"Dead for the Last Time" is a novella of mine that recently appeared in an electronic magazine called Mysterical-E. Actually, the first installment has been published, and the second half is to appear in the Spring 2010 issue. The story itself is a little over 22,000 words, very much novella length, and that is why the editors decided to issue it in two parts. As for content, it is representative of one kind of fiction I have been working with lately in the short and middle-length range—–fiction in the mystery/hardboiled/noir style.

The setting of this story, as with other pieces in a collection I am putting together, is rural California of the 1960's. I knew this setting at first hand when I lived in small towns and worked in the fruit fields for several years as I was growing up. As I mentioned in an earlier entry about a story entitled "At the End of the Orchard," I wrote a collection of stories with this setting a few years back, and now, more recently, I have been working with a harder kind of realism that reflects the bleak prospects of doing field work and living in labor camps and other cheap housing. Of the stories in this latter sortie, "Dead for the Last Time" is probably the cheeriest, as it has a free-spirited fellow for a narrator. It is also more of a straight murder mystery.

The narrator is a young man named Larry Sterne. He is a lad who has just finished a year of college, so he is not as cynical as someone who is stuck in the world of day labor, but he is a bit whimsical and satirical. When he comes back to town for the summer, he finds out that an older man who had a reputation for dallying with teenage boys has been found dead. Because the blame falls on some of Larry’s friends, he takes an interest in the case, only to find the body of one of the suspects.

That is as far as the first half goes. The second installment should appear in about a month or so.

Here is the address for the website:

http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=current_issue&body=toc

Since writing "Dead for the Last Time," I have worked on a couple of more stories in this same vein of rural hardboiled/noir. Each story in the collection is narrated in first person by a new narrator, and each story continues to seek its own length. The two most recent pieces are about 8000 words and 25,000 words. I am still having a hard time finding a market for fiction of this length (and with the inherent limitations of my writing on a narrow subject). But I am still happy with my pursuit here, as I hope to give a certain kind of truth to a world of experience I have known. In reality, not much happened in the fruit fields and labor camps, but those places make good settings for the kinds of story lines that I hope will bring out the sense of character and the quality of life inherent in that world as I knew it.

Not a Rustler

2010-02-09T14:39:00.000-08:00

Not a Rustler is my eighteenth traditional western novel. It was published in February 2010 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). In this book I try to maintain continuity with my previous two westerns, in which I work at straightforward action with strong elements of character and landscape.

In Not a Rustler, the main character is caught between his sympathy with small ranchers and his obligations to the big rancher he works for. For a good part of the story, Spencer Prescott has a hunch that the big ranchers have conspired to hire a gunman to pick off some of the smaller operators, but he doesn’t have any proof, and he doesn’t want to put himself in the killer’s gunsights. He also develops an interest in the widow of one of the small ranchers who get killed. This complication allows someone to start rumors that Spencer might have had a motive to knock off the woman’s husband. It also pushes Spencer to try to do more than he might otherwise.

Things become more complicated when someone kills one of the big cattlemen. Murder has struck on both sides of the conflict, and whoever is promulgating rumors now puts it out that Spencer might have had a revenge motive for killing the more prestigious cattlemen.
Before too long, it becomes evident that Spencer is the next one on the hit man’s list. He realizes that someone doesn’t like him asking questions and finding out connections, and he figures that some party or parties would like him dead so that he will not be able to defend himself when someone tries to pin one or more of the other murders on him.

Although this may seem a bit convoluted, I think it is a realistic reflection of what happens in real life. When people who want to be controlling the show decide to put blame on someone, they don’t hesitate to smear the person one way and then the other, even if the smear jobs contradict one another. They also do not hesitate to ruin people’s lives and careers, as they do not grant their victims the basic decency they deserve.

Meanwhile, Spencer is on his own, as he figures that the men from his own outfit are out to get him. So he has to learn more about the murky machinations of big cattlemen bumping off small cattlemen and then taking their land, and then he has to deal with the conspirators in proper order.

As I wrote this novel, I cared about the character and the friendships he gets into—his relationships with the honest small rancher, with the man’s wife, with other ranch hands, and even with the wife of the prosperous cattleman who catches a bullet. I also cared about the horses Spencer rides and the land he rides across. But most of all, I cared about a topic that often keeps me going—the injustice of people of influence sharing their power, suborning hatchet men to do the dirty work, and denigrating and destroying people who stand in the way. I come back to this topic from time to time, not because it is an easy story line but because it is a topic I do not quit caring about. When I wrote this book, I thought that having the protagonist bring down one hired killer could make this novel lift. I hope it does.

Books in Audio

2010-01-15T15:00:00.000-08:00

My most recent work in audio is Trouble at the Redstone, recorded and released by Books in Motion and now available in truck stops, libraries, and bookstores across the land. It makes a fellow happy to see his work available in a new format and in new outlets.

Books in Motion is a company located in Spokane Valley, Washington. A good part of the company’s business, as I understand it, is distributing books in audio (MP3 and CD) for rent as well as for sale. Travelers (big-riggers among them) are able to rent a book in one location and leave it off in another, where, I presume, more travelers have the opportunity to do the same. These audio books are also for sale as downloads or in physical packets. Books in Motion puts out a great number of these books, and they have a very good reputation for tending to details and staying on top of the business. I count myself lucky to have my work recorded and distributed by them.

My first book recorded with them was Poacher’s Moon, which was released just a little over a month ago. I received my copy on my birthday, which was nice in itself, and I put it in the CD player on my way home from picking up the mail. It was an interesting experience to hear my story being spoken out like that, sort of like a movie with the listener imagining the scenes. I had heard excerpts of my work in the past, but not the opening scene of a story I wrote, so this was a new experience for me. I suppose that even people who have listened to quite a few audio books find it notable to hear their own work in that format for the first time, especially when the story opens.

Three of my westerns have been recorded by another company, named Recorded Books, and that is where I had heard my work before. The ones recorded there are Death at Dark Water, Rancho Alegre, and Lonesome Range. Each of these books is read (or narrated) by a different person, as are the two with Books in Motion, so I have heard a few different voices interpreting my work. I can’t say that I like all of them equally well, as there seems to be a tendency to have people with a down-home drawl do westerns (with the exception of the person who narrates Death at Dark Water and who sounds a little like Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest, which I rather like for that novel). The drawl isn’t perfectly in line with the tone of my work or with the speech of many of the characters who are indigenous to the northern plains. However, the opportunity to have one’s work in another medium is nothing to be supercilious about, at least in my view. The product is for the listener, and I just hope the listener likes it. And furthermore, the subsidiary rights were paid for.

All of these titles are available through everyone’s favorite online outlet, Amazon, as well as through the websites of the producers. It is also possible to hear an excerpt in any of those places. And so, as the markets adapt and morph, we follow along and see what might come of it.

Understanding Fiction

2009-12-18T14:15:00.000-08:00

Understanding Fiction is a textbook/manual I have put together for my college classes in introduction to literature and studies in the short story. Like Writing for Real, it evolved out of materials I developed for a distance course. When I first undertook the project, I was presenting a course in short fiction and the novel, and I wrote explanatory sections for stories in an anthology I had ordered and for novels I had selected.

I did not offer the course more than once a year, and sometimes it did not come around for two years, so I had the inherent problem of updating my explanatory sections to fit the new editions of the anthology. I didn’t like being in the position of having to overhaul the basic content every time I taught the course, so I began to work up a core of out-of-copyright stories that I could use for explanations of the elements of fiction. At about the same time, people a little higher up on the chain suggested that I re-design the course so that it was exclusively a course about short fiction. So I cut the material on the novels and concentrated on short and not-so-short stories.

Although I had some work-study assistance in typing up the text of many of the stories, I still had to do all the editing myself, and as time went on I continued to make decisions on stories to add or delete from the collection. At one point I boiled down a lean, trim version for use in introduction to literature, and then I blended that material back into the larger volume because I didn’t want to spend all of my waking time maintaining two separate, overlapping volumes.

What I have ended up with, at present, is a 500-page textbook that has seven chapters on the elements of fiction, a chapter on genre fiction, a chapter on relative value, a chapter on stories by Ernest Hemingway, a chapter on stories by Alice Munro, and a chapter on the novel with, so far, introductions to Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I also have a substantial section on the subject of writing about fiction, rounded out with several model essays ranging from one page to several pages. This way, I have a text that I can use in either the first-year or the second-year course, and with either course there will be some parts of the book I do not use. That, however, is pretty normal for college textbooks of this nature.

The core of the book consists of the seven chapters on aspects of fiction. Here, I have explanations of each topic, followed by selected stories ranging in length from a few pages to many pages. After an introductory chapter on reading fiction, subsequent chapters cover setting, narrative design, characterization, point of view, theme, and figurative language. The chapters feature sample stories by authors such as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, John Galsworthy, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

The chapter on genre fiction focuses principally on mystery writing, with a sample story by Arthur Conan Doyle. Then the chapter on relative value has stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Katherine Mansfield.

Because this work, like my other course projects, is a small-scale, one-person production of limited distribution, I have avoided the complications of securing reprint rights. With the exception of one story (which I translated, having met the author during a sabbatical in Mexico), everything reproduced in the manual is out of copyright. I have tried to maintain a balance between stories written by men and women, and I have tried to include stories that have stood the test of time. With the exception of O. Henry’s "The Gift of the Magi" and Kate Chopin’s "Désirée’s Baby," which are short examples of gimmick stories in the narrative design chapter, all of the stories have, I hope, timeless value in speaking to today’s reader as well as in illustrating standard features of short fiction.

To balance the limitation of having old material, I am happy to have a chapter on Hemingway, a modern writer, and a chapter on Munro, a contemporary writer. Along the way in some of the first nine chapters, I also mention standard classics in modern short fiction such as "The Lottery" and "Why I Live at the P.O.," as well as classic novels such as Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I hope that within the next year or so I will have this work in book format. I do not aspire to market it commercially, as I composed it mainly for use in my own courses. However, it could be of interest to someone (a reader or writer of fiction) who wanted a basic explanation of how fiction works. If someone was interested in this work in its present form, I would be happy to answer any inquiries.

Writing for Real

2009-12-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

Writing for Real is a textbook I have composed for my classes in college composition. It first began to take shape a little over ten yeas ago, when I was putting together a manual for a distance course in composition. At that time, I wrote up quite a bit of material that I used to present in lecture or discussion, and I plundered material that I had included in an earlier version of the Blue Book of Basic Writing (ostensibly for a broader audience, at the suggestion of the publisher at the time) but did not use to any appreciable extent. All of this I combined with handouts and assignments I had developed. Once I got the content combined and smoothed out, I had a workable manual for students to follow as they worked through the exercises and essay assignments in the distance course. For the next step, I used the manual in an on-site course, and I saw that it worked well in helping me present the course content in an efficient manner. With a little more work I had it into book form, and the good people at Endeavor Books have been great to work with in making inexpensive copies available to my students.

For content, this book has traditional chapter topics. It begins with a chapter of introduction to college composition, which includes not only general ideas about writing college essays but also suggestions about outlining and vocabulary work. Subsequent chapters cover summary and paraphrase, definition, classification, narration, description, process analysis, argumentation, and comparison and contrast. In each of these chapters, there is coverage of the topic as a skill or method (as in service of an essay with a larger purpose) and then coverage of how to write an essay of that nature. Following these chapters is a short one on revision and correction.

Within each chapter, in addition to discussions of method and organization, I have included reading selections and sample essays. The reading selections are taken from works no longer under copyright, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography or Thoreau’s Walden. The sample essays are mostly pieces of my own composing, many of them written over the years in response to my own assignments. My one regret in using this book is that it has taken over the role of the various rhetoric/anthology texts I used to use in addition to a handbook. (I still assign and use a handbook.) When I used to use an anthology, I had a greater range of authors, styles, and voices, even though many of those selections were not models for the kinds of essays the students write in a first-year college composition course. During the time that my modest text has supplanted selections that operate on a higher level, however, our semester has been shortened and the general level of students’ academic preparation has gone down, so I do not know that some of the anthologies I used to use would see as much use now.

Meanwhile, as is mentioned in the Preface, I have tried to incorporate some worthwhile content on use of the English language at the same time that I have tried to promote cultural literacy and appreciation for the environment. I have also tried to make the book reflect the practical world, in which real people do real work (including learning and writing as well as harvesting crops, cutting up chickens, and saddling horses) and in which real products (such as bacon, eggs, and tortillas as well as shoes and books) come from real sources. Thus the reader will come across sample essays on using metaphors and planting trees, interspersed with essays of historical and cultural interest. In this respect, the book is a kind of sequel to the Blue Book of Basic Writing. If the Blue Book is the only extant book in which an essay about Queen Victoria appears back-to-back with an essay on Pancho Villa (and I think it is), Writing for Real may be the only book in which an essay about the term "Victorian" is followed by an essay about signature killers and the Black Dahlia murder. Charles Dickens and his novel Great Expectations come in for reference and excerpt as well, as do Samuel Johnson, Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Mary Austin.

Although this is a small-scale product with its inherent limitations, it has been a useful book for me to work with, and my intentions at least have not been trivial. I do hope that in the future, some students will be better equipped to write an essay of a given nature, and I do hope that some of them will have a better idea of what a Victorian mansion is. As for Irving, Dickens, and Melville, of course I hope to make their names familiar, and I am happy to say that they are in the sequel as well.

Blue Book of Basic Writing

2009-11-18T13:14:00.000-08:00

The Blue Book of Basic Writing is a textbook I developed for my basic writing classes. I first started working on it in the late 1980's, when I had become more and more dissatisfied with basic writing textbooks on the market. The more I taught basic writing, the more I developed my own materials, until I had enough to begin building my own text. The first two editions I worked with came out in manual format with plastic comb binding, and they went along with a commercial handbook. From then on I was able to get a book publisher to produce copies in a regular perfect-bound book format, and I had enough material that I no longer needed a handbook.

Since the fourth edition, Endeavor Books has been the publisher, and our arrangement has been a good one. I am able to use the material I want and in the sequence I want, so I am able to achieve good efficiency. Endeavor Books runs off a small number (fifty to a hundred) copies at a time, so if I have some emendations to make or if I want to go to a new edition, we can do that without great upheaval. Furthermore, since I choose not to receive royalties on textbook projects for my own students, Endeavor Books is able to supply my students with books that cost much less than comparable textbooks from larger commercial publishers.

Because I have been working on this project for so long and have made so many changes both major and minor, I have put more time, research, and energy into the Blue Book than I have into any other project, including my doctoral dissertation. I am currently in the sixth edition, and I am now bringing to fruition a collateral text consisting entirely of supplemental exercises. This text, entitled Done by Friday (reference to Robinson Crusoe explained in the Preface), has increased my efficiency in the course even more than with the Blue Book alone.

Although not many people other than my own students have bought (and learned from) the Blue Book of Basic Writing, a few have. From time to time an adjunct instructor in one of the outreach centers will use the book for a course, and a few writers have acquired copies for reference. My explanations tend to be more discursive than the typical entries in a handbook, so a reader will get an actual discussion of a problem such as who versus whom or whether to use I or me in a two-part construction ("Nora went to the bank with Raquel and me"). I do believe that many writers who would like a brush-up on this or that point of usage could benefit from the discussions and examples, but of course not all people have the same level of interest in controlling the grammar, punctuation, and syntax of their sentences.

One significant difference between this book and a handbook is that the Blue Book of Basic Writing does not attempt to cover all topics or all points of usage. As is explained in the Preface, the book covers many of the most common problems in everyday writing. In order to discuss things like verb or pronoun use, however, I find it useful to lay out a few basic ideas about how sentences are put together. Therefore, Chapter 1 covers simple sentences, the main parts or core elements of a sentence, plus phrases and clauses. Chapter 2 (a short one), covers compound sentences. Chapter 3 covers complex sentences and the three kinds of dependent clauses. After that, we apply these terms and the ideas behind them to various problems in sentence composition—verb forms, pronoun forms, agreement, sentence fragments, comma splices and run-on sentences, main uses of the comma, main uses of the semicolon, minor punctuation, syntax, sentence combining, and prose style. After all of these chapters there is a general reference chapter on parts of speech, so that the active learner may read more sentences about Eileen, Bernice, and many others, all illustrating how the parts of speech work in sentences.

The general assumption is that studying any or all of these topics will help a person become a proficient writer. That is, the overall approach assumes application, and it assumes that people who study this material are going to write sentences in continuous discussions. In addition to these chapters, then, the book has chapters on writing short compositions and essays, with progressively more focused exercises.

This book and its companion workbook volume have been a useful and rewarding professional project for me for more than twenty years. And as I write in the Preface, I hope the Blue Book of Basic Writing helps make the student’s education enjoyable and worthwhile.

Meeting the Governor and His Wife

2009-11-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

A little over a month ago, the president of Eastern Wyoming College surprised me with a small tribute. He told me that the governor of our state was going to be visiting our campus on October 16 as part of a visit to the new corrections facility being built near our town. The governor was going to stay for the Baxter Black show, and there was going to be a reception before the program. At the reception, said the president, he planned to present the governor with a collection of four of my books that he, the president, had found in the college bookstore. The president said that if I liked, I could attend the reception and present the books myself. I was quite honored by the invitation, and I said that I would have to make sure I didn’t have a conflict. I added that if I thought I had a small conflict such as elk hunting, my wife would make it quite clear that meeting the governor was much more important.

We had met the governor and his wife a few years back when they hosted a reception at the Governor’s Residence for an anthology of Wyoming literature entitled Deep West. It was an honor to be included in the anthology to begin with, and it was an additional honor to visit with Governor Dave Freudenthal and his wife, Nancy. During the reception the two of them posed for a photo with our son, Dimitri, and then with the daughter of another writer who was present. All in all, we thought the governor and his wife were very gracious and very personable, in addition to being supporters of the arts. (The wine, cheese, and desserts were very good, too.)

On October 16, then, Rocío and I went to the reception, which was mainly for the purpose of some donors (those who had paid for higher-priced tickets) to meet Baxter Black. When we got there, Baxter Black was already present and was making fast friends with the college girls who were helping with the hostessing that evening. When he was done getting his picture taken with them, he called for a picture with me and included Ron Lovercheck, husband of the president of our board of trustees and also head of the Wyoming Game and Fish.

Not long after that, people got in line for the buffet dinner, and the informal event went along pleasantly. Baxter Black got up and gave sort of a prelude of his humorous entertainment, and he continued to be personable and friendly with the people who had come to meet him. Some farm and ranch people had come quite a ways, and it was nice to see them having the opportunity to meet a celebrity as he moved among them.

Still, the governor did not show up. The college president came around every few minutes and said he thought the governor would be there pretty soon. As the clock ticked, we knew that the show had to start at 7:00, so there was a time limit on our event.

Finally the governor arrived, not with any pomp or great attendance. He had just had things to do, I suppose. Much to our pleasant surprise, his wife, Nancy, appeared as well. Because Wyoming has a small population, people who are active in any kind of activity will know people from all of the other communities. As a writer, then, I know people all over the state. The same goes for firefighters, bowlers, real estate agents, and so forth. Therefore, people like the Freudenthals know lots of people in every community as well, so they had bits of small-scale visiting to do as they tried to work on their buffet dinners.

At last the college president told me we were going to make the presentation, so I got up and went to an open area in front of the governor’s table. The president made a small speech explaining that on an earlier occasion, to inaugurate the college’s mobile welding lab, he had presented the governor with a pair of welding gloves. Both the governor and his wife now lit up and nodded in recognition, and Nancy mentioned that her husband had really liked the gloves. The president went on to say that this time, he thought it would give a good balance if we presented the governor with something from the arts side of the college. With that, he had me present the gift bag with the books. The governor accepted the bag as I imagine he accepts similar gifts and tokens of esteem. Then I got to say a few words. I welcomed the governor and his excellent wife to our campus, and then I commended them for being such strong supporters of the arts. I said I remembered with fondness an earlier occasion when they had hosted a reception for a book of Wyoming literature. Now they lit up again, apparently recognizing me as they remembered the event.

After that, Baxter Black had the microphone for a few minutes and took his turn at political humor (including an Ace Reid and LBJ anecdote). The governor showed his good nature at that, and we all got to sit down.

A few minutes later, as the gathering was beginning to break up in anticipation of everyone going to the Baxter Black program, Nancy Freudenthal came over and thanked me in person for the books. I think the books had become real, rather than just something inside a bag. We had a pleasant chat, and then the governor also stopped by to thank me. As people who know them will agree, the Freudenthals are down-to-earth, sincere people who live in the same world as their constituents. So I would like to thank them again for their exemplary leadership and especially for their support of the arts in Wyoming. It’s a nice world here.

Robert Roripaugh

2009-10-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

Robert Roripaugh is a booklet in the Boise State University Western Writers Series. This slim volume came out in 2004, and it gives an overview of the career of Robert Roripaugh, who has been a major literary figure in Wyoming for many years.

Roripaugh has had a long career as a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Perhaps he has been best known as the Poet Laureate of Wyoming from 1995 to 2002 and for his two collections of poetry, Learn to Love the Haze (1976; 1996) and The Ranch: Wyoming Poetry (2001). Prior to his recognition as a poet, however, he wrote two acclaimed novels, A Fever for Living (1961) and Honor Thy Father (1963). From the 1950's until the early 2000's, he also wrote and published short stories, which were brought out in a collection entitled The Legend of Billy Jenks and Other Wyoming Stories (2007).

I undertook the Western Writers study because I thought it was something that ought to be done. I had been familiar with the line for many years, as I had read several of the numbers in the series when I was studying major writers of western fiction for my dissertation. I thought that some day I should try my hand at that kind of a study. When I came to a point at which I had time for such a project, Robert Roripaugh’s work seemed like the ideal topic.

I had become familiar with Roripaugh’s work in the 1980's. Shortly after I came to Wyoming in 1981, John R. Milton of the South Dakota Review recommended meeting Roripaugh and becoming familiar with his work. Therefore, one day when I was in Laramie, I dropped in on Roripaugh in his office at the University of Wyoming, where he was a professor of literature and creative writing. He was very cordial, and it was the beginning of a valuable friendship. Not long after I met him, I read and studied his novel Honor Thy Father for a funded study I was doing on Wyoming fiction. A year or so after that, I read more of his fiction in preparation for critical introduction on him for a reference work entitled Twentieth-Century Western Writers (second edition). When I communicated with Roripaugh about this project, he was very helpful and sent me copies of his work and of reviews.

During this time, I also met Roripaugh from time to time at workshops, conferences, and other gatherings of the Wyoming literary community. By the time I undertook to write the Boise booklet, he and I were good friends. Again, he provided me with any the information I needed, plus copies of any work I did not have in my collection. Just as a side note, I would like to note that he is the neatest, most conscientious person I have known when it comes to sending material through the mail.

Writing the booklet was a project in itself. After proposing it, getting approval, and going to work on it, I came up with a draft. Then the editor wanted more scholarly apparatus, which I knew how to include but had not chosen to do, so I produced a second draft in which I incorporated references to standard secondary sources. Then the editor wanted me to cut some material because I was running over the standard length for works in the series. After I did the cutting, I went through the editing, which was not too bad but a bit curious in the various tweaky format practices that latter-day literary scholars follow. The work came out on schedule, and in its own modest way it was well received.

Writing about a friend’s work is an interesting undertaking. Naturally, I would not have chosen to do this study if I didn’t think highly of Roripaugh’s work to begin with, but even at that, my style of literary criticism does not always include only glowing praise. Accordingly, I had a couple of reserved comments about one small thing or another, and I trusted that Roripaugh, who had a lifetime of experience in writing reviews and in being reviewed, would be able to appreciate my position. Still, one worries. In our correspondence I brought up my concern, and Roripaugh was very gracious in assuring me that a comment here or there did not conflict with the larger things that matter.

I was glad to have done this study, and it was very gratifying to bring out this small tribute while Roripaugh was (and still is) hearty and hale. I was also glad to be able to have the book available at conferences where other writers who admire Roripaugh and his work were able to acquire copies.

Not long after the booklet came out, Roripaugh had his short story collection accepted for publication with High Plains Press, who had reprinted Learn to Love the Haze. I had the honor of being included in that project, as I wrote a foreword for the collection. I was glad to be able to do that, as I had to cut the discussion of a couple of short stories in the Boise booklet, and now I was able to give the stories the attention they deserved.

So it is with the work of Robert Roripaugh in general. When a person does a project like this, he or she sees from the inside the importance of doing work that needs to be done. Robert Roripaugh has been an important literary figure in Wyoming, and I hope someone comes along and does a better study than I have done, but until that happens, I am glad I did it when I could.

At the End of the Orchard

2009-10-06T13:46:00.000-07:00

"At the End of the Orchard" is a story of mine that recently appeared in a magazine called Hardboiled. This story is a little under 10,000 words—not quite in the novella range but longer than most short stories. It is representative of one kind of fiction I have been working with lately.

The setting of this story is rural California of the 1960's, a setting I knew at first hand when I worked in the fruit fields. Having written a collection of stories in that setting (Seasons in the Fields) and not having come close to using up my material, I wanted to write more stories about that world. While my first go-around with field work stories produced fiction that was, as I have styled it, realistic and bittersweet, this time around I have been working in a harder kind of realism. As in some of my traditional western fiction, I have felt at home in the hardboiled/noir area, and that tone seems to match up well with the field work experience. When I had finished "At the End of the Orchard" and was hoping to find a place for it, I could not wish for a better one than a magazine called Hardboiled.

This story is narrated by a fellow named Charlie Mullen, a fellow in his mid-twenties who is somewhat hard-bitten and cynical, as well he might be. While he is working on a peach-picking crew, he does what I have wanted a character of mine to do: he finds a body in the weeds at the end of the peach orchard. The body is that of a girl he has known in the labor camp, and because he has had a little to do with her, he becomes a suspect. The story goes from there, and although he has managed to clear himself by the end, the story does not have a rosy ending.

Since writing "At the End of the Orchard," I have worked on a few more stories in this same vein of rural hardboiled/noir. Each one is narrated in first person by a new narrator, and each story seems to be seeking its own length. The shortest is about 6000 words, and the longest is over 20,000. One of the stories has been accepted for publication in an anthology, and another is supposed to appear in an e-zine in the near future, but there is not what anyone could call a market for fiction of this length. But that is all right with me. I wanted to write these stories because I felt I had some original subject matter and a legitimate perspective. What I am looking for as I write these pieces is voice, and tone, and a certain kind of truth. I do not know how I would measure my success in that area, but I will be glad I tried.

Rose of Durango

2009-09-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

"Rose of Durango" is a short story of about 6500 words that was first published in electronic form in the Amazon Shorts program. The story is about Jimmy Clevis, the main character of my mini-series of crossover western/mysteries entitled Red Wind Crossing, Rancho Alegre, and Raven Springs. As in the second and third novels in the series, Jimmy accepts the job of looking for a person. This time it is an individual named Rose, who is originally from Durango, Colorado (hence the title). She has dropped out of contact with her friends and relatives after going to work on a ranch in Wyoming. On his way to find her, Jimmy meets a few interesting characters who work thematically in the story and who populate the world that Jimmy Clevis lives in.

Two things motivated me to write this story. The first was that I liked Jimmy's voice and his view of the world, and I thought it would be fun to have him narrate something shorter than a novel-length piece of fiction. A second and more practical reason was to write a short story that would intersect with my other work. The Amazon program worked with the premise that it would be a good marketing tool (their metaphor, not mine) to have a downloadable short piece that for forty-nine cents would promote interest in other titles. At about this same time, I became aware that my editor was not eager for another book about Jimmy right away. The third novel in the series, Raven Springs, had done well enough by winning an award as Spur finalist in 2008, but it came at a time when my sales were on a downward trend. So for the time being at least, Jimmy was not going to get to narrate another book-length story. Having him do a short story seemed just right.

The Amazon Shorts program seemed to operate on some good ideas, but it did not last long. The works are still available for inexpensive downloads, but the program is not open to new submissions. I did three stories with the project, and I think that each one sold a few copies. I was not unhappy with the experiment, but in the forums on the Amazon site, I read that other writers were displeased with the way things turned out. Perhaps if I had had more at stake, or if I were more given to self-promotion, I would have had more of a reaction to how the whole thing was managed. As it is, I have been content to see my work in another medium, and I haven't lost anything. The rights to the stories remain mine, so I can reprint the works elsewhere if an opportunity comes up. Meanwhile, "Rose of Durango" is still available for forty-nine cents, and I think it has a good line or two that will bring a smile to anyone who reads it.

Blue Horse Mesa

2009-09-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

"Blue Horse Mesa" is a short story I wrote for the Lost Trails anthology edited by Russell Davis and Martin Greenberg and published by Kensington in May of 2007. A year or so earlier, Russell Davis invited me to submit something for consideration, and he told me that the unifying idea of the collection was that each writer was to base a fictional story on a real-life historical character.

I usually do not write about real-life figures, but I had had quite an interest in Nate Champion, the cowpuncher and small-time cattleman who was killed in the Johnson County War. I have read about Champion in a few different histories, and I have always found his story moving. I was very reluctant to take liberties with a real person's life, but I had a story line I was interested in pursuing, so I gave it a try. I explain this idea in my "Author's Note," which precedes the main text of the story. Because the note is brief, I am reproducing it here:

The story of the Johnson County War of 1892 is well known in the history of Wyoming, as is the bravery of Nate Champion, who stood off an army of hired guns for the better part of a day until they smoked him out and shot him down. The most eloquent part of the story is his own courage, which had fifty witnesses, but history has also preserved the contents of a little notebook that Champion kept while he was under siege.

Several years back, I heard a less verifiable story from the great writer Frederick Manfred, who in the mid-1950's interviewed people in Johnson County who were close in time and family to the original participants in the conflict. According to Manfred (whose research culminated in his novel Riders of Judgment), there was speculation that Nate Champion might have had a child with a woman who was married to someone else. With all respect to a brave man, this story explores that possible lost trail.

In addition to writing about a historical character, I did something else that is not characteristic of me in writing fiction. I shifted points of view in the story, moving from the man's point of view to the woman's. The woman in the story is purely fictional and not based on anyone of whom I have heard or read. I did this not only to give additional dimension to the story but also to have somewhere for the story to end after Champion runs into ambush--sort of a practical consideration.

When I was done with this story, I thought I had done something unique, at least for me. From there I went on to do something else unusual. I was really not done with the story, I guess, because I still heard these characters speaking, wanting to tell their story in a different way. So I wrote a poem in two voices, with the hope that someone might record it as a duet with two parts. To do this piece of writing, I studied quite a few duets I have on records in my collection (Red Foley and Kitty Wells, Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens, Dwight Yoakam and Patty Loveless, and that sort of thing). Then I worked out a pattern that seemed appropriate for my piece, and I labored away on the thing. When it was done, I called it "Blue Horse Mesa" as well, and it was published in a magazine called Emerging Voices, which is published by a group of dedicated people at Western Nebraska Community College.

If I get the poem recorded as a song (still working on that), it will have the same title. This was a rather unusual evolution for me, but then again, it was an uncharacteristic endeavor to begin with.

Seasons in the Fields

2009-08-20T10:47:00.000-07:00

Seasons in the Fields is a collection of short fiction set in the farm and ranch country of California where I grew up. This book consists of thirteen stories, nine of which were previously published. I brought out these stories as a collection in the spring of 1998 so that I could promote it along with Black Diamond Rendezvous, a paperback western that came out in May of the same year.

This was the fourth short story collection that I produced under my own imprint. It consists of fiction that I wrote from the mid 1970's until the mid-1990's, at the same time I was working on other kinds of short stories as well as scholarly work, non-fiction, poetry, and novels. I wrote other stories set in rural California as well, but I selected the pieces for this collection on the basis of what I thought was their quality or level of seriousness. I considered this collection on a par with Antelope Sky, which I had brought out the year before, and I thought that between the two, I was presenting my best work as a short story writer. As with the previous collection, most of the stories had been published, and several of them had won awards with literary magazines, writing organizations, and the Wyoming Arts Council.

In writing these stories, I drew upon my experiences growing up and working in the fields in the 1960's. I think of these selections as being realistic and bittersweet, not pieces of nostalgia about the happy days, because people in the hand-to-mouth way of life and consequently in my stories have to struggle to make a living and often have a hard time holding things together. As in much of my other fiction, they also do not find easy solutions to their problems.

One thing that makes the stories in this bunch work is that they are grounded in experience and in the emotion that is related to that experience. For example, in "Daddy and Norma Jean," there is a kid who works in the crops with his father. They sleep in an old station wagon, and for a while the kid has to go into restaurants and ask for a thermos of hot water so that he and his father can make instant coffee in the car. The narrator, looking back on his experiences, says, "My dad was good about letting me pick the café so I wouldn't go to the same one two days in a row. That's when I started drinking coffee, when I was grown-up enough to beg the hot water for it." That part of the story is based on my own experience, although there is not a one-to-one correspondence. I was a couple of years younger than the kid in the story, as this is a story about his coming of age. He goes on to narrate the rest of his day, which is the day the world heard of Marilyn Monroe’s death. On that day of my own life, I was working in the fields with my father and two of my brothers, and I wasn’t quite old enough to have the other experiences the narrator has that day. Also, as I wrote this story, I went to the library and did some checking of facts, an unexpected kind of historical research, so that I could get everything right in its new arrangement. So, even though I drew upon experience and emotion that I knew as well as anything, I did not just open a vein, as they say; rather, I took what I had and made it work for the purpose of the story.

Many of the other stories have similar transformations. I cite this one because it has content that many people are familiar with and because it has a nice mix of personal and public experience. But the overall principle runs through the collection. I have so much of this material to draw upon that I do not have to let the story follow the original. One of the best ways to liberate the material and the story is to draw freely, form composites from people and events in one’s own experience and then to let that material take its own life in the story. I hope I have done that all right.

After I brought out this collection, I revisited some of my other material from the rural California setting and developed it into a short novel entitled A Good Man to Have in Camp. Since then I have gone on to write more fiction (from short story to novella length) based on field work and seasonal labor, and I am not done yet. I have plenty of material I still want to write about, and I continue to think of ways of shaping a story, in terms of both narrative design and tone. Hoping not to sound too pretentious, I would say that Seasons in the Fields has its vision. As the back cover copy states, "These people live in a world of young hopes and sad memories, pretty girls and hard work." There is, as I mentioned above, a kind of bittersweet realism. That is not my whole vision—of fiction, of life, or of field work—and I look forward to adding a little more as I go along.

Antelope Sky

2009-08-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

Antelope Sky is a collection of short stories set in the contemporary West, for the most part Wyoming. It consists of twelve short stories, nine of which were previously published. I brought out these stories as a collection in the spring of 1997 so that I could promote it along with Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon, a hardcover western that came out in June of the same year.

This was the third short story collection that I produced under my own imprint, and I did so because I wanted to see these stories together in a group and available in book format. When I first embarked on the venture of self-publication, I had the idea that my short fiction could be sorted, for the most part, into four piles: traditional western stories, ironic stories, contemporary stories set in the modern West, and contemporary stories set in rural California. I had written a good number of short stories by this point, and I felt it was time to get them into piles. Antelope Sky was the third pile, and its subtitle is Stories of the Modern West.

The collection consists of stories that I wrote from the early 1980's until the mid-1990's. When I first came to Wyoming in 1981, I was happy to be here and willing to take the place on its own terms. That meant that it would take me a while to know the place well enough to presume to write about it. Within a couple of years I was writing stories set in Wyoming, and at the same time I was writing fiction that would end up in the other three piles. I was also doing book reviews, literary articles, and an occasional poem. All this is a way of saying that I wasn’t on production. I had the free life of a writer in that stage of his or her career, in which a person writes whatever seems to come next. I was writing short pieces (nothing book-length), trying to stay versatile in a few different areas, and avoiding the commitment of doing something longer with which I would have the risk of success or failure.

As time went on, I found myself focusing more on fiction and less on reviews, articles, and the like. As I got into book publication with traditional westerns, I still felt that short story writing was an important part of me and that I did my best work in contemporary fiction. So when I brought together the selections for Antelope Sky, I felt that I had some of my best work to show. Not only had nine of these stories been published, but seven of them had won me awards with literary magazines, writing organizations, and the Wyoming Arts Council.

For stories of this nature, I try to maintain what I think of as a modern outlook (though I realize it is still pretty traditional in comparison with cutting-edge and avant-garde material). In my version of modern life, the characters are everyday people rather than the "larger-than-life" characters that are reportedly necessary for stunning bestsellers. My characters are not all good or all bad, and they have normal problems of adjustment that do not have easy or definite solutions. I think of these stories as being realistic to the average run of people who do not have fame or fortune and who do not get to solve their problems with flamboyant action.

For example, in "Junior’s Family," a young man who has grown up with his friend’s family receives a letter from his long-lost brother and mother, who want him to go meet them. He enlists his friend’s company and moral support, and they go on a road trip for a not-so-perfect meeting. For another example, in "Lodgers in Queer Street" (with a tip of the hat to a chapter title in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend), a handyman becomes friends with a couple who have rental property. As the story develops, the narrator gets to know more than he really cares to about the couple’s disintegrating marriage, and in the end he has some observations about friendship.

These stories of the modern West are, for me, serious studies about life around us. As with the work of any author, they come from that person’s narrow view of the world. But that is what I feel I have to offer, my view of things. I have continued to write fiction in this mode. My later collection Shadows on the Plain continues with fiction set in the contemporary West, as does my novel Poacher’s Moon. I still feel that I do my best work in contemporary fiction, and I plan to do more.

I'll Tell You What

2009-07-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

I’ll Tell You What is a collection of short stories that I brought out myself in the summer of 1996. It consists of fourteen stories, eight of them previously published, and it was a bit of a lark to publish.

The subtitle of this slim collection is Fiction with voice, and the unifying characteristic is that the pieces are all in the first person. I like to think that each voice is different and that none is equated with that of the author. As I mention in a foreword entitled "To the Reader," I "brought these stories together because each has a voice that is (as it seems to me) responsible for the story’s existence. . . . Some of these characters might be people you want to kick in the ass; others you might imagine having a beer with. . . . I hope you and your friends try reading some of these stories aloud, for the shared fun of bringing out the voice."

It should be evident from this little bit that many of these stories have an ironic distance between the author and the created speaking voice. That is, many of the narrators are what we call unreliable narrators. That is part of what makes stories such as these fun to write and fun to read aloud, as both author and reader can enjoy going out of himself or herself and getting into the character, however tacky or unaware that character may be.

Some of these stories I wrote out of amusement, to create the character and have him reveal himself in his own words. Others I wrote out of a stronger compulsion, I believe, as I would imagine a character in a strange position, such as "Down in the Ditch" or "On the Trail," and I felt that I had to bring out what the character would have to say.

I wrote these stories over a period of time, from the late 1970's through the mid-1990's, and I had fun writing every one of them. I have also had fun reading them aloud, especially some of the shorter ones, as they lend themselves to informal gatherings and group readings. If I were to pick up one of these stories right now, let us say "I’ll Tell You What" (the title story) or "Good Night, Niobe" (the last one), I could slide right into that character as I have done several times and merge with what I think of as the autonomous character of the story itself.

I did not have any career motives in bringing out this collection, but I did so largely because my brother David was coming over from Spain that year and I thought it would be fun to have a few copies on hand for him to sign and to hand out to friends. David has done a great many illustrations for my publishing projects, post cards, and so forth, and he did up a few marvelous sketches for this collection (check out the dome tents in "Good Night, Niobe" or the guy on the cover). So it was fun, from beginning to end.

I have sold a few copies of this book (I have only a few left from the print run of 400 or so), and I have had readers write me and say they enjoyed the stories. I even came across an online comment from a reader in Arizona who picked up a used copy in Flagstaff, I think, and who saw fit to post a complimentary review. Sometimes when I sign a copy of this slender volume at a book signing, I inscribe a comment that if the reader does not laugh at least once out loud while reading the book, he or she may write me and tell me so, and I will write a spirited (though perhaps humorless) letter of apology in response. No one has yet taken me up on that offer, but it is still good.

One Foot in the Stirrup

2009-07-09T14:28:00.000-07:00

One Foot in the Stirrup is a collection of western short stories that I first brought out myself in the fall of 1995. It consists of nine stories, six of them previously published, and it has been a nice little book for me.

The short stories range from my first published piece of fiction, a story entitled "West of Dancing Rock," published in 1978 by a pulp magazine called Far West, to a couple of other gunfight stories, to a couple of heartfelt stories, to a closing piece that edges into irony and parody. These stories together have a varied appeal, and the collection has sold in bookstores that carry my traditional westerns.

Why I brought out this collection is an interesting footnote in itself. When my first novel, One-Eyed Cowboy Wild, came out in 1994, I plunged into the new life of a published author who did book signings and other promo activities such as interviews, readings, and panel discussions. The book sold well and went out of stock pretty quickly, so when I went to the Western Writers of America convention the next summer, I was unable to participate in the group book signing because my first book was sold out and my second one, Twin Rivers, was still going through the press. So I wandered around and looked at everyone else’s books. During this period between the release of my first two novels, I also reflected on the many occasions in which prospective buyers looked at the price of a hardcover western and set the book down. So I decided two things: one, that I was not ever going to be without a book on the table again, and two, that I was going to try to have something less expensive than a regular hardcover.

With that in mind, I went about selecting the stories for this collection, getting bids, and arranging for production. This was all new to me, but I plugged through and got four hundred copies that I could sell for $7.95, which was less than half of the $19.95 that the hardcover westerns were costing at the time. I sold the first print run in a couple of years, and I had gotten a positive enough response from readers and booksellers that I decided to do a second printing. My brother David, who is a professional artist, did me a new cover drawing, and I had a couple of review excerpts to go along with the cover copy on the back. This time I printed five hundred copies, and within a couple of years I had sold most of them. In the meanwhile I also was able to get a contract for a large print edition, so a thousand copies went out into the world in that version, primarily to libraries. All of this is still on a very small scale, but I felt as if it was a successful project.

There is a stigma to self-publishing, especially in fiction, as it seems to be an admission that no one else will publish this author’s work, and therefore he has to do it himself. In this case, it was true to some extent, as I could not find a publisher who wanted to print this collection at the company’s expense. However, my decision to self-publish was not a desperate act, as most of the stories had been previously published, and I had already had two real novels published in hardcover. Furthermore, one of these stories has been singled out for praise in a prestigious review when the story first appeared in an anthology, and the collection itself received a couple of positive reviews when it came out. After that, the large print edition got out and about and made money (for the publisher and for the author) on its own. My most important measure for the success of a book is whether it gets a good response from reviewers and readers. For other writers, the success of a book is measured by whether it makes money. Either way, One Foot in the Stirrup has been rewarding to me.

WWA 2009--Winning the Spur

2009-06-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual Western Writers of America convention in Oklahoma City. The high point for me was receiving the Spur award for Best Mass Market Paperback Original for my 2008 novel Trouble at the Redstone. Earlier in the year, I was very excited to learn of my winning the award, but the emotional value really increased when I went to the convention. Not only did I receive congratulations and expressions of good will from many friends and fellow writers, but I also had the great pleasure of meeting Leah Hultenschmidt, an editor from Dorchester Publishing / Leisure Books, the company that has published my westerns for several years. After stammering out a few words of acknowledgment as I accepted the award, I stepped aside and heard Leah's eloquent words of praise and appreciation. It was an unforgettable moment, certainly one of the high points in my life and in my career as a writer, ranking right up there with finishing my doctoral dissertation and seeing the first printed copy of my first book.

To recapitulate my acceptance remarks, I express my thanks to Don D'Auria, my editor at Leisure Books, who has always offered me encouragement and support and who has believed in me as a writer. I also thank his excellent colleague Leah Hultenschmidt, who was very generous with her time, as she listened to and responded to my thousand questions about my various writing endeavors, and who put in a stellar appearance at the convention in various sessions and meetings. I express my appreciation to Max McCoy and Andrew Fenady, finalists in this year's competition, two very fine writers whose company it was an honor to be in. I thank my wife, Rocio, and my son, Dimitri, for their unfailing support in all that I do and for their sharing this great moment with me. I thank the members of Western Writers of America, with gratitude in knowing that this honor comes from all of them. And as an added note I thank my horse Blackie, who threw me off a couple of times and sent me to the hospital on the second occasion; although he did not intend to, he taught me that even when a fellow thinks he's got a good hold and thinks he might make a good ride, there's a lesson in humility waiting to happen.

Adventures of the Ramrod Rider

2009-06-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

Adventures of the Ramrod Rider was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in the fall of 1999. It followed two contemporary western novels of mine that Endeavor Books published, and it was a great joy for me to see this book published.

Sometimes, as when I am inscribing a signed copy for someone, I refer to this as "a crazy little book, dear to my heart." That it is. A mixture of parody, satire, (pristine) romance, and traditional cowboy poetry, this is a one-of-a-kind book that people get a kick out of.

I first started with the Ramrod Rider when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation in the late 1970's. After reading numerous early nineteenth-century historical romances, late nineteenth-century dime novels, and twentieth-century hack westerns, many of which seemed preposterous, I felt myself brimming with material that needed to be dealt with—or, to put it in another way, material that I had to write about in order to keep a sane perspective. I sometimes describe this need as writing in self-defense, sort of defending myself against impulses I don’t want to keep trapped inside, as well as defending myself against the absurdities of the world.

So I created the Ramrod Rider and put him through some encounters in a story called "Adventures of the Ramrod Rider, Price Ten Cents," the title of which I think is self-explanatory. I gave some of the characters alliterative names, as in the dime novels, and I also dropped in allusions and references to twentieth-century western writers and their works. Here the Ramrod Rider delivers part of his autobiography in spontaneous poetry. It was all a great deal of fun, and I was pleased to get a rejection slip from an editor who was appalled. I don’t think a person is supposed to explain his work or his jokes in a submission letter, so I took my chances. Then I wrote "Further Adventures, Price the Same," and after a few submissions of that, I found an editor who saw things a little off-center as I did and who was willing to publish the first little chapter of this story. That was a delight, and I am afraid to admit that it encouraged me to do some more.

My idea of the Ramrod Rider was that he was a timeless character, sort of like the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid and the Phantom, but also like some character I saw in the matinee, who took on the garments and the identity of his predecessor. The Ramrod Rider himself has a mind that is like a clean slate, upon which is imprinted this archetypal identity. He merges with the character and goes out into the world to deal with injustices in a Quixotic sort of way. Again, this is a lot of fun, as the Ramrod Rider travels through time, one generation after another, always the same tabula rasa, puritanical, not-quite-getting-it kind of guy who nevertheless helps bring scoundrels to justice.

With this idea, I put him into a modern-day setting, in which his original antagonist, Durango Dan, becomes Daniel Durant. That was a lark, and I also brought in such characters as Puss and Puncher and the buxom twins Wyoma and Wynema. In the tradition of cliff-hanging chapter endings, I left Daniel Durant more or less in mid-air as his horse plummets into Sybille Canyon.

Here I took a breath for a year or so (having written the first three stories over a period of ten years or so), and one day on a lark, I thought I would see what self-publishing was like, so I drew up a small book with these stories and had it printed. I never sold a copy but rather gave away all of them. My idea was that I didn’t want to make a dime on the Ramrod Rider but preferred to make it my gift to the world.

A few years went by, and after I had a few western novels published, I thought it might be fun to do some more with the Ramrod Rider. So in and around other things I was doing, I took him out of his suspension in time and wrote three more stories. Two of them fill in the Ramrod Rider of the second generation, where the man bedecked in black meets Daniel DuRonde, who declaims a long narrative poem of his own composition before going on to the skulduggery for which he will be pursued. In the next story, the Ramrod Rider meets a couple of cowboy singers who deliver their material, for a little more wholesome verse content. This story, "Trouble at Happy Valley Ranch," continues as a genial satire of things that happen in the workplace. Then the last story continues with the latter-day reincarnation of the Ramrod Rider, who meets up again with Wyoma and Wynema as he resumes his pursuit of Daniel Durant. He also meets a character named the Old Scout (who will appear in a jaunty story in a collection of serious fiction, Shadows on the Plain). As in other stories in the Adventures, these two characters break into song as they communicate.

Once I had these six stories, I had enough for a book. In order to market it, I appealed to my brother David, who is an artist and has provided me with artwork for some of my other projects. With two mighty fine cover illustrations plus a few for the chapters, I was prepared to pitch this book to Dan and Bruce at Endeavor Books.

It was one of the better moments of my life, pitching this book in person. I was lucid and, I think, inspired, and there seemed to be some real energy in the air. Dan and Bruce decided to go ahead with it, and in a matter of a few months the book was a reality.

Of course, since it was someone else’s commercial enterprise, I could no longer insist on giving the thing away. Dan put a price on it, and we sent it out into the world. I got a couple of reviews that showed appreciation for some of the zaniness, and copies have sold both in bookstores and through online outlets. It is gratifying to have this kind of endorsement for a project that is so idiosyncratic.

Sometimes it seems as if this kind of writing is self-indulgence, except that once the story is out there, it does have a life of its own, and people have found amusement in it. Of the many things I have written, this one (for some readers, at least) comes closest to having a touch of magic in it. It is nice to think that this crazy little book might continue to bring a smile now and then to a venturesome reader.

A Good Man to Have in Camp

2009-05-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

A Good Man to Have in Camp was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in May 1999. It was the second of two contemporary western novels of mine that Endeavor Books published, and I was glad to see it make its modest way into the world.

This short novel (a little under 53,000 words) is set in rural California, the land of my youth. It continues to develop ideas that I explored in my collection of short fiction entitled Seasons in the Fields, which was printed a year earlier. The main character, Jim Lander, lives in the foothills outside a small town in the Sacramento Valley. He has done farm and ranch work all his life, and although he has his own place now, he has uncertainties to work on in his personal life. As with my other California stories as well as with my other contemporary fiction, I work with character, relationships, and landscape.

I wrote this novel freestyle. That is, I let it evolve as I went along, in a way that I have written quite a few short stories. This approach contrasts with my more typical method of planning out and then working from an outline, as I have done more and more when I work with book-length story lines. In order to write in this freer style, I don’t work with preconceived boundaries in areas such as length, subject matter, level of language use, and the like. These are important considerations, but for the purposes of exploring a story and letting it find itself, I suspend thinking about where I might try to get the thing published. I concentrate on getting it written, and then I worry about where to send it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think about audience, shape, form, balance, length, and so forth, or even about explicitness in subject matter and language use. It just means that those parameters come from within rather than as a set of premises from the beginning.

I took the less-structured approach with this novel because I just wanted to get it written. More specifically, I wanted to carry out an idea I had begun quite a while before and had not brought to completion.

My original idea for this work began to take shape, though not very definitely, when I finished my doctoral dissertation. I had written several short stories and, having just completed a long project, I thought I should move into a book-length work of fiction. My problem was that I did not know how to conceive of or plan out a longer work, so I tried writing my way into a novel. However, after about twenty pages I got stalled. At the time I bounced back and forth between short stories, articles, reviews, and other miscellaneous short pieces, so my work did not come to a halt. I just left the idea unfinished and worked on other things.

From time to time over the next several years I would look at the fragment I had written and would review the notes I had sketched out for other parts of the story. I still liked the idea, but I didn’t know how to carry it out. Each time, I would set the material aside and work on things I was more certain about.

After I had written another contemporary novel and about four westerns, I thought I should go back to this story line and see if I could finish it. For a stretch of a few months, I had the rare experience of having a bit of free time in the evenings and on the weekends, along with the other rare experience of not having a lot of personal intrusions to distract me. So I thought, I’ll just write this thing and see where it goes.

By now it was fifteen years since I had first started work on the idea, and my writing style had changed—settled into something more like my own voice, I think. So the first thing I did was revise the twenty or so pages I had kept in the folder. I revised that piece a few times, so that the new version didn’t look very much at all like the original. That was all right, too, because if I was going to free this thing, I couldn’t cling to any part of it just because I already had it written down.

And so it went. I wrote out a story about my character, and it was somewhere in that middle ground between long short story and novella. I decided I wasn’t through with him, so with some more of the material I wrote a second story, again in the forty-to-sixty-page range. That chunk turned out all right, too, so I wrote a third one. Now I thought I had my character’s trajectory done and had covered most of the subject matter that seemed to belong in his world. As I looked at the three pieces, which I had consciously written as segments in sequence, I saw that I wasn’t too far away from making one continuous work out of them. So I worked on transition and continuity, brought in a little more detail here and there that would be more appropriate in a longer treatment than in any one of shorter length, and now I had a long novella. I went through it again, sort of back and forth, still working on balance, and when I came out of this version (my third or fourth), I had a short novel. I did not feel a need to make it any longer just for the sake of trying to make it look more like a novel. I was past 50,000 words, which by most measurements and certainly by mine put it into the novel range.

Having done so much short story writing in my life, I do not ever have the problem of having too much content and having to decide what to cut. In this case, since I had started out in the very beginning with a short story approach (and probably a short story conception of my story line) and had then followed through with a short story method, I was satisfied with what I thought of, in aesthetic terms, as the relative weight of my short novel. It was lean and crisp, and it had only what it needed to realize its own form.

Following the sequence of working in this way—that is, write first and then try to place it—I now needed to see what I could do with a manuscript like this. Lucky for me, I had a good relationship with the great fellows at Endeavor Books, who had published my first contemporary novel and still had some faith in me. They also had a second painting they had commissioned and not used for the cover of the previous book, so the production did not threaten to be costly. Bruce read the manuscript and made comments, Dan set the type, he and I went through the editing, and then Bruce and I worked on marketing.

The book did not make a big splash, but I did hear from some readers, especially women, who liked it. I think it has a modern appeal in its treatment of male-female relationships, more so than most of my traditional westerns might, and I think it has a spare, unadorned effect that some readers of literary fiction appreciate.

As for myself, I like it for its subject matter as well. The protagonist plants trees, hunts deer, buys a horse, and does ranch work in the daytime; in the night time he goes to the honky tonks and pursues the other side of trying to find balance and harmony in life. I think there are a few good lines in this story, and maybe an image or two that will stick with some readers.

Another aspect I like about this short novel is its form. In writing it the way I did, I was able to finish a work I felt I had to finish, and I was also able to achieve a small victory, a quest, in carrying out the story as it sought its own form and fulfilled it. In this respect, A Good Man to Have in Camp seems like one of the purer works I have written.

Stranger in Thunder Basin

2009-05-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

Stranger in Thunder Basin is my seventeenth traditional western novel. It was published in April 2009 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). In this novel I continue my efforts at writing traditional fast-action westerns with strong elements of character and landscape.

Stranger in Thunder Basin is in some ways a quest novel, as it is the story of a young man who seeks to find out why someone would want to kill his guardian / grandfather, a man who cared for him like a father. This young man, Edward Dawes, needs to find out not only who did it, but why. Then he needs to see justice served.

Although this is pretty much a straightforward, go-ahead kind of story, it has a few subtleties. The first stranger who appears in the tale is the assassin who kills Jake Bishop. In turn, Edward Dawes becomes the stranger who avenges Bishop’s death, and after that he is a stranger to his own mother. The whole idea of the stranger and of the ways in which one could be a stranger was an interesting one to work with. One aspect of the idea comes from Oedipus Rex, in which the title character says:

Until now I was a stranger to this tale
As I had been a stranger to the crime.

In this context, a person is a stranger because of not knowing, and part of the action of the story is moving towards knowledge. My character Ed, like Oedipus, comes to knowledge about the crime and also about his true mother and father.

Another aspect of the idea of the stranger comes from L’ Étranger (The Stranger) by Camus, which I read in French when I was in college and which I read again (with my old annotations) in preparation for writing this novel. In Camus’s novel, the protagonist commits an irrational act by killing a stranger, and by doing so, he becomes a stranger, or outsider, in the world he lives in. I explored this idea in a non-fiction piece of my own entitled "Stranger at the Lookout," which I first wrote in Spanish when I was studying in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, and later converted into English. In this essay, I relate an experience in which I, a stranger or foreigner (extranjero) happened upon a scene where a man had been stabbed the night before. At the end of the piece I conclude that I felt a relation with the person who had been stabbed (and possibly killed) and that the person who shed the blood would forever be the stranger.

Well, these are just ideas, and I do not wish to seem immodest as I discuss how I played with them; rather, I hope to show how ideas come from here and there, get tossed into a mélange (I think of it as being like a big pot of soup), and come out in a blend. For my own purposes, at least, it gives me energy to draw from.

A similar effect comes about from field research. When I have a story line that is grounded in a specific place, it does me a world of good to go out and observe that place. In the case of this novel, I had the notion that I wanted to set the story in Thunder Basin, which is an actual place in northeastern Wyoming. It is a vast, relatively untouched area, which a person sort of goes into and comes out of. So, in addition to having an evocative name, the place seemed appropriate to the story. With that in mind, I knew I had to go on a field trip in order to give myself another fund of material or source of sustenance.

I decided to go by myself and camp two nights, so I took a small camper I have for excursions of this nature. We had just had a spell of wet weather, and things were cleared out for the time being, so I hoped for the best. When I got to the Thunder Basin area, after about three hours of driving, I saw plenty of evidence of the recent rains, but as the afternoon wore on, it looked as if I was going to enjoy some gentle late-spring weather with little wind, warm sunshine, and wide, clear skies.

I drove inland, as it seemed to me, until I came to a spot that seemed like a good place to camp. I pulled off the gravel road and followed a dirt road for about half a mile, and there I pitched my camp. I had been poking along, taking notes and snapping pictures, and now that I was stopped, I could take things in at an even slower pace. The spot where I camped was just above a grove of dead cottonwoods, an impressive feature that I incorporated into the story along with many other scenes, large and small.

After spending two nights in the same place, I packed up my camp and headed out for a slow drive through the Thunder Basin National Grassland. At a far point on my journey, I had to turn around because of a washed-out road, so I was obliged to re-trace some of my route. That in itself is an interesting exercise in observation, as a person sees from the opposite direction what he has just driven past without thinking he would see it again so soon. After taking a long way around, I ended up in Newcastle, Wyoming, and from there I drove south on US 85 along a stretch I am familiar with and always enjoy. All this time, I continued to take notes and snap a picture now and then.

When I got home, I found out that the film had not been advancing in my camera, so instead of having a full roll of pictures to help me in my recollection, I had none. But that was all right. I am, after all, a writer, and I did take good notes, which at the time helped me open my eyes and then later helped me re-imagine the scenes.

When I wrote this novel, I had a good sense of place all the way through. That, and my sense of purpose in carrying out my ideas related to the stranger, kept me on track. I feel that Stranger in Thunder Basin is one of the more dramatic novels I have written, and I hope it brings some enjoyment into the lives of a few readers.

Keep the Wind in Your Face

2009-04-21T06:47:00.000-07:00

Keep the Wind in Your Face was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in October 1998. Although it was the first complete novel I wrote, it was not the first to appear in print. Not only did it take me a long time to assail and finish a full-length manuscript, but I also struggled finding a publisher for it.

After I finished my dissertation on the western novel in 1980 and had had a few short stories published, I thought it was time to write a novel, but uncertainties plagued me. For one thing, even though I had studied plenty of novels literary and traditional, classic and contemporary, I didn’t know how to write one. I thought I needed a big, inspiring idea which I could then follow as I did on a smaller scale when I wrote short stories. I have no doubt that such an approach, what I call writing by feel, works for other writers, but it didn’t for me—not for writing a novel, anyway. I thought I needed a big idea, and it didn’t come to me. I took to thinking of it as a vision. I needed a vision, and if it didn’t come to me, I needed to go out and find it. One time I had gone on an excursion through the foothills and had gotten an idea for a short story that turned out pretty well, but now when I went to the mountains, nothing happened. Then I thought I needed a bigger expedition, but I didn’t know how to outfit myself to go hunting for a vision. I also didn’t think I had the time, which was equivalent to saying I really didn’t know how to go about it.

I made a false start on a contemporary novel, getting about twenty pages into it and then stalling for lack of a sense of how to carry it all the way through. Time passed. I got a job in Wyoming while my wife stayed in California, and then I went through the ennui and desperation of divorce. I kept writing short stories, along with nonfiction articles, poems, reviews, and literary articles. I tried to keep up several lines of endeavor, hoping that one of them would develop into a good avenue of opportunity. I dug out the twenty-page false start from time to time and put it away. Then I tried another longer story, again getting an idea and following it until I was done. It ran to forty pages, and although I thought it fulfilled its form all right, I now had something else I couldn’t do much with. It was too long to get published in the regular outlets for short fiction, and it didn’t have enough in it for me to try to build it into a novel.

There were two things I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. One was the person who always said he’d like to write a novel some day but never got it together to do it. The other was the person who said, "I wrote a novel once. A very bad novel." That person does not go on to write another. I knew I needed to write a novel and keep it from being a very bad one.

Time was passing. I was doing all right at short stories, getting them published in popular and literary magazines and sometimes getting a prize or a few dollars for them. I was in my seventh year at my career job at Eastern Wyoming College, and I decided I needed to do something for professional rejuvenation. I took a semester without pay so I could go to the University of Wyoming and study Spanish, which would give me a little variety in my teaching load. Just before embarking on my study plan, I got married again, this time to a young woman who was finishing her degree at UW, so the two of us set up housekeeping in a basement apartment in the cold winter months. By now a novel idea was forming in my mind, and I could steal some time to work on it. In a cold little alcove off from the main part of the basement apartment, I began writing a contemporary novel about big game hunting.

One day when I was at my office at the University, where I was teaching part-time in the English Department, I received a phone call from the Wyoming Council on the Arts and learned that I had won a $2000 fellowship for a set of four short stories I had submitted to the annual competition. This was a great break for me, especially since I was making a pittance at the two courses I was teaching, and my move to Laramie was costing me a great deal. More than the money, however, was the encouragement to keep working on my novel. An agent wrote to me on the basis of my having won the award, and she expressed an interest in seeing the manuscript when it was ready.

I worked on the manuscript off and on for the rest of the year, and I had a complete typed draft of it by my fortieth birthday. That was December 14, 1988. I went on to revise the novel, and then I began to send it out. First I sent it to the agent I had corresponded with after winning the fellowship. She wrote back and said it wasn’t for her, partly because of her "relative disinterest in hunting" and partly because the story just didn’t rouse her interest. Next I send the first fifty pages to an agent who had written me on the basis of having seen a short story of mine in a magazine, and he sent me a crabby letter of rejection. After more revision, I sent it to an agent whose ad I saw in a magazine, and she enjoyed the story and its content (her father had been a hunter), but she didn’t think she could sell it.

I went on to give the manuscript four substantial revisions, each time after I had had one or more sets of constructive comments from people who had read the whole thing. I sensed that the novel did not come out of an ideal preliminary conception of narrative design, but I felt that, given its form, I was making it as good as it could be.

By the time I had four traditional westerns out and had gotten a bit of name recognition, at least in this region, I was able to interest Endeavor Books in the novel. We put our heads together for a marketing plan, and we also collaborated on a cover. I gave Dan and Bruce, the owners, an idea of what details I would like to see, and they commissioned a local artist to do a painting. I found it gratifying that the publishers would be willing to take on the book at their expense and to invest in original artwork for the cover. Meanwhile I touched up the text a final time, and this novel that was dear to my heart became a reality.

When the book came out, I received a variety of responses. Women told me that even though they had never been hunting and did not plan to, they felt as if the novel had taken them there and they had enjoyed it. Hunters and cowboys liked the novel for its content, and I must admit that one of my intentions was to give readers the vicarious experience of going out on horseback and having successful hunts. One woman, the mother of a friend of mine, relayed the comment that she thought there was too much blood and gore in the hunting scenes. A magazine editor declined to review the book because of some content she would not speak of. I was left to wonder whether it was because of game violations committed by a couple of the less-admirable characters or because of the affair that goes on between the hunting guide and a female client. Maybe the editor missed the thematic parallel, or maybe there was something else unspeakable. Two other reviewers, both ranch women, found the content worthy of praise. In the end I had to admit that the novel might have limited appeal, but I was glad that some readers liked it.

One-Eyed Cowboy Wild

2009-04-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

One-Eyed Cowboy Wild was my first traditional western and my first full-length book. It was published in March 1994 by Walker and Company, a well-respected hardcover publisher in New York. I had been writing short stories and getting them published, some of them in some pretty good places, for over fifteen years, and I had also done a couple of monograph and chapbook works on a small scale, but it was hard to break into book publishing. I was elated when I did.

When I was in college, reading westerns for fun and then doing my doctoral dissertation on the classic western novel, I had the ambition of writing a western some day. It was a hard thing to gear myself up for, however, because I was afraid I would write something for a narrow purpose and then fail at it. My first published short story was a traditional western piece, and I sold it to a commercial, pulp-like magazine called Far West. Having gotten paid well for it, I got inspired and wrote another, which the editor rejected with a comment that said it was way over-written and I could do better. I went ahead and wrote another story or two in that line, but I couldn’t place anything more with that magazine, and then it folded. Meanwhile, although my other stories eventually found homes, I had one short story that I had written specifically for the commercial market, and I couldn’t find a place for it. I did not want that to happen on a larger scale, so I put off trying to write a traditional western novel.

My first complete attempt at full-length fiction was a contemporary novel entitled Keep the Wind in Your Face. In the course of trying to find a publisher for it, I corresponded with an agent who liked the story but didn’t think she could sell it. She suggested that I try to write a novel that fit into an established genre. As she put it, publishers needed to see a niche for a book when there was no name familiarity.

That was the single most useful piece of advice I have received. At the time, there was a going genre called men’s adventure fiction, but my contemporary novel did not fit there, and as I looked at some of the books on the rack, I could see that I did not have the aptitude for writing about tanks and grenades, machine guns and helicopters. For me, genre meant a western. I brooded on the agent’s advice for a while, still hesitant to start a novel that might not go anywhere, or, to put it more bluntly, that might fail. I had one novel manuscript on my hands, and I didn’t want another weighing me down. Also, as I always told myself, I needed an open space in my life so I could devote myself to such a project.

The open space came in the form of emptiness when I went through my second divorce. Alone in a big house in the country, with winter keeping me indoors and my financial situation keeping me from going anywhere, I got started on a manuscript that would become One-Eyed Cowboy Wild. By late January of 1991 I began to close in on the end of it, so I wrote the agent who had encouraged me earlier. She wrote back and said sorry, she had decided to give up agenting. Back at square one, I finished the manuscript and started to try to find a publisher. On the basis of advice from published novelists, I tried to find an agent first, but after many tries over a period of a year and a half, I began to get discouraged. I decided to contact editors directly, even though the effort might get me rejected with a good house that might accept my work through an agent. And so I started sending query letters and submission packages to such places as Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell (whose assistant editor sent me a rejection letter two years later).

In the fall of 1992, I attended a conference on the western novel in Laramie, and there I had the good luck to sit next to Jackie Johnson at dinner. I found out she was the westerns editor at Walker and Company, so I asked her several questions about the company. She seemed surprised that a person like myself, who was there in an academic capacity, should be interested in the publishing aspect of traditional westerns. A few months later, when the rest of my queries and submissions came trickling back in with no positive results, I submitted a partial manuscript to Jackie Johnson and reminded her that we had visited at the conference in Laramie. She wrote back within a week and said she had read what I sent, was hooked early, and would like to see the rest of the manuscript. This was in February of 1993. I sent the whole manuscript to her, and then she couldn’t get to it right away, but, considerate person that she is, she sent me a note and told me when she could. By May she was able to make a tentative offer on it, and by August I had a contract. In the meanwhile, we went through a trial edit and then a second edit, so she was accepting the revised manuscript. After that, it went through a final edit and a copy edit.

Skeptical and superstitious as I am, and having heard many stories about publishers who had to cancel plans to publish a writer’s precious work, I had a mix of caution and optimism in the months that followed. However, Jackie coached me through the whole process. She knew how insecure and worried a first-time author could be, and she let me know what I could expect at each step along the way. Finally, in February of 1994, I received a padded envelope with the first copy of my first published novel. Along with it was another letter from Jackie, telling me how to work with other Walker personnel in publicity, sales, orders for myself, and subsidiary rights.

The book went on sale in March 1994, and it was well reviewed in standard journals in the book industry as well as in other magazines, journals, and newspapers. It sold out the initial press run of more than 2500 copies, and then it went into large print. In 1997, it went into paperback reprint with a cover that I found enthralling, and it helped me in my start with Leisure Books and Dorchester Publishing.

As most writers who have had a book published will agree, it is a life-changing experience. A person can write short stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces for years and win prizes for them, as I did, but when a person has a book, the world sees him or her, as if for the first time, as a writer. On a personal level, also, one feels a deep gratification at having a lifelong dream realized. I will never be able to express my gratitude enough, for it was Jackie Johnson who saw my potential and gave me that great opportunity.

Of all the emotional memories associated with my first book, one comes to me once in a while. I was talking on the phone to a young woman in publicity / promotion, a very competent but also endearing person, who listened to all of my urgent questions and comments. Her name was Jo Ann Sabatino, and she had a beautiful, calm, reassuring voice. She said, "Don’t worry so much, John. Slow down. This isn’t your last book. It’s your first one." She was right. Thanks to Jackie Johnson, I went on to write two more westerns with Walker and Company.

Twin Rivers

2009-03-25T13:20:00.000-07:00

Twin Rivers, my second traditional western, was published in December 1995 by Walker and Company, the hardcover publisher in New York that produced my first novel, One-Eyed Cowboy Wild. In this novel, as in my previous one, I tried to write something serious and not typical of the genre western.

In the main story line of this work, a cowboy named Clay Westbrook gains the disfavor of local ranchers and land-grabbers when he sticks up for a Mexican friend of his who pastures sheep on public range. Clay develops a love interest in Lupita, the niece of his friend, and he gets to know the Hispanic community that others are prejudiced against.

My interest in this subject comes from my own family background as well as from my personal and professional interests. My stepmother is from Chihuahua, and from her marriage to my father came my two sisters Carmen and Irene, to whom I dedicated this book. I have lived around Mexican people all my life, and I have studied Spanish most of that time. In 1988, I updated my command of Spanish in order to teach the subject at the community college level. In 1994, I undertook a sabbatical project to study Spanish in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.

My stay in Saltillo ran from May to September, so the school year had barely gotten under way when I was done with my sabbatical work and ready to take the equivalent of my summer vacation. That gave me time to spend long hours at reading and research for a novel. My first novel had come out in March and was already out of print, and my editor was wondering if I had anything else. I sent her Keep the Wind in Your Face, a contemporary novel that I had in manuscript. She found the story interesting but not something she could convert into her western line, so she sent it back. Then we began to communicate about the novel I had in mind, Twin Rivers. She appreciated the bi-cultural subject matter, and she saw how I could shape a western that would go well with her line.

Prior to writing the first draft, I read several works on Wyoming and western history, mostly autobiographies of ranchers and ranch hands, to steep myself in the practices and customs of the cattle country. Having come back from my immersion study in Saltillo, I was steeped in that subject matter as well. I read through September and October, and when hunting season was over, I launched into the manuscript.

The writing itself was an intense undertaking. I was living by myself, on leave from my job, so I had nothing to keep me from writing all day, every day. I started in the morning and wrote until ten or eleven at night. I wrote a couple of subsequent novels that way also, getting hooked in deep, until I learned to pace myself. But for this novel, I had not learned moderation. I wrote the manuscript straight through, in longhand (as I have written all of my fiction), and then got some help typing it up.

I think my editor was displeased that I wrote it so quickly, but she would have had plenty of suggestions anyway. She told me where she thought the story needed more or needed less, and I followed her recommendations and came up with a second draft. She was pleased with how well it came out, and from then on she was very enthusiastic about it. Shortly before the book came out, she wrote me that it was "a lovely, gentle drama, told with style and good grace." She also praised it for not having "any gunplay or gore," elements that a reviewer had criticized in a western of hers by another author.

These were kind words of praise, and they help point out what I was trying to do with the western novel at this point. I wanted to write a story that did not depend on violence for its central conflict or for its resolution. Only one person dies in this story, and he comes to grief by drowning when he does not listen to advice on how to cross the river. There are a couple of fistfights, but they are anti-climactic, a feature that one literary reviewer cited as thought-provoking. The same reviewer wrote that "Clay Westbrook is very much a hero for our time" and that the story "offers its quiet rewards."

I felt that I succeeded in writing the kind of novel I wanted to write, and I appreciated the support of Jackie Johnson, my wonderful editor. This book went on to receive favorable reviews, to go into large print and paperback reprint, and to get me listed in places such as Contemporary Authors. It has also made more money than any other book of mine to date. Money is not a big factor in my measure of success, but because westerns are commercial products as well as works of art, it is nice to succeed in that scale of value as well.

Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon

2009-03-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon is my third traditional western novel. It was published in June of 1997 by Walker and Company of New York, a company that was still publishing hardcover westerns at the time. The novel was reprinted in May 1999 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing) as a mass-market paperback, and like most of my other traditional westerns, it also came out in a large-print edition. This was actually the fourth western I wrote, but it got published ahead of the third one (Black Diamond Rendezvous), and it is similar in style to my first two westerns, also published by Walker, so it fits neatly into that set of three. Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon is what I think of as a decorous novel, with little violence or strong language and even less sex. It has also had emotionally pleasing color and design in the hardcover and paperback covers, which, along with the imagery in the title, has made this book appealing to women readers as well as men. Overall, this work has been very successful for me, in spite of a few rough spots early on.

After writing two successful novels with Walker and then writing one that the editor didn’t care for (and rejected), I went through the proposal and discussion stage before I wrote this one. It was a good process to go through, as I ended up with a novel that both the editor and I were happy with. In my first plan for the story line, I had a few lurid ideas that didn’t make it very far, but it was not a problem to set that material aside for later use in some other work. I concentrated on writing a story that turned on character and circumstance, friendship and ethics, plus the beneficial influence of honest work in a restorative landscape. It turned out to be a thoughtful treatment of an honest cowboy who has to deal with less honest people but who has the understanding of his French-Indian sweetheart. It’s a nice story, slow action as opposed to fast action (only one death, and that one offstage), with what I hope is a satisfying ending.

As with my previous two Walker westerns, this one went through some rigorous editing. After arriving at what was my final draft, I submitted it and then had to revise it according to suggestions by the editor. After that, I went through an edited copy and had to defend such things as being able to see a small, narrow blaze on a horse’s forehead at a distance of a quarter mile. (This is the type of minutiae that copy editors like to niggle over; I supported my case by posing the question to the first cowboy who came into my office as I was typing my responses.) After the editing, I proofread the galleys (a preliminary printout), and I waited for the book to come out.

Then came the rough spots. At about the time this book was released, Walker decided not to do any more westerns. It was a business decision, and although it was a disappointment to people in the westerns market, it was not incomprehensible. Other hardcover publishers had closed down their western lines as well. What it meant for me was that I wasn’t going to get to do any more books with an editor who had been so good to work with. I had even begun to plan another story line in consultation with her, and now that progress had dead-ended.

My next setback took the shape of stories I had read by other authors whose work had been published and then not supported by the publisher. I still don’t understand (except on the most cynical level) why a business would do something like this, but the practice has been common enough to be a recognizable pattern. When a company closes down a line, changes editors, or changes its lineup of authors, sometimes the "refocusing" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea seems to be something like, this product is losing money for us, as we will see. Strange to the common observer, I am sure.

Although my editor was as helpful as she could be when it came time to promote Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon, other people in the company were not. At about the time of this refocusing, new employees were put in the publicity and subsidiary rights departments. Review copies did not go out as I requested, so I did not get reviewed as I did with my first two books. Nor did copies go to the paperback and large-print editors, both of whom I had come to know and could ask without being a great nuisance. The person who was in charge of sending out copies insisted that she sent them, more than once, and yet they did not arrive. I sent copies myself, and I am glad to say that Walker replaced those copies for me. I think that the hiring of this undependable employee was coincidental with other changes, but even so, I could tell clearly that my problems were down the list of priorities for the company in general. I did hear, later on, that the employee in question had gone elsewhere, but that was after my last book with this publisher had pretty much run its course.

In spite of these little setbacks, however, the book did go into paperback and large print, which helped the earnings look better than they would have otherwise. But sales of the initial hardcover print run did not do well. As a consequence, a couple of years later, the company had a great many remainder copies. According to custom, I had an opportunity to buy as many of them as I wanted, at a low price, so I ordered a couple hundred copies. And so the story has a happy ending, as I have had a good supply of complimentary copies of a handsome hardcover book whenever someone requests one (or more) for a worthy cause or benefit.

Black Diamond Rendezvous

2009-02-05T11:34:00.000-08:00

Black Diamond Rendezvous is my fourth traditional western novel and my first paperback original. It was published in May 1998 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). It was actually the third western I wrote, but it was the fourth published, which probably doesn’t matter much to anyone but myself. However, there is a mini-chapter here on the topic of how, why, or why not a work will be published.

This novel is unlike other traditional westerns I wrote at this stage in my career. After writing what I hoped were atypical westerns of character, idea, and landscape, I thought I would try to write one that dealt more with action and danger, with a protagonist who would defeat his enemies, have good triumph over evil, and win the girl. I wanted to work with a character who was young, hedonistic, impulsive, and not always careful and who therefore got himself into deadly trouble. So I wrote Black Diamond Rendezvous without consulting anybody or trying to get a contract ahead of time. With my self-appointed liberty I had a great deal of fun writing it, and it turned out the way I wanted it to.

When I finished it, I sent it to Jackie Johnson, my editor at Walker, who had worked closely with me on my first two books and had kept me on the straight and narrow as far as possibly offensive content went. She wrote me a very nice letter of rejection for Black Diamond Rendezvous, closing with an assurance that she would still be interested in other westerns by me. I was disappointed, of course, but I had been through plenty of rejection in the past, and I took her at her word that she was still interested in working with me. I called her up, just to have a post-mortem on this attempt. Among other things, I thought she might not have appreciated what I was attempting and how I was trying to do something different from my previous work. In the course of the conversation I explained what I was up to with the manuscript, how I was attempting to be a bit ironic and play around with allegory and archetypes while at the same time trying to write a less pensive but perhaps still cerebral work. She listened to me with exemplary patience, and then she said, "I think I understand that, John. But I don’t know why someone would want to do that."

Well, for one thing, that told me I wasn’t going to get her to re-consider this, my most recent and (to me) very clever piece of work. It also told me that in the future, I would run my story ideas past her first so that she would have a sense of investment in the work. She was very good at talking over story ideas and assuring me that everything that came out of our conversation was mine to work with, as all she did was respond to my ideas. So that was fine. I got back on track with her to do Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon, which was one of the last westerns published by Walker. But that is another story.

Back to Black Diamond Rendezvous. I wrote it in the summer of 1995, had it rejected before many months went by, and then spent quite a while trying to interest someone else in it. I sent it (unwittingly) to publishers who referred me to book doctors, to publishers who were over-committed, to publishers who really didn’t do westerns (in spite of listings that said they did), and on and on—all the travails of anyone who writes a novel manuscript and tries to find a home for it. I even got to talk to a couple of assistant editors (one who passed the manuscript on to another), the second of which told me, in that eternal sophomoric style, that he wasn’t sure about the manuscript because he always rooted for the bad guy.

Finally I got a break. At about the time Walker was closing down its hardcover western line, Dorchester was reviving its western line with its Leisure Books imprint. A good (and valued) friend in Western Writers of America told me that the editor was looking for new work and that I should try to get in right away. This was in early 1997. A few months later, I was informed that Leisure Books had acquired paperback rights to One-Eyed Cowboy Wild, my first Walker western. After confirming this news with my editor, I got into contact with Don D’Auria, who was getting the Leisure western line up and running and who had the manuscript of Black Diamond Rendezvous. It worked out well for me, as publishers like to have authors who show promise of continuity and who are therefore worth investing in. One-Eyed Cowboy Wild came out in August 1997, and Black Diamond Rendezvous came out, as noted above, in May of the next year. Twin Rivers, my second Walker western, had come out in paperback in February of 1997 with HarperCollins, so now I was into paperback reprint and paperback original.

I was a happy boy. Not only did I find a home for Black Diamond Rendezvous, but I also landed on my feet when my previous publisher quit doing westerns. In addition to that, Don D’Auria liked Black Diamond Rendezvous and was interested in doing more westerns with me. That was over ten years ago, and I have been with Don and Leisure Books ever since. During that time, I have returned on a few occasions to write in the more ironic, carefree mode of Black Diamond Rendezvous, so I see this novel as also initiating one kind of western that I have continued to write.

I will always be indebted to Jackie Johnson for having picked me up out of the street, as it were, and for having discovered me as a western writer. She made my career possible, and Don D’Auria has had faith in me and has helped me keep going. There is nothing guaranteed in this business, and writers (at least at my level) always have to deal with insecurity, so it is nice to look back and appreciate that moment in 1997 at which I was saved from being thrown out into the street where I came from.

Coyote Trail

2009-01-20T11:05:00.000-08:00

Coyote Trail is my fifth traditional western novel. It was published in January 2000 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). As with other traditional westerns I wrote at this stage in my career, this novel attempted to work outside the typical patterns of the paperback western. In writing it, I placed a strong emphasis on character and idea as well as on landscape, rather than focus on a hero who would defeat his enemies and cause good to triumph over evil.

With this work, I began with an idea and a couple of characters to go with it. I wanted to write a story about a problem in friendship when one person does not level with the other. For my story I started with a character who was willing to extend his friendship to a stranger and who was willing to stick his neck out to help his friend. In contrast, the friend is not only ungrateful but, as it turns out, self-serving and dishonest. But, as the protagonist learns, that’s all right too, because it helps a person appreciate the friends he does have.

Travis Quinn, the main character of Coyote Trail, strikes up a friendship with a fellow named Miles Newman when the two of them end up working on the same ranch. In order to make this situation real, I found it useful to go on a field trip to the area where this ranch would be. I went to a place called Lost Springs, which is in the plains country west of Lusk, Wyoming, and east of the Laramie Range. At the time of the story, the place was called Lost Spring, so that is what I call it in the narration. I took a memorable drive through the area, which is rolling grassland with the unexpected variation that a person finds when he or she looks at the country up close. This turned out to be a good thing to do, as the landscape serves as a presence in the story, a sense of constancy that Quinn has but some of the other characters don’t.

From this grass country, Quinn ends up going to a couple of other places, which I also have found interesting in my travels. He goes on an errand south through Hartville (always a pleasure to go through) and on over to Chugwater (a place name always dear to our hearts), then gets caught in a snowstorm. He goes on a trip to the Laramie Range, also good landscape, and after that he follows the North Platte river bottoms from Orin Junction up past Douglas and back. All this time, he is living in the landscape while others are traveling over it, taking what they can and not worrying about what they leave behind.

Not all of the other characters are inconsiderate, however. A couple of Quinn’s fellow cowhands bring out the better side of the contrast, as does Quinn’s boss, though in a more restrained away. Also, Quinn meets a woman who, though also cautious, has qualities that the novel holds up for approval. In the final words of the story, Quinn looks forward to spending future time with "a woman who believed in trust and who would have some ideas on how to take the bitter with the sweet."

As I wrote this novel, I felt that I was dealing with lifelike characters, real-life problems, and bittersweet solutions. When I finished writing it, I felt about the novel as I would feel about others as I progressed in my career. I thought it was the most original and best executed of my westerns up to that point. That does not mean that it is perfect or even that I think it is; it just means that it has been a milestone work for me, and as with all my westerns, I am proud to have written it.

North of Cheyenne

2009-01-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

North of Cheyenne is my sixth traditional western novel. It was published in October 2000 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). This work, like many of my other traditional westerns, places an emphasis on character and landscape, and it is a continuation of my earlier attempts at breaking out of the predictable patterns of the paperback western.

Monte Casteel, the main character in North of Cheyenne, is different from the typical western hero in that he is not the type to jump in and settle things with his fists and guns. However, he lives in a world of men who do intimidate others, slap them around, kill them furtively, and kill them outright, so he can’t be a gentle milliner or haberdasher. He is a working cowboy who lives on the range, and when someone tries to tell him to move on, he resists. When injustices are committed, he works to set them right. He just doesn’t do it by jumping in, beating up some adversaries, and killing others.

At the point in my career when I wrote this novel, I was interested in writing a new kind of western, or at least something that I saw as original in its rebirth. I had read (and studied) so many formula westerns, as they are called, that I didn’t see much originality in the pattern of the hard-hitting, fast-shooting hero who solves all conflicts (and wins the girl) in a climax of massive violence. So I tried designing plots in which the protagonist gets into conflicts by his own actions, develops a love interest, and resolves conflicts without using violence as the main means. I wrote five traditional westerns this way, and when I lucked into an appreciative reviewer, I received recognition and sometimes praise for what I was trying. If I had a reputation at that point, it was for writing character-driven fiction, which means, among other things, fiction that does not depend heavily on twists and turns in the action but on more subtle points such as motivation.

I did not stay wedded to this plan, however. For one thing, as far as plotting was concerned, I sensed that I was substituting one formula for another, and I saw myself faced with a future in which I was going to have to resort to ingenious tricks to keep the protagonist from engaging in direct action. For another, I wanted to try working with different kinds of characters, some more assertive than others, and some of them not hesitant to give the bad guys what they deserve. And for another, I became more of a believer in the more definite conclusion. After all, in spite of the surface illusions of reality, westerns depend on patterned action, and if a person is going to write a traditional western, she cannot stray too far from that idea. So after this novel I tried more variation in the kind of ending I was working towards, and I embraced the idea that having an assertive or dynamic character who solves things with definite measures does not require that I follow stereotypes, nor does it require that I give up writing character-driven fiction.

Meanwhile, as I wrote North of Cheyenne, I tried my best to execute the idea that I had at the time, and I thought I measured up to the task all right. I devised characters and problems that I was interested in and that I could write about with conviction, and I turned a good phrase or two. As part of my preparation for writing this novel, I went out on a short field trip in the area around Wheatland and Glendo and on up to the foothills of the Laramie Mountains, and I formed some good impressions of the places where my characters would interact.

The year after this book came out, it received the fiction award from the Wyoming Historical Society. I have also received a few nice letters and personal comments from readers who have liked it. For people in this part of Wyoming, at least, the title has resonance, as does the first line of the novel: A cold wind blew from the north.

Man from Wolf River

2008-12-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

Man from Wolf River is my seventh traditional western novel. It was published in May 2001 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). As I planned and wrote this novel, I considered it to be in a somewhat lighter style than some of my previous works such as Coyote Trail and North of Cheyenne. I thought of it as being in the same spirit as Black Diamond Rendezvous, a work that I hoped had a bit of humor, a bit of dark irony, and some underlying serious value. This would also be a style that I would strive to continue in later works such as the Jimmy Clevis novels (Red Wind Crossing, Rancho Alegre, and Raven Springs).

For this kind of story, I work with a main character who is not quite as serious and pensive as, say, the protagonist of Coyote Trail or Lonesome Range, even though he gets into complications that are dead serious. This kind of character is more of a fun-loving, pleasure-seeking kind of a fellow who meets sexy women as well as sociopathic or psychopathic men with deep and narrow habits. In my own system of classifying, I think of these stories as being more lurid in their portrayal of pleasure and of evil than the straighter stories are.

I got my first inspiration for Owen Felver, the protagonist of Man from Wolf River, from a nineteenth-century photograph of a man sitting on his horse, inside the entryway of a saloon, drinking a glass of beer. It went well with my idea of a hedonistic character, so I opened the story with just that image. Having established that much, I went on (two paragraphs later) to have the character interact with a man who is looking in through the window of a café as another, younger man sits in his shadow.

Eventually it will come out that the man looking through the window is the antagonist and that in his secret life he has the habit of looking at things he ought not to. By the second page, the reader sees the man’s current object of interest, a young woman he seems to be in pursuit of. Naturally, the young woman (not exactly pristine and puritanical) is the kind of person Owen Felver should meet and become attracted to.

The story goes on, with a variety of characters and complications. It was a fun story to write because of the interactions that Felver has with the other characters. It was also a satisfying story because I was able to deal with a topic that I consider serious and worthwhile—the problem (or offense) of invasion of privacy. On a small scale, I have had people pry into my life by reading my journal and other personal writings (such as letters not written for them), and I have also had my house burglarized and my property trespassed on, so I have some sense of what it feels like. These are small things, to be sure, in comparison with what others have endured. I have known people, some of them close to me, who have had presumptuous individuals barge into their personal lives and effects and, as it were, walk all over what should be private and inviolate. I find that kind of behavior repugnant, especially when it is done in the guise of respectability, as it sometimes is. I have also known people, mostly women, who have been trespassed upon physically, and I consider that action criminal, whether it is done within the sanctimonious claim of matrimony or otherwise. I took a gentler approach, both in the offense and in the poetic justice, in Man from Wolf River than I did in Black Diamond Rendezvous or the later work Raven Springs, but I thought I served a decent purpose. Not everyone will like how I did it (one reader wrote me that the book went back to the library pronto when she came to the scene in which the main character takes the girl into the tent), but I think most readers will agree that this story at least gives an honest try at dealing with people who look in through windows.

For the Norden Boys

2008-11-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

For the Norden Boys is my eighth traditional western novel. It was published in June 2002 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). As with Black Hat Butte and Lonesome Range, I consider it to be at the center of my work, as it is a literary traditional western with strong interest in character and landscape.

As part of my preparation for writing this novel, I went out to do field research in order to get a feeling for the place where I wanted my story to take place. Because I was planning to deal with topics such as treachery and injustice, and because I wanted to have an amoral hired killer in the enemy camp, I thought it would be interesting to go to Iron Mountain, the scene of the fatal shooting that led to Tom Horn’s hanging. I did not intend to use any historical characters in the story, but I thought that if I went to the place, I might feel some inspiration.

So with plenty of food and drinking water, I set out on a back-roads journey in my old black pickup. The pickup doesn’t have air conditioning, and I expected the weather to get hot that day in late summer, so I got an early start. I drove south to Hawk Springs, then took the road west, over the rim to Chugwater. From there I took the narrow two-lane highway south to the Iron Mountain area, where I found the old post office, now closed. I took a road that led into the hills, and I wondered which of the peaks in the vicinity was Iron Mountain.

I ended up driving into a ranch yard, where I got out of the pickup and lingered at the low woven-wire fence until someone came out. A woman perhaps in her late fifties, wearing what I might vaguely describe as town or city clothes, came to the gate. I had the impression that she did not live there, and my guess was confirmed when she said she and her husband were visiting her son. I told her I was a writer and was hoping to see Iron Mountain, so she went to get her son the rancher.

He was a fellow in his mid to late thirties, I would guess, and he didn’t seem to care for visitors. When I told him of my interest, he pointed out a flat, stubby rise to the northwest and said that was Iron Mountain. I said it didn’t look much like what I was expecting, and he told me that most of the mountain had been mined away, and the hill was what was left of it. I apologized for the trouble, and he must have been an honest man, because he did not tell me it was no trouble at all.

For a short while, I felt as if my hopes were like that mountain, all carted away. I drove back out to the main road, took another look at the post office, and headed south to Horse Creek, which is a small community about twenty miles north of Cheyenne. Still not having seen a landscape that matched with what I was looking for, I turned around and went back north to Chugwater. The day was wearing on, and the heat of the engine was coming through the floorboard. I ate lunch, pondered for the umpteenth time what it was like to look for a mountain and find that it wasn’t there any more, and drove further north to see what I could see.

Then the good thing happened. The Laramie Mountains begin to rise taller in the near distance as a person travels from Chugwater to Wheatland, and there I saw a couple of mountains and a canyon that spoke to me for my story. I had to drive past them until I found a way to cross over the interstate and get onto the right road that would take me close to the mountains. Then I was able to take in the landscape, jot down notes, and take pictures. By the end of a hot afternoon, I had the setting for my novel.

As for the story line, I had been tinkering with it for a while, and I knew I wanted my main character to be an older cowpuncher who had become a ranch cook. I found the place on the range where he would first meet the Norden boys, Dane and Hal, and agree to go to work for them. I had decided to call him Tom Atkins, which in my reading of Thomas Hardy’s poetry I had learned was a generic name for a common soldier. My character was a regular guy, not heroic or superhuman, but in the course of events he was going to have to rise to courage and try to deal with injustice.

To get into his character a little more, I did some other research at my own place. In my back yard, where I have a permanent campfire site, I experimented with the various kinds of fuel, such as sagebrush and cedar, which Tom Atkins would use in his work. I practiced with cast-iron skillets and Dutch ovens on the open fire, and I learned what it felt like to put my hand palm-down to see if the bottom of the skillet was hot enough to fry meat. On another occasion, when the ashes were cold, I set up the iron tripod and used it as Atkins was going to do—as a rifle rest. I got exactly the right feel of how things come together, and then I squeezed off a shot with my lever-action saddle gun. I did this on two separate occasions, to make sure I got it right. The scene in the novel works pretty well, as Atkins shoots an antelope that comes unwisely close to his camp. It is also a good set-up for a later scene when he has a more critical shot to make.

As I wrote this novel, I had the good feeling that I was carrying it off all right. My character was rising in his power to act, but he wasn’t going to be able to do away with injustice in the world. Furthermore, he didn’t kid himself. I thought it was a real novel about a real kind of person. Several months after I wrote it, I did the proofreading before the book went to press, and again I had a very memorable feeling that I had done as well as I could. After that, the responses I got in person as well as in the mail told me that at least some readers took the novel as I envisioned it.

When this book came out, I thought it was the best thing I had written up to that point in my career. Later I would feel that other works rose to this level, and I hope it happens again. Without feeling that I have to compare or rank my own work, however, I am content to say that For the Norden Boys is right up there with my best.

Black Hat Butte

2008-11-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Black Hat Butte is my ninth traditional western novel. It was published in February 2003 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). I consider it to be at the center of my work, as it is a literary traditional western with strong interest in character and landscape.

In preparing to write this novel, as in several of my other projects, I went out to do field research in order to find a place where I could envision my story taking place. I knew I wanted to set this novel somewhere in the area between Hartville and Manville, south and a little east of where I set Coyote Trail. Having done field research there before, I knew there were plenty of landscape features like the ones I had in mind. So I went in search of an area with a butte that matched my conception of Black Hat Butte.

I was driving south on a dirt road, going up and down through hilly grassland, when I saw the tip of a butte several miles further on. I got excited, because I had the feeling of discovery, the feeling that the material was talking to me. I drove on, still noting the landscape around me, until I came to the butte itself. With my camera as well as my notebook, I made note of many, many features, including colors, shapes, shadows, other landmarks. I sketched out a few maps by hand, and as I did so I noted where some of the places and events of my story would be located. It was a long summer day, and I had packed a lunch as well as drinking water, so I was in no hurry.

Once the place came alive as the locale of my novel, the feeling was almost magical. At the very least it was inspiring. I believe that the special feeling I got from this place was related (though I can’t say which came first) to a conception of a secondary character I planned to put in the story. The character’s name is Rove, taken from a use of the word that I had seen more than once in reading Great Expectations. It is related to ropes and strands. My idea for the character was to have him enigmatic, a character who comes and goes on horseback (his appearance is always foreshadowed by antelope, which I saw the first day I went to do my research), appears to none of the characters in the novel except the main character (until the last scene), and seems to materialize out of and fade back into the landscape. In the story, he not only does those things but also communicates on an irrational level with the main character, speaking in gestures, metaphors, and riddles. To the main character, Rove seems clairvoyant and possibly supernatural, "an ethereal sort who nourished himself on rainbows," but he has a handshake as solid as a rock.

Rove was an interesting, not to mention entertaining, character to experiment with. As I go back through the scenes in which he appears, some of the lines make me laugh. I have that sensation that I am sure many writers have when they read their own work and come across something that surprises or delights as if the passage were written by someone else.

I would not want to set things out of proportion, however. Although working with Rove as a character was the most unique thing about this work or even most of my traditional westerns, I hope I succeeded at blending him into the novel at large. As always, I tried to work with a variety of characters whose story lines or strands interact, and I set several scenes in other places in that beautiful grassland I have come to know. For this novel, I went to the area a second time to renew my impressions and to feel again the life of the land. Moreover, I envisioned it as a place where a man named Braden (the main character) meets realistic cowboys as well as quirky characters, comes across injustice and confronts it, and takes an interest in a woman named Beryl. Overall, this is the story of Noel Braden, a cowboy with a good conscience, who rides the wide, rolling country near a place called Black Hat Butte.

Trouble at the Redstone

2008-10-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Trouble at the Redstone is my sixteenth traditional western novel. It was published in October 2008 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). After having written a couple of pensive, atypical westerns with Death at Dark Water and Lonesome Range, interspersed with the crossover western-mysteries featuring Jimmy Clevis, I thought it would be a good idea to try my hand again with a more traditional fast-action western. The result was Trouble at the Redstone.

Although this novel has some similarities with a couple of the Jimmy Clevis stories in that the protagonist goes off in search of a missing person, I made some conscious changes in the main character and therefore in the tone of the work. For one thing, I decided I wanted to work with a character who was more hard-wired for direct action than Jimmy Clevis or the more contemplative protagonists of Death at Dark Water and Lonesome Range. Will Dryden, the main character of Trouble at the Redstone, is well equipped with the ability to fight with his fists and with his six-guns. Like other traditional western heroes, he also gets thumped once in a while and has a knack for getting gonad-driven bad guys to want to kill him. Somewhere in there, he also shows that he is hard-wired for direct action with a woman.

When Will Dryden goes to work at the Redstone Ranch, however, he does not rely only on his fists, his guns, or other physical equipment. He has to try to figure out connections between the missing man he is looking for, a young cowhand who has recently been killed, a couple of more men who turn up dead along the way, and a stealthy land-grabbing plan on the part of the owner of the Redstone. Naturally, Will Dryden has to figure out what is going on beneath the surface.

I chose to set this story in the desert plains area of south-central Wyoming, where the harsh, arid landscape would support the rugged tone of the novel. I also chose to incorporate a little bit of historical background material on the early days of oil development in Wyoming, which I thought might correlate in an interesting way with what goes on beneath the surface in the story.

Of at least equal importance, to me at least, was the development of a cast of diverse characters. I must admit I had a bit of fun with Blanche, the cook at the Redstone, and with Aden, the hothead with little-man syndrome. I also enjoyed working with more sympathetic characters such as Pearl, the kitchen girl, and Jim Calvert, the level-headed old cowboy who showed up ten years earlier (and younger) in Wild Rose of Ruby Canyon and who, in the last words of the novel, suggests that he might show up again some time.

West of Rock River

2008-09-13T08:29:00.000-07:00

West of Rock River is my eleventh traditional western novel. It was published in October 2004 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). I wrote this novel in between Red Wind Crossing and Rancho Alegre, and it is quite different in tone from the Jimmy Clevis books.

West of Rock River is a chase or pursuit story, as the protagonist joins a couple of brothers who are on the trail of what they think are two people who killed their brother. The main character, Vance Coolidge, goes along because of a feeling of obligation based on his friendship with the youngest brother, but he comes to realize that he also joined up because of some unresolved feelings about getting even in his own life. As the pursuit develops, Vance comes to see that the whole idea is a bad one, and worse, the brother who demands to be in charge is a bad leader. So, in addition to being a story about chasing the purported bad guys (who turn out not to be villains of the deepest dye), West of Rock River is also a story about misplaced loyalty, ill-conceived missions, and poor leadership.

In preparing to write this novel, I felt it imperative to go out and follow the route that the characters would take. So I hooked a little camper trailer to my old black pickup, and with my wife and son packed into the cab along with water, snacks, and cameras, I set off on the field trip.

We kept to two-lane highways and gravel roads. We went first to Rock River, Wyoming, which is a little town northwest of Laramie. At that point the trip slowed down, as I took notes on landscape features and clicked a few photos. From Rock River we went to Medicine Bow, another small town on the old route (the Overland Trail and later the transcontinental railroad) from Laramie westward. (Medicine Bow, as many readers know, is the setting for the opening scenes of Owen Wister’s The Virginian.) At Medicine Bow, after a few more notes and photos, we went south through some vast, arid country toward Elk Mountain. This part of the route was new to me. I stopped at various places along the way here, too, in order to catch images and to make note of where my characters might make camp, meet the sheepherders, or meet the party who seems to be pursuing them.

We went into the town of Elk Mountain, where I made sure of my directions. Then we drove out west through the mountains, following a road that goes through Rattlesnake Pass. I had been on this road a couple of times before, but now I was seeing it through new eyes, as I had to imagine how it would seem to a party on horseback. I continued to snap photos and make notes until I got to the other side of the mountains where the trail leads out onto the plains. I noted a spot where my characters would have their big confrontation with the purported killers.

From there we went around to Saratoga, Wyoming, a pleasant town on the North Platte River, and back into the Snowy Range. We camped by a creek for a couple of days as I gathered further impressions for this story and who knows what others that might follow.

Going on this field trip was a rich experience, and I felt that it gave me genuine content for my story. Although I traced my characters’ route all in one day, I took things in at a slow pace, stopping every so often to gaze at this detail or that. The old black pickup doesn’t have air conditioning, and the afternoon sun heated up the cab pretty well on that day in late summer, especially in the two stretches where we were headed west, but we got through it all right. A little discomfort was well worth the experience and all the material I gathered.

Shadows on the Plain

2008-08-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Shadows on the Plain, published in 2005 by Endeavor Books, is my fifth collection of short stories. As with my previous collection Antelope Sky, these stories are set in the contemporary West, for the most part Wyoming, although a couple of the characters travel from there to other places. Shadows on the Plain consists of fifteen stories that were written between 1995 and the year of publication of the book (many of the stories were previously published). I have been writing short stories for over thirty years, and although they do not earn much recognition and they tend to fade from view in a short time, I continue to strive to meet the challenges of writing short fiction.

There is a great variety of length and form in short story writing, so in addition to not writing the same story line twice, I try not to use the same narrative structure from one story to the next. In contrast with writing fiction for a mass-market audience (as I do with traditional westerns), a writer may write a short story that does not have a definite, problem-solving resolution. The end of a short story may seem more open-ended, lifelike, with the aesthetic purpose of expressing the idea that some problems in life do not have solutions or that some people are willing not to deal with problems in a direct, decisive way. A reader can hang in there for ten or twenty pages and be satisfied with the insight implied by such a treatment. The same reader might not be as satisfied with a three-hundred-page novel that does the same thing. Every story has an end, though, and if the author is writing with a sense of purpose and form, the ending will be designed so that it supports the feeling or idea about life that the author wished to deal with in this sortie.

Although I think of stories in terms of form (sequence, tangible vs. intangible conflict, open vs. closed ending), I have found it practical to classify my own stories into four categories according to subject matter. One kind of short story I write is the one with an Old West setting—sort of like a traditional western novel in miniature. For the most part, these stories follow the idea that a genre western should have a clear conflict and a definite ending. They don’t all have to end with gunfights or triumphs of good will over bad, but they can’t end with wisps of fog or smoke. My first collection of short stories, One Foot in the Stirrup, consists of somewhat conventional stories that have the same audience as paperback westerns do. In this category, as in the others to some extent, the subject matter and the narrative form go together.

A second kind of story I write is almost a polar opposite of the western story. I sometimes think of this category as the smart-ass story, but to put it in more technical terms I would call it the ironic story. These stories are usually in first person, often very short, and often evanescing toward the end as the main character is bedeviled by the predicament he got himself into. My second short story collection, I’ll Tell You What, is a slim little volume of mostly short pieces (three to ten pages), all narrated by characters whom you might listen to over a beer but with whom you would not want to keep close company for very long.

A third kind of story I write draws upon my experiences growing up and working in the farm and ranch country of California in the 1960's. My perspective on that way of life tends to be more bittersweet than nostalgic. The third collection of short fiction that I brought out, Seasons in the Fields, is about people who struggle to make a living and manage their lives. In my experience, that is the nature of working at seasonal labor. As for structure, these stories often do not follow a straight-line chronological narrative, and they tend to have meditative or thought-provoking endings rather than happy ones.

A fourth kind of story I write is the one set in the modern or contemporary West. These stories, like the ones set in California, are serious, literary pieces that range in length from ten to thirty pages and seek their own form in terms of structure and resolution. My fourth collection of short stories, Antelope Sky, contains stories that deal with modern-day problems and pose contemporary ways of looking at life.

Shadows on the Plain continues in the style and subject matter of Antelope Sky, in that the stories depict the kinds of characters and problems that one would meet in everyday life in the contemporary West. The characters are generally outdoors-y, and the landscape or environment influences how they live. Their problems are either interpersonal or occasioned by the character having to adapt to his place in the world. As I sometimes put it, a character in a traditional story cannot end by thinking that he’ll just deal with those cattle rustlers some other day. He needs to rise to action and bring the bad guys to justice, not just think about it. In a contemporary story, or in a story with a contemporary treatment, the character indeed may end by forming an insight, as in "Cowboy Heart," or by settling for an un-articulated insight, as in "Hunting Along the Wall" (these are good stories for contrast with the traditional story, as these two both have characters who go out on horseback into an evocative landscape). A contemporary treatment may also lend itself to having characters express unconventional or anti-mainstream sentiments, another kind of risk that an author can take in fiction that is not directed at a mass-market audience in a conservative genre. In this collection, then, the reader meets characters such as the narrator in "Memoirs of the Old Scout," who shoots gophers and jackrabbits as part of his effort to deal with a strung-out love affair, or the narrator of "Drunk on Christmas Day," who has good reasons for disliking Christmas and the people who make scenes on holidays, even as he recognizes that he himself got drunk on the Christmas Day in the story.

This kind of fiction may also wander into the ironic mode, as discussed above. If I had written "Nice Boots" earlier in life, it would have ended up in I’ll Tell You What, but it was short so I had room for it here, and a little bit of vulgarity wasn’t going to get it kicked out of the collection. The story entitled "On the Outskirts" is an interesting foray on its own, again about a character who does not endorse the values of mainstream America. This selection consists of five parts, each one about a page in original manuscript; I call them one-page novels (I term I heard elsewhere), and the concept might be interesting to ponder as one reads these inter-related vignettes about a character who, like others in the collection, rides a horse. For the reader who enjoys irony in larger doses, I will mention "Memoirs of the Old Scout" once again.

These are just a few of the stories in the book. Some are pensive and somber, like the closing story, "Dusk on the Rangeland"; some are skeptical and realistic, such as "County Plates" and "Campers"; and some are heartfelt and hopeful, such as "Chokecherries Are Free." Each one, I hope, adds something to the variety while sustaining the overall thematic unity or world view of the collection. Not every story I wrote since my last collection went into this one, and the ones I did include did not go in according to the order in which they were written or published. I tried to arrange the stories so that they would read like a book even as they functioned as autonomous reading experiences. The reader may decide whether I succeeded, just as the reader may ponder the kinds of shadows that appear in the lives of plain people who live in the plains country.

Death at Dark Water

2008-08-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Death at Dark Water is my fifteenth traditional western novel. It was published in February 2008 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). Although it shares some of the features of my other westerns, such as an emphasis on character, landscape, and prose style or language use, it is unlike all of my other works in its initial conception.

My inspiration for this novel came from a story line I became familiar with in my studies in Spanish and Latin American literature and in the culture of Mexico. The story line begins with a stage play named La Malquerida (1913), written by the Nobel Prize-winning author Jacinto Benavente and set in rural Spain. This play was made into a Broadway play entitled The Passion Flower (1920) and into a Mexican film entitled La Malquerida (1949). The title of the Broadway play is not anywhere near a close translation, as "la malquerida" means the ill-loved or wrongly loved woman. I took special interest in the Mexican film, which features the famous Dolores Del Río and Pedro Armendáriz, is very stylized and melodramatic, and has wonderful action scenes on the hacienda and in the cantina. I thought that in setting, the movie was a kindred spirit of the western, and I thought that the story line had universal interest. The lustful obsession of a stepfather for his stepdaughter seemed to me as old as the Greeks, and it worked effectively in its transformation from a stage play set in rural Spain to an action film set in rural Mexico. I thought that with one more transformation, it could be an intriguing western.

One question that might arise is why a person would want to re-write someone else’s story. Writers do it all the time (or with great frequency), but I usually don’t, so the question certainly came up with me. My answer is that I thought that the stepfather got off too easily in being honored after his death (I read him as a sleaze) and that the stepdaughter was treated a little too much as a tease, as an immature girl who wanted to trifle with the man and compete with her own mother. I thought there was room in the world for a treatment in which abusive men do not get eulogized and a young woman does not get portrayed as a vixen.

The practice of taking a story line from a foreign art work and doing homage to it in a western is a time-honored one, so my editor gave me free rein to try an experiment here. My problem became one of how to frame the story. My editor made it clear that in order for this to be a western, it had to take place in the U.S. and had to have an Anglo protagonist. So I set the story in territorial New Mexico, in what the voice of the novel calls an insular world, where life goes on as if the town of Tinaja (name borrowed from one part of New Mexico and plunked down in another) were still part of the old country. All the characters in the novel (except the protagonist) are Mexicans, Spanish-speaking people who have little sense of being part of the U.S. and who have more affinity with Mexico itself, which they call the Republic (as people in Mexico do). So that was how I got a method for making the story line into a western. I sent my protagonist into this remote area and got him embroiled in the family problem of a stepfather who is jealous of his stepdaughter’s suitors.

I wrote the novel from the point of view of the protagonist, Devon Frost, so I had the unity that a single point of view gives a novel. It also limited the reader’s access to scenes entailing other characters by themselves, which is a limitation not imposed on the stage play or the film. I am used to writing a novel entirely from the viewpoint of one character (I have done so twenty times as of this writing), so that part of the technical challenge was one I could handle. However, it also meant that I could not show the stepfather making his sleazy moves or the stepdaughter rebuffing him. I tried instead to show, in scenes with the protagonist present, how people who have been in furtive scenes act in public. That makes for a more subtle dramatization.

While I was at it, I thought I needed to do more with the protagonist than just to use him as an observer, although that in itself is an established technique. I thought I would give this character, Devon Frost, a trajectory or what some people call an arc, in which he goes through a process of character development as a result of being brought into contact with these characters and their problems. So, at the beginning of the novel, Devon is a passive person who is on a quest not only to try to find his artistic vision (he has come to this area to observe and sketch old buildings) but also to improve his own ability to assert himself in the world. This is perhaps a bit subtle for some readers, who might want Devon to defeat the stepfather and win the girl (or in other ways be a more traditional western hero who provides vicarious wish-fulfillment), but I went for the more realistic treatment, in which Devon improves his ability to act and thus rides away at the end of the story more capable than at the beginning.

There were many other considerations that went into the writing of this novel, many of which, again, may not interest some readers. My interest in the Spanish language and my love of the Mexican people and their traditions allowed me, I think, to write this story as if from the inside, so that as I wrote it (especially in the dialogue) I often felt as if I was writing in Spanish and translating into English. I also felt that the décor or scenic details were drawn from my own knowledge base and experience (with the help of photos I took from my favorite abandoned hacienda in the state of Chihuahua), and I felt that my depiction of character was based also on my personal experience. In order to liberate the characters from anything like sources in real life or in other works, I gave the characters names that I thought worked coherently in the world of my novel. Some of the names (Petra, Consuelo, Felipe) also resonate thematically for readers who are interested in language.

As a final note, I thought I might say a word or two about the title of the novel. I named it Death at Dark Water because the ranch where much of the action takes place is called Rancho Agua Prieta, or Dark Water Ranch (explicated in the main part of the novel and reinforced in the final words). Both deaths in the story take place on the ranch, as does the corrupt passion of Don Felipe. Thus the idea of dark water figures into what some readers might call the figurative or metaphorical aspect of the book. As mentioned above, I transplanted the town name of Tinaja (which means a natural water tank), and there is a bit of attention directed toward water troughs as well as toward the artesian pool from which Rancho Agua Prieta takes its name. What the figurative meaning might be is up to the reader to think about or to overlook.

As I said at the beginning, this was an unusual undertaking for me. Having written it, I felt I did an honest job with my materials. Death at Dark Water became more of a thoughtful, meditative novel than a fast-action story, as one might expect given the nature and role of the protagonist. I hope readers enjoy it for what it is. As for the fast-action westerns, I have written one or two of those in the past and have a couple coming up.

Poacher’s Moon

2008-07-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

I describe Poacher’s Moon as a contemporary western novel with a strong element of mystery. It takes place in present-day Wyoming, and it deals with environmental ethics at the same time that it traces the mystery of a missing person.

Wilf Kasmire, the main character of Poacher’s Moon, is an outdoorsman who at the opening of the novel would like to try to make his living at being a guide and outfitter. That means taking out other hunters, seeing them and helping them kill big-game animals. While some guides see it as a business proposition, with a resource and a consumer, Wilf comes to question the extent to which he wants to help others take advantage of natural resources and especially animals. Like many characters in fiction, Wilf is testing his own values and finding his place in the world. He wants to decide for himself what it is all worth.

As he goes about his work of taking out hunters, he is troubled by the disappearance of Heather Lea, a woman he used to spend time with. Most recently, Heather has been a truck-stop waitress, and her disappearance has not sparked very much public interest in finding her. In deciding how far to go in pursuing the ethical irregularities of some of his clients, Wilf also finds himself pursuing the question of what happened to Heather Lea.

Poacher’s Moon has been a major work for me to write, and in it I believe I blend my various strengths as a fiction writer. For as long as I have been writing fiction and getting it published, which has been about thirty years, I have written both contemporary and traditional (old West) stories and novels. Although I have gotten the most exposure with the traditional works and have therefore produced more in that line, I feel that I can draw on a greater range of material and therefore write with greater freedom in contemporary fiction.

This is my third contemporary novel, and in it, as in many of my contemporary short stories, I explore human character in the context of landscape and nature. One area in which I have quite a bit of experience and, I think, a few original ideas is hunting. Although some readers and some publishers stay away from this topic, I think it is productive for fiction because it is a complex activity and brings out human character in unpredictable ways. Having hunted with quite a few other people (including several women hunters) and having taken out quite a few people under my auspices, I have had the opportunity to have a multitude of experiences good and bad as well as to form many insights on my own. Therefore, when I set out to write about a character who hunts or who takes out other hunters, I have a wealth of material from which to draw.

At the same time that I have drawn from a rich fund of contemporary material, I have benefitted from having written more than fifteen traditional westerns. For one thing, traditional westerns have to meet more concrete expectations than a free-form contemporary novel. On the other hand, a mystery has to meet even narrower demands, so if I wanted to write a mystery (or a work that is a novel first and a mystery second), I could benefit from what I learned about plotting westerns. Moreover, several of my westerns have been crossover western mysteries, so it is as if I had been (as subconsciously as Wilf searching for Heather) preparing myself to write this novel.

I hope Poacher’s Moon succeeds as a breakthrough or new plateau in my writing career. Although I realize that not everybody is going to like everything, I do have hopes that this novel will be appreciated as something by a guy who knew a little bit about what he was doing.

Lonesome Range

2008-07-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

My novel Lonesome Range was a challenge to write and, for me at least, one of the two or three best things I had written up to this point. For my entry on this novel, I am posting the commentary that I wrote for the Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing) website when the book came out a little over two years ago.

Riding the Lonesome Range

Lane Weller is a man who is looking for something bigger than himself to believe in. He finds it with Cora McGavin, a woman who is also looking for something more than she has in life now. Unfortunately, Cora is married, and her husband is a bullying sort who always wants things done his way. As a result, Lane becomes something of an outcast, riding the lonesome range. Through the course of events, he has to decide whether his love with Cora is the real thing or just something to lie about.

I had been wanting to write this novel for a few years, and I was glad to get the encouragement from my editor, Don D’Auria, to do it. Don told me he has found it best to have an author work on the novel that he or she most wants to write. For me, it was Lonesome Range.

With this novel, I wanted to push the limits of the traditional western in a way that I hadn’t yet pushed them. When I write a western, I try to fulfill the expectations that a reader would have of the category, and at the same time I try to make the novel resonate for the modern reader. In Lonesome Range, I wanted to take the timeless problem of a man who falls in love with a married woman, and I wanted to set it in the historical West, where such a problem was even more repressed than it is today.

One thing I have noticed about people who fall into hopeless love affairs is that they are often isolated and alone, so I thought, what better place for such a story than a small town in Wyoming and the surrounding rangeland. One part of my research for this novel entailed taking day trips out to the range country where Lane Weller would spend much of his time learning to be a ranch hand and trying to figure out an answer to the big question. Other parts of my research consisted of reading historical books about Wyoming over a hundred of years ago, sorting through hundreds of notes about nature and the seasons, and reading a couple of French novels that Lane would have read about idealistic and fated affairs.

I have seen the topic of clandestine love treated in more recent works of high quality as well, such as The Go-Between (both a fine novel and a fine movie) and The Age of Innocence (an all-time great novel), both of which have moved me. Stories such as these have a powerful pull because they deal with a truth in life that many people have been through and that many others would rather not talk about. My belief is that sometimes the best genre fiction takes risks and does not stay safely within the bounds of the genre, and I thought I would give it a try here.

The end result, I hope, is an original western novel, written along classic lines, about a man and a woman who fall in love in Wyoming. For the reader of classic westerns, it portrays the conflict of an individual against a powerful antagonist, the conflict of an individual against the acquiescence of average members of society, the belief in an ideal, and the need for the idealist to negotiate with himself what he can expect out of life. I believe that many readers have ridden a similar lonesome range, and I hope some of them enjoy this treatment.

Red Wind Crossing

2008-06-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

With Red Wind Crossing I began what has been a mini-series about Jimmy Clevis, a cowboy detective or amateur sleuth. For my commentary here, I have decided to post a commentary that I wrote for the Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing) website when the book came out in November 2003. Here it is:

Red Wind Crossing is my tenth western novel, and it has been a very enjoyable book for me to work on. I try to do something original with each thing I write, and I feel that I managed to do so with this book. Up until now, I have not written any sequels or series, so I have always started with a new set of characters each time. That may change, as I conceived of Jimmy Clevis, the main character of Red Wind Crossing, as a character that I might like to write more than one story about. That in itself makes this novel different, as it introduces a character that we might see more of as time goes by.

Jimmy Clevis is a cheerful young fellow who is fond of the pleasures of life. When he runs through them, he thinks of food, drink, and girls. However, like the main characters in all of my stories, he is imperfect. (I write about everyday fellows, not bigger-than-life heroes.) One of Jimmy’s problems is that earlier in life, he fell in with some bad company and strayed from the straight and narrow. At the point that our story opens, he is thinking about how he would like to get away from the bunch he has fallen in with, but he’s not sure how to go about it. Things get complicated when he meets a girl who seems trapped in her own set of circumstances. He wants to help her get out of what seems like a kind of imprisonment, but as time goes on, the crooks he is hanging out with start to turn on him. So trying to be free has its dangers.

In addition to being good-natured and somewhat hedonistic, Jimmy is comfortable among Mexican people. He speaks their language, knows their customs, and gets invited into their homes. Among his friends in this community is Magdalena, a girl that just about any fellow would like to meet. She becomes Jimmy’s ally in the course of the story, and she might become more, except that for the time being at least, Jimmy is hung up on the idea of trying to rescue the girl he meets in town.

So this is where my story came from, as my stories so often do—from a sense of my main character and of the kinds of problems he would find himself in. In Jimmy Clevis’s case, I also had the feeling that he should tell his own story. This was a new technique for me to carry out in novel length. I had written quite a few short stories in the first person, but nothing this long, and I knew I would have the challenge of trying to keep the voice consistent all the way through. I felt pretty good about the way the story came out, as I felt that it was Jimmy’s voice that was telling the story. His voice seemed real to me, and I hope it seems that way to readers.

It is hard for me to rank my own works, but I do know which ones are the most enjoyable to work on. One of the reasons that Red Wind Crossing was fun to write was that it had some good bounce to it without losing its underlying serious value. I have written a couple of other westerns that have similar bounce—Black Diamond Rendezvous and Man from Wolf River—so I was able to feel my way through this one as well. A difference between this book and those earlier ones, of course, lay in my decision to let the main character tell his own story, and that, in turn, contributed to some of the fun. I think that everything I write is serious in one way or another, but some works are more playful than others. Some of my westerns (and other works) are somber and even grim, and I expect to write others that are that way as well. Red Wind Crossing, then, does not constitute a permanent change in direction for me; rather, it is done in a fun style that I hope to return to from time to time. I hope the world likes Jimmy Clevis, and if things work out all right, I hope to have another story about him in the future.

Rancho Alegre

2008-06-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Rancho Alegre, which came out in July 2005, was my twelfth traditional western novel and the second novel with Jimmy Clevis as the narrator and main character. Because Jimmy Clevis is a good-natured, fun-seeking fellow, writing from his point of view was once again an enjoyable undertaking for me.

As Jimmy tells the reader in the opening sentence of the story, Rancho Alegre means "happy ranch." From there he goes on to talk about how he didn’t expect to go to Rancho Alegre or Pueblo, Colorado, but ended up going there anyway.

The title of this book has appeared in a few other places. I was inspired by having seen it on a sign, right inside a barbed-wire fence with crooked cedar posts, on the highway from Cd. Juárez to the city of Chihuahua, in the desert rangeland of northern Mexico. I have driven that highway many times, and for a few years I used to see the sign. Past the closed gate and the sign, a road stretched away across the desert, curved, rose up toward some hills, and disappeared. It was pleasant for me to imagine that somewhere out there in the far-flung country, the people were cheerful enough to give that name to the place where they lived.

At about the time I decided I wanted to write a story with this title, I no longer saw the sign along the highway. I mentioned my interest to some family members in Chihuahua, and they told me that Rancho Alegre was also the title of a song in the ranchera style. After writing the story, I found on the internet that there were a couple of guest ranches in the U.S. with the same name. I thought that was all right, too. We could all be happy together. But for me it still meant a ranch for me to imagine, a place out on the desert plains.

Because Jimmy Clevis has friends (not to mention a love interest) in the Spanish-speaking world, it was plausible that a place named Rancho Alegre would be a place for him to go. What I needed to do, for the purposes of creating a story, was to venture out and find a location for a fictional Rancho Alegre for him to go to. I had already decided that this was going to be a story in which Jimmy was going to look for a lost relative for someone else, and I had also decided (or more or less followed a feeling I had) that he was going to go south to do it. Jimmy’s first story, Red Wind Crossing, took place in northern Colorado, in a fictional place in the foothills west of Denver, so I studied the map for likely places to the south. In addition to having traveled straight west through Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction a few times (nice train ride), I had been southwest a few times, down through Buena Vista, Salida, and Poncha Springs and then over the pass to Gunnison. So I decided I would send Jimmy down that way so I could set most of the story in the area between Poncha Springs and Pueblo. Even though I had traveled that area a couple of times as well, I decided to do what I prefer to do when I have the time and other resources and when the weather cooperates. I took a special road trip down that way and poked around for a few days, soaking up a sense of place and gathering source material on historical background.

So that was how I started my work on this novel. I had my character and I had the place where he was going to go on his search. But of course I needed a little more story than just "Jimmy Clevis looks for a man’s long-lost son." One way of making a search story interesting is to make it into a search for more than one thing. For example, not only does Jimmy look for a person, but he also, without announcing it to himself, is on a search for knowledge or truth, which will be the reader’s reward. Another way of increasing the story interest is to complicate the object of the search. I enjoy stories in which someone comes to the detective and says, I would like you to look for X, and the detective (in this case, an amateur detective) says I’m not interested. Then another person says, I would like you to look for Y, and the sleuth says, I think I can do that. Somewhere beneath the surface, the reader senses that in the process of looking for Y, the character is going to find X as well. So I thought I would give that a try. A man asks Jimmy to look for a stolen saddle, but Jimmy thinks it sounds a little too shady, so he turns down the work. Another man asks him to look for a long-lost son from a liaison earlier in life, and Jimmy says he thinks he can do that. Then the man who wants to find the saddle turns up dead (with a bullet hole), and Jimmy goes on his way to look for the old man’s natural son.

Does he find the saddle? We hope so, and we imagine he will find something else along the way, some kind of knowledge or understanding that makes the trip worth the effort. Meanwhile, Jimmy gets to spend a little time with the lovely Magdalena, and he gets to enjoy some of the festivities at Rancho Alegre. Who wouldn’t be happy? Well, the reader also knows that the dead man in the early part of the story won’t be the only one on Jimmy Clevis’s journey.

To see the cover on Rancho Alegre and other works, go to my website: http://www.johndnesbitt.com/

Raven Springs

2008-05-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

I was very happy recently to learn that my novel Raven Springs was selected as a finalist for the annual Western Writers of America Spur Awards in the Mass Market Paperback Original category. I have decided to post here a bit of commentary that I wrote for the Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing) website when the book came out a little over a year ago. Here it is:

Raven Springs is my fourteenth traditional western novel and the third in my mini-series about Jimmy Clevis, the good-natured cowboy who finds himself having to solve mysterious connections and disappearances. The main reason I wanted to write this novel was that I like Jimmy as a character and I did not feel I was done with him when I finished Rancho Alegre. I think of him as a character who has his own life and who holds some enduring interest for readers.

In spite of having lived on the shady side of the law himself, Jimmy is a principled character. In Raven Springs, some friends of his ask him to help find out what happened to a man who disappeared, and even though he doesn’t have any great friendship with the man who has turned up missing, he agrees to help. Once he starts out, of course, he sticks with it.

One problem in the world of this novel is that most people don’t care very much about others. Even more pointedly, they are prejudiced against non-whites and others who are not like them. That makes Jimmy’s task more difficult, because the man he is looking for is a Mexican. Some of the people he meets along the way are antagonistic to that idea, and others are apathetic at best.
The biggest problem that Jimmy uncovers is the cold-blooded way in which people exploit the lives of others. It becomes apparent that travelers get done in because they have a little money, or the appearance of it. Jimmy also discovers the possibility that someone has been exploiting young girls and then doing away with them. In addition, people who might know anything about any of these disappearances also become homicide victims. The people behind these deeds seem to have no conscience, while Jimmy does.

I hope part of the reader’s interest in this story comes from wanting to see how Jimmy puts things together and tries to bring evil to light. I hope another part comes from the reader’s willingness to measure his or her own values against those suggested by the story. This is not what people call a morality tale, but it does suggest that there is such a thing as evil in the world and that there is something like a hierarchy or scale of greater and lesser wrongs. Jimmy has his scale of value just as the reader has his or hers, and I hope the reader finds it interesting to consider whether justice gets served.

Naturally, I also hope people enjoy following Jimmy Clevis through another chapter of life. I hope they enjoy his world view, his observations about life as it comes his way, and his comments about his own adventures. When I first started planning out the idea of a series of stories about Jimmy, I imagined him as a kind of traditional, straight-talking detective narrator, but not the real hard-boiled, hard-hitting, hard-drinking type we meet in urban dramas. Jimmy is what some people would call an amateur detective, and he is a little more genial than the guy with a necktie, a two-day stubble, and a pint of rye. As he himself mentions from time to time, he likes to eat, drink, and be merry, and sometimes his relaxed enjoyment gets him into trouble.
As reviewers have pointed out, Jimmy is a less-than-perfect character, and I hope readers can relate to a fellow who doesn’t always do everything perfectly but who tries to stick to his principles. Early on in the story, Jimmy has a conversation with an older cynical man named Tom, a character who appears in Red Wind Crossing and Rancho Alegre as well as here. Their dialogue goes like this:

". . . No need to get yourself hurt just because you think someone expects it of you."

"No, I’ve thought about it in my own way, and it seems like the right thing to do. I’ve got this task, and I want to follow through with it. If something’s not right, I want to find out why."

"You’re a regular crusader, aren’t you?"

"No, just a fool."

"There are worse kinds."

Jimmy’s classification of himself as a fool is an example of his droll view of his life; many of us have used the same kind of self-criticism, and the worldly-wise answer, as offered by Tom, is something we don’t mind hearing. I hope Jimmy’s story, and his way of telling it, speaks to readers, as I imagine there is a little bit of Jimmy Clevis in a great many of us.

To see the cover on Raven Springs and other works, go to my website: http://www.johndnesbitt.com/

Getting into the sphere

2008-05-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

This is my debut at having a blog. To anyone who drops in to look at things, I thank you for your interest.

My plan as I embark on this new journey is to communicate with readers who drop in, read, and leave posts. I plan to make my own posts on a regular basis. My first priority would be to respond to any questions or comments readers might address to me. When there is an open slate, I will post my own comments about things I have written, events I have participated in, and topics that come up in the life of a reader and writer.

Once again, I thank visitors for their interest, and I look forward to some interesting exchanges.

John