Writers of the West

Remembering Stan Steiner

2012-02-18T17:03:00.005-07:00

1925-1987

Stan Steiner echoed writers across the country who felt that the publishing industry was in a sad state of affairs during the 1980s, because editors and publishers had lost touch with the America people--"especially with people in the West. So it behooves writers to publicize their books and market them on their own."

To combat what he termed eastern indifference, Steiner and some twenty-five of his fellow New Mexico authors formed the Writers Cooperative of Santa Fe during the early eighties to sell their work any way they could. "Going out and doing it yourself is what it's all about," he said. "Stop complaining about what the publishers do or don't do--just do it yourself."

Santa Fe writers took their books directly to the public, readers in small villages as well as New Mexico's largest cities. They even built their own booths at the state fair in Albuquerque, where they hawked their wares like everyone else. The concept is not really new, the co-op's first president, said. "But fairs are a great untapped marketplace."

Encouragement and financial backing from both the Santa Fe Arts Council and New Mexico Humanities Council kept the co-op alive, and their projects received favorable responses from state officials and readers at large. With substantial grants the writers organized and carried out a number of projects, such as renting a book van to travel as far as remote mining villages in the northern mountains. The Small Town Book Van Project gave most rural residents their first glimpse of a professional writer.

During the process of selling their books, the Santa Fe Co-op members came to the attention of eastern publishers when they were written up in The New York Times. Steiner credited a New York writers' conference with making himself and fellow mavericks angry enough to establish the cooperative.

"The invitation said 'Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem and a bunch of people invite you to this conference.' So I wrote back saying, "I think this is a good idea; writers ought to fight for their rights, especially in this sad state of publishing.' But I noticed that they had no Western writers listed--and Mailer and Steinem don't represent the writers of the West. Well, they got real excited and said I had to come to New York to represent Western writers, which was their first mistake. No one represents a Western writer, other than him or herself."

Steiner's reply to the request was that New York culture is very provincial, that the nation had shifted west, along with demagogic charts, population, economy and politics. "The population center is no longer in Manhattan, New York. It's in Manhattan, Kansas, and you have to go beyond the Hudson. So I went to New York, and they had this panel they had arranged for me. Outside the door the panel read: 'Beyond the Hudson, outside the center of gravity.'"

Steiner and a group of Santa Fe writers returned from the conference and mulled that one over for some time. "What do we do about it?" they asked themselves. After a while, they stopped talking, stopped complaining, and formed the Writers Co-op of Santa Fe. "It's not a writers' literary club," Seiner was quick to explain. "Nor is it a literary support group, or group therapy. It's a group of professional writers who are trying to develop ways of marketing and selling books that are particularly, uniquely, and ingeniously Western."

Steiner, himself, was not indigenously Western, but embraced the West with both arms, refusing to let go. He was born in Spottswood, New Jersey, and grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn., with westward yearnings.

"My father came to America in 1905 from Vienna, Austria, and the first postcard he sent home was a picture of Custer's scalp, on which my father had painted a feather."

(Part II of Stan Steiner's interview will appear next week.)

C. J. Box Revisited

2012-02-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

Blue Heaven, C.J. Box's first stand-alone novel, won an Edgar Award for Best Novel of 2008 and has been optioned for film. Three Weeks to Say Goodbye was published in January 2009 and debuted on the NY Times extended bestseller list. His ninth Joe Pickett novel, Below Zero, released last year, became his biggest bestseller to date.

Chuck, how do you manage to write two novels a year? What’s your writing schedule like?

Two books a year is kind of a temporary predicament that came about because I've got two publishers: Putnam for the Joe Pickett series and St. Martins Press for the stand-alone novels. Each wants a book a year. It's worked out because the first stand-alone Blue Heaven was already written so, for me, it's been more like nine months between writing the books which is just about right for me.

I work every day with my best work in the mornings. I edit and do other things in the afternoons. When I'm at my cabin or an isolated place, I work in one or two more writing sessions and sometimes go deep into the night. My goal is always 1,000 good words a day, but sometimes I exceed that. And sometimes I fall short.

I know that you’re an avid hunter-fisherman. Were you in the Wyoming outback when you conceived your series characters, game warden Joe Pickett?

I was working as a newspaper reporter in Saratoga, Wyoming, when I first started working on the novel which would later become Open Season, the first Joe Pickett novel. I spent (and spend) a lot of time outdoors and while I was coming up with the premise I was doing ride-alongs with the local game warden for newspaper stories. As I learned more about the duties and responsibilities (and home life) of a game warden, I thought a game warden would be a great protagonist. I'm glad I chose correctly.

Would you rather be hunting or fishing than writing?

I'd rather be combining the three, to be honest. Do a productive session at the computer, grab my fly rod, and come back later to write a little more. That, for me, is the perfect day.

How does it feel to not only win an Edgar Award but to make the New York Times bestseller list?

It feels fantastic, because the Edgar is an honor bestowed on my fellow novelists for quality and being on the NYT list means readers are buying the books. I think all Edgar winners want to be best-selling authors, and all best-selling crime novelists want to win an Edgar. So I'm a lucky guy.

How did your novel, Below Zero, evolve? Tell us about the plot.

I'd heard about carbon offset companies over the years and was both fascinated and repulsed by the concept of, in effect, buying out ones guilt for producing a carbon footprint by paying money to one of the organizations. I researched the concept and built it into one of the primary storylines of the novel. In it, a dying mobster finds out the only way he can reconcile with his extreme environmentalist son is to try and bring his massive carbon footprint to "below zero" by the time he passes. Because he only has a few weeks to live, he has to commit large-scale crimes to make his balance drop.

At the same time, Joe Pickett's daughters start receiving text messages from a foster sister who they thought had died six years before. Investigation reveals the texts have originated from locations where major crimes have occurred. As Joe pursues this, the two storylines merge.

Which of your novels was the most difficult to write and do you have a favorite among them?

Blue Heaven was the most difficult because of the structure. The novel is told from six points of view within 60 hours in real time. Only the reader knows completely what's going on. Multiple points-of-view can get really, really tricky. If the reader doesn't think of the structure or difficulty, that means it worked. But getting there is tough.

I like all my novels for different reasons the way a parent likes his or her children. But if someone held a gun to my head and made me choose, I'd say Blue Heaven, Free Fire, Winterkill, and Open Season are my favorites.

What’s the best way to promote your books? Personal appearances or the Internet?

Books are still sold one at a time by people to other people. It's a very basic, low-tech business and it's driven by word-of-mouth. Getting out and meeting readers and potential readers is the best way to build a career, I think. Of course, if the books aren't good it doesn't matter either way.

Advice to budding western mystery novelists?

Read! It always amazes me when fledgling novelists don't read widely or often. More can be learned from reading than classes or courses. And if you choose to use the west as your location, please be authentic and stay away from western "characters" and hokum.

What makes a novel successful?

The reader must empathize with a character or several characters. And the novel should be structured so the reader wants to keep turning pages. There are so many entertainment options out there an author must realize the reader has choices, and one of the easiest choices of all is to put the book down if it isn't compelling.

Thanks for stopping by.

You can visit C.J. Box at his website: http://www.cjbox.net/

Remembering Louis L'Amour

2012-02-04T00:01:00.002-07:00

1908-1988

Louis Dearborn L'Amour (La Moore) was not only the West's best-selling storyteller, he was the consummate Western man, a pattern for the white-hatted heroes he wrote about. Hardworking and soft-spoken, he was proud of his accomplishments, yet despite rumors to the contrary, he was often shy in his remembrances. L'Amour literally elevated himself by his proverbial boot straps, and in the process, left footprints in the marketing landscape that few writers will be able to fill.

Luck had nothing to do with his success, he said not long before his death in 1988. "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I did not create for myself. I just tried to write the best I could about things I knew."

There are realities that writers must consider, he was quick to add. "No publisher is going to do anything for you that you don't earn. They simply can't afford to. Once a writer proves he can make money, they will often extend themselves. There's no magic, just hard work."

The work ethic was instilled in L'Amour as a child by his parents in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father, a veterinarian and farm machinery salesman, was involved in local politics. He served as alderman of Jamestown's largest ward for many years as well as deputy sheriff, but he lost his mayoral race. "People in small towns doubled in brass, you might say."

Young Louie enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians, and roughhoused in the family barn, which doubled as his father's veterinary hospital. He did more than his share of reading, particularly G. A. Henty, an Englishman who wrote of wars through the nineteenth century. L'Amour said, "It enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."

The L'Amour family library encompassed some five hundred books, among them the works of Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as popular American and English writers. The youngest of the L'Amour children, Louie remembered reading a five-volume Collier's History of the World while he was small enough to sit in his father's lap.

"I think all things you read influence your writing to some degree. And if you don't learn anything else, you learn something about living and the use of words."

His serious reading began at twelve with a collection of biographies titled The Genius of Solitude. "The only one I remember is Socrates, the first chapter, but I remember it well." A book of natural history followed, which he tried unsuccessfully to locate years later for his children. During adolescence, L'Amour immersed himself in books of chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the history of aircraft.

His concentrated self-education resulted in boredom with school. "I was just spinning my wheels," he said, "so it was no real hardship for me to leave. I had to go to work to find myself a change." L'Amour left school and Jamestown at fifteen, after completing the tenth grade. Since crop failures were common in North Dakota, and his father's livelihood was linked to the farming community, he decided to find his niche elsewhere. By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he arrived in Oklahoma City to visit an older brother, who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on.

"By then I was broke and I got a job in West Texas skinning dead cattle that died from a prolonged drought. They had been dead a while. Some fellow was trying to save the hides and it was the most miserable job, but I learned a lot." The young man's boss was a seventy-nine-year-old wrangler raised by Apaches, who had ridden on war parties with Nana and Geronimo. "He was a very, very, hard old boy but I got along with him fine. He was the first to teach me about tracking and using herbs."

L'Amour left his odorous job, after three months sleeping on the ground and staying downwind from passersby. He had helped skin 965 head of cattle by staking their skulls and tying their hides to the bumper of an early model pickup truck.

His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley, across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. He visited the Maxwell home where Billy had been killed, and talked to the woman who offered the outlaw his last meal. L'Amour remembered her as "a pretty sharp old lady who still had all her buttons." He then talked to Judge Cole in Ruidoso, and got to know some thirty former gunfighters, rangers, and outlaws in the area. He regretted not knowing about a number of others.

While wandering about the West, he joined a circus in Phoenix, leaving three weeks later in El Paso. He then hoboed his way to Galveston, Texas, where he hired on as a merchant seaman. His first cruise was to the West Indies, his second to the British Isles. He tried his hand at writing during his travels, but his scribblings didn't include events as familiar as his Western heritage.

L'Amour's family history is rich in frontier adventure. His maternal great-grandfather was scalped by the Sioux while a member of the Sibley Expedition, following the Little Crow Massacre in Minnesota. Both his grandfathers served in the Union army during the Civil War, and his maternal grandfather taught him military tactics by drawing battle plans on a blackboard.

The novelist was especially proud of his mother's ancestry, beginning with Godfrey Dearborn, who arrived in this country in 1638, an antecedent of General Henry Dearborn, who marched with Arnold to Quebec. He also took part in the second Battle of Saratoga, Monmouth, Sullivan's raid on the Iroquois villages, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and the surrender of Cornwallis, among others. Some of the general's diaries were published, and he and his wife corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, exchanging garden seeds.

General Dearborn's son, of the same name and rank, published half a dozen books, but L'Amour was only able to locate one of them, a biography of William Bainbridge, commander of "Old Ironsides." The book was published posthumously by Princeton University Press.

L'Amour stressed the fact he had never taken a creative writing course, and that his post tenth-grade education had been earned from voluminous reading. While in Oklahoma City, L'Amour assisted Foster Harris and Walter Campbell in their creative writing courses after he began to publish. He later lectured at more than forty institutions of higher learning, principally the University of Oklahoma. He was also a featured speaker for the National Convention of Genealogists in San Francisco.

"I get many questions about people mentioned in my stories—people looking for relatives or family histories—or about conditions at the time, or to clarify some point on which they lack understanding. Few people realize how much language and word usage have changed. Half the nonsense written about Shakespeare would not have happened if people knew more about the language and customs of the time. For example, they write of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, which in those days meant bawdy men."

L'Amour's constant research turned up the little known fact that Wild Bill Hickok's ancestors were tenant farmers on the property owned by Shakespeare. He insisted that credit for the factual unearthing go to English writer, Joseph Rosa.

The novelist's first published story sold to True Gang Life, and a few of his poems were featured in The Farmer's Stockman, an Oklahoma-based magazine. He also wrote boxing articles for a newspaper, sans payment, after meeting two pretty young news reporters in Oregon, who gave him a byline. He was fighting professionally at the time, and knocked out thirty-four of fifty-one opponents during his light heavyweight career. He first stepped between the ropes at age sixteen, and fought more heavyweights than those in his own weight division.

His first short story sales concerned the West Indies, football, rodeo, "detective yarns," and a few Westerns. "I'd grown up in the West and absorbed live background, but I was too close to it. I wanted to write about something far away, you see." He spent ten months in China, and bicycled across India during his twenty years in the merchant marines.

L'Amour's first big sale was Hondo, originally published in short story form by Collier's Magazine. "Dick Carroll of Fawcett Books asked me to come in, and he said, 'There's a novel here, and I'll buy it.' So I wrote it, and he bought it. Then John Wayne made a movie of it, and suddenly, everyone wanted Westerns."

The writer had an important decision to make. "Westerns have always been regarded in this country as second rate literature. I didn't agree with that. I never have. The paperback book was regarded as third or fourth rate, and I didn't agree with that either. So I sat down and had a very serious talk with myself. "Do I take the ball and run with it, or do I stay the same course I'm on?

"I decided to hell with it, that I was going to write damn good Westerns and I would make them accurate. I would show them that Westerns could be history, that they were important. Because to me, this was the most important phase of American history. The Western period, the pioneer period, did more to form American character than anything else done in this country. It should be taken seriously, and more attention should be given to it." The main difficulty he encountered was Eastern prejudice—those in the publishing business raised in the East, with little understanding of life west of the Mississippi River.

L'Amour did not come into his own as a writer until mid-life, much like English novelist Joseph Conrad, who also spent years at sea before settling down to write. While L'Amour lived in Oklahoma City, he realized "there was something drastically wrong" with his writing. "The short stories I sent out came back like homing pigeons. So I got a bunch of short stories and studied them to see how they were written. I found what I had been doing wrong and that's when I began to sell."

L'Amour's long-term association with Bantam Books began after his disillusionment with Fawcett, his first publisher, which only produced one of his novels a year. He said, "I have had, all the way along, to lead my publishers, sometimes by the nose. It hasn't been easy."

Saul David, a Bantam Books editor, told L'Amour he could write three books a year, but it took some persuasion on the writer's part, who liked "to write fast." He admired David's courage and his ability to "swim against the tide. If you told him something could not be done, he'd do it."

L'Amour maintained the schedule he had worked for years until just before his death, at 81. "I'm not rigid about it," he said. "I work every day, seven days a week, and that's not a problem. However, if something comes up and I want to take a little trip, I do it. I come back and go to work again."

Rising at 5:30 or 6:00, he'd read two Los Angeles newspapers and The Wall Street Journal before breakfast. His work day then began. At noon he sometimes stopped for lunch, often meeting friends at a restaurant. He said he occasionally went alone at an off-hour to make notes for a forthcoming novel, although he was rarely known to use them. "But, I can discuss it with myself, and the direction the book will follow."

He usually returned to his IBM Wheelwriter after lunch for an hour, or he used that time to read. He would also file mounds of research material crowding his large office. Three-foot stacks of paper neatly flanked three sides of his desk. He had no secretary and didn't want one, because "it would keep me busy finding work for her to do." Only he knew where to file research material so that he could find it. He also answered his own mail, but only a small percentage of some 5,000 letters that arrived annually.

His personal library contained more than 10,000 books, with hinged bookcases revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the visible ones. He also left behind map drawers, much like those on ships, with geographical charts of every country on earth. The world was literally at his fingertips.

Little physical research was done during his latter years because he had already been there. "Usually I write about places I've been," he said. "I knocked around the world for twenty years, and one of the things I did was file a claim on a mining camp where I had to do a hundred hours work a year to hold it. Sometimes I hired somebody to do it, or miss out on a good job."

Although he only two-finger typed one draft, he admitted to rewriting on occasion. "Usually if I find something wrong, I rewrite the whole page. Occasionally I reread the previous day's work, and that's only when there's been a break in continuity. My feeling is that if one plans to rewrite, one is careless, figuring to pick it up the next time around. I wrote for the pulps and to make any money, one had to produce a lot. I drilled myself in getting it right the first time."

His wife Kathy proofread his work, checking for typos and redundancies. She rarely found misspelled words and no one changed his work, "not even editors. They never have, not since that first sale when the editor sent my story back and said to cut 1,500 words. I thought, 'Ah baloney, I just don't know how I could possibly do that. I hate it." Chuckling, he added: "Now when I look at it, I wonder where all the words went."

During the mid-1980s, his novels crowded book store racks along with adult Westerns that he hated. "Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the Brontes, Checkov, Thackeray, and many others, who used sex, did it with wit and charm," he said. "Sex in current books is clumsily done, indicating that most writers really know very little about it. They write like a bunch of small boys out behind a barn. They are crudely lewd. There's no fun in their sex and nobody appears to be having a good time."

L'Amour advised fledglings to read and write "everything you can. Keep writing, putting words on paper and learn to express yourself. One difficulty I find of people who write is that they don't read enough. And our schools aren't giving enough background in American literature. I think you should have a pretty good idea what's been done before you try to do it. And you can learn some valuable things by writing. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant."

A sentimentalist, L'Amour adopted a white dove before his first novel sold. The dove had taken up residence in the novelist's garage and was brought into the house and named Rama-Cita after two deities of East Indian mythology. The name was later shortened to Rama when the bird was found to be male. The dove could be heard throughout the L'Amour's large Spanish-style home as though in an echo chamber, and outlived most of its species as the writer's "good luck mascot."

Louis L'Amour was visibly proud of his children. His son Beau, at the time of the interview, was a film producer's creative consultant, who wrote in his famous father's wake. His pretty younger sister Angelique also writes. Both L'Amour offspring planned at the time to produce biographies of their father, in addition to the one he was writing at the time of his death. L'Amour wanted to be remembered as a storyteller—a man who told the American story, or one version of it."

Among his legion of books, Walking Drum, a twelfth century adventure, was the most fun to write. When asked which had been his favorite, he said, "I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, you see, and make it a little bit better.

"The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now."

(Excerpted from Maverick Writers and Weserners: Candid & Historic Interviews)

© 2012 Jean Henry-Mead

Richard S. Wheeler Revisited

2012-01-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Award-winning novelist Richard Wheeler left journalism to write more than 70 books: westerns, historicals, biographies and nonfiction.

Richard, which project presented the greatest challenge?

Books featuring deeply controversial figures posed the largest difficulties because the historical record is riven with inconsistencies and the rankest sort of partisanship. My novel about Major Marcus Reno was one; my novel about Thomas Francis Meagher was another; and a third was my novel about John Fremont. These people were demonized by some of their contemporaries, loved by others.

Your latest novel, Snowbound, concerns John C. Fremont’s fourth, ill-fated expedition. What led you to write about him and how did you go about researching the expedition, with so many conflicting reports written about it?

A novel about Fremont was proposed to me by my publisher, Tom Doherty. I found myself up against a major best-selling novel, Dream West, by David Nevin, and needed to approach Fremont in some other way. As I began research, I gradually realized that an entire dramatic novel could be drawn from a single ruinous expedition, so I chose that.

How much research do you conduct before starting a new book, particularly those based on actual people such as Fremont? And do you adhere to historical facts without dramatization?

Historical novels vary from pure fiction, with invented characters, set in a time and place, over to dramatized history with real people. The Fremont story is one of those, in which all the characters are as accurate as I could make them, and events are all grounded in the journals of the men on the expedition.

What prompted you at the age of 50 to begin writing novels after a career in journalism?

I wasn't a successful journalist, being a born wimp, and kept losing my job. I thought I would set a record for the most-fired newsman in the U.S.. I worked as a book editor after that, and I was more at home in that field, but I kept getting laid off during recessions, or when companies were unloading employees for other reasons. My resume listed so many brief jobs that I had become unemployable, so I turned to fiction in desperation.

You’ve won many writing awards and are respected and admired by your peers. What about your writing career has brought you the most pleasure?

That is a good and piercing question. My deepest pleasure lies in being a good journeyman. For centuries, the skilled trades had apprentices and journeymen, with the journeymen being the experienced and steady tradesmen. Several things happened. One was simply that I made a living from writing, and haven't had a paycheck for twenty-five years. Another was the realization that I'm no one's favorite novelist; my works are on no best-ever list. I do not have any title on the all-time best western novel list published by Western Writers of America. And all this led me to a deep satisfaction in being a competent journeyman in my trade, able to earn a steady living, but not anyone who has written breathtaking or brilliant or wildly popular books. I admire those people greatly, but my career has been moulded from different clay.

What was it like living in Hollywood during your youth, taking acting lessons and attempting to become a screenwriter? What prompted you to leave to become a journalist?

I was trying to become a playwright in the mid-50s by studying at the Pasadena Playhouse. But then I drifted into Hollywood and the rough and tumble world of the Sunset Strip, joined an acting class, and wandered around hoping to spot movie stars in Schwab's Drugstore. (The only one I ever saw was Angie Dickinson, and she was still in a training bra.) I worked in a record store and as a freelance photographer. Eventually I came to my senses and got out of there, embarrassed that I had squandered two years of my life pursuing foolish dreams. I learned a few things, but nothing anyone would find in textbooks.

Why did you decide to write Western novels and who most influenced your own work?

During one of those periods when I was jobless and desperate, I thought maybe I could write westerns because they were all badly written and therefore easy to do. Western fiction was obviously the most primitive storytelling of all. If I couldn't write a western, I couldn't write at all. The only influence any author had on me was to encourage the belief that I could do a lot better. Much later, I did discover authors I admired, but none who influenced me.

How important is humor in Western novels as well as the strengths and weaknesses of your fictional characters?

I'm no good at humor, because I lack a sense of the ridiculous. Apart from a few inebriate efforts at wit, my novels are stern and sober and full of puritanism. Puritans don't laugh. I come from a family descended from early New England puritans, so I am inclined to consider laughter a sin.

What’s the biggest mistake most writers make (from your former editor’s viewpoint)?

Boy, that's hard to answer. I could usually tell whether a writer had read much; the ones who were well read seemed to have a command that the others lacked. I would say that those who had a broad liberal arts background, especially in history, biography, and English literature, were apt to produce better stories than those who were narrowly expert in western lore.

Advice to aspiring writers of the West?

Don't write westerns at all. Write mysteries set in the West, or romances, or thrillers, all with a western setting.

Jory Sherman Revisited

2012-01-20T19:11:00.001-07:00

The nephew of B. M. Bower and the author of hundreds of published books, Jory Sherman is one of the West's most prolific novelists as well as one of the most helpful. Dusty Richards says of the Pulitzer nominee: "Jory Sherman is a walking encyclopedia on how to write fiction. He's helped more folks become successful writers than any living man I know . . ."

Jory, which of your many books do you consider your best?

Actually, I’ve published more than 400 books in my 50 years of writing professionally. I think my favorite is Song of the Cheyenne, originally published in hardcover by Doubleday. Tor published it in paperback. I liked it because it told a true story of the Cheyenne and I did not use any white eyes terms to tell the story.

What’s it going to take to bring the Western genre back into vogue?

If publishers realized that Western writing is exclusively American literature and promoted western fiction and nonfiction as mainstream books, there would be a change for the better. Even our language is circumscribed by uniquely western terminology. But, the Western has always been a bastard child of the publishing industry. Yet, the writers of westerns are among the most accomplished artists and offer great stories that deserve to be read by the general public. Westerns should be labeled American and promoted as such.

Are you writing in other genres?

Yes. I’m writing a mainstream book now, in fact. Over the years I’ve written in several genres.

Who, in your opinion, was/is the best Western writer on the planet? Were you influenced by his/her work?

I think Loren D. Estleman is right up there at the top, past or present. I am impressed with his use of language, the power of his characterizations, his gritty use of imagery. I am influenced by a number of writers, living and dead. I read a great deal and study how writers portray a time, a place, a history of fictional lives. I am legally blind, so I can no longer read printed books. But I subscribe to audible.com and get 2 books from them and I get a lot of audio books from Books for the Blind.

Which novel was the most difficult to write and required the most research?

For some reason, I had trouble writing the prequel to Winter of the Wolf for Walker, a book called Horne's Law. I had written Winter as a single title and it was difficult to create a backstory and flesh it out into a full-length novel. Grass Kingdom and the subsequent novels in the Baron saga required a great deal of research into such ranches as the King, XIT and others. The series, for Forge involved 3 ranching families and had no central hero. But it was the book that launched the Forge imprint and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Literature. Annie Proulx won it that year.

Why the Western genre? Were you influenced by your background?

My dad, Keith, was born in Pierre, South Dakota, and broke horses as a kid and knew many Lakota people. He learned their signs and some of their language. My great aunt, Bertha Muzzy, was a western writer who wrote under the name of B.M. Bower. We had all her books and my father used to read them to me and my sister, Kay. We also had The Virginian, by Owen Wister and many Zane Grey novels. Later, I read Louis L’Amour and began a correspondence with him long before we met and became friends.

I stumbled onto writing westerns when I was sitting in the editor’s office at Major Books in North Hollywood. The art director came in with a book cover. The book was Gun for Hire and he said that the writer had a block and couldn’t finish the novel. The art director, Wil Hulsey, had painted the cover. I jokingly remarked that I could write the book just by looking at the cover. I went home to Big Bear Lake in California and forgot about it. Two weeks later, the editor called me and asked if I were serious when I made that remark. I didn’t recall that I had said such a thing, but she said she’d send me the cover and asked if I could write the book in 2 weeks. I wrote it in a week and a half and that book went through multiple printings for higher and higher cover prices, launching me as a writer of westerns.

Describe your writing schedule? Do you outline and meet a word quota each day?

I don’t have much of a schedule now that I think about it. I don’t write much each day nor for very long. But, I’m a fast typist. I see a book as completed and in print with a cover and title long before I start to write. I use my subconscious a great deal and meditate a couple of time s a day and at night before I go to sleep. I think of a title and a main character and a first scene, then just let the story unfold. Publishers wanted outlines for many years so I wrote them, but seldom followed them to the letter. These plot summaries, outlines, or synopsis served as a skeleton or a guidebook to the novel. I do not adhere to a quota each day, but usually write 5 to 10 pages in less than an hour and when pressed, I have written 25-35 pages per day and taken somewhat longer to do that many pages. I’ve never missed a deadline. My mind knows where to go with a book and I never question my writing. Nor do I rewrite or edit my novel after it’s finished. Most of my editors have left my prose untouched except for time conflicts, character ages, etc.

What’s the worst thing a writer of the West can do? And the best?

To me, the worst thing a western writer can do is set a novel in a real town that did not exist at the time of the story. I have seen this occur more than once in novels I’ve read. The best thing a writer can do is to capture the feeling of the land and the people in a bygone era, to make the reader see and feel and hear and smell whatever occurs in a given scene. I feel the writer of westerns must take the reader back in time and paint the truest portrait of the people and the landscape as he or she can with the power of language. English is the richest language in the world and the best writers know how to bend and shape the words into a special language that conveys the majesty and grandeur of the West and bring their fictional characters to life.

Advice to aspiring writers?

My advice to aspiring writers is to read and to write. Write every day. Don’t read books on how to write a novel or short story. Instead, read Christopher Vogler’s book, based on research by Joseph Campbell, The Writers Journey. Read the masters, all the way back to Homer, and get a feel for the music of language from Shakespeare’s plays and by all means read Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and most particularly, Vladimir Nabokov. Read contemporary authors, too, but retain the magic the great writers bring to their prose. Finish each book or story and do not ever give up the dream of becoming a writer. Persistence overcomes many obstacles.

Thanks, Jory.

You can visit Jory Sherman at his website: www.jorysherman.com. His blog is also located at the site as well as a sporadic journal. He's also on Facebook.

A Visit with John Nesbitt

2012-01-14T00:01:00.008-07:00

John Nesbitt not only writes western novels , he composes cowboy poetry. His poems often place him outside the traditional cowboy poetry form because some of them don’t rhyme and he doesn’t have them memorized. He enjoys the work of Mark Todd and Laurie Wagner Buyer as well as gatherings that are “less dogmatic about poetry.” He especially likes to take part in events that feature western songs and songwriters such as Mike Blakely, John Chandler, W. C. Jameson, and Wyoming’s Kevin McNiven.

John’s first cowboy poem, “You are the Pearl of My Mountain Oyster,” had been “kicking around” in his head “and needed to get out.” Published in one of his short stories in West Wind Review, it received the best short story award and was reprinted in his collection, Antelope Sky.

An instructor of English and Spanish at Eastern Wyoming College in Torrington, he has participated in the Cheyenne Cowboy Symposium as well group and solo readings. “Because I have a full-time teaching job, I write whenever I can find time in the evening, weekends, and during breaks.

The poet has been published in several genres. His literary articles and book reviews have appeared in Western American Literature, South Dakota Review, Journal of the West, and other journals. His fiction, nonfiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, including Wyoming: The Hub of the Wheel, The Dakotah, Owen Wister Review, and West Wind Review. They have also appeared in Roundup Magazine, and other publications.

The author has more than a dozen traditional western novels to his credit, including his latest, Gather Your Horses, published last June, as well as several contemporaries. His writings also include his doctoral dissertation, a textbook for basic writers courses, manuals for composition and literature courses as well as a booklet about Robert Roripaugh, a former Wyoming poet laureate. He’s most proud of his long narrative poem, “When My Pony Sheds again,” a fun poem to read aloud. Although the work is over 200 lines, it appeared in Adventures of The Ramrod Rider, a medley of fiction, poetry satire and parody.

“Readers love the cowboy poetry genre because it is simple and direct. It often speaks to the reader’s experience and reaffirms the reader’s values. People like it because it is not highly intellectual—and is often anti-intellectual—because it’s often sentimental, and because it often contains clean humor. Another way of saying it is that people like cowboy poetry because it’s safe.”

His poem “Nebraska Girl” follows:

I’ve got a girl back in Nebraska
With sparkling eyes and long, dark hair—                                                A voice that rings with golden laughter,                                               And lips that brush away all care.

When I last saw her in Nebraska,                                                    Beneath the spring-time moon so bright,
She whispered words demure and tender,

‘And held me in her arms so tight.

The golden moon above Nebraska
Lit up the prairie with its glow—

And showed to me scene of wonder,
A dark-hired goddess here below.

I had to leave her in Nebraska,
But I’ll be back when roudup’s done,
And meet her on the golden prairie
Beneath the smiling autumn sun.

And when the winter in Nebraska
Gives way to prairie flowers in bloom,
We’ll walk together slow at sunset,
And watch the rising of the moon.

And when the moon over Nebraska,
Lights up the evening warm and free,
We’ll pledge our love in moonlit whispers, My sweet Nebraska girl and me.

John is featured in the newly released Wyoming's Cowboy Poets and Their Poetry. (See side panel)

A Visit with Jodi Lea Stewart

2012-01-07T00:01:00.026-07:00

Jodi Lea Stewart was born in Texas and grew up in Apache County on a cattle ranch near Concho, Arizona. She left the University of Arizona in Tucson to move to San Francisco, where she learned about peace, love, and exactly what she didn’t want to do with her life. Since then, Jodi graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Business Management from Letourneau University, raised two children, worked as an electro-mechanical drafter, penned humor columns for a college periodical, wrote regional western articles and served as managing editor of a Fortune 500 company newsletter. She currently lives in Texas and Arizona with her husband, Mark, three standard poodles, two rescue cats and numerous gigantic, bossy houseplants. Silki, the Girl of Many Scarves: SUMMER OF THE ANCIENT is her first novel.

Jodi, tell us about Silki, the Girl of Many Scarves?

Silki lives in the modern-day Navajo Nation, where her mother is a professor at one of the eight colleges, her dad is a silversmith and her traditional grandparents live nearby. Silki is a precocious young girl with an over-the-top imagination, a knack for getting into predicaments, and an addiction to scarves. She is madly in love with her black and white paint horse, Smiles, and loves everything about her world.

She thought she’d made up Wol-la-chee, an Ancient Ant Man, on one of her horseback rides with her best friend Birdie. When Wol-la-chee shrieks into her life one summer day on Concho Mountain, Silki’s world turns upside down. Since Birdie has already accused Silki of mixing up her real and unreal, will she believe her now? As her family pushes her toward more responsibility and respect for her Navajo culture, Silki finds herself catapulting into a mystery in which nothing is as it seems to be.

How did you go about researching the book and how long did the project take from start to finish?

Most of my research for this three-book series came from my own childhood adventures. I grew up in the Arizona high country on a large cattle ranch wedged between the mysteriously gorgeous Navajo Nation and the stunning beauty of the White Mountain Apache Tribe Reservation. My friends were Native American and Hispanic, with a few Anglos thrown in for good measure. Those experiences are permanently embedded in my psyche. Like Silki, I rode horses, climbed giant petroglyph-etched boulders and galloped the winds of my imagination.

Of course, I do normal research via books (millions of them!) and online. A lot of my research for the Silki series was done in the library in Window Rock, the capitol of the Navajo Nation.

When did you start writing and what prompted you to do so?

I’ve always written. My college roommate called me “Jodi the Apostle,” because I couldn’t write anything less than several pages, whether it was a letter or notes in class. My path to publication began when I returned to college when my children were still in school. I happened to take a news-reporting class and became hooked on journalism. I started writing a humor column for several college campuses, and a regional magazine noticed it and hired me to freelance write a few western articles on branding, spurs, early historical pieces, etc. A few years later, I challenged myself to take a magazine writing fiction course. That’s when I fell totally in love with creating my own world through fiction. Silki showed up about then. After several short stories featuring this protagonist, my instructor suggested I write a novel. I did.

Which writer inspired you most with his/her work and why?

Mark Twain. I love his work because it’s sharply rooted in the culture of his day, believable and timeless. I agree with Ernest Hemingway that Huckleberry Finn is the best book ever written.

Who’s your favorite Western writer and which book/novel do you enjoy most?

I’m still a Zane Grey fan. I know they’re simply written, but I find that refreshing. Nowadays, I’m getting hooked on Dale Jackson’s writing. He’s also a friend of mine on Facebook and Twitter. He writes about the old West with a deeply sensitive maturity.

What’s your writing schedule like and do you outline your books or wing it?

When I wrote Summer of the Ancient, I had other obligations by day, which caused me to do most of my writing at night. I was sleepy a lot! I also had a larger learning curve in the beginning and attended many seminars, conferences and webinars. I incessantly read books about the craft of novel writing, and visited the Navajo Nation for first-hand research. So, I guess from the first chapter to its debut in December 2011 took nearly four years. Fortunately, I laid the groundwork for the other two books in this series at the same time.

Nowadays, I’m working diligently to create a routine allowing me to research, write novels, blog, do my social media interaction and still be present for my family and friends. It’s a challenge, no doubt. Right now, I’m taking an online course given by Kristen Lamb, a social media expert and author of two best-selling books on that subject. Ms. Lamb seems to have mastered the new writer’s lifestyle in which authors write and market their writing while baking pies and taking intricate exercise classes at the same time. I want to be just like her when I grow up!

I am a firm believer in a detailed chapter summary system. For me, it’s the most difficult phase, but it’s so worth it! I create my basic plot, subplots, theme, the characters, and literally, what will (mostly) happen next. After that, I allow myself tons of creative license, but I always have my “map” to return to if I become lost. It keeps me focused.

What’s the most difficult aspect of writing for you and the most enjoyable?

The most difficult aspect of writing is finding the time to do it. Seriously, everything else about writing is enjoyable to me. I’m not very happy unless I get to write something every day.

How do you promote your work?

I’m a firm believer in platform building. The best way to do that is by having a professional website, blogging on a regular basis and building your brand on Twitter and Facebook. Of course, in-person author activities are crucial as well.

Advice to unpublished writers?

Persevere. Just don’t give up! If you have the dream of writing in your soul, it’s there for a purpose. Give yourself the best chance you can by never letting anything diminish that burning desire to be a writer. Never stop learning. Read everything, including books about writing, grammar, style, plot and characterization. Attend conferences. Become affiliated with writing organizations. My special ones are Women Writing the West (WWW), Western Writers of America (WWA), and the Society of Childrens' Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI).

Thanks, Jodi. You can visit Jodi Lea Stewart at her website: www.JodiLeaStewart.com
on Facebook: facebook.com/jodi.lea.stewart
and Twitter: twitter.com/JodiLeaStewart

Remembering Tommy Thompson, Part II

2011-12-31T00:01:00.002-07:00

Ten year's worth of sales pitches as a furniture salesman produced an ulcer, so Tommy Thompson found a writer's position with Douglas Aircraft. He said he knew his destiny the day he wrote writer as his occupation on the front of his World War II coupon ration books. He then met several well known southern California pulp writers, among them Tod Ballard, Cliff Farrel, and Tom Blackburn, who befriended him "because they wanted a guitar player-singer at their monthly business meetings, and because they knew I was in awe of them.

"I felt guilty among such high and lofty personages and started writing madly. I made my first sale to the old popular publications magazine, Fifteen Western Tales, for half a cent a word. The die was cast. I went through the usual amount of stories about the little boy feeling sorry for his deathly ill mother, and giving her poison. And the farmer whose well had run dry and all the rest of the gruesome gamut that beginning writers see as literature."

He then sold a few Western stories, at "one whole cent a word, and greed took over." On DJ Day he took a six week's leave of absence from Douglas Aircraft, and wrote sixteen pulp Westerns that sold. He said, "I haven't been back to work since."

Over the years Thompson developed the habit of rising at four each morning to write before he left for work. When he began writing full-time, he sporadically maintained an office in downtown Los Angeles, whee he kept regular business hours, putting in four hours of intensive writing, sans telephone calls and other interruptions.

His wife June ran interference for him and proofed his work throughout his writing career. He confessed that she could spell but he couldn't. "She never makes suggestions, but she has a very clever way of sometimes seeming to fail to understand. At which point I go into a towering rage, scream and yell, trying to defend myself, and in so doing I will suddenly stop, grin, give her a kiss and say, 'Thanks, it's all straightened out now.' I sometimes think she's a better writer than I am."

Pre-sixties pulp writers had to be prolific in order to earn a living from their craft, and Thompson's theory was "take care of of the inventory and it will take care of you. I kept fifteen or twenty stories [circulating] in New York at all times and the checks would keep coming in at a fairly steady rate. Sometimes eight or ten stories would sell at once and I would go into a panic to rebuild the inventory."

Thompson's novels would take from two weeks to six months to write during his early years in the business. During the time he spent in the television industry, he sometimes created two one-hour scripts over a weekend for a production company preparing to film on location. "If I'm hungry, I'm very prolific," he said. "If I'm affluent, I'm the slowest writer on earth." One of his novels, Outlaw Country, took two years to write and was released by Doubleday in December 1987, a good indication that he no longer worried about finances.

The veteran writer acknowledged that library research could be a bear trap. He enjoyed researching so much that it ate up huge chunks of his writing time. "When I was writing for the Saturday Evening Post and other big magazines with a sort of implied deadline, I would go ahead and write the story and then go back and check the facts. Because I've been in the business of writing Westerns for many years, I often find that I have very few changes to make to bring something up to total accuracy. I've never attempted a truly historical novel. If I had, I'm sure my research process might have been reversed." Research is the "real fun part of writing," he said, but he avoided it whenever possible.

He admitted that he had been overwhelmed by every book he started. "I overcome it by just plodding ahead anyway. He experienced two moods while writing: "Higher than a cloud or somewhere under the belly of a snake. Anyone who says he hasn't suffered from writer's block just hasn't started writing. I have offered my typewriter for sale a least a hundred times, and have threatened to throw it out a second story window on numerous occasions. I've thought that if I burned my reams of unused paper it might help to get me out of this miserable business."

Two magnificent Spur Award plagues, his Saddleman trophy and other writing prizes decorated his 14 x 18 ft. office, and served to cheer him on when, "for the ten thousandth time I am convinced I will never write another word."

(Excerpted form Maverick Writers)

Remembering Tommy Thompson, a WWA Founding Father

2011-12-24T00:01:00.012-07:00

1913-1993

Plotting a novel was always Tommy Thomspon’s biggest problem. The prolific novelist-scriptwriter confessed that he had a “terrible time seeing an overall story. The actual writing is a pleasure and sometimes even a thrill. It’s driving myself to put the seat of my pants on the chair that is sheer hell.

“When I write the end, the two most wondrous words in the English language, there is a blinding flash of glory that endures until the manuscript goes into the mailbox. Then comes deep depression as I realize what a horrible writer I am. When [the book] sells, again comes the burst of glory, and when it appears in print I hang my head and dread meeting anyone who has read it. I’m embarrassed when somebody tells me that something I have written is exceptionally good, but I’m secretly saying to myself, “Please say it again.’ The self-confidence—I’ll avoid the word ‘ego’—of most writers astounds me.”

Thompson’s successful writing career never quite compensated for his erratic upbringing. Born in Dixon, California, the youngest of three children, he was the product of a broken home. His parents divorced when he was two. His mother supported her brood as a cook and housekeeper in a logging camp in northern California’s Mendicino County and married a man four years later “who believed it was beneath his dignity to work for wages. He spent the rest of his life proving it.”

Tommy was a shy, withdrawn child, whose only playmates were a few children from a nearby Indian reservation. His older brother and sister left home shortly after they acquired a stepfather, but their youngest sibling was moved about the state, mostly to remote areas where there were no schools for him to attend.

Despite his sporadic education, he received a certificate of honor as the fifth grade student who read the most books in Fresno County. He also managed to be listed on his high school’s honor roll, graduating at the age of sixteen. He struggled through high school algebra and chemistry in high school, but was editor of his school newspaper. He had begun writing poetry at the age of ten, and his mother saved most of it, much to his chagrin. She submitted one of his poems to the Fresno Bee, and young Tom was “secretly thrilled” to see his work in print.

He recalls reading “everything I could get my hands on. In those early days, up in the high Sierras, my favorites were Jack London, James Oliver Curwood, and Harold Bell Wright—mostly because those were the books available.” His stepfather read western pulps magazine stories, and Tommy devoured them as well. He said that even though he dreamed of how wonderful it would be to see his name in print, he didn’t remember considering writing as the means to accomplish it.

Thompson left home upon high school graduation in 1929, and hitchhiked to San Francisco, where he signed on with the Dollar Steamship Company. He made four trips to the Orient and three around the world as a student officer, which convinced him to change his career goal from singer to sea captain. He had played the French horn in his school orchestra and developed his singing voice, which he later put to use. The captain encouraged his young officer to sing with the ship’s orchestra to entertain passengers “so that dream didn’t really die.”

When the cruise ship was in port at Marseilles, Thomson’s natural father died, leaving him “the princely sum of one thousand dollars. Positive that I would never have to work again in my life, I left the ship in San Francisco and for some strange reason, paid a year's tuition to Heald’s Business College. There I learned to write shorthand, operate a typewriter and keep books. Discovering that I was filthy rich, several fellows moved in with me at the boarding house and I soon ran out of money and turned to the only thing I knew to make a living.” He sang for tips at various saloons in San Francisco by night and attended school during the day.

(Thompson’s writing career next week . . .)
Excerpted from Maverick Writers.

A Visit with Ellen Recknor

2011-12-17T00:01:00.006-07:00

Ellen Recknor lived with a variety of animals in Scottsdale, Arizona. A night owl, she wrote western novels during the wee hours under her own name as well as Wolf MacKenna. Me and the Boys and Prophet Annie won her two prestigious Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, and she said at the time of the interview several years ago that she would love to write additional novels with eccentric, humorous women as lead characters. Her talents and humor are apparent in the following:

Ellen, were you born into a creative family?

Creative? We were the Midwestern version of the Von Trapps. Dad played the trumpet and cornet on “Armed Forces Radio” during WWII. My mother played jazz piano by ear and also sang in the Ames Trio with two of her sisters before she married Dad. In fact, her siblings include a much–publicized poet and several natural musicians.

When did you take an interest in art?

When I was sixteen, I had my first dog portrait published in a national magazine. This was something I had been doing for quite a while to make extra money. Eventually, I acquired a stack of magazines and magazine covers with my portraits of show dogs on them. Later on, I found out that horse portraiture paid better, and I started doing more portraits of show horses and racing stock.

When did you begin writing?

I had always been interested in writing, but as more of a hobby than anything else. I think I figured that my aunt, the poet, filled the literary niche in the family, and so I was going to fill the artist niche.

When did you switch from art to writing?

In the late 1980s, when the stock market took the famous major nose dive, the money I was making in horse portraiture suddenly wasn’t there. By this time, I was specializing in Arabians, a breed whose value, overnight, went from about four million for a good horse to about a buck-sixty. A short time before this disaster happened, I had read a magazine article about some girl who had just sold her first romance novel for $50,000. There was an excerpt included, and I remember thinking, “I could do better than that.” Famous last words, right?

I sat down one night with a yellow pad, and wrote the first chapter of a novel, set in the West. This was a natural thing, I suppose, since I grew up during the golden days of Westerns, and was a Jesse James junkie and John Wayne’s #1 fan. The next day I borrowed a friend’s computer, and learned how to use it—and wrote the book in six weeks. This, in spite of never having read a romance novel in my life. I had a friend who read them all the time and she said, “Just talk a lot about the color of their eyes and use lots of adjectives.” I took her at her word. A year later, I had not only an agent, the great Oscar Collier, but a contract for that book. It was titled Wild Captive Fire by some addlepated marketing genius at Zebra, and was published in 1990. I think I used a pseudonym. And, by the way, I did NOT get $50,000. That magazine lied. Big time.

When did you start writing adult Westerns?

I wrote Westerns from the start. I was inundated by the culture of the West, I guess, both by choice and circumstance and by that time, I had moved to Arizona, so it was inherent. I wrote a total of eight western historical romance novels, plus a novella, under three different names. I have also written one contemporary woman’s novel, whatever that means, short series of Western historical mysteries as Kate Byran, my own western historicals as Ellen Recknor, a dozen or so books in the Slocum series for Berkley, and a couple of Trailsman books for NAL/Signet. I’m currently writing as Wolf MacKenna for Berkley.

What’s the most difficult aspect of writing for you?

The part that I don’t like. And this can be different in each book. Since I don’t plot ahead I just take a character and run with him or her—it’s usually when I’ve run my protagonist up a tree and chucked so many rocks at him that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get him down. But I always do. Eventually. Usually with a great deal of hair loss and gnashing of teeth.

Part II of Ellen's interview will be continued next week.

(Excerpted from Westerners: candid and Historic Interviews)

A Visit with Carole Estby Dagg

2011-12-10T00:02:00.001-07:00

Carole left her position as assistant director of the Everett Public Library System to research and write the story of her great-aunt Clara Estby and her mother who walked from near Spokane, Washington, to New York City in 1896 in an effort to win $10,000 to save the family's farm and to prove women could do it. But because of the way the trip ended, they never published the book about their trek and agreed never to talk about it. "But times change, and what seemed shameful then seems heroic today," Carole said. Seventeen years after leaving the library to research and write The Year We Were Famous. Carole's book was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Carole writes in Everett, Washington, in a converted woodshed on San Juan Island.

Carole, what prompted you to write The Year We Were Famous? And do you know how many people took part in the walk?

Great-aunt Clara and Great-grandmother Helga kept journals during their unaccompanied 232-day trek across the country and meant to write a book about their adventures. Because of the way their trip ended, however, their records were burned and they vowed never to talk or write about the trip again. Times changed. Two women leaving their family at home to walk across the country on their own was considered scandalous 1896; one hundred and fifteen years later it was considered heroic. The time was right to share their story.

I was the only one of Great-aunt Clara’s nieces and nephews admitted to the hospital to see her before she died back in 1950, almost as if I had been commissioned as a child to someday write the story she never had a chance to tell.

How did you research the book?

My most important source of information was newspaper articles written about Clara and Helga as they walked across the country. I also read dozens of books about William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, women’s suffrage, early railroading, rattlesnakes, and the eating habits of cougars. I studied old maps, drove part of the route with my daughter, bought period postcards on ebay, sewed a replica of Victiorian underdrawers, and combed antique stores for items similar to the ones they carried with them.

Why, as a librarian, did you buy a piano-sized loom and learn to weave?

I sometimes get carried away by research. When costuming puppets for a performance of a Samish Indian tale, I visited the Burke Museum to take notes on a chieftain’s robe and decided that the only way I could reproduce it on puppet scale was to buy handspun yarn and loom and weave it myself.

What sparked your interest in Western history?

It would be more accurate to say that I am inspired by women’s history in general, which tends to emphasize the lives of ordinary people sometimes doing extraordinary deeds, instead of textbook history which emphasizes kings and presidents. I started with stories of the west because I felt compelled to tell the story Great-aunt Clara was forbidden to tell and to attempt to solve mysteries about Clara which have intrigued four generations of Estbys.

What’s your work schedule like? Do you write every day and do you aim for a certain amount of words?

I often start the morning with old-fashioned paper and pen, brainstorming the next scene or backstory for a character, then going to the computer with my notes to see what I how to incorporate my notes into the scene I’m working on. I don’t aim for a certain number of words, because I know that 95% of my work will end up in the wastebasket anyway. I hole up in August in a converted woodshed on San Juan Island, where I may work ten or twelve hours a day with major writing and revisions. It may seem a waste of summer, but that’s when I have the fewest commitments on the mainland.

Although I try to write every day, sometimes research or promotion takes priority. And if grandkids are visiting, I might not write for a week or so, but will come back to writing inspired to dig in again.

Who most influenced your own work?

My biggest inspiration has come from children’s literary non-fiction writers and historical fiction writers. After hearing several of them talk, I was comforted to know it was OK to spend half a day researching what kind of pencil sharpener might have been used in a public library in the 1890’s and if I needed to revise twenty times, it didn’t mean I had no talent for writing – it’s just what it often takes.

Here are some of my favorites: Russell Freedman, Jennifer Donnelly, Karen Cushman, Katherine Paterson, Avi, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Jennifer Holm, and Ann Rinaldi.

What types of children’s books do you write? And do you find that more and more kids are reading on Kindle, Nook and other e-readers?

I’m hooked on historical fiction—especially historical fiction featuring bold women. My next book (if my publisher accepts it) will be the sequel to The Year We Were Famous, in which Clara is an example of the New American Woman of the late 1800’s who wanted the vote and a career as well as a family. I’ve also started a book set in Alaska, and have notes on books set in Great Britain of the 600’s and in colonial America.

I have no empirical evidence, but I suspect (or hope) that children are still reading old-fashioned paper and ink books more than e-readers.

Advice for fledgling writers?

Never stop learning and never give up. I received twenty-nine rejections over a period of thirteen years before signing a contract. I took each rejection as a sign I still had more to learn and took eight more college classes in writing and at least a dozen writing workshops. Seventeen years after starting TYWWF, I finally saw it in print.

Seek the support of other writers. You might picture writers toiling in solitude, and a lot of the time you’d be right. But much of your professional growth will also come from writer’s groups. I’d urge children’s and young adult writers to join SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), which offers workshops, speakers, contests, moral support, critiques, and access to agents and editors.

Thank you, Carole.

You can visit Caraole at her website: www.CaroleEstbyDagg.com
Her book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32EWPJt8i_A

A Visit with Susan Page Davis

2011-12-02T19:42:00.002-07:00

Susan Page Davis is an award-winning author with thirty-nine published novels and novellas. A Maine native, she has also lived in Oregon and recently moved to western Kentucky. Susan has six children and eight grandchildren and loves to spend time with them. In January, 2011, she was named "Favorite Author of the Year" among readers of Heartsong Presents books. She’s a member of Women Writing the West and American Christian Fiction Writers and a past winner of the Carol Award (ACFW’s Book of the Year) and the Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award.

Susan, Why did you decide to take a farrier’s course after earning a degree in history?

I loved horses and had owned a few. I’d always wanted to learn the trade. Back in those days, I believed my career would lie in the equestrian world, not the publishing realm.

Which came first, your interest in genealogy or your novel writing? And did one further your interest in the other?

I’ve always made up stories and have preserved some that I wrote as a child. But I never thought I could be a “real” novelist then. My interest in genealogy developed in college, when I belonged to a history club, and the advisor encouraged us to learn about genealogy. The research and documentation methods I learned through genealogy have been very helpful in writing historical novels. A few of my husband’s and my quirky ancestors have inspired characters.

Were you able to write while home schooling your six children? And have any of them inherited their parents’ writing talent?

I didn’t begin seriously writing fiction until 1999, when the four oldest were mostly grown. However, I did work as a news correspondent during their upbringing, and also wrote magazine articles. When I started writing fiction, I had two toddlers. We continued home schooling until we moved to Kentucky (they were 16 and 17 at that time, and I had about two dozen books in print). All of the children are very verbal, and several are published. Megan co-authored three cozy mysteries with me (The Mainely Mysteries series). Amy has published poetry and nonfiction articles. Jim has published articles and is about to e-publish his first novel, a fantasy. Phoebe and Page have also published articles, and Nathaniel has begun writing fantasy.

It must be great to have a husband capable of editing your work. Do you ever have disagreements about his edits?

Oh, yes—all the time! Mostly it’s over word usage. I have to say, he’s usually right. He’ll say, “This sounds too modern for 1857.” When that happens, I have to go and look it up in English Through the Ages or on the Online Etymology Dictionary. He spent 21 years editing news, and he’s edited quite a few books. He’s good at finding mistakes and also seeing plot holes.

When did your interest in the West and its literature come about?

I married a true westerner. Jim’s father was born in Albuquerque, and his mother on a ranch in Oregon. We lived in his home state of Oregon for a while after we married. But I grew up watching and reading westerns.

How do you research your Western books from Maine? Do you visit the sites before you being a book?

I have been to almost all of the places I write about with a couple of exceptions. The West is not hard for me, having lived there and returned many times. Our oldest daughter and her family live in Idaho, and Jim still has close family in Oregon. One of my sisters used to live in Arizona, and I got to visit her there. For my Oregon Trail stories, I’ve driven the route several times and done a great deal of research. Texas was a challenge to me. I’d visited, but hadn’t spent much time there. I was a little intimidated, knowing there are so many wonderful writers in Texas. Books, computer research, another visit, and help from friends enabled me to find the information I needed.

What’s your writing schedule like and do you outline?

I absolutely outline. I had to learn that from my first fiction editor. After my first book, she bought based on the synopsis, and she didn’t want to have to read the entire book to know if she would buy it. I had to learn to craft a compelling outline for her.

My writing schedule begins as early in the morning as I can get moving, usually between 6 and 8 a.m. I write or do writing-related tasks most of the day now. I take breaks for time with my family and try to lay my work aside in the evening and on weekends, but that isn’t always possible.

Has the ebook revolution affected your sales in any way?

Yes, it has. All but one of my publishers have put at least some of my books out as e-books, and in October 2011, I noticed that for the first time, my e-book sales on Amazon outnumbered my paper book sales. When the royalty statements come, the picture will be clearer, but I think electronic sales will continue to grow in importance for writers. I love e-books, because now I can find nearly any book, even if it’s been out of print for decades. Right now I have 19 titles available as e-books, with more coming soon.

Advice for fledgling writers.

Read a lot, and write something every day. Take the time and the effort to master the craft of writing. Grammar and punctuation DO count! But story rules. A good story, well told, will bring you success.

Thank you, Susan.

You can visit Susan at her website: www.susanpagedavis.com.

A Visit with Dee Brown, Part II

2011-11-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

Dee Brown’s list of published books includes seventeen histories, and twelve novels, three of which were written with Martin Schmitt. He said that his fictional characters occasionally surprised him by running away with the story, “sometimes to the determent of the book. They simply will not do what they’re supposed to do. They don’t say what I want them to say, and they try to move forward when I want them to recede, I’ve killed off characters because they begin to bother me.”

The author hated writing with a pencil. “To me there’s something cheap about it—it’s second rate.” He also disliked ballpoint pens. “You can use soft pens at an angle and get a nice black or blue line that my bad eyes can read. I’ve tried word processors, but I think I’m too old a dog to use one. If I were younger, I’d certainly go for it because I can see how helpful they must be, and how much time you can save—but time doesn’t mean much to me anymore.”

The Saddleman winner lived close to his roots. He was born along the Red River in northwestern Louisiana, where his father, a timber man with a large lumber company, was killed when Dee was five. His mother worked at various jobs to support four children, when women “earned half of what a man made while doing the same work. That’s why I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of the movement to give women equal pay for equal work.”

Growing up when reading was prime entertainment, he remembered how the Tarzan books first surfaced in his small town. “I don’t recall who owned the first one, but it was passed around to probably two dozen boys and girls who read it and wore it out. Then the others in the series began to be available. They didn’t have paperbacks then—you could buy these second-hand books for twenty-five cents. But I don’t think anybody actually owned them. They simply circulated though the group in school or in the neighborhood.”

A good student but poor in math, he began writing letters to Saint Nick in the local newspaper. “I always did my best in writing to Santy Clause, but I never thought of writing as being something you did for a profession.” During high school he read Blue Book magazine, which paid $100 for short stories. “That’s equal to $1,000 now. And I wanted to make that $100. It wasn’t the writing. It was the money, and I wrote about what I knew.”

His family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, to a house on the edge of the Southern Association Baseball Park. Engrossed in the sport, he decided to write about it. One of his short stories eventually sold to Blue Book, “which was more exciting than any book I’ve since published.”

Brown worked as staff writer and Linotype operator for his local newspaper before enrolling at the Arkansas State Teacher’s College. A library assistant while an undergraduate, he found that he had access to more research material than the average student. He also noticed that the librarians were “rather pleasant people who enjoyed themselves.” That discovery, coupled with his fondness for books, decided his career. He later worked as a first-run librarian for the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., gradually climbing to the top of his profession at a research center in neighboring Maryland. During his off-hours he attended librarian’s school at George Washington University.

He wrote his first books during weekends and evenings before his retirement. He also enjoyed writing travel articles. His family often accompanied him and he said, “If they get a free trip with me, they gotta keep a notebook.” Most of his vacations were spent in research and his children often went with him while they were growing up, although they rarely saw him. His wife once worked as an editor and would go over his galleys. “She made a lot of extra work for me,” he said, “so the last book or two I told her she could read, but don’t proof read ’em. “

The author agreed that persistence is the key to success. “You just don’t give up. There have been times when everything seemed to conspire against getting a book done or printed, and I would feel like turning my back on the whole thing. But I came back and persisted.”

Excerpted from Maverick Writers, Caxton Press, 1989

Remembering Dee Brown

2011-11-19T00:01:00.021-07:00

February 28, 1908—December 12, 2002

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee may have been Dee Brown’s best known book, but it wasn’t his favorite. He said, “I got very weary of it and had to take a week off and go away to a different place and never think about t. It was a most difficult book emotionally to write.”

His favorite? ”That’s easy. The Year of the Century: 1876 was fun to research and I did a great deal of traveling. I wanted to cover every event of any importance for that year. So I had to immerse myself in microfilm of a dozen newspapers in different cities, and half-blinded myself looking at it, hour after hour.” Brown also scanned popular periodicals of the era, and traveled to Philadelphia “because the centennial of the U.S. was the event around which the book turns.”

The nation’s hundredth birthday was also the year of Jesse James’ last bank robbery, and “quite a few other remarkable events that happened in the West.”

His most difficult book in terms of research and writing was The Galvanized Yankees, an account of Confederate prisoners who had opted to fight Indians in the West instead of serving time in prison. The retired librarian said, “It was difficult because very little had been written on the subject. I had to do most of it from scratch from the national archives, which is a very difficult place to work. It wasn’t as formidable when I was doing the research, but before I finished, the archives had become entangled in bureaucratic red tape. “

Plots germinated in his mind for years and he filed story ideas in a notebook. “Kildeer Mountain came from an actual event I came across in an historical journal probably twenty-five years ago,” he said. “I put the idea in a notebook and then kept thinking about it as time went on—about how to handle the story.

“Creek Mary’s Blood was the same way. I read a little four or five paragraph item in an old book about Mary Musgrove, and I thought, 'Gee I’d like to write her biography.' Having lived in Georgia, I dug around trying to find the material but there just isn’t enough to even write an article about her. So she wound up in a novel, using the material I gathered over a considerable amount of time.”

His nonfiction books usually required a year or two of research, and if the landscape hadn’t changed appreciably, he traveled to the locale. One of his most pleasant research years was spent on his ninth book, The Bold Cavaliers, which tells of the events leading up to, and including, Confederate raids in Indiana and Ohio during the Civil War. He followed their route from the Tennessee Mountains, where battlefields are still relatively intact.

“But if anything’s changed, I don’t want to see the site. I’ll avoid going there., and will instead use journals of early travelers for descriptive passages.” If a city has been built on an historical site, he would only look at an important preserved landmark, deliberately avoided its surroundings.

The quiet southern gentleman knew not why he wrote. “My God, I’ve never understood it, although it was partially to earn some money. I think there’s a compulsion about writing that no one has ever explained satisfactorily to me. But I think I wrote Westerns back in the 1950s because they were doing so well—as compared to nowadays. There were many more published, and it wasn’t hard to get one accepted. The amount of money you received was just about the price of an automobile. So when I needed a car, I usually wrote a Western.”

(Part II will appear next week)

Excerpted from Maverick Writers, Caxton Press, 1989

A Visit with Troy D. Smith

2011-11-12T00:01:00.003-07:00

Troy D. Smith was born in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee in 1968. He has waxed floors, moved furniture, served as a lay preacher, and taught high school and college. He writes in a variety of genres and achieved his earliest successes with westerns. His first published short story appeared in 1995 in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine, and he won the Spur Award in 2001 for his novel Bound for the Promise-Land (also a finalist on two other occasions). He received his Ph.D in history at the University of Illinois, and is currently a visiting assistant professor of history at Tennessee Tech.

Troy, how has your background ingrained itself in your writing?

Everyone’s does, of course, to varying degrees. I think that growing up poor in rural Appalachia gave me a strong sense of fairness and justice (and dislike for injustice), which in turn has given me a strong empathy for the underdog. This shows up in my fiction and nonfiction alike, as I like to bring focus to the histories that have been traditionally overlooked, and many of my tales center on one person standing up for what they think is right.

What prompted you to enroll in college at the age of 32?

I had foregone college after high school because I belonged to a religious group at the time that forbade it; I invested myself into my faith, spending several years as a full-time minister, including two years doing mission work with Haitian immigrants in South Florida and New York City. I read prodigiously, and widely, and began writing as well. I buffed and waxed floors to support my ministry, my writing, and later my family. By the time I was thirty I realized that particular denomination was not for me, though, and left it –the problem was, I saw no future in continuing as a janitorial worker, a trade I had gotten into as a way to support my other activities. Every job I saw in the want ads which looked interesting, and that I believed I’d be good at, required a college degree. Fortunately an old high school friend who’d gone back to grad school at Tennessee Tech convinced me I was not too old to go to college and start over. Now it’s eleven years later, and I’m back at the same school as a history professor. Thanks, David.

Why Westerns? Were you interested in the West from an early age?

I’ve always loved Westerns. Having grown up in the 70s, I’m part of the last generation to come of age with the Western (I suspect the release of Star Wars in 1977 was the dividing line.) I watched new episodes of Gunsmoke with my family every week, saw John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies at the theater and drive-in, read new books by Louis L’Amour and Elmer Kelton, read Jonah Hex and Rawhide Kid comics, played with Johnny West action figures, and listened to my uncle’s old Frankie Lane and Tex Ritter records. I loved several genres, and still do, but there’s always been something special about the Western that keeps calling to me.

Where does your Spur winner, Bound for the Promise-Land, take place and what prompted you to write the novel?

It follows the life of an African-American man for forty years, from his young manhood in the 1850s until the 1890s, as he searches for the meaning of freedom and tries to find peace in his life. It starts on a South Carolina plantation, then follows the protagonist, Alfred, as he fights for the Union Army in the Civil War then returns to South Carolina during Reconstruction, then to the docks of New York and eventually to re-enlisting in St. Louis. The remainder of the story is about his career as a Buffalo Soldier throughout the West, and the climax is the charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Throughout all those dramatic events, we also follow Alfred’s spiritual journey as he tries to find that elusive liberty he’s always yearned for, and wrestles with his own anger.

The idea actually came to me when I was nineteen and listening to a particularly monotonous speaker give a sermon. His topic was “Freedom of the children of God,” from Romans 8:21. I found my mind wandering, reflecting on the irony that slaves were promised freedom during the Civil War but that the “freedom” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras hardly qualified as freedom at all (I guess I was destined to become a historian, I don’t think normal people daydream about stuff like that at nineteen.) I started thinking about a story which would explore just that, and kind of filed it away. Later, when I started writing seriously, I tackled the project. I was able to incorporate a lot of the issues that are most important to me –freedom, justice, dignity, and so on –into the book.

When did you take a serious interest in writing? And when were you first published?

I had a casual interest in it my whole life. I often wrote stories and made my own comics when I was a kid, and any play I engaged in had to have a cohesive plotline (why are these action figures fighting? What is their motivation?) In my late teens and early twenties I cleaned Wal-marts and K-marts, and would be locked in alone overnight –after awhile I ran out of things to read, and started entertaining myself while I was buffing (a very boring task) by imagining how I would tell various stories. I started writing them down, and was actually on my third or fourth novel before it ever dawned on me that I could try to get them published. In fact, an issue of Writer’s Digest jumped out at me from the magazine stands one day –it said “Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Writer? Take Our Quiz!” I bought it, and was surprised to learn that I gave the appropriate answers to all the quiz questions –so I thought “Hey, maybe I ought to give this a shot.” Once I decided to make a serious effort, I developed a plan. I bought a lot of books about writing and studied them closely, and got a subscription to Writer’s Digest. I read an article that suggested an aspiring writer might want to get a few short stories published, so as to have something to put in a query letter when submitting novel manuscripts, so I decided to give that a try. It is kind of weird, in retrospect, that I started writing short stories after I had tried several novels.

That was the summer of 1994, when I was 26. I wrote about half-a-dozen short stories, in several genres –a Western, as well as horror, mystery, and science fiction –and mailed them all off. The Western story, “Mourning Glory” –which was the first one I’d written –was accepted on my first try by Louis L’Amour Western Magazine, and came out in the November 1995 issue (there was a long wait for publication in those pre-Internet days.) In fact, they took several more of my Westerns –but unfortunately the magazine folded before any more of mine could appear in it. In short order, though, I was getting published in several other periodicals –in ’97 my nonfiction history articles starting appearing in Wild West.

How important is it to incorporate actual history into your novels?

History is such a passion for me that I wind up incorporating it almost by default. Even if you are not being specific with a Western –say you are using original characters in a fictional town –you still wind up addressing broader historical events in some fashion, such as the lingering impact of the Civil War or the arrival of the railroad.

How do you research your books and how much time do you spend reading about your subject before you begin writing?

It depends on the novel. If I am working on a big historical epic I do a lot of research. I spent six months combing the libraries in my spare time, reading history books and taking careful notes, before I wrote the first page of Bound for the Promise-Land. For Good Rebel Soil: The Champ Ferguson Story I went to the state archives in Nashville and pored through old newspapers from the Civil War era, and visited the places Ferguson (a Confederate guerrilla) had operated. I got so much historical detail on that book that I was able to also parlay it into a history article for Civil War Times Illustrated.

If I am working on a more traditional Western I take a different approach. I rely on the years of study I have already done on the era (mostly for fun) rather than do an inordinate amount of original research. Several of my upcoming Western projects are going to be set in Indian Territory / Oklahoma, a time and place I’ve researched for years for my dissertation and am already very familiar with.

When it comes down to it, though, when writing fiction, one has to be prepared to change some things for dramatic effect. Your story has to flow, and “real life” has a tendency to sort of jump around and get complicated. This might mean dropping or adding some characters, or combining several “real” people into a single character so as to avoid confusion. But your basic history has to be right, or people will notice and it will jar them out of the story (no dynamite during the California Gold Rush, or Gatling guns at the Alamo.)

Tell us about your latest novel?

My most recent Western is Riding to Sundown, which was released by Western Trail Blazer earlier this year. It is about a legendary lawman, Luke Temple, who comes out of retirement in the 1890s and gathers his old deputies together to hunt down the gang of vicious robbers who murdered the chief deputy’s wife. The pursuit leads Temple to the lair of his oldest enemy, and also forces him to face his own mortality and the passing of the world he grew up in. In Temple we have a character who has seen the whole Western era in his lifetime –mountain man, Texas Ranger in the Mexican War, taming cow-towns –and he and his posse are determined to have one last ride.

Advice to budding writers?

Three things, really.

Practice makes perfect. If you want to write, write –learn by doing, and develop your voice while you’re at it.

While the creative energy is flowing out through your fingertips, don’t forget to feed it by bringing more in through your mind –in other words, read, read, read.

Be persistent. Don’t give up. Some of the best writers struggled to find an audience, and a publisher –if they’d given up, their work would be lost to us. You never know when your break will come.

Thanks, Troy.

You can learn more about Troy at his website: www.troyduanesmith.com,
His Blog site: tnwordsmith.blogspot.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Troy-D-Smith/136529343076637
and Twitter: @paladin_68

A Visit with Ann Parker During her Virtual Book Tour

2011-11-05T00:01:00.015-06:00

Ann Parker is a California-based science/corporate writer by day and an historical mystery writer by night. Her award-winning Silver Rush series, featuring saloon-owner Inez Stannert, is set in 1880s Colorado, primarily in the silver-mining boomtown of Leadville. The latest in her series, Mercury's Rise, was released November 1. Publisher’s Weekly says, “Parker smoothly mixes the personal dramas and the detection in an installment that’s an easy jumping-on point for newcomers.” Library Journal adds, “Parker’s depth of knowledge coupled with an all-too-human cast leaves us eager to see what Inez will do next. Encore!”

How do you conduct your Leadville, Colorado, historical research from San Francisco?

I have a pretty good collection of books and photographs of the area now, after more than a decade of writing about Leadville and its environs. My bookshelves include such items as Leadville: Colorado’s Magic City, by Edward Blair; the humongous 2-volume The History of Leadville and Lake County, Colorado, by Don and Jean Griswold (and I have it on a searchable CD!); and Historic Leadville in Rare Photographs and Drawings by Christian J. Buys. I love looking at old photos… you can pick out such interesting little details with a close examination! I also “walk the streets” when I can manage to get up there, and take a lot of photos and scribble down a lot of notes. I peruse the old newspapers at the online Historic Colorado Newspapers, and am a regular Internet visitor at the Lake County Public Library’s Local History site. And I pester the research librarians at the library regularly by email, when I have questions.

Tell us about Mercury’s Rise.

When the book opens, it’s the summer of 1880, and Inez Stannert, part-owner of the Silver Queen Saloon in Leadville, is on a stagecoach Manitou, Colorado. Many come to Manitou to “chase the cure” for tuberculosis, but Inez has a different reason for visiting this fast-rising health resort: she is on her way to reunite with her young son, William, and her beloved sister, Harmony. However, the journey turns lethal when East Coast businessman Edward Pace mysteriously dies under the horrified gaze of Inez and Pace’s wife and children. As Inez digs deeper into the wherefores and whys of his death, she uncovers shady business dealings by those hoping to profit from the coming bonanza in medicinal waters and miracle remedies, medical practitioners who kindle false hopes in the desperate and the dying, and deception that predates the Civil War. Then Inez’s husband, Mark Stannert, reappears after a year-and-a-half unexplained absence. Even as she fights to hold on to her child and the life she has built for herself, Inez comes to realize there is no “cure” for murder....I know that many readers of the Silver Rush series have been curious as to what happened to Mark Stannert, who mysteriously disappeared before the start of the series. Mercury’s Rise answers that question, at least in part!

I know that your 1880s protagonist, Inez Stannert, was named for your grandmother, but was she also the strong woman you portray?

Granny was definitely strong, in her own way, but not the gun-carrying, whiskey-drinking, card-playing Inez portrayed in my fiction. I believe she must have had a rough childhood--she never talked about her years as a child and a teenager, so I believe that says something in itself. She raised three children during the Depression, when my grandfather couldn't find work (not an uncommon story back then, I'm afraid). What's more, even though she never finished high school, she made sure her children got good educations and entered worthwhile professions; my uncle because a mechanical engineer, my aunt was a legal secretary (back in the day when women didn't generally do that sort of work), and my father became a physician.

Why would someone with a degree in Physics decide to write a series about the Leadville mining town?

My decision to write about Leadville is due to a family history mystery: Granny was raised in Leadville, and never talked about it… even though she loved telling us grandkids stories about her later life in Denver! My Uncle Walt urged me to research Leadville and think about setting a novel there. I took it on as an assignment, and before I knew it, I’d fallen in love with Leadville’s rich history and its current-day incarnation. As to how this ties to the degree in Physics… I’ve always been fascinated by science and technology, and that led me to research topics such as silver mining and assaying in 1880s Colorado (for Silver Lies). From there, it was easy to apply the same research skills to a host of historical subjects for the other Silver Rush books: Colorado railroads, the Reconstruction, women’s rights in terms of divorce and property law, the medical views/research/treatments of tuberculosis, and so on—all in the proper time frame, of course.

What’s your day job and when do you find time to write an historical series? Do you outline and have a regular writing schedule?

I’m a science and technical writer/editor and write about darn near any topic you want to throw my way, from nanotechnology to solar energy to cosmology or hydrodynamics or the latest, greatest in supercomputer architecture for data-intensive computing. I also do regular “corporate” writing projects: developing employee handbooks, safety manuals, website content, proposal writing … if it has to do with words, I’ll tackle it. I’m self-employed, for the most part, so take on whatever comes my way.

As for finding time to write fiction… yes, it’s difficult. I don’t have a regular writing schedule—work comes first, because it pays the bills. The fiction I write to “feed my soul.” I joke that I’m driven by deadlines and panic, but it’s actually more truth than not. I’m a caffeine addict, who prefers writing late at night when things are quiet around the house. Sometimes, I will take a weekend and go hide in the guest room of good friend and fellow mystery writer Camille Minichino. I can pound out up to 30 to 50 pages on such a weekend, sometimes even more. I don’t write an outline, but I’m required to write a synopsis for each book before starting, and my synopses tend to run about 10 pages long, so if I get stuck, I turn to the synopsis or brainstorm with other mystery writers.

How has the ebook revolution affected your book sales?

I think the jury is still out on that. My publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, has the first three out in various ebook formats, so that’s great. I can’t say I’ve gotten rich off of the sales, but I’m pleased that the books are available in so many ways, including in audio format, for the most recent two: Leaden Skies and Mercury’s Rise.

Who has been your most read historical author and which author most influenced your own writing?

Since I read so much non-fiction, I’m hard put to name a most-read historical author. I always look forward to books by Martin Cruz Smith, and I very much admire his writing and how he can put me right into any time and place! Right now, the historical fiction book I’m looking forward to reading next is Michelle Black’s Séance in Sepia. I’m also a closet fan of steampunk, and thinking I’d like to try my hand at that genre someday.

Advice for fledgling historical writers?

Write, write, write. Remember to use all the senses in your writing. Have some honest and blunt “beta readers” who will let you know when you’ve let your research take over your book (a definite hazard of being an historical writer!).

Thank you, Ann. It was a pleasure to have you visit us here.

You can visit Ann at her website: http://www.annparker.net/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/annparker.writer

Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheSilverQueen

and Mercury's Rise and the other Silver Rush mysteries are available from independent booksellers, amazon.com, and Barnes and Noble.

Leave a comment on this post to be eligible to win a Silver Rush mystery prize! To see the rest of Ann’s blog tour schedule, check out her News page.

A Visit with Mary E. Trimble

2011-10-29T00:01:00.015-06:00

Award-winning writer, Mary Trimble lives with her husband on Camano Island, Washington. A prolific writer, Trimble draws on personal experiences including purser and ship's diver aboard the tall ship, M.S. Explorer as well as two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa; and a 13,000-mile South Pacific sailing trip with her husband aboard their Bristol 40, Impunity. The couple has also made extensive overland RV trips. Trimble is active with the American Red Cross and responds to national and local disasters. Her latest novel, Tenderfoot, a romantic suspense with a sub-plot of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, was a finalist in the Western Writers of America Spur Awards in 2010. Her coming-of-age novels, Rosemount and McClellan’s Bluff have been well received and McClellan’s Bluff was the EPIC 2004 Winner for Young Adult Fiction. Her 400-plus articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and her work-in-progress is a memoir of her two-years in Africa.

You have a fascinating background, Mary. Tell us about your job as purser and ship’s diver aboard the tall ship, M.S. Explorer and your 13,000 mile trip aboard the Impunity.

My job as purser aboard the tall ship M.S. Explorer involved handling the ship’s finances. In early 1976, before the ship left for New York to participate in the Bicentennial Tall Ship Parade, we stopped at many sea-ports along the west coast to welcome people aboard the ship. We didn’t charge admittance, but many people donated money and goods. As ship’s diver I often performed repair work under water, using SCUBA gear, caulking the old wooden hull. The ship, built at the turn of the century, required constant repair.

Our cruise throughout the South Pacific was a dream my husband Bruce and I held for many years. Our sailboat, Impunity, a Bristol 40, served us well for the 13,000-mile voyage. There were just the two of us for the entire fourteen-month trip.

Could your Peace Corps service in West Africa compare in any way with existence in the Old West?

We were in the Peace Corps from l979 – 1981. Living in “the bush” in The Gambia was a strange blend of old and new. Like in America’s old west, we hauled our own water from a well, could only purchase fresh produce in season, and had no electronic communication, not even telephones. The various government projects, sponsored by Americans, Germans, Chinese, etc., had trucks and other equipment, but the “common person,” including us, mostly walked everywhere we went.

Your novel Tenderfoot was a WWA Spur finalist and Rosemount and McClellan’s Bluff have been well received and earned an EPIC award for young adult fiction. Which book was the most difficult to research and write?

My first novel, Rosemount, was the most difficult to research. All three of those books are contemporary westerns. I found I had a lot to learn about modern ranching in the State of Washington. How many acres does it take to support “X” number of cattle? When you vaccinate, what are you vaccinating against? I am a great believer in authenticity and I won’t just “fake it.” Also, my protagonist, a teen, runs away to Oregon and I had to have her stop at towns. Although we’d been in that area several times, I found when I wrote the book I needed to really know the territory in detail, describe the landscape, experience the terrain from a walker’s perspective. We returned to Oregon to trace my character’s travels, and those of her brother’s, who searched for her. The sequel, McClellan’s Bluff, was easier in that regard.

In Tenderfoot, my research involved Washington’s Mount St. Helens and the eruption of 1980. Washington is my home state and Tenderfoot was a fun project with plenty of material to draw from. I spoke with many people who had been directly involved in the incident either on or near the mountain. Every mention I make of Mount St. Helens is true.

My work-in-progress, Toubobs, is a memoir of our days in Africa with the Peace Corps. Our families saved all our letters home and I had that rich material to draw from this past year as I wrote.

You’ve written more than 400 magazine articles. Which do you enjoy most, short nonfiction or novels? Why?

For ten years, most of my writing consisted of travel destinations and articles of interest to homeowners, but once I started writing novels, my true love surfaced. For awhile I wrote both, but now I only occasionally write a destination piece, usually something that I’ve discovered while researching a novel.

What’s your writing schedule like? Do you outline and aim for a certain amount of words per day?

We begin our day early. Up at 4:30, we go for a three-mile walk, then Bruce leaves for work by 6:00. So I have the luxury of a quiet house in a rural setting where all I see from my office window are our own trees on a wooded five-acre piece of land on Camano Island. What I do first depends on my stage of writing. If I’m creating, I do that before looking at email. I often write ten or more pages a day when I’m in that mode. I do follow an outline, but always feel free to deviate. If I’m editing, I check email and take care of other matters so that I can concentrate. I recently chaired the Women Writing the West 2011 Conference, so that took a lot of my time, but now I’m back into the swing of my normal routines.

Who do you consider the best ever writer of the West? And which author has most influenced your own work?

I look more at single works to determine my favorite. Larry McMurty’s “Lonesome Dove” is high on my list; Edna Ferber’s “Giant” is way up there, Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage” is stunning. I’m awed with Jane Kirkpatrick’s meticulous research, superb characterization and the sheer volume of books she churns out.

Advice to fledgling writers?

Read! Especially in your genre of choice. You simply must do both, read and write. It keeps the juices flowing. Try to keep to a schedule, though I realize that isn’t always possible. Join a critique group, or form one yourself. Writing is a business; keep the meetings businesslike. Join writers associations, such as Women Writing the West.

Anything you’d like to add?

I am so grateful to the many generous people who have helped me along the way. The best way to honor this kindness is to “Pay it forward.” Also, writing as a career requires a lot of self-education. Speaking for myself, I need to get up to speed on social media. That’s one of my immediate goals.

Thanks, Mary.

You can visit Mary at her website, which also contains her blog: www.MaryTrimbleBooks.com .

She's also on Twitter and facebook.com/mary.e.trimble

A Visit with Dac Crossley

2011-10-22T00:01:00.019-06:00

Former professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, Dac Crossley writes about southern Texas, his ancestral home, where his grandfathers fought Mexican bandits as well as the Comanches. His latest novel, Escape From the Alamo, poses the question: "What would have happened if one of the Alamo defenders had actually escaped?"

Dac, why did you decide to write Westerns?

Well, I brought my father here to Georgia for his final decade. Every morning we’d go for coffee and he’d tell me about the old days growing up in San Antonio and down on the border. He had so many stories, people and places I could relate to from my own childhood. I was trying to write murder mysteries at the time. Western stories just seemed to be a better fit for me.

Tell us about your new release, Escape from the Alamo.

I just asked myself, “Suppose one of the defenders did survive? What would happen to him?” My fictitious character is a Tennessee boy and he is lost and hopelessly confused on the Texas frontier. (Of course there really were survivors, women and children and at least one Hispanic man. Alamo myth – and history – continue to unfold).

How has your background influenced your writing?

I retired as professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, and I’m somewhat attuned to natural surroundings. I have to guard against over-describing landscapes in my stories, just letting them emerge with the story. My childhood had a strong western flavor, of course. My grandfather fought Mexican bandits. His father fought Comanches.

What’s your writing schedule like? Do you aim for a certain amount of words each day and do you outline?

I do my major plotting while walking. I have a 2-mile loop I tackle 3-4 times a week, and that vigorous exercise is an ideal time for mentally testing various scenarios. For putting words on paper (or electrons in orbits) my schedule is far too irregular. I write in spurts – several intense days, then several days of duties such as household chores.

How much research do you conduct before and during your work in progress? And do you visit the location?

Western novels are historical fiction. I do research constantly, using my library and – increasingly – online sources. Yes, I visit locations. For Guns Across the Rio I spent days on the south Texas border, finding likely vistas for my scenes (this would be a problem with today’s immigration climate). I’ve prowled through southern Texas and spent happy hours in and around historical sites in San Antonio.

Which writers of the West do you admire most and who influenced your own writing?

Goodness, that’s a difficult question. I certainly do admire Cormac McCarthy. His writing is so powerful it intimidates me. And Larry McMurty is a story teller par excellence. Tony Hillerman. Elmer Kelton. Louis L'Amour, of course. I go back to my childhood with Zane Grey. I consider Robert Louis Stevenson to be a western writer, too.

Advice to fledgling Western writers?

Read, read, read! And write, write, write. Find your own voice. Tell me a story.

Thanks, Dac. Where can we find you online?
I’m on Facebook, a recent venture for an old timer. My web site is www.daccrossley.com. The blog

is www.daccrossley.typepad.com. And my e-mail is dacxley@gmail.com. [Blogger glitch]

Remembering Peggy Simson Curry, Part II

2011-10-13T16:59:00.004-06:00

Peggy Simson Curry didn’t have a regular writing schedule because she taught in the Poetry in the Schools Program, which she helped to instigate in 1970. Traveling the state in her four-wheel drive Jeep, she taught primarily in outlying areas, dispensing juvenile verse and stimulating smiles, even from some sixth-graders who considered poetry “sissy stuff.” She initially captured their interest by reciting a silly poem about frogs and toads.

Adults attended her creative writing classes at Casper College for more than thirty years, some of the senior citizens had enrolled in nearly every course. She also taught a writing class each summer at the Blind Camp on Casper Mountain. Her students were told to write about things in which they were interested, because she felt there was nothing sadder than a would-be writer who sits down at the typewriter with nothing to say. She told them all to “relate you inner world to the world around you.” Some of her advice must have rubbed off on her son Michael, who earns his living as a public relations writer in California.

Curry’s writing techniques have reached around the world with her nonfiction book, Creating Fiction from Experience. In it she says: “Writing is a way of life. At best it is a rewarding combination of creative experience and creative expression. One cannot exist without the other. Memorable writing can happen only out of memorable living. How much authenticity and vitality appear in the written words is directly dependent on the writers himself. He is the fountainhead of all his fiction.”

A.B. Guthrie was her favorite Western author. She enjoyed his “realism and writing skill,” and shared “the feelings he has for the natural world.” Reading “exceptional authors” of varied genres in bed at night was the way she liked to end her day.

The imaginative, emotional author said she wrote whatever happened to turn her on, “when I ride in the car, get up in the night, walk by a lake. I do work hard hours at the typewriter when an article, poem, or story takes over my imagination. But writing is never a grind in my life. I find great pleasure in being inspired to capture meaningful existence in words.”

When the impulse to write arrived, she used pen, pencil or her typewriter, whatever happened to be on hand. “I carry notepaper everywhere I go whether I’m fishing, hiking or having lunch with friends. I simply follow my impulse to capture what excites me, regardless of time, place or dream.”

Often one draft was sufficient, but at other times she wrote several . “Sometimes I know the conclusion of a poem, article or short story but many times I don’t. Characters do take over in fiction and are as alive as people I meet, listen to and see clearly. I record anything and everything that interests me—scenery, aspects of people, vagaries of weather, voices of the wind, history . . . I enjoy just recording things I’m interested in. It makes me aware of the relationship of my inner word to the world around me.”

(Excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers.)

Remembering Peggy Simson Curry

2011-10-08T00:01:00.007-06:00

Peggy Simson's western research began 93 years ago when she migrated with her parents from Scotland to North Park, Colorado, where her father had been hired by the Big Horn Cattle Company. By the age of twelve, she had learned to drive a hay rake and help her mother cook for a twenty-man hay crew. As a youngster, she was taught by ranch hands to hunt, fish and trap small animals along sandy river banks, and to appreciate the beauty of nature.

Long before she was honored as Wyoming's poet laureate, she filled her novels, short stories, articles, and poetry with early experiences, written primarily from the male viewpoint. Two of her short stories won Spur Awards and the honors and kudos heaped upon her over the years--including "Peggy Simson Day" in Walden, Colorado, every April 13 until her death in early 1987--could have easily filled the old barn in North Park.

When Peggy was nine, her father insisted that she leave the ranch and "get educated in town." She said, "I wrote my first poem that first day in Walden School, expecting to be kicked out of class, but my teacher got it printed in the local newspaper, and I saw my name in print. The poem consisted of: "I hate school. I hate school. I want to go back to the ranch, my horse and the red fox in the meadow.'" She felt she had been banished to the small town where she wsa boarded with the local sheriff and his wife, who had no children of their own.

Later boarded with a number of Walden residents for the fourth through ninth grades, she spent her summers on the ranch, cooking and performing chores. Her last two years of high school were in Denver, where her short stories and poetry won her on-campus essay prizes and sales to various newspapers. She then majored in journalism at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, where she wrote and performed in a play for her creative writing teacher. When her talents were discovered, the university staff went out of its way to help her by carefully reclassifying courses so that she could take advantage of them.

She made her first sale to a major magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, after she married Bill Curry, an English major at UW in 1937, and moved to Illinois for his first teaching assignment. At that time, unknown poets had to prove that they had actually composed their work by submitting character references. So the Currys trekked downtown ot gather up affidavits. During the years that followed, Peggy sold quite number of short stories and poetry to the Post without the verifying stastements, and later understood the Post's policy when one of her poems was plagiarized on a Casper, Wyoming, radio station.

She sent her first short story to Good Housekeeping, and received a nice rejection letter saying that although it wsd done it was not a GH story. "They said I should send it to a romancee magazine, so I sold it to one. It was a silly story about a cowboy, and it contained phrases like 'cows don't breed in too much heat.' The editor wrote back and said, 'We can use it if you will change some of the dialogue. There's nothing romantic about cows breeding.'" Peggy revised the story and was paid forty dollars. "Not bad in those days."

She considered her second novel, So Far From Sping, her best. Somewhat autobiographical, the protagonist is a liberated nineteenth-century woman rancher by the name of Monty. The storyline follows a young Scottish man as he leaves his homeland in 1830 to immigrate to North Park, Colorado, to work as a ranch hand. The writer interviewed a number of old-timers in her childhood territory, and based some of the characters on people she had known.

After her husband had begun teaching in Casper, and their son Michael was born, she wrote a novel aptly titled, The Oil Patch, which with her earlier book, was translated into eight languages. Her juvenile book, A Shield of Clover, is an historical look at ranching and preceded Red Wind of Wyoming, a book-length poem of the Johnson County War.

(Continued next week . . .)

Excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers, Caxton, 1989)

A Visit with Heidi Thomas

2011-10-01T00:01:00.001-06:00

Heidi Thomas followed her own dream of writing novels based on her rodeo riding grandmother. Award-winning Cowgirl Dreams was followed by 2011 Willa Award-winner, Follow the Dream. Heidi also teaches classes in beginning fiction and memoir writing as well as offering manuscript services to fellow authors and writers.

Heidi, how has your background influenced your writing?

Since I grew up on a ranch in isolated eastern Montana, I have some first-hand experience that helped me understand what my grandmother’s life might have been like. I rode horses, helped with roundup, branding and shipping (although I never got into rodeo). We also lived more primitively in the 1950s and ’60s than most: we didn’t have electricity until I was about six and no indoor bathroom until I was in high school.

Tell us briefly about your rodeo riding grandmother. Was she around while you were growing up?

She was, until she died when I was 12. I remember going to spend time with my grandparents in the summer and we rode horses together. They bought me my first horse when I was about eight. My grandma was petite and slender and wore men’s Levis (although she also dressed up very fashionably), and I always had the impression that she felt more at home on the back of a horse than anywhere else.

You first book, Cowgirl Dreams, has won an EPIC Award and the USA Book News Best Book Finalist award. Your second, Follow Your Dreams won the WILLA Literary Award. Which means the most to you and why?

All these awards mean a great deal to me. They are validation that my stories and my writing are considered “good.” I think many authors always have that fear in the back of their minds that their books aren’t “good enough.” The EPIC is recognition from the Electronic Publishing Internet Connection and was judged on content. The organization and recognition is important in this new era of e-books and in promoting reading among young people. The WILLA is probably more well-known and is named for the wonderful author, Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foremother of western experience writing. I’ve been aware of this award (and dreamed of someday winning one) since before I joined Women Writing the West 10 or so years ago. It’s a prestigious award and I’m honored to receive it.

Tell us about Follow the Dream.

This book is the sequel to Cowgirl Dreams (although the story can stand alone) and takes place in the 1930s during the Great Depression and severe drought. Our heroine, Nettie, continues to pursue her dream of becoming a rodeo star, but life has a tendency to get in the way of dreams. Unexpected family responsibilities, the death of a good friend, and threat of starvation for their horse herd forces her to dig deep to find ways to overcome these challenges and look at her dreams in a different way.

How important are writer organizations and which one has given you the most encouragement and support?

Very important. I started out in a writers group in Montana, which encouraged me to get back into writing after a long hiatus. When I moved to western Washington in 1996, I found a similar group, the Skagit Valley Writers League, which is a wonderful support group. Through fellow writers’ encouragement, participating weekly critique groups, and by serving as President for several years, my confidence grew enough to complete a novel manuscript and to begin submitting for publication. Later, I found Women Writing the West, which I felt might be my niche group for my work. And I was right. I met my publisher, Lee Emory of Treble Heart Books, at one of the WWW conferences. The membership is also a warm, supportive, helpful group and I value my inclusion.

How has the ebook revolution affected your own work and what do you foresee for the future of the publishing industry?

I’m not sure I’ve seen much effect in sales for my books. Most of my sales are through handselling at events, arts and craft fairs, speaking engagements, etc. However, I do believe with the younger generations growing up attached to their iPhones, that e-books will be the way they will read, if they do read.

Who most influenced your own work? And why?

I read a lot of Zane Grey when I was in grade school, little knowing that I would grow up to write what is classified as “western” books. My parents read to me before I went to school and after I learned to read for myself, and ever since, I have been a voracious reader. I read all types of genres and I really believe my reading taught me how to write. I give credit to my dad who also was a reader and constant learner and to the teacher I had for my first three grades for encouraging my reading and my writing.

Where is the center of your universe and where would you prefer to live and write?

I live in Mount Vernon, Washington in the evergreen state and home of the famous Tulip Festival. I do enjoy living here, although I’m always a Montanan at heart. Although this is a beautiful area, we pay for our greenness with a lot of rain. I would like to live where there is more sun.

Advice to aspiring writers of the West?

Write what YOU want to write, don’t write what you think the “market” wants or how others write. I didn’t set out to write a “western” per se. I just wanted to tell my grandmother’s story, and it happened to take place in a ranching and rodeo world in the west. I also advise perseverance—don’t give up when you get negative criticism or rejection. Continue perfecting your craft, keep practicing your writing, and keep on sending it out. It took me ten years from the time I started writing Cowgirl Dreams until it was published. I’m finding that is not so unusual. My favorite quote is from Ernest Hemingway, “There are no great writers, only great re-writers.”

Your social networking links.

Website: http://www.heidimthomas.com, Blog: http://heidiwriter.wordpress.com Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Heidi-M-Thomas-Author/113945861994671 Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Heidiwriter

My books are available through my website, from my publisher, Treble Heart Books http://www.trebleheartbooks.com/SDHeidiThomas.html and Follow the Dream is available on Kindle.

A Visit with Carol Buchanan

2011-09-23T20:07:00.008-06:00

Carol Buchanan has been a writer her entire life. Even before she knew how to form letters, she told herself stories. At age 15, she began writing for the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. Since then she's written for newspapers and national magazines in the fields of Western history, horticulture, and equine journalism. Her longest stint was writing technical manuals about computer systems for a major aerospace company in Seattle. About that time her first book, Brother Crow, Sister Corn: Traditional American Gardening, was published in 1997. The Spur award-winning Montana native's latest release is Gold Under Ice, a five star rated novel.
Why Westerns, Carol? What attracted you to America’s unique historical literature?
I grew up the daughter of a cowboy who turned to railroading to make a better life for his family. Both my parents were born before the turn of the 20^th century, and my father especially was a great storyteller. On both sides, they were the children of pioneers who homesteaded and literally carved out places for themselves. My great-aunt, who was born in 1865, lived with us for a time, and her husband had trailed a herd of cattle to Montana from Texas. I never met him, but she loved talking about cowboys and life on ranches. My father absolutely hated the myth-making of the West. Every time we’d watch a Western he’d tell me all the things that were wrong with them. And because he met the Sundance Kid, he loathed the movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” So I developed a strong feeling for getting it right and doing justice to the people who lived during the times I’m writing about. I’ll make mistakes, but I try hard to make my stories true. Before they died, I convinced them both to write down as much as they could remember about their lives. Bless them, they did. I have a treasure of an archive from them both
Tell us about your background.
Almost from the time I was able to sit up, my older sister tells me I wanted stories. People read to me until I could read on my own, and I got books for Christmas and birthdays: Trails Plowed Under by Charlie Russell, The Virginian by Owen Wister, Smoky the Cow Horse by Will James, as well as others. I still have them. Because the college I went to didn’t have creative writing, I majored in English, then went to graduate school in English lit. Totally impractical, except for being able to read English and American literature. I taught on the college level for about 8 years, then quit academia and went to work. I was a technical writer for a very large aerospace company in Seattle, and wrote manuals for computer systems.
Who influenced your own writing and why?
Everybody contributed. The good storytellers and the great poets like Wordsworth, Chaucer, Shakespeare. I’m an eclectic reader, except some genres don’t interest me though there are good writers in all.
What’s more important, characterization or accurate depiction of the Old West?
I can’t separate those. To write about the West pre-1900 means understanding a different mindset, the Victorian mindset, and if a character’s mindset is 21^st century, the history is wrong and so is the character. It’s not just a matter of what sort of spur, or the right saddle, or whether a woman rode sidesaddle or astride (which they considered a coarse expression), it’s how they thought and felt about the lives they led and others’ lives. Some people plunk a 21^st century person down in another era and think that’s good enough, but it’s not. Not nearly. It’s hard to get that right, but that’s primary for building a Western character and being historically true.
Do you build your plots around actual historical events or historical characters?
Both. Just now I’m working on a short novel about Joseph Slade called Legal Tender. To me he was a tragic figure in the classical sense, brought down through a flaw in his own character, but the events in the book are historical. I’ve read several books and I’m still not sure I have the correct sequence, because few of the early accounts agree. So far as the historical sequence is concerned, I’m taking my best shot and I know some Slade experts will disagree. God’s Thunderbolt started out because I noticed that some of the Vigilantes of 1863-1864 were lawyers, and I set out to learn why lawyers would become involved with a vigilance committee. So that’s how Daniel Stark came about, and he’s the protagonist for all the books so far.

Tell us about your latest book.
Legal Tender is about Joseph Slade’s challenge to the Vigilantes of Montana just a few weeks after they hanged more than 20 members of the Henry Plummer gang between Dec. 21, 1863, and Feb. 2, 1864. When he got drunk, he would smash saloons and stores, and when people demanded payment, he would take out a pair of human ears and make the person agree they were legal tender.
What’s your writing schedule like and when and where do you conduct your best writing?[
I write in the mornings for at least two hours. My friends and my husband know not to disturb me then. The hardest part of writing for me is the first draft; after that, I can rework and revise as many times as needed to do the best job I can.
Advice to aspiring writers of the West?
Get it right. No matter how many revisions it takes, get it right. Too many new writers let their work go too soon. Some parts of my novels are revised countless times. Twenty isn’t too small a number.
How do you promote your books and is social networking helpful?
I promote my books by any means necessary. Social networking is very helpful, but it takes time and patience and a good strategy to rise above the noise of millions of people on the Internet and on Twitter and Facebook.
Your social networking links?
So far, I’ve concentrated on Twitter and Facebook. LinkedIn doesn’t make sense to me because I’m not job hunting. I’m registered on Goodreads, and with the Writers Digest community but haven’t had time to pay much attention to them. I blog at http://swanrange.com/blog and I blog about self-publishing at The Entreprenturial Author: http://www.mtbusiness.com/Business-How-To/the-entrepreneurial-author-self-publishing-is-not-an-easy-road.html That blog I write in hopes of saving other writers time and money and inflated expectations.

Remembering Elmer Kelton, Part II

2011-09-17T07:19:00.001-06:00

Elmer Kelton’s primary interests and writings were always Western, and specifically Texan. His newspaper career was based on the livestock industry and his novels followed in harness. His novels were always written on weekends and in the evenings. "Ideally, I try to keep a firm schedule, but I find it difficult because of other obligations, honor jobs and the like that keep coming my way. I always tell writers to keep a rigid schedule as I did in earlier days, because unless you learn self-discipline, you're unlikely to ever make it."

He also told fledglings that writing is a difficult job and the process was often a disagreeable chore, especially when the story is "not coming along well. To quote Robert Louis Stevenson, 'I hate to write but love having written.'"

He urged would-be-writers to start writing today, tonight, not tomorrow or sometime in the vague future. "You have to make time. You have to want it so badly that nothing will deter you from writing. You study all the books, you read all the magazines designed for writing—I did—but in the long run, the only person who can teach you to write is yourself, and the only way you learn is by doing it over and over and over again until it becomes second nature."

Kelton stressed the fact that a writer cannot get by on what he carries around in his head. "He never could. A writer must have a flair for word usage to create images in the reader's mind and for constructing stories that will grab and hold interest. Much of what sells today has little lasting quality, but it does at least engage and entertain. The art of entertaining is not something you acquire by being the nephew of the chairman of the board. Knowing the right people may open doors that otherwise remain closed, but once those doors are opened, the writer still has to deliver a salable package.

"Don't give up if a hundred editors reject your book. Write again and again, and if your determination is backed with talent, editors will someday be coming to you." While learning his craft, Kelton studied writers whose work he admired, trying to determine style, story construction, rhythm and word building blocks. He often copied individual stories or passages on his typewriter to get a feel for language use, much as fledgling artists copy the work of old masters.

"For me the old masters of the Western story were Luke Short, Ernest Haycox, S. Omar Barker, Bennett Foster, W. C. Tuttle, and many of their contemporaries."

Eventually a beginner must develop a style of his or her own, which may remain a mystery to the author, but becomes recognizable to readers, Kelton said. "People have often tried to tell me what my style is. They say they can readily recognize it. I don't know what it is and don't really want to know, because if I become conscious of it, I may in some way either cater to it or tamper with it and risk ruining it."

He tried not to judge fledglings who constantly asked for his advice. He also avoided reading manuscripts whenever possible, with notable exceptions. During the mid-1960s, "an old horse trader and jackleg veterinarian by the name of Ben K. 'Doc' Green ask me for advice on publishing his book." The newsman doubted that Green could "put six words in a straight line on paper," but he became "somewhat of a legend in Texas letters during the limited number of years he still had left to live. Before long, I was going to him for advice."

Kelton averaged a call a month from aspiring writers with books that were going to be "bestsellers and great movies." The caller usually wanted to supply the idea and Kelton to write the book . "I always plead over commitment and lack of time," he said. "Certainly no exaggeration. Usually, if they are persistent, I will promise to read the manuscript and give dubious advice if the person will go ahead and write the book himself. Or herself.” Less than one person in fifty took him up on his offer, and "the few times my hand has been called, I have bitten the bullet and read the manuscript."

The novelist cringed when he heard of an acquaintance who quit a steady job to write full-time. He told newcomers to consider writing an avocation, not a full-time career. "If it proves to be more than that, fine, but don't risk the children's college savings on it."

Advising beginners was his way of repaying those who were generous with their time and advice when he needed them. He said, "The only way I can ever repay their kindness is by passing it on. I feel I owe this to a profession which has been good to me.”

Kelton enjoyed writing when inspiration was high and the story rolling. “When the inspiration is low and the story has to be pushed along with main strength and awkwardness, writing is a chore." The nearest he came to pure inspiration was in writing The Good Old Boys. Although the first ninety pages were tough going, the characters suddenly took control and the story "fairly rolled out of the typewriter. I just went along for the ride. Often the words spilled onto the paper without my knowing where they came from or why. Times like that, writing is an exhilarating experience, and that feeling can carry the writer though a lot of slow, agonizing times when telling a story is sheer labor."

Kelton carried his novels around in his head for years before they emerged on paper. The Day It Never Rained began developing during the long Texas drought of the 1950s, and Hewey Caloway, the restless cowboy of The Good Old Boys, germinated in his mind for fifteen years before coming to life. The author's shortest germination was The Wolf and the Buffalo, after Doubleday’s Harold Kuebler asked him to write a novel about the black Western cavalry.

"Because my newspaper training has taught me never to refuse an assignment, I said yes, and worried later about how to do it." But even as they discussed the book, a rudimentary plot and main character began to take form. The lengthy subplot with a Comanche character evolved after he had begun to write. "Gray horse became so strong that I had no choice but to elevate his role and develop it as I went along."

While learning his craft, Kelton studied writers whose work he admired, trying to determine style, story construction, rhythm and word building blocks. He often copied individual stories or passages on his typewriter to get a feel for language use, much as fledgling artists copy the work of old masters. “For me the old masters of the Western story were Luke Short, Ernest Haycox, S. Omar Barker, Bennett Foster, W. C. Tuttle, and many of their contemporaries."

Much of Elmer Kelton's research came from his extensive background in ranching and livestock, and needed little library ferreting to round it out. The Wolf and the Buffalo and Stand Proud required considerable background research from his own formidable library as well as county and university facilities.

Often, I'm able to dovetail this with my newspaper work, which allows me much freedom of movement." Research was not confined to experience and books. Kelton also visited his book's locale to get a feeling of time and place. "Louis L'Amour said that when he wrote of a spring, that spring exists—he had been there and tasted the water and found it good."

When he began writing The Wolf and the Buffalo, he visited the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, where he tasted the water and "found it gyppy as hell. Had I not tasted it for myself, I might never have conveyed this adequately to the reader. Every trip I make, whether vacation, or working trip for our livestock newspaper, is in a sense research. Long stretches on west Texas highways afford a lot of time for thinking, for planning, for observing locations that may someday find their way onto a sheet of paper. With a writer, research never stops."

He most enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment when a job was finished, and felt he had given birth to a good set of characters while telling the story well. But he hated false starts and moments when "drawing words out of the creative well is like pulling my own teeth." Novels in progress haunted him, particularly when he reached a problem point and had to decide in which direction to continue.

"The whole thing will boil along on a slow burner at some level beneath the conscious, then suddenly come bubbling to the top at an unexpected moment, waking me from sleep or jarring me as I come driving down the road. I write myself a great deal of notes on dialogue and catchy phrases, most of which I later find I cannot use."

Kelton's office was located in one corner of his home and enlarged 200% since the house was built in 1957. The 15 x 20 foot room has a large connecting storage area, which was isolated from the rest of the house, originally to filter out the noises of children playing. Once his children were grown, he often welcomed the distractions of his grandchildren.

His large desk was once a front door "which the builders accidentally spoiled in 1957," and three sides of his study are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Two additional freestanding bookcases house his huge collection of reference books and friends' novels. He said, "I believe they breed at night."

The newsman composed all his work on a typewriter until the early 1980s when he bought a Xerox 820 word processor. Typing was the only subject he flunked in high school, and was, he said, "almost the only one vital to my livelihood. I usually revise and polish—but not always—a great deal more in the early chapters of a book and progressively less as the story takes on a life and movement of its own. Once in a while, when a story really rolls, I swing along with it and trust that I can make all the necessary revisions and give it a good polishing after the draft is done. In such a case, I am simply trying to preserve the momentum."

A number of Elmer Kelton's novels have been condensed by Reader's Digest Books, including The Man Who Rode Midnight. Among his many honors and awards was the Texas Library Association's selection of The Wolf and the Buffalo as one of five novels featured for its Sesquicentennial special program.

The author smiled and summed up his successes with: "The sun has been shining on me and I'm grateful."

Remembering Elmer Kelton

2011-09-10T00:01:00.006-06:00

1926-2009

One of the West's most congenial writers, Elmer Kelton received the 1977 Saddleman Award from Western Writers of America for outstanding contributions to Western Literature. He had already won four Spurs and two Wranglers by the mid-1980s as well as the Texas Institute of Letters McCombs/Tinkle Award for continuing excellence.

Among his best known novels are The Time it Never Rained, The Day the Cowboys Quit, The Wolf and the Buffalo, and The Good Old Boys. A life-long Texan, Elmer was born on the Five Wells Ranch in Andrews County, the son of a cowboy, R. W. "Buck" Kelton, who spent the best of his life in the saddle, some 36 years as wrangler, foreman, and general manager of the McElroy Ranch Company near Crane, Texas. Buck's son, Elmer, later used the McElroy name as a pseudonym.

When Buck retired, he and his wife acquired a small ranch of their own in Brown County, where Elmer's mother lived until she was 80. The former school teacher taught her four sons to read before they started school in Crane, nine miles from the ranch. Elmer, the eldest, skipped the second grade, which, he said, made him the "runt in every class for many years. When they chose up sides to play football, I was the odd one that the unlucky team had to accept, and I usually got run over early in the game. So I spent a lot of time on the sidelines reading."

Kelton was near-sighted and excelled in reading, spelling and composition, "which made a boy suspect in the oil patch of Crane." Myopia handicapped his athletic abilities, but enhanced his communication skills. "The only area in which I could beat the other boys was in the use of words, and I capitalized on that."

He credited his mother with his voracious reading habits because she read to him before teaching him to read for himself. When he was nine, he contracted tuberculosis, as did several of his schoolmates, and spent nearly a year in bed. "That," he said, "no doubt added to my introversion and detracted from any athletic tendencies I may have had."

The youngster wanted to write as soon as he could read, and volunteered to create themes, beyond those assigned, instead of doing his math. Before he was ten, he was writing short stories, and by twelve had outlined the plot for the great American Western novel, which he said he never wrote. His readers would undoubtedly disagree.

His mother encouraged him to write, as she did herself with pencil on lined paper. "It must have been contagious," he said. "My father was an outdoorsman who never understood why I wanted to write, but he came to accept it after a while. I was not a good cowboy, which bothered him more than a little. Writing to him seemed a semi-honest way to earn a living, on a par with law and politics. Work to him was something to be done on horseback or with a pail and shovel. Not behind a desk.

“While a senior in high school I finally confessed to him my long-held ambition to attend the University of Texas and study journalism. He gave me a cotton-killing stare and declared: "That's the way it is with you kids nowadays—you want to make a living without having to work for it!"

The cowboy sent his son to talk to the ranch's Norwegian bookkeeper, a worldly soul by rural Texas standards, in the hope he could talk Elmer out of his foolish notions. But tales of sobering up O. Henry so that he could meet his deadlines, and of other hard-drinking newsmen did little to squelch the budding writer's enthusiasm.

"He gave up when he saw that he was encouraging my folly. 'All right, Elmer', he said. ‘If dats vat you vant, go ahead. But vun ting remember: vriters are alvays drunk, and dey are alvays broke.' Over the years I have found little quarrel with the second half of his admonition."

Upon discharge from the army following WWII, Kelton needed three semesters to earn his degree in journalism from the University of Texas. He returned to school in Austin, where he spent his spare time and some study sessions writing short stories for submission to magazines. "I suffered through a great many rejections before making my first sale in 1947, during my final semester at the university. My first sale was to Ranch Romances, edited by Fanny Elsworth, who will always have a special place in my heart."

Fanny Elsworth had rejected a number of his previous stories, but took the time to write him letters, telling him what was wrong with his work as well as making suggestions. "Everyone else was simply sending printed rejection slips," he said. From that point on, he wrote most of his stories with her publication in mind, but it was a year before she bought a second one. "That one acceptance made up for dozens of rejections and gave me enough faith and hope to keep trying."

Kelton assumed that after his first sale he would soon become a full-time, highly-paid author. Meanwhile, he would work as a journalist. He began his career as a livestock reporter for the San Angelo Standard-Times, expecting to hold the job for six months to a year until he could establish himself as novelist. Twenty-five Western novels and forty years later, he remained a newspaperman. He also continued to do a limited amount of nonfiction freelance writing for various publications. He spent fifteen years as a farm and ranch reporter for The Standard-Times before progressing to editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser Magazine as well as associate editor of Livestock Weekly.

Excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers.

Part II will be featured next week . . .

Bill Markley, Part II

2011-09-03T00:01:00.006-06:00

You’re quite a world traveler, Bill. Why were you in Antarctica and why the trip with boy scouts to Japan? (It seems an expensive way to earn a scouting badge).

I went to Antarctica my senior year at Virginia Tech. My course advisor received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study Antarctic lakes in an area called the Dry Valleys. It was about an 80-mile helicopter flight from McMurdo Station. Six of us were isolated from anyone else. It was a great experience. I went back again the next year after I graduated to set up for the next field season and to participate again on the field team. Afterwards, my good friend, Jim Borchers, and I flew from New Zealand, to Fiji, took a ship hauling a load of concrete to the Kingdom of Tonga, then we got jobs on a Tongan refrigerator ship hauling bananas to New Zealand. From there we caught a military flight back to the States. I kept journals on both trips and want to publish them someday.

Why did we take the Boy Scout Troop to Japan? We had hosted a Japanese scout troop for summer camp in the Black Hills. The Japanese then invited our troop to the Japanese National Boy Scout Jamboree. The scouts spent 2 years raising money to go. Adult chaperons spent their own cash. I was Troop Committee Chairman at the time and figured I would go along as a chaperon. It was a great experience. We spent one week at the jamboree and one week with host families. The Japanese people are wonderful and they really like Americans.

Tell us about your books, Dakota Epic, Experiences of a Reenactor during the filming of “Dances with Wolves” and Up the Missouri River with Lewis and Clark.

While I worked on the film Dances With Wolves, I kept a journal about what was going on during and after filming. It was a behind the scenes look at how the movie was made from the perspective of someone who had never been involved in something like that before. Everything was fresh and new to me. When the filming was over, I typed up the journal and let a few friends read it. They loved it and said I should publish it. I could not find a traditional publisher to do it, so I took matters into my own hands and self-published the journal as Dakota Epic, Experiences of a Reenactor During the Filming of Dances With Wolves. I think it’s done quite well; through my own marketing, I’ve sold over 2,000 copies.

Up the Missouri River with Lewis and Clark began as a series of newspaper articles for a Pierre by-weekly newspaper during the 200-year anniversary of the Corps of Discovery assent of the Missouri River. I took those articles, had two maps made, used photographs of the reenactment of Lewis and Clark heading up the Missouri for illustrations and again self-published the book. It has done quite well.

I write for magazines including True West and Wild West. My latest story in Wild West in the August 2011 issue titled “Laughing Sam, Harry Young and Bummer Dan Were Embroiled in a Deadwood Feud” tells the story of the murder of Bummer Dan by Harry Young who thought he was shooting Laughing Sam. A miner’s court convenes and they declare Harry Young not guilty because he did not kill the man he intended to kill—true story. My latest article in the June 2011 issue of True West Magazine is titled “Tracking Roosevelt’s River Pirates”. Three desperadoes stole Theodore Roosevelt’s rowboat on the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt and his ranch hands built another boat, chased after the thieves, caught them, and escorted them back to justice. I followed part of his route by canoe down the Little Missouri in North Dakota and wrote about Roosevelt’s experiences and my trip. I have another article coming out in the October issue of True West on the original western artwork found at the South Dakota tourist attraction, Wall Drug.

What's the story behind your tragic trek from Pierre, South Dakota, to Blacksburg, Virginia, and your subsequent book, American Pilgrim: A Post-September 11^th Bus Trip and Other Tales of the Road.

My new book, which has just come out, is titled American Pilgrim, A Post-September 11^th Bus Trip and Other Tales of the Road. It’s about a public bus trip I took from Pierre, South Dakota, to Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity celebration. It was several weeks after the September 11 attack on our country. The day I was scheduled to leave, a deranged Croatian attacked a Greyhound bus driver, wrecked the bus, and killed eleven people. The whole bus system in the USA was shut down, but after a few hours, the system started up again. My story is a mad dash across the country never knowing if I will make the next bus in time to make my reunion. One missed bus and I was done. I describe the characters on the bus and my experiences. As the bus travels through different towns and the countryside, I take literary side-trips I call “detours” and describe local history, unusual occurrences, or humorous personal experiences in or near those locals. One major theme running through the book is how we as a country were so patriotic and not in a sappy way. We were looking out for each other. Our background didn’t matter, white, black, Hispanic, protestant, catholic, democrat or republican, we were all Americans first. That’s what I hope to convey in this book and hopefully those who read it will be inspired to look past our differences and embrace our being American and being proud of it.

Advice to aspiring writers of the West?

Wow, advice to aspiring writers of the West. I feel that I’m still aspiring. Most good writers I know are humble people who strive for excellence in their writing. My advice is hang in there, it’s a tough road. Write what you love, but at the same time, if someone gives you an assignment, write that too. I believe that networking with other like-minded writers is essential. I would not be as far along in my writing as I am if were not for the great friends I have met in the writing field along the way. Now comes the commercial plug. If you are writing about the West and you are not already a member of Western Writers of America, join right now. The people of WWA are so friendly and helpful you will be amazed. The annual conferences are important on several levels. Again, you will meet fellow writers of the west, maybe an agent or two and a few editors. The sessions on writing and history are excellent. The companionship is great and I have made many very good friends in the organization. Again, join Western Writers of America, you won’t go wrong; and hang in there, for most folks the advancement of their writing is a slow process.

Where are the social networking links where you can be found?

People can find my books online at most Internet book sites including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I have a website, www.billmarkley.com. I have a place at My Space, I’m linked in on the LinkedIn Network, and I Tweet on Twitter, but I really don’t use them much. I’m also on Facebook and I must admit I am a Facebook junkie; but I think it’s the place for writers to be right now. Millions of people are on Facebook. They communicate to each other and pass on sites and ideas. I have sold books to folks on Facebook. About two years ago, I found there was really no sites where people could discuss anything they wanted to about the west, so I started the page Old West. There are about 1,400 people using the site now. It’s fun to sit back and watch the interactions between people I don’t even know on a site I set up. Then I thought, hey, there’s no site for Western Writers of America. I asked the leadership of WWA if I could set up a WWA Facebook page, they gave me the go-ahead and now there are over 800 members. I then set up my own page to promote my own writing. I’ve concluded, which I’m sure is nothing new, that selling is like fishing, you got to go where the fish are to catch them, so you have to go where the people are if you want to sell your books and writing.

A Visit with Bill Markley

2011-08-27T02:16:00.001-06:00

Bill Markley immersed himself in local history when he moved from Pennsylvania to South Dakota in 1976 and participated in Civil War and Western frontier reenacting. He's been in films such as "Dances With Wolves,""Son of the Morning Star," "Far and Away," "Gettysburg," and "Crazy Horse." He worked in Antarctica, traveled the South Pacific, kayaked and backpacked in Alaska, chaperoned a Boy Scout troop to Japan, and has camped, hiked, and rode horseback through the West. Markley has written two books, Dakota Epic, Experiences of a Reenactor during the filming of Dances With Wolves, and Up the Missouri River with Lewis and Clark. He writes for South Dakota Magazine, Roundup, True West, and Wild West. Markley’s story “Kenneth McKenzie, King of the Upper Missouri” appears in WWA’s anthology, Roundup! Markley and his wife Liz, live in Pierre where they raised two children.

Bill, How did your interest in history come about?

I have always been interested in history; and I lived with history as I grew up. My parents raised my brother and me on our southeastern Pennsylvania farm that’s been in the family since 1878. As a boy I could see where people before me had carved their initials in the barn beams. I used farm implements that would horrify people today knowing that we were using them and not placing them in a museum. Our church was a small Pennsylvania Dutch denomination that no one has ever heard of, the Schwenkfelder Church, and l learned early on about our perilous escape in 1734 from the religious intolerance of Germany to the religious freedom of William Penn’s colony. Adding to this, family members would occasionally find an arrowhead or musket ball while plowing the backfields. Just to top it off, we lived three miles from Valley Forge and would sled down its hills in the winter or go with the Boy Scout troop to participate in the Valley Forge pilgrimage during February snows where Washington’s army struggled to stay intact. Of course, it helped that my parents and grandparents loved history. For example, my dad’s mother loved to cook on a wood-burning stove and make us kids waffles using a cast-iron skillet. My mom and dad enjoyed collecting Native American craftwork. So, I love history; it’s in my blood.

What prompted your move to South Dakota?

A job. But it’s not that simple. I have always had a love for the West instilled in me by my dad. He had worked on a ranch near Loveland, Colorado, after he graduated from high school; and he loved everything western. We dressed western in eastern Pennsylvania. My dad usually wore a Stetson and always rode Western where most people at that time in that part of the country rode English. We raised Quarter Horses and came from a long line of horsemen. During the Great Depression, my dad’s dad bought and sold horses to bring in income for the family. I wish I had paid more attention to what my dad tried to teach me about horses.

Then of course, there were western movies, The Comancheros with John Wayne was one of the first movies I ever saw and it is still one of my favorites. I watched all the TV westerns with Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, The Virginian, Maverick, and Laredo as favorites. Reading was even a larger influence on me. I read every Zane Grey novel I could get my hands on. The Thundering Herd being one of my top favorites. I read fiction such as the Long Rife by Stewart Edward White and nonfiction such as Osborne Russell’s Journal of a Trapper.

At age 14, mom and dad decided they needed to take my brother and me on a family trip west. It was a two-week tour through South Dakota and into the Black Hills, through Sheridan, Wyoming, and up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn, over Bear Tooth Pass into Yellowstone, then the Grand Tetons, into Utah to Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyons, back up to Denver, Estes Park, and then a mad scramble home. I was hooked, I loved the west. Then in 1970, at the end of my freshman year at Virginia Tech and before my summer construction job was to begin, my cousin Ken Thompson and I decided to take a wild whirlwind camping trip out west and back in his 1960 VW Bug. Our only goal was the Pacific Ocean. We traveled through Nebraska and up to Yellowstone National Park, then across Idaho breaking down in the desert of eastern Oregon. Back on the road again to Crescent City, Oregon, where we saw the Pacific. We traveled along the California coastline to San Francisco, Los Angles, and then east through the Mohave Desert to Las Vegas up into Utah where the Bug died for good east of Price, and from there we took Continental Trailways bus line home.

I earned a BS degree in Biology and then a MS degree in Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. I sent job inquiry letters out to industry, environmental consulting firms, and state governments. The South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources responded, eventually interviewing and hiring me. I thought I knew what I was getting into from all my reading, viewing TV and the movies, and my treks through the West. I’ve lived in Pierre, South Dakota since 1976. I met my wife, Liz, here in Pierre where we have raised our two children Becky and Christopher. And, you know what? After living in the West for 35 years I’m still learning, there is so much about the west I don’t know!

Why did you become immersed in Civil War and Western frontier reenactments?

As I mentioned before I love history and I love reading; but reenacting is one step beyond reading and studying. As a kid, our family traveled to the Gettysburg battlefield and toured the grounds and monuments. It left a lasting impression. I went to college at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg Virginia. My freshman roommate had never met a Yankee. So you know what our first discussion was? That’s right, the Civil War. Over the years, I worked on family genealogy and found I had three great-great-grandfathers who fought for the North during the Civil War.

In 1989, Terry Pool, a Lutheran pastor and history-loving friend who had joined the 1^st Nebraska, a Civil War reenactment group in Omaha, gave me a telephone call. The 1^st Nebraska had been invited to portray Confederate soldiers in the Kevin Costner film, Dances With Wolves. A couple of the guys could not make it to South Dakota where the filming was to take place and Terry asked if I wanted to fill one of the vacant positions. I jumped at the chance and immersed myself into reenacting. By the end of the film, I had bought a musket, clothing, shoes, hats, and all the accoutrements that go with Civil War reenacting. As time went on I accumulated more and more frontier cavalry reenacting gear for movies and just plain fun of reenacting with like-minded friends.

Which films have you taken part in and how did that come about?

I mentioned earlier about how I became involved in Dances With Wolves. I was in the opening Civil War scenes. I can be seen in the first scene where Dunbar’s foot is going to be amputated. I am in the background, sitting on the left-hand side of a table playing chess. Later I play a Confederate soldier as Dunbar has his suicide ride against the Confederate line. I’m in the Fort Hayes scene where the major blows his brains out, and the final scene in Spearfish Canyon in the Black Hills as the cavalry search for the Indian village and Dunbar.

After Dances With Wolves, the reenactors formed a loose network of phone calls and e-mails to alert each other to new films coming about where they would need reenactors. The first of these was Son of the Morning Star, which was a made-for-TV movie about the Battle of The Little Big Horn. I was in several scenes including Reno’s attack and retreat. Next, I was in the Tom Cruse and Nicole Kidman film, Far and Away. I was an outrider for a wagon during the Oklahoma Land Rush, which was actually filmed in Montana. That land rush scene was amazing to be in when they fired off the cannon and hundreds of horses started at a full gallop. There were wrecks, runaways, and folks hauled off to the hospital. I was happy to survive that one. I was in the Ted Turner film, Gettysburg, and fought at Pickett’s Charge. The first few days we portrayed Confederates then the days after that we were Federals, so you could say I was shooting at myself. Last, I was in the TNT made-for-TV film, Crazy Horse and was in the final scene when Crazy Horse is killed at Fort Robinson.

What’s the most unusual event that happened while filming?

That’s a tuff question because there were lots of unusual and humorous things that happen that of course never make it on film. But a series of events took place that might be considered unusual or just plain bad luck for me. During Son of the Morning Star, the film crew gave several of us horses to ride out of the Fort Abraham Lincoln set. The horses were a little on the crazy wild side. At one point as I was climbing back up into the saddle, my knothead threw his head back giving me a head butt to the face. I thought I was okay, but the others around me called for the EMTs. One look at me and over my protests they hauled me off to the hospital for observations. I was eventually set free sporting a nice shiner. Later during the filming of Reno’s retreat into the woods, a rider dropped a guidon on the ground with the butt end sticking in the ground and the spear point facing skyward at a forty-five degree angle. We had dismounted and formed a skirmish line. The director told us to fire, fall back, reload, fire, fall back until we reached the woods just as Reno’s men had done. I started firing, and reloading on the run until I unknowingly ran into the guidon. The spear tip and flag fabric went through my coat, and through my shirt. I could not untangle and pull it out as the Indian reenactors were galloping toward us. So I pulled the guidon out of the ground and ran back into the woods with this spear sticking out of my chest. Fellow reenactors helped unravel the flag and pull the guidon out. Fortunately, I had only a nice gash along my chest. Of course, the others were impressed that I was wounded at the Little Big Horn.

My running into the woods with the guidon sticking out of my chest must have looked stupid because it did not show up in the movie. Later during the filming of Gettysburg, we were portraying confederates climbing over a split rail fence along the Emmetsburg Road

The director told us to fix bayonets. As I was climbing up the fence, I felt a sharp painful blow to my back. I had been hit from behind with the flat end of a bayonet as a Pennsylvania reenactor with a PhD in Reconstruction History, tripped and fell. It left a nice welt. Several days later, we were portraying Union troops. As we fired a volley of blank black powder into the oncoming rebels, I felt a hot searing pain in my right calf. I had been shot in the leg—no bullet but black power is powerful enough at close range. It singed my pants and long underwear. Turning around, I saw the culprit was Mr. PhD Reconstruction History. He apologized profusely and insisted on buying me a new pair of pants. Everyone joked that maybe someone was trying to tell me to get out of reenacting.

Part II of Bill Markley's interview will appear next week . . .

A Visit with Velda Brotherton

2011-08-20T00:01:00.003-06:00

Velda Brotherton was chosen The Washington County Historical Society's Distinguished Citizen for 2010. The Arkansas native was raised in Wichita and lived in New York. She and her husband returned to Arkansas where they live on an acreage in the Ozark National Forest. Fellow western writer Dusty Richards has influenced Velda's career more than anyone else. "He never let me give up, and there were times I wanted to. He always told me, 'The road to success is littered with quitters,' and I've never forgotten that." She has won a number of awards, including the coveted Willa from Women Writing the West for her novel, Fly Wwith the Mourning Dove.

Velda, what prompted you to begin writing?

At a certain age, my head filled with so many stories I began to write them down. I realized right away that book length was my best work mode. It appeared that I would have to give up something when my children and full time job demanded so much time. I know a lot of writers have full time jobs, but I would get so wrapped up in writing that I'd sit at the typewriter all night, get my kids off to school and it would be time to go to work. After having one short story published in a small magazine, I packed it in until we scaled back, left the rut we were in and moved to Arkansas where I was born. Here I got involved in the craft world, but since I don't know how to make anything, I began to write profiles about crafters. That, in turn, threw me back into the beloved world of writing fiction. I guess I've split my work over the years equally between western historical romances and regional nonfiction.

Why do you write Westerns?

That's probably Dusty Richard's fault. Each year he sponsors a western writing contest for Ozark Crative Writers Conference. In secret I wrote three chapters of a western and entered it. The first time I'd ever entered a contest. It won first place and you should've seen his face when he opened the envelope to give the award and saw my name. He had no idea the piece he had judged was mine, but he had written on it, something to the effect that the book needed to be published. So, I became a western writer. This book morphed into a romance when I pitched it at a WWA conference, the editor took it and told me with a woman protagonist I should turn it into a romance. So, I did. It was then published by Topaz at Penguin as were three more.

Why have you chosen the indie route? Do you enjoy having control over every aspect of your work?

The main reason for this change is my age and physical capabilities, or lack thereof. I just don't feel I can continue to promote "in the field," so to speak. Lugging my books from one store, library, society, etc., has become more than I can handle. So I'm not going to submit to publishers who will naturally require that of me. On the indie route, I can promote heavily on the Internet, and reap my rewards, whatever they might be without much sharing with publishers or agents.

Do you upload your books to Kindle or have someone else do the technical work for you?

Oh, dear. I learned to format and upload my books over a period of a few months. with much tearing of hair and chest beating. I took it a little bit at a time, and did a lot of research online as to the best ways to accomplish this. My good friend Lois Kleinsasser, helped me a bunch. At times we stayed on the phone for an hour or more while she instructed me in ways to "skin this cat," as she calls it. I now have two books up on Kindle and two more waiting in line that have been scanned. The final two are still in a box and will go off for scanning soon. At the moment, I'm still struggling to get professional looking book covers, though the two I have designed have gotten a lot of compliments. I want to learn more about this.

Why is Arkansas the center of your universe?

It's sort of like knowing where your roots are. I knew the moment we returned here to look for property---it was to be just the beginning of our search---that this was where I needed to be. My mother was raised here, my dad came here when he was sixteen. They left out of necessity when times were so hard and jobs non-existent. But something about these Ozarks gets into your blood. People who come here say the same thing, once they've lived here a while, they simply can't leave . Northwest Arkansas offers everything from the wilderness of the Boston Mountains where we live to a population center that serves half-a-million people and offers them jobs as well. I love the utter stillness of a summer's day, the green mountains that go to blue in the distance, the birds and other wildlife. To me it's the perfect place to live and write.

What’s the most difficult part of writing for you and the most rewarding?

The most difficult is that first draft. I feel the most creative then, but I am not a prolific writer. It's hard work for me to fix what I've put down on paper. A book can take me a year or more to finish, and then sometimes I have to go back and make major changes.

The most rewarding? Well, that would be the people I've met during these long years I've spent writing. Oh, it's great to see that book become "real" and hear people tell me how much they enjoyed it. But other writers and my readers make me feel like it's all worthwhile. I've made some lifelong friends and hold them dear, all because I'm a writer.

How do you find time to travel and attend so many writers conferences? And does it pay off in terms of book sales?

We love to travel, but we're having to cut back some as we get older. I still like to get behind the wheel and drive with hubby as navigator. I actually only attend three or four conferences a year, plus the quarterly Ozark Writer's League in Branson. And yes, it pays off, but not necessarily in book sales. Every book I've had published I pitched and sold at a writer's conference, from the very first to the two nonfiction books I'm now promoting. Nothing beats sitting down with an editor or publisher and discussing my work . As for time, I hold to a strict schedule. Mondays for online promotion, Tuesdays for short work, stories and articles. The remainder of the week for whatever book project I'm currently working on. Six days a week, six hours or more a day. It's my job, and I love it.

Which book required the most research and which has been your favorite?

The one that required the most research was probably Springdale: the Courage of Shiloh, though The Boston Mountains: Lost in the Ozarks would run it a close second. Nonfiction like I write calls for hours of research, more hours of driving around checking my facts and interviewing tons of people.

You know what? My favorite book is usually the one I'm working on. And that would be a women's fiction which I plan to publish online when it's finished. The title is Beyond the Moon and I'm loving the ins and outs of the story about a woman and her granddaughter and two men involved in wars decades apart. It's challenging.Advice to aspiring writers.

If you don't love writing, don't do it. Don't do it for money or fame, do it because you love it. I can't stress that enough. And then if you do love it, learn your craft, find a critique group or a couple of other writers to help you out. Help them out in return. Go to conferences, learn from everyone. No matter how long you study, there'll always be something else you can learn. We can't listen with our mouth open, so listen to what others have to teach you. And never give up.

Thanks for stopping by, Velda.
You can vist Velda at her webiste: http://www.veldabrotherton.com,
her blog sites: http://vbrotherton.blogspot.com and http://veldabrotherton.blogspot.com
on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/authorveldabrotherton
and Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/veldabrotherton
Plus a link to her Kindle books: Here's a link to my Kindle books: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005G4WVSE

A Visit with Mike Kearby

2011-08-13T10:38:00.000-06:00

Mike Kearby, a retired high school reading and English teacher, is the author of nine novels. The Road to a Hanging (2006), Ride the Desperate Trail (2007), and Ambush at Mustang Canyon (fall, 2007), completed his Young Adult trilogy published by Dorchester Publishing. Ambush at Mustang Canyon was honored as a 2008 Spur Award Finalist from the Western Writers of America. Mike’s other works include: The Taken (Dorchester) A Hundred Miles to Water (ReadWest), Texas Tales Illustrated~The Revolution (TCU Press).

Mike, what prompted you to establish the Collaborative Novel Project for teen writers?

Elmer Kelton, James Ward Lee, and Judy Alter spoke on their involvement in a collaborative novella published by TCU Press. The novella was entitled, Noah's Ride. A few days after the event, I spoke with James and Elmer about collaborating with other professional authors in such an undertaking. After those conversations, I thought it would be a great vehicle for kids who dreamed of becoming writers. As the concept evolved, I came up with two take-aways for participants in the project. They were:
(1) Students will understand that schools can meet and collaborate without being involved competitively.
(2) Small town students will understand that they possess the ability to write as well as their counterparts in larger schools.
I think the project has proven its value. In 2010, The Western Writers of America took over the collaborative novel and re-branded it as the WWA Youth Writing Project. During its first year under the WWA umbrella, I was project coordinator. Our 2010 novella was entitled, Anthology. This fall, WWA members Linda Jacobs and Sherry Monahan will take the reins and drive the project to new heights.

Are your books written for young adults?
I write both adult and young adult novels.

Tell us about your Will Rogers Medallion winner, A Hundred Miles to Water.

A Hundred Miles to Water is an historical fiction account of the Olive family of Williamson County, Texas. The Olives were ranchers who trailed cattle during the cattle drive hey-days. They were a violent family who delivered their own brand of justice to anyone who crossed them, including two Nebraska farmers, Luther Mitchell and Ami Ketchum. The book was written to show that historical events often come blurred as to right and wrong. One of my favorite lines from the book comes when antagonist, E.B. Gunn and protagonist, Pure Reston meet on opposite sides of the Rio Grande. The encounter comes after Pure has raided a bandit hideout slaughtering all inside. After the gunplay, Pure hollers across the river demanding to know how E.B. knew he would attack the bandits. E.B. responds, "Because Pure Reston, you and me . . . we ain't all that different are we?" The book, while violent, portrays the fruits of such violence. In the end, all of the characters lose. Some their lives, some their health and wealth, and for Pure, he loses the most - which is his inability to look into the mirror each day and like what he sees.

Why don’t most young people like to read for enjoyment? Are there too many video games competing with books? And have kids discovered e-readers such as Kindle?

Great question. During the mid-eighties, when parents wanted to relax from a hard day's work, they came home, and stuck a video game or movie in their kid's hands and said, "Go watch a movie or play a game so Daddy and Mommy can have some quiet time."
It worked really well.

Too well, in fact, for soon after those same movies and video games sat prominently on the kid's bookshelves. And the books dwindled in number until they were gone. As is the case with most ills in society, the adults are usually the ones to initiate the problems. The kids simply observe and follow the examples they are given.

During my time as a reading teacher, the prevailing thought regarding reading was if a child had books available at home, and if the parents read in front of the child, then one day that child would read also. If every school in the U.S. would allow one hour per day for students to read, and by read, I mean read whatever they want, then in less than a decade, we would see a huge difference in our kids enjoying the learning process and best of all seeking out knowledge. You can still maintain required reading, but every child needs time to read what they enjoy - be that Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, the Sunday paper, or a graphic novel. And here's why, we know that a child who reads and associates reading with pleasure will continue to read throughout their life. The pleasure comes from reading something that interests their minds. Over time, the brain will ask that child to read something more challenging. The graphic novel about The Alamo becomes easy, and the child turns to the biography of David Crockett or Juan Seguin. It's really a simple process that unfortunately, we adults have messed up.

It does take time and varies by child, but then not all children walk at the same age, talk at the same age, etc…

And why is reading so important? Reading is the foundation for all learning, from science to math. A child who reads well is a confident child. Most discipline problems in our schools can be traced back to a child who does not read at their grade level. It is much easier to be a problem than be exposed as "that dumb kid who can't read."

As far as reading on Kindle-type devices, what I see is that kids will probably never join the electronic reader revolution. Today's kids and the generations to follow only want to have one device. And that device will be a phone-like device that allows them to read, watch movies, purchase merchandise, etc… While iPhone type devices do much of that today, I see another device arriving over the next three years that will obsolete today's smart phones. I think the Kindle and Nook are an interim step for the generations of the 50's 60's and 70's. The newer generations will be reading on "one device does all" handhelds.

What prompted you to begin writing in 2005 and how have you been able to turn out nine books since that time?

In 2005, I looked up and asked myself, "Where did all the time go?" I sat down with my wife and told her I was going to sell my business and do the one thing that I had wanted to do all of my life, and that was - write. I didn't want to go another ten years and regret having not tried. As far as "churning" out the novels, I decided early on in the process that in order to enjoy any success, I had to "go to work everyday." I am an early morning person, so at 5:30 a.m. each morning I am at my desk writing. I usually finish by 8 a.m. and then edit the morning's writing in the afternoon.

Are all your books set in Texas, or do you travel to other areas for research?

Currently all of my work is set in Texas.

What do you tell young students that fires them up to read?

I always begin my school talks with the question. "What is the most important muscle or organ in your body to exercise? The one good thing about today's kids is they exercise. The exercise might be skateboarding, playing sports after school, or walking, but most kids do it. So the normal response is to shout out, "Your heart!" Then I ask, but what organ or muscle tells your heart to beat, and your lungs to breathe? Then, they understand. Once I tell them that exercising your brain will not make them sweaty, or tired, or in need of a shower, and that it makes them smarter without studying, I get their full attention. Since peer pressure can be intimidating within some student groups, I always encourage kids to read at home before they go to sleep at night. Before I leave any speaking engagement, I extract a pledge from the students that they will read thirty minutes every day on whatever interests them.

Who most influenced your own work?

I grew up reading Ray Bradbury. His books fueled my imagination early in my reading life. Western-wise, I read Clair Huffaker, Louis L'Amour, and of course Elmer Kelton.

Advice for fledgling writers of the West?

I teach writing classes for several organizations. The first handout every student in one of my classes receives is my "writing ante" page. I'm sure everyone knows that ante is a poker term that describes the initial contribution a player makes before any cards are dealt. I tell my students that a writing ante is their "stake" or what must be paid to be allowed in the writing game. My ante is three-fold.

(1) I will be a voracious reader
(2) I will write everyday
(3) I will always present a perfect manuscript to my publisher
I go on to tell the students that they need to decide what their writing ante will be. And then build up that ante so they can sit down at the writing (poker) table.

      Thank you for stopping by, Mike. I've enjoyed our visit.

      You can visit Mike at his website: www.mikekearby.com
      and his blog site http://mikekearbystexas.blogspot.com/
      He's also on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/MikeKearbyNovels

Remembering Will Henry, Part II

2011-08-06T14:05:00.001-06:00

1912-1991

Was your father proud of you when you became a published writer?

My father was a great bookman—by that I mean that he loved great books and owned many shelves of them—but he was likewise a spirited reader and user of all literature with a major in poetry. He loved Poetry. Paticularly Burns and the great British narrative poets. He could recite Burns in the vernacular by the hour. I give him a hard way to go in some of my memories, but he was no ordinary man. Oddly enough, for a man with such a hot flame for reading and authors, his reaction to my emergence as a sometime writer of frontier and other fiction, was virtually nonexistent. That always puzzled me. Worried me, too.

I had to ask him, after I sent him a copy of No Survivors (Henry’s first novel). He didn’t volunteer. And when I cornered him he was plainly at a loss for what to say. I always felt as though he thought I wasn’t a writer in those terms he used to define writers—world fame—and he really didn’t know what to do with me and General Custer. It made me think, in view of his love of books, that it became quite possible that he was right, and that I wasn’t a real writer. Pretty hard to argue when you’re being measured against Wee Bobbie Burns and, oh, Byron, Coleridge, Browning and Sir Walter Scott.

How did you later break into script writing?

I was first hired as a script writer by Dale Robertson on his old “Wells Fargo” series, next by Twentieth Century Fox to do the first script for “The Tall Men.” Then on to Universal to do a takeoff—what we call a spin-off today—in other words a sequel to “The Day Fort Larking Fell.”

Did you write scripts for films while you were in Hollywood?

I never was a screenwriter in the feature-length sense. I worked for the short subjects department at MGM as a contract writer for several years. I had a few TV credits back in the fifties, but my assignments with movie studios were mainly as a writer-hand on those ten-week contracts the major studios gave to writers to come in and develop a script from their novels. I learned a lot about “inside Tinseltown.” But as to being a screenwriter, no, I was not that. Nor did I ever more than briefly aspire to be. The money was incredible, yes, but the terms for earning it were impossible to accept—the trashing of friendship, truth and loyalty. So here I am starving under all those grand terms. Flat-tail broke, but upright and loyal and full of truth and friendship.

How do you compare screenwriting with novels?

I did consider screenwriting to be a second cousin to novel writing. And still do. But it is a splendid art form in its own right. Did you ever stop to think that nearly all of the Western movies of major note were successful as published works only after the “great movie” had been made from them and released, to start the fire under published material which otherwise would be going the way of Old Will, down the trail to Wanagi Yata? Make your own list: Shane, Hondo, Red River, Stagecoach, True Grit, High Noon, The Way West. The list is endless. The movies have been the great savior of the Western novel, say Western story, period.

Why do you write Westerns?

I write westerns because I’ve always loved the West, both as a land and as an intangible mythology. I love the looks of the deserts, the skies, the mountains, the roll of the plains. There’s nothing like it. I can’t to this day take an automobile ride in prairie country, or mountains or canyon country that I don’t thrill to it, and feel its strangeness, and the pull of its mystique, and want again to write. Oh, yes, I love the West.

How would you categorize your work?

I consider myself out of the mainstream of Western traditional writing. This fact, more than any other, has operated against my achieving the wide popular readership I lament never having had. Category traditions are sacred in the Old West. If an author wants to travel his own road, he better be prepared to walk lonely through its dusty shadows. Because that will be his pay, and he with only himself to blame for dreaming to be different, or trying to be separate and still equal. That’s a toe-dance that will damage your tootsies every time. But I have had fun. And great rewards from colleagues’ respect and affection.

What advice do you give aspiring writers?

Keep at it. That’s all. If it’s in you, it will come out. If it’s not, you’ll still get a lot of fun thinking it is.

Any tips for a writer approaching an editor for the first time?

Yes, for God’s sake, get your manuscript set up in a professional manner before you go to the editor with it. It never ceases to amaze me how amateur writers will not listen to people who try to help them; who tell them how to prepare a professional manuscript in the visual and actual sense, not the creative, but simply the appearance of knowing what they’d doing on paper. So new writers, listen when old writers talk.

What do you admire most in other writers?

The gift, the gift, if they really have the gift.

Who, in your opinion, has been the most effective writer in the business?

The most effective writer was Mr. Louis Dearborn L’Amour. He was an absolute phenomenon. I cannot believe the man’s talent for what he did. It is absolutely beyond my comprehension. I know of his endless work ethic. I held him to be an honorable man. But I just can’t see how he did what he did. He was the most effective at it, and by light years.

(Excerpted from Maverick Writers as well as Westerners, although not in its entirety.)

Remembering Will Henry

2011-07-30T19:39:00.002-06:00

Will Henry, Clay Fisher or Henry "Hank" Allen; it matters little by which name he was known for his words sing like no writer before him. His romantic, poetic, often cynical prose is shot with humor and appreciation for a simpler time when a man's world was his bond, and a woman was a warm, noncompetitive companion.

The tall, lanky author of more than fifty books, most of them Western novels that sold more than 15 million copies, once worked as a script writer in Hollywood, where a number of his novels were adapted to film. One of the few of his profession who actually looked like a novelist, Henry described himself as having the "old-hand, far-squinted look, all bearded and Levied, mainly unshorn and eons ahead of the hippies. But God understands that Will Henry is not a hippie." He was a guarded, self-effacing man who said he skulked around life's edges, a reclusive hypochondriac (an occupational hazard), who had reason to to worry about his health during his final years, yet always seemed to find time to come to the defense of his fellow man.

If his collection of awards is indicative of his writing ability, few can match him; nor was he included to talk about the honors heaped upon him. Research uncovered the fact that he was the first writer to receive the prestigious Saddleman Award from Western Writers of America in 1961 for outstanding literature. He also shared the honor with the late Fred Grove of winning five Spurs. Another kudo was the Cowboy Hall of Fame's Wrangler Award.

To tamper with such creative talent would be pure heresy, so the following interview contains his unabridged responses to the question: Who is this Will Henry?

"You must be warned that my name is not Ishmeal, nor was I born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. Neither was it the best of times or the worst of times. My name is Will Henry and maybe Clay Fisher, and for sure Henry W. Allen. Likewise, this is as much of my story as I would care to see displayed where small children might get their hands on a legible copy. Attend therefore charitably. It was a raw, cold day that saw my birth in old Missouri. Mean with the bite of sleet in its frozen teeth. One of those westering days when the very wind carried a knife. A perfect day for a Libran child to emerge, gaze in whinnied startlement at the strange world all about, recoil and cry out, "Oh, my God, I thought it was 1812!"

How did your family background shape your life?

They always want to know right off about your family background. And this is a subject that must be approached with some care in the present case. The family background is no stranger to suspicion. Indeed, there must have been an extra-legal scrape, or six, along the way. Even some time served, or owed the State. Who knows? We don't guaranteed a thing here. On me? A fellow whose father was a best personal friend of Jesse Woodsen James III? Who was whelped and reared in one of the two counties that harbored the James gang in its halcoyn raids? Who got to meet Cole Younger in the Confederate Veterans Home at Liberty, when his oral surgeon dad took him along one day when called out to treat the old outlaw? But, after all, how many ten-year-old kids get to meet Cole Younger?

Were were you born?

I was born fit and proper of a married mother and father in the "Show Me" stare of Missouri, which everyone knows is pronounced "Missourah," county of Jackson, city of Kansas City, September 29th, 19 and 12. That made me the middle of three brothers, with two sisters, one each flank, oldest and youngest of the brood.

So you're a Libra.

Yes, that's the brand of starchild I was. Libras are nuts, you know. But mostly just dingy, not dangerous. They drink spunkwater and hang upside down in old barns. And they're sneaky. But excuse me, Ma'am, you wanted specifics?

What were you like as a child? Were you shy? Precocious?

Was I shy? Of course, cripplingly so. Precocious? Not likely. If I knew the antonym for precocious, I mean if I were a writer or something like that, I would know. I'd tell it right out, that I was the antithesis of precocious. Friendly, outgoing? Quite the contrary. I was a crafty and coyotish child. Stealthy, skittish, not above the occasional disinformational mispresentation. Just your typical middleborn neurotic kid growing up bored and restless in the midwest heartland of the early 1900s.

What did you read during your youth?

Weird Tales magazine. Oh, hardcover? Well, there was Sax Romer and old Dr. Fu Manchu, and Edgar Rice Burroughs with the Mars books and At the Earth's Core, and Conan Doyle and that doper Holmes, and Jeffry Farnol and The Money Moon, and Kipling and that talking animal act and Soldiers Three, and, Oh, Lord! all the wonderful old stuff of a better day among reader-people.

Were you a good student?

The answer is still nyet. But I don't want to be misunderstood. I know it is popular in current biographical references to say that they were educated in the streets--street child, street smart--the usual dreary litany of modern validation. But such anti-establishment posturing, with its incurable juvenitis, was not for me. I was not, as they put it, into that. Of course, no generation escapes its rebel youth. I was a bunchquitter, myself, but not in their frame and fashiion. I was in business for myself, a certified lone-hand kid. If I were not a good academic risk, neither was I pointlessly rebellions. I just didn't belong to any crowd, and still don't.

(Next week he talks about his writing, his days in Hollywood and his father's detrimental influence. . .)

Excerpted from my book, Maverick Writers.

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A Visit with Jan Marquart

2011-07-23T00:01:00.009-06:00

Jan Marquart is a licensed clinical social worker who specializes in family and couple counseling in addition to being an author. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of California/Santa Cruz and a master’s degree in Social Work from San Jose State University. She's a member of the New Mexico Book Association, National Writers Union, and the National Association of Social Workers. She has authored eight books, two booklets, and numerous articles for newspapers a s well as more than 88 daily journals. Her latest book, an historical, is titled Voices From the Land,

Jan, your historical novel is based in 1860. Why was that such an auspicious year in American history?

In 1860 President Lincoln had become president-elect Lincoln which portended powerful changes to this country. Southern states were seceding from the Union. It was a time in which the country was on the brink of structural changes and the ownership of slaves was a major issue. In 1861 President Lincoln issued the executive order of the Emancipation Proclamation, but just because the President signs a piece of paper doesn’t mean humanity’s beliefs and actions change. Voices From the Land doesn’t speak from the voices of politicians; it speaks from the individual voices that walked through those political changes.

How did your novel evolve? And why is the story important to you?

The novel evolved over eleven days of sitting on my five acres in Lamy, NM and simply listening and writing. An intuitive told me to do that but it took me two years before I had the courage to embark on such a strange adventure. Every day I would sit on my land and get real still inside. Before I knew it I was writing so fast I could hardly keep up. The last few testaments from the voices were written in my home because the weather turned too cold to sit out on the land for any length of time and write. Each of my books has its own value in my life but I feel honored that Voices From the Land was ‘given’ to me and I think the reason for it will unfold somehow. I often ask what that reason was but whatever it was this book is important to me because its power has remained with me for the last three years. What better message to get from a book than the fact that peace and harmony demands cooperation, love and compassion?

Describe the storytelling device you use in Voices From the Land and how it defines your characters.

The device used is a separate chapter for each voice. Together these chapters make up the story of this newly forming town in the Wild West.

How did your interest in the Old West come about?

I never considered myself someone interested in the Old West although my dad and I used to watch all the western movies together: Rawhide, Wagon Train, Matt Dillon and such. I never thought about it after that, even when I lived in California. When I bought my home in Lamy the realtor gave me a copy of the history of the owners of the land. I thought it was fascinating but I don’t believe that had anything to do with Voices From the Land.

You’ve written a fair amount of nonfiction about the writing process and I understand that you’re about to teach an online course for writers. How did writing about the West evolve from writing about writing?

I don’t believe my books about writing evolved into writing about the west. Voices From the Land was not a deliberately written book. So I see it as separate from my usual writing interests. If I hadn’t been told to sit on my land, listen and write by the intuitive in 2006, I just don’t see any way Voices from the Land would have been written.

Who are your favorite authors and which ones most influenced your own work?

People ask me that all the time and I immediately get a long list of writers filtering through my mind. I read a great deal and enjoy so many different authors, but if I were to talk about the two authors that influence my own writing I would say Elizabeth Berg and Paul Coehlo. Their writing focuses on relationships and soul-searching and I love that. They inspire me to think deeply and that inspires me to write deeply. Kate’s Way began the minute I finished one of Elizabeth Berg’s novels. I’ve read 14 of her books.

What do you love almost as much as writing?

Cooking, drawing, decorating-anything creative. Without the creative process I don’t know where my soul would go for rejuvenation because when I’m creative I’m linked to God.

What do you tell aspiring writers?

I tell them to write and don’t raise the pen off the paper until they have poured from their heart everything it has to say.

Thanks, Jan.

You can visit Jan at her website: My website is www.awareliving.net which she'll soon be changing to a WorlPress site, which will provide links to her books.

Her blog is: www.freethepen.wordpress.com

and her Facebook account is located at:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Jan-Marquart-Author/206946139348615

A Visit with Candy Moulton

2011-07-16T07:30:00.001-06:00

Candy Moulton has written thirteen Western history books, co-edited a collection of short fiction and an encyclopedia. She also wrote, produced, and has been a reenactor in several documentary films. She won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America in 2006 for her biography, Chief Joseph: Guardian of the People and another Spur in 2010 for In Pursuit of a Dream, the documentary film she wrote and produced with Boston Productions Inc (BPI) for the Oregon-California Trails Association.

That production won an Oregon Heritage Award, Best Experimental Film from the Oregon Film Festival, Silver Remi Award from the USA Film Festival in Houston, and was a Finalist at the International Family Film Festival in Hollywood. “Footsteps to the Wes,t” written for the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper, Wyoming, was a Spur Finalist for Best Documentary in 2003.

Candy, what prompted your book, Forts, Fights and Frontier Sites?

I attended the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association quite a few years ago as a representative for Wyoming Writers. We had a publisher walk up to our booth and tell John Nesbitt and I that she was looking for a writer to do a book in a series she was publishing about frontier military sites in Wyoming. John told her I could do the book. We took her information and published it in the Wyo-Writer newsletter to let all members of the organization know about the opportunity. Approximately six months later I contacted the publisher and asked if she had a writer lined up. She did not and I told her I was interested in writing the book, which I did. As fate would have it, before she could publish the book, she sold her company. The new owner did some additional work with me on the manuscript, but also did not bring it out and I was able to reclaim rights to the book (before long this publisher went bankrupt).

Once I had my rights back, I took the manuscript to the one publisher best suited to do it in the first place—High Plains Press in Glendo, Wyoming. I had already done other books with Nancy Curtis at High Plains and she agreed to publish this volume as well. We jointly decided to expand the book to include other frontier sites in addition to forts and conflicts that involved the frontier army. I had a lot of information and many photos related to my years of traveling across Wyoming for various articles, and traveling with wagon trains on the many overland trails in the state and it was fun to incorporate that into Forts, Fights and Frontier Sites.

What does your job as executive producer for BPI (Boston Productions) entail?

I plan and produce multimedia projects for museums, visitors’ centers, and interpretive centers. This gives me an opportunity to work in a number of interesting venues, generally working on projects in the West. Among the projects I’ve produced (or co-produced and written) are exhibits at the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper, Wyoming; exhibits at the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center in Worland, Wyoming; a documentary film “In Pursuit of a Dream” for the Oregon-California Trails Association; and other projects in Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Kansas.

How do you find time to write books while you’re editing WWA’s Roundup magazine, the Oregon –California Trails Associations News from the Plains as well as freelancing for True West Magazine and other publications? You must be very organized.

If you saw my office you would know that organization is not my strongest suit. But I do have a lot of different projects ongoing at any one time. I manage things through the use of lots of lists, and find that I never have to worry about “writer’s block.” If for some reason I can’t seem to get moving on one project, there is a guarantee I have something else on which I can spend my time working. I also have a regular work routine. Freelance writing is my job and I treat it as one that I do full time, at a minimum of 40 hours a week, but more often 50 or 60 hours each week. If I’m involved in film production as well, I am often putting in 14 to 16 hour days. I do it because I absolutely love what I do. It is work and fun and gives me great opportunities to learn or do something new almost every day. And as for writing the books…I don’t do them as quickly as I ought to…and have a publisher who is probably wondering even now whey I’m not concentrating on the one I should have done!

Where do you lecture and on which subjects?

I do not do many lectures because I honestly don’t have time for them. I have occasionally done talks at museums and libraries to share information about writing or history, most often related to my books and the research I have done for them, or about the overland trails, which are a favorite subject of mine. This year I was invited to speak at the Order of Indian Wars Conference, and that was a great experience because I got to attend and listen to some other speakers who shared interesting research.

Briefly, why do you consider Chief Joseph the greatest Indian diplomat, philosopher and war leader?

He worked all of his life to retain his tribal culture and do so from a position of diplomacy and cooperation rather than conflict. He did not seek out a fight with the federal army prior to, nor even really during the events that led to the 1877 Nez Perce war and the tribe’s epic flight across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. He was not a war leader (his younger brother held that distinction for their Wallowa band of Nez Perces), yet he fought for the rights of his people. Even after he surrendered his gun at the Bear’s Paw Battlefield in October 1877 and was transferred with the ill, injured, young and elderly people of his band and tribe to Indian Territory, he worked tirelessly to eventually make it possible for them to return to the Columbia Basin. While many were allowed to return to Idaho, he and his closest followers were instead placed on a reservation near Colville, Washington. All he ever really wanted (as did his father), was to remain on their tribal lands in the Wallowa Valley. Whenever I sign a copy of Chief Joseph: Guardian of the People I always write, “Cherish your freedom!” If you read the book you will understand that is all Joseph and his people wanted: to live freely in their home country.

Is western literature on the comeback trail?

It never went anywhere so I don’t think it needs to come back. However, it certainly has evolved. I actually believe there are more Western books written and published now than ever before—they just all don’t look the same. Instead of novels about cowboys and Indians fighting each other, or cowboys fighting large landowners we have a broader range of stories than ever. There are tales of prehistoric people, mountain men, pioneer women, young people challenging the Western landscape, those who are involved in mysteries or contemporary law enforcement in the West, and more. And there are stories of Indians written by Indians, of Chinese in the West written by Chinese writers, and other ethnic stories that in the “good old days” may have never seen the opportunity for publication.

Advice to aspiring western writers?

Write. Read. Attend a writer’s conference. Read. Meet other Western writers. Read. Join a writer’s organization and truly become involved. Oh, and finally, read more.

How important is social networking and blogging to a western writer?

My first newspaper editor told me when I was 16 that it did not matter how much you wrote, nor how good it was, if you did not have readers, your writing meant nothing. If you are writing and publishing books these days, you absolutely must be doing corresponding marketing. A way to do that is through attending book signings, giving talks at the local senior center or for any other group you might be able to visit, and now as our communications world evolves, by posting notices, and other material on social network sites. Some people are very, very good at this. I am only mediocre. I blogged when we were filming “In Pursuit of a Dream” and had fun with it. I’ve tried resurrecting my blog more recently, but find myself too busy doing the writing that I get paid to do that I don’t keep up with the “free” writing very well.

And how are writer organizations, both online and off, a great help to fledglings as well as old pros? They are essential. Writing is generally a solitary pursuit; writer’s organizations give you a network to tap into for inspiration, advice, and even opportunity. My involvement in such organizations as Wyoming Press Women/Wyoming Media Professionals, National Federation of Press Women, Wyoming Writers, Women Writing the West, and most especially Western Writers of America have provided me with my greatest opportunities and successes as a writer. If you want a career as a writer you absolutely must join—and become involved with—writer’s organizations.

Thanks for stopping by.

You can visit Candy at her website: www.candymoulton.com

Her blog site: candymoulton.blogspot.com

Facebook/CandyMoulton

Facebook/Inpursuitofadream

www.inpursuitofadream.org

www.bostonproductions.com

and LinkedIn