One Foot in the Stirrup is a collection of western short stories that I first brought out myself in the fall of 1995. It consists of nine stories, six of them previously published, and it has been a nice little book for me.
The short stories range from my first published piece of fiction, a story entitled "West of Dancing Rock," published in 1978 by a pulp magazine called Far West, to a couple of other gunfight stories, to a couple of heartfelt stories, to a closing piece that edges into irony and parody. These stories together have a varied appeal, and the collection has sold in bookstores that carry my traditional westerns.
Why I brought out this collection is an interesting footnote in itself. When my first novel, One-Eyed Cowboy Wild, came out in 1994, I plunged into the new life of a published author who did book signings and other promo activities such as interviews, readings, and panel discussions. The book sold well and went out of stock pretty quickly, so when I went to the Western Writers of America convention the next summer, I was unable to participate in the group book signing because my first book was sold out and my second one, Twin Rivers, was still going through the press. So I wandered around and looked at everyone else’s books. During this period between the release of my first two novels, I also reflected on the many occasions in which prospective buyers looked at the price of a hardcover western and set the book down. So I decided two things: one, that I was not ever going to be without a book on the table again, and two, that I was going to try to have something less expensive than a regular hardcover.
With that in mind, I went about selecting the stories for this collection, getting bids, and arranging for production. This was all new to me, but I plugged through and got four hundred copies that I could sell for $7.95, which was less than half of the $19.95 that the hardcover westerns were costing at the time. I sold the first print run in a couple of years, and I had gotten a positive enough response from readers and booksellers that I decided to do a second printing. My brother David, who is a professional artist, did me a new cover drawing, and I had a couple of review excerpts to go along with the cover copy on the back. This time I printed five hundred copies, and within a couple of years I had sold most of them. In the meanwhile I also was able to get a contract for a large print edition, so a thousand copies went out into the world in that version, primarily to libraries. All of this is still on a very small scale, but I felt as if it was a successful project.
There is a stigma to self-publishing, especially in fiction, as it seems to be an admission that no one else will publish this author’s work, and therefore he has to do it himself. In this case, it was true to some extent, as I could not find a publisher who wanted to print this collection at the company’s expense. However, my decision to self-publish was not a desperate act, as most of the stories had been previously published, and I had already had two real novels published in hardcover. Furthermore, one of these stories has been singled out for praise in a prestigious review when the story first appeared in an anthology, and the collection itself received a couple of positive reviews when it came out. After that, the large print edition got out and about and made money (for the publisher and for the author) on its own. My most important measure for the success of a book is whether it gets a good response from reviewers and readers. For other writers, the success of a book is measured by whether it makes money. Either way, One Foot in the Stirrup has been rewarding to me.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
WWA 2009--Winning the Spur
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual Western Writers of America convention in Oklahoma City. The high point for me was receiving the Spur award for Best Mass Market Paperback Original for my 2008 novel Trouble at the Redstone. Earlier in the year, I was very excited to learn of my winning the award, but the emotional value really increased when I went to the convention. Not only did I receive congratulations and expressions of good will from many friends and fellow writers, but I also had the great pleasure of meeting Leah Hultenschmidt, an editor from Dorchester Publishing / Leisure Books, the company that has published my westerns for several years. After stammering out a few words of acknowledgment as I accepted the award, I stepped aside and heard Leah's eloquent words of praise and appreciation. It was an unforgettable moment, certainly one of the high points in my life and in my career as a writer, ranking right up there with finishing my doctoral dissertation and seeing the first printed copy of my first book.
To recapitulate my acceptance remarks, I express my thanks to Don D'Auria, my editor at Leisure Books, who has always offered me encouragement and support and who has believed in me as a writer. I also thank his excellent colleague Leah Hultenschmidt, who was very generous with her time, as she listened to and responded to my thousand questions about my various writing endeavors, and who put in a stellar appearance at the convention in various sessions and meetings. I express my appreciation to Max McCoy and Andrew Fenady, finalists in this year's competition, two very fine writers whose company it was an honor to be in. I thank my wife, Rocio, and my son, Dimitri, for their unfailing support in all that I do and for their sharing this great moment with me. I thank the members of Western Writers of America, with gratitude in knowing that this honor comes from all of them. And as an added note I thank my horse Blackie, who threw me off a couple of times and sent me to the hospital on the second occasion; although he did not intend to, he taught me that even when a fellow thinks he's got a good hold and thinks he might make a good ride, there's a lesson in humility waiting to happen.
To recapitulate my acceptance remarks, I express my thanks to Don D'Auria, my editor at Leisure Books, who has always offered me encouragement and support and who has believed in me as a writer. I also thank his excellent colleague Leah Hultenschmidt, who was very generous with her time, as she listened to and responded to my thousand questions about my various writing endeavors, and who put in a stellar appearance at the convention in various sessions and meetings. I express my appreciation to Max McCoy and Andrew Fenady, finalists in this year's competition, two very fine writers whose company it was an honor to be in. I thank my wife, Rocio, and my son, Dimitri, for their unfailing support in all that I do and for their sharing this great moment with me. I thank the members of Western Writers of America, with gratitude in knowing that this honor comes from all of them. And as an added note I thank my horse Blackie, who threw me off a couple of times and sent me to the hospital on the second occasion; although he did not intend to, he taught me that even when a fellow thinks he's got a good hold and thinks he might make a good ride, there's a lesson in humility waiting to happen.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Adventures of the Ramrod Rider
Adventures of the Ramrod Rider was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in the fall of 1999. It followed two contemporary western novels of mine that Endeavor Books published, and it was a great joy for me to see this book published.
Sometimes, as when I am inscribing a signed copy for someone, I refer to this as "a crazy little book, dear to my heart." That it is. A mixture of parody, satire, (pristine) romance, and traditional cowboy poetry, this is a one-of-a-kind book that people get a kick out of.
I first started with the Ramrod Rider when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation in the late 1970's. After reading numerous early nineteenth-century historical romances, late nineteenth-century dime novels, and twentieth-century hack westerns, many of which seemed preposterous, I felt myself brimming with material that needed to be dealt with—or, to put it in another way, material that I had to write about in order to keep a sane perspective. I sometimes describe this need as writing in self-defense, sort of defending myself against impulses I don’t want to keep trapped inside, as well as defending myself against the absurdities of the world.
So I created the Ramrod Rider and put him through some encounters in a story called "Adventures of the Ramrod Rider, Price Ten Cents," the title of which I think is self-explanatory. I gave some of the characters alliterative names, as in the dime novels, and I also dropped in allusions and references to twentieth-century western writers and their works. Here the Ramrod Rider delivers part of his autobiography in spontaneous poetry. It was all a great deal of fun, and I was pleased to get a rejection slip from an editor who was appalled. I don’t think a person is supposed to explain his work or his jokes in a submission letter, so I took my chances. Then I wrote "Further Adventures, Price the Same," and after a few submissions of that, I found an editor who saw things a little off-center as I did and who was willing to publish the first little chapter of this story. That was a delight, and I am afraid to admit that it encouraged me to do some more.
My idea of the Ramrod Rider was that he was a timeless character, sort of like the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid and the Phantom, but also like some character I saw in the matinee, who took on the garments and the identity of his predecessor. The Ramrod Rider himself has a mind that is like a clean slate, upon which is imprinted this archetypal identity. He merges with the character and goes out into the world to deal with injustices in a Quixotic sort of way. Again, this is a lot of fun, as the Ramrod Rider travels through time, one generation after another, always the same tabula rasa, puritanical, not-quite-getting-it kind of guy who nevertheless helps bring scoundrels to justice.
With this idea, I put him into a modern-day setting, in which his original antagonist, Durango Dan, becomes Daniel Durant. That was a lark, and I also brought in such characters as Puss and Puncher and the buxom twins Wyoma and Wynema. In the tradition of cliff-hanging chapter endings, I left Daniel Durant more or less in mid-air as his horse plummets into Sybille Canyon.
Here I took a breath for a year or so (having written the first three stories over a period of ten years or so), and one day on a lark, I thought I would see what self-publishing was like, so I drew up a small book with these stories and had it printed. I never sold a copy but rather gave away all of them. My idea was that I didn’t want to make a dime on the Ramrod Rider but preferred to make it my gift to the world.
A few years went by, and after I had a few western novels published, I thought it might be fun to do some more with the Ramrod Rider. So in and around other things I was doing, I took him out of his suspension in time and wrote three more stories. Two of them fill in the Ramrod Rider of the second generation, where the man bedecked in black meets Daniel DuRonde, who declaims a long narrative poem of his own composition before going on to the skulduggery for which he will be pursued. In the next story, the Ramrod Rider meets a couple of cowboy singers who deliver their material, for a little more wholesome verse content. This story, "Trouble at Happy Valley Ranch," continues as a genial satire of things that happen in the workplace. Then the last story continues with the latter-day reincarnation of the Ramrod Rider, who meets up again with Wyoma and Wynema as he resumes his pursuit of Daniel Durant. He also meets a character named the Old Scout (who will appear in a jaunty story in a collection of serious fiction, Shadows on the Plain). As in other stories in the Adventures, these two characters break into song as they communicate.
Once I had these six stories, I had enough for a book. In order to market it, I appealed to my brother David, who is an artist and has provided me with artwork for some of my other projects. With two might fine cover illustrations plus a few for the chapters, I was prepared to pitch this book to Dan and Bruce at Endeavor Books.
It was one of the better moments of my life, pitching this book in person. I was lucid and, I think, inspired, and there seemed to be some real energy in the air. Dan and Bruce decided to go ahead with it, and in a matter of a few months the book was a reality.
Of course, since it was someone else’s commercial enterprise, I could no longer insist on giving the thing away. Dan put a price on it, and we sent it out into the world. I got a couple of reviews that showed appreciation for some of the zaniness, and copies have sold both in bookstores and through online outlets. It is gratifying to have this kind of endorsement for a project that is so idiosyncratic.
Sometimes it seems as if this kind of writing is self-indulgence, except that once the story is out there, it does have a life of its own, and people have found amusement in it. Of the many things I have written, this one (for some readers, at least) comes closest to having a touch of magic in it. It is nice to think that this crazy little book might continue to bring a smile now and then to a venturesome reader.
Sometimes, as when I am inscribing a signed copy for someone, I refer to this as "a crazy little book, dear to my heart." That it is. A mixture of parody, satire, (pristine) romance, and traditional cowboy poetry, this is a one-of-a-kind book that people get a kick out of.
I first started with the Ramrod Rider when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation in the late 1970's. After reading numerous early nineteenth-century historical romances, late nineteenth-century dime novels, and twentieth-century hack westerns, many of which seemed preposterous, I felt myself brimming with material that needed to be dealt with—or, to put it in another way, material that I had to write about in order to keep a sane perspective. I sometimes describe this need as writing in self-defense, sort of defending myself against impulses I don’t want to keep trapped inside, as well as defending myself against the absurdities of the world.
So I created the Ramrod Rider and put him through some encounters in a story called "Adventures of the Ramrod Rider, Price Ten Cents," the title of which I think is self-explanatory. I gave some of the characters alliterative names, as in the dime novels, and I also dropped in allusions and references to twentieth-century western writers and their works. Here the Ramrod Rider delivers part of his autobiography in spontaneous poetry. It was all a great deal of fun, and I was pleased to get a rejection slip from an editor who was appalled. I don’t think a person is supposed to explain his work or his jokes in a submission letter, so I took my chances. Then I wrote "Further Adventures, Price the Same," and after a few submissions of that, I found an editor who saw things a little off-center as I did and who was willing to publish the first little chapter of this story. That was a delight, and I am afraid to admit that it encouraged me to do some more.
My idea of the Ramrod Rider was that he was a timeless character, sort of like the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid and the Phantom, but also like some character I saw in the matinee, who took on the garments and the identity of his predecessor. The Ramrod Rider himself has a mind that is like a clean slate, upon which is imprinted this archetypal identity. He merges with the character and goes out into the world to deal with injustices in a Quixotic sort of way. Again, this is a lot of fun, as the Ramrod Rider travels through time, one generation after another, always the same tabula rasa, puritanical, not-quite-getting-it kind of guy who nevertheless helps bring scoundrels to justice.
With this idea, I put him into a modern-day setting, in which his original antagonist, Durango Dan, becomes Daniel Durant. That was a lark, and I also brought in such characters as Puss and Puncher and the buxom twins Wyoma and Wynema. In the tradition of cliff-hanging chapter endings, I left Daniel Durant more or less in mid-air as his horse plummets into Sybille Canyon.
Here I took a breath for a year or so (having written the first three stories over a period of ten years or so), and one day on a lark, I thought I would see what self-publishing was like, so I drew up a small book with these stories and had it printed. I never sold a copy but rather gave away all of them. My idea was that I didn’t want to make a dime on the Ramrod Rider but preferred to make it my gift to the world.
A few years went by, and after I had a few western novels published, I thought it might be fun to do some more with the Ramrod Rider. So in and around other things I was doing, I took him out of his suspension in time and wrote three more stories. Two of them fill in the Ramrod Rider of the second generation, where the man bedecked in black meets Daniel DuRonde, who declaims a long narrative poem of his own composition before going on to the skulduggery for which he will be pursued. In the next story, the Ramrod Rider meets a couple of cowboy singers who deliver their material, for a little more wholesome verse content. This story, "Trouble at Happy Valley Ranch," continues as a genial satire of things that happen in the workplace. Then the last story continues with the latter-day reincarnation of the Ramrod Rider, who meets up again with Wyoma and Wynema as he resumes his pursuit of Daniel Durant. He also meets a character named the Old Scout (who will appear in a jaunty story in a collection of serious fiction, Shadows on the Plain). As in other stories in the Adventures, these two characters break into song as they communicate.
Once I had these six stories, I had enough for a book. In order to market it, I appealed to my brother David, who is an artist and has provided me with artwork for some of my other projects. With two might fine cover illustrations plus a few for the chapters, I was prepared to pitch this book to Dan and Bruce at Endeavor Books.
It was one of the better moments of my life, pitching this book in person. I was lucid and, I think, inspired, and there seemed to be some real energy in the air. Dan and Bruce decided to go ahead with it, and in a matter of a few months the book was a reality.
Of course, since it was someone else’s commercial enterprise, I could no longer insist on giving the thing away. Dan put a price on it, and we sent it out into the world. I got a couple of reviews that showed appreciation for some of the zaniness, and copies have sold both in bookstores and through online outlets. It is gratifying to have this kind of endorsement for a project that is so idiosyncratic.
Sometimes it seems as if this kind of writing is self-indulgence, except that once the story is out there, it does have a life of its own, and people have found amusement in it. Of the many things I have written, this one (for some readers, at least) comes closest to having a touch of magic in it. It is nice to think that this crazy little book might continue to bring a smile now and then to a venturesome reader.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
A Good Man to Have in Camp
A Good Man to Have in Camp was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in May 1999. It was the second of two contemporary western novels of mine that Endeavor Books published, and I was glad to see it make its modest way into the world.
This short novel (a little under 53,000 words) is set in rural California, the land of my youth. It continues to develop ideas that I explored in my collection of short fiction entitled Seasons in the Fields, which was printed a year earlier. The main character, Jim Lander, lives in the foothills outside a small town in the Sacramento Valley. He has done farm and ranch work all his life, and although he has his own place now, he has uncertainties to work on in his personal life. As with my other California stories as well as with my other contemporary fiction, I work with character, relationships, and landscape.
I wrote this novel freestyle. That is, I let it evolve as I went along, in a way that I have written quite a few short stories. This approach contrasts with my more typical method of planning out and then working from an outline, as I have done more and more when I work with book-length story lines. In order to write in this freer style, I don’t work with preconceived boundaries in areas such as length, subject matter, level of language use, and the like. These are important considerations, but for the purposes of exploring a story and letting it find itself, I suspend thinking about where I might try to get the thing published. I concentrate on getting it written, and then I worry about where to send it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think about audience, shape, form, balance, length, and so forth, or even about explicitness in subject matter and language use. It just means that those parameters come from within rather than as a set of premises from the beginning.
I took the less-structured approach with this novel because I just wanted to get it written. More specifically, I wanted to carry out an idea I had begun quite a while before and had not brought to completion.
My original idea for this work began to take shape, though not very definitely, when I finished my doctoral dissertation. I had written several short stories and, having just completed a long project, I thought I should move into a book-length work of fiction. My problem was that I did not know how to conceive of or plan out a longer work, so I tried writing my way into a novel. However, after about twenty pages I got stalled. At the time I bounced back and forth between short stories, articles, reviews, and other miscellaneous short pieces, so my work did not come to a halt. I just left the idea unfinished and worked on other things.
From time to time over the next several years I would look at the fragment I had written and would review the notes I had sketched out for other parts of the story. I still liked the idea, but I didn’t know how to carry it out. Each time, I would set the material aside and work on things I was more certain about.
After I had written another contemporary novel and about four westerns, I thought I should go back to this story line and see if I could finish it. For a stretch of a few months, I had the rare experience of having a bit of free time in the evenings and on the weekends, along with the other rare experience of not having a lot of personal intrusions to distract me. So I thought, I’ll just write this thing and see where it goes.
By now it was fifteen years since I had first started work on the idea, and my writing style had changed—settled into something more like my own voice, I think. So the first thing I did was revise the twenty or so pages I had kept in the folder. I revised that piece a few times, so that the new version didn’t look very much at all like the original. That was all right, too, because if I was going to free this thing, I couldn’t cling to any part of it just because I already had it written down.
And so it went. I wrote out a story about my character, and it was somewhere in that middle ground between long short story and novella. I decided I wasn’t through with him, so with some more of the material I wrote a second story, again in the forty-to-sixty-page range. That chunk turned out all right, too, so I wrote a third one. Now I thought I had my character’s trajectory done and had covered most of the subject matter that seemed to belong in his world. As I looked at the three pieces, which I had consciously written as segments in sequence, I saw that I wasn’t too far away from making one continuous work out of them. So I worked on transition and continuity, brought in a little more detail here and there that would be more appropriate in a longer treatment than in any one of shorter length, and now I had a long novella. I went through it again, sort of back and forth, still working on balance, and when I came out of this version (my third or fourth), I had a short novel. I did not feel a need to make it any longer just for the sake of trying to make it look more like a novel. I was past 50,000 words, which by most measurements and certainly by mine put it into the novel range.
Having done so much short story writing in my life, I do not ever have the problem of having too much content and having to decide what to cut. In this case, since I had started out in the very beginning with a short story approach (and probably a short story conception of my story line) and had then followed through with a short story method, I was satisfied with what I thought of, in aesthetic terms, as the relative weight of my short novel. It was lean and crisp, and it had only what it needed to realize its own form.
Following the sequence of working in this way—that is, write first and then try to place it—I now needed to see what I could do with a manuscript like this. Lucky for me, I had a good relationship with the great fellows at Endeavor Books, who had published my first contemporary novel and still had some faith in me. They also had a second painting they had commissioned and not used for the cover of the previous book, so the production did not threaten to be costly. Bruce read the manuscript and made comments, Dan set the type, he and I went through the editing, and then Bruce and I worked on marketing.
The book did not make a big splash, but I did hear from some readers, especially women, who liked it. I think it has a modern appeal in its treatment of male-female relationships, more so than most of my traditional westerns might, and I think it has a spare, unadorned effect that some readers of literary fiction appreciate.
As for myself, I like it for its subject matter as well. The protagonist plants trees, hunts deer, buys a horse, and does ranch work in the daytime; in the night time he goes to the honky tonks and pursues the other side of trying to find balance and harmony in life. I think there are a few good lines in this story, and maybe an image or two that will stick with some readers.
Another aspect I like about this short novel is its form. In writing it the way I did, I was able to finish a work I felt I had to finish, and I was also able to achieve a small victory, a quest, in carrying out the story as it sought its own form and fulfilled it. In this respect, A Good Man to Have in Camp seems like one of the purer works I have written.
This short novel (a little under 53,000 words) is set in rural California, the land of my youth. It continues to develop ideas that I explored in my collection of short fiction entitled Seasons in the Fields, which was printed a year earlier. The main character, Jim Lander, lives in the foothills outside a small town in the Sacramento Valley. He has done farm and ranch work all his life, and although he has his own place now, he has uncertainties to work on in his personal life. As with my other California stories as well as with my other contemporary fiction, I work with character, relationships, and landscape.
I wrote this novel freestyle. That is, I let it evolve as I went along, in a way that I have written quite a few short stories. This approach contrasts with my more typical method of planning out and then working from an outline, as I have done more and more when I work with book-length story lines. In order to write in this freer style, I don’t work with preconceived boundaries in areas such as length, subject matter, level of language use, and the like. These are important considerations, but for the purposes of exploring a story and letting it find itself, I suspend thinking about where I might try to get the thing published. I concentrate on getting it written, and then I worry about where to send it. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think about audience, shape, form, balance, length, and so forth, or even about explicitness in subject matter and language use. It just means that those parameters come from within rather than as a set of premises from the beginning.
I took the less-structured approach with this novel because I just wanted to get it written. More specifically, I wanted to carry out an idea I had begun quite a while before and had not brought to completion.
My original idea for this work began to take shape, though not very definitely, when I finished my doctoral dissertation. I had written several short stories and, having just completed a long project, I thought I should move into a book-length work of fiction. My problem was that I did not know how to conceive of or plan out a longer work, so I tried writing my way into a novel. However, after about twenty pages I got stalled. At the time I bounced back and forth between short stories, articles, reviews, and other miscellaneous short pieces, so my work did not come to a halt. I just left the idea unfinished and worked on other things.
From time to time over the next several years I would look at the fragment I had written and would review the notes I had sketched out for other parts of the story. I still liked the idea, but I didn’t know how to carry it out. Each time, I would set the material aside and work on things I was more certain about.
After I had written another contemporary novel and about four westerns, I thought I should go back to this story line and see if I could finish it. For a stretch of a few months, I had the rare experience of having a bit of free time in the evenings and on the weekends, along with the other rare experience of not having a lot of personal intrusions to distract me. So I thought, I’ll just write this thing and see where it goes.
By now it was fifteen years since I had first started work on the idea, and my writing style had changed—settled into something more like my own voice, I think. So the first thing I did was revise the twenty or so pages I had kept in the folder. I revised that piece a few times, so that the new version didn’t look very much at all like the original. That was all right, too, because if I was going to free this thing, I couldn’t cling to any part of it just because I already had it written down.
And so it went. I wrote out a story about my character, and it was somewhere in that middle ground between long short story and novella. I decided I wasn’t through with him, so with some more of the material I wrote a second story, again in the forty-to-sixty-page range. That chunk turned out all right, too, so I wrote a third one. Now I thought I had my character’s trajectory done and had covered most of the subject matter that seemed to belong in his world. As I looked at the three pieces, which I had consciously written as segments in sequence, I saw that I wasn’t too far away from making one continuous work out of them. So I worked on transition and continuity, brought in a little more detail here and there that would be more appropriate in a longer treatment than in any one of shorter length, and now I had a long novella. I went through it again, sort of back and forth, still working on balance, and when I came out of this version (my third or fourth), I had a short novel. I did not feel a need to make it any longer just for the sake of trying to make it look more like a novel. I was past 50,000 words, which by most measurements and certainly by mine put it into the novel range.
Having done so much short story writing in my life, I do not ever have the problem of having too much content and having to decide what to cut. In this case, since I had started out in the very beginning with a short story approach (and probably a short story conception of my story line) and had then followed through with a short story method, I was satisfied with what I thought of, in aesthetic terms, as the relative weight of my short novel. It was lean and crisp, and it had only what it needed to realize its own form.
Following the sequence of working in this way—that is, write first and then try to place it—I now needed to see what I could do with a manuscript like this. Lucky for me, I had a good relationship with the great fellows at Endeavor Books, who had published my first contemporary novel and still had some faith in me. They also had a second painting they had commissioned and not used for the cover of the previous book, so the production did not threaten to be costly. Bruce read the manuscript and made comments, Dan set the type, he and I went through the editing, and then Bruce and I worked on marketing.
The book did not make a big splash, but I did hear from some readers, especially women, who liked it. I think it has a modern appeal in its treatment of male-female relationships, more so than most of my traditional westerns might, and I think it has a spare, unadorned effect that some readers of literary fiction appreciate.
As for myself, I like it for its subject matter as well. The protagonist plants trees, hunts deer, buys a horse, and does ranch work in the daytime; in the night time he goes to the honky tonks and pursues the other side of trying to find balance and harmony in life. I think there are a few good lines in this story, and maybe an image or two that will stick with some readers.
Another aspect I like about this short novel is its form. In writing it the way I did, I was able to finish a work I felt I had to finish, and I was also able to achieve a small victory, a quest, in carrying out the story as it sought its own form and fulfilled it. In this respect, A Good Man to Have in Camp seems like one of the purer works I have written.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Stranger in Thunder Basin
Stranger in Thunder Basin is my seventeenth traditional western novel. It was published in April 2009 by Leisure Books (Dorchester Publishing). In this novel I continue my efforts at writing traditional fast-action westerns with strong elements of character and landscape.
Stranger in Thunder Basin is in some ways a quest novel, as it is the story of a young man who seeks to find out why someone would want to kill his guardian / grandfather, a man who cared for him like a father. This young man, Edward Dawes, needs to find out not only who did it, but why. Then he needs to see justice served.
Although this is pretty much a straightforward, go-ahead kind of story, it has a few subtleties. The first stranger who appears in the tale is the assassin who kills Jake Bishop. In turn, Edward Dawes becomes the stranger who avenges Bishop’s death, and after that he is a stranger to his own mother. The whole idea of the stranger and of the ways in which one could be a stranger was an interesting one to work with. One aspect of the idea comes from Oedipus Rex, in which the title character says:
Until now I was a stranger to this tale
As I had been a stranger to the crime.
In this context, a person is a stranger because of not knowing, and part of the action of the story is moving towards knowledge. My character Ed, like Oedipus, comes to knowledge about the crime and also about his true mother and father.
Another aspect of the idea of the stranger comes from L’ Étranger (The Stranger) by Camus, which I read in French when I was in college and which I read again (with my old annotations) in preparation for writing this novel. In Camus’s novel, the protagonist commits an irrational act by killing a stranger, and by doing so, he becomes a stranger, or outsider, in the world he lives in. I explored this idea in a non-fiction piece of my own entitled "Stranger at the Lookout," which I first wrote in Spanish when I was studying in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, and later converted into English. In this essay, I relate an experience in which I, a stranger or foreigner (extranjero) happened upon a scene where a man had been stabbed the night before. At the end of the piece I conclude that I felt a relation with the person who had been stabbed (and possibly killed) and that the person who shed the blood would forever be the stranger.
Well, these are just ideas, and I do not wish to seem immodest as I discuss how I played with them; rather, I hope to show how ideas come from here and there, get tossed into a mélange (I think of it as being like a big pot of soup), and come out in a blend. For my own purposes, at least, it gives me energy to draw from.
A similar effect comes about from field research. When I have a story line that is grounded in a specific place, it does me a world of good to go out and observe that place. In the case of this novel, I had the notion that I wanted to set the story in Thunder Basin, which is an actual place in northeastern Wyoming. It is a vast, relatively untouched area, which a person sort of goes into and comes out of. So, in addition to having an evocative name, the place seemed appropriate to the story. With that in mind, I knew I had to go on a field trip in order to give myself another fund of material or source of sustenance.
I decided to go by myself and camp two nights, so I took a small camper I have for excursions of this nature. We had just had a spell of wet weather, and things were cleared out for the time being, so I hoped for the best. When I got to the Thunder Basin area, after about three hours of driving, I saw plenty of evidence of the recent rains, but as the afternoon wore on, it looked as if I was going to enjoy some gentle late-spring weather with little wind, warm sunshine, and wide, clear skies.
I drove inland, as it seemed to me, until I came to a spot that seemed like a good place to camp. I pulled off the gravel road and followed a dirt road for about half a mile, and there I pitched my camp. I had been poking along, taking notes and snapping pictures, and now that I was stopped, I could take things in at an even slower pace. The spot where I camped was just above a grove of dead cottonwoods, an impressive feature that I incorporated into the story along with many other scenes, large and small.
After spending two nights in the same place, I packed up my camp and headed out for a slow drive through the Thunder Basin National Grassland. At a far point on my journey, I had to turn around because of a washed-out road, so I was obliged to re-trace some of my route. That in itself is an interesting exercise in observation, as a person sees from the opposite direction what he has just driven past without thinking he would see it again so soon. After taking a long way around, I ended up in Newcastle, Wyoming, and from there I drove south on US 85 along a stretch I am familiar with and always enjoy. All this time, I continued to take notes and snap a picture now and then.
When I got home, I found out that the film had not been advancing in my camera, so instead of having a full roll of pictures to help me in my recollection, I had none. But that was all right. I am, after all, a writer, and I did take good notes, which at the time helped me open my eyes and then later helped me re-imagine the scenes.
When I wrote this novel, I had a good sense of place all the way through. That, and my sense of purpose in carrying out my ideas related to the stranger, kept me on track. I feel that Stranger in Thunder Basin is one of the more dramatic novels I have written, and I hope it brings some enjoyment into the lives of a few readers.
Stranger in Thunder Basin is in some ways a quest novel, as it is the story of a young man who seeks to find out why someone would want to kill his guardian / grandfather, a man who cared for him like a father. This young man, Edward Dawes, needs to find out not only who did it, but why. Then he needs to see justice served.
Although this is pretty much a straightforward, go-ahead kind of story, it has a few subtleties. The first stranger who appears in the tale is the assassin who kills Jake Bishop. In turn, Edward Dawes becomes the stranger who avenges Bishop’s death, and after that he is a stranger to his own mother. The whole idea of the stranger and of the ways in which one could be a stranger was an interesting one to work with. One aspect of the idea comes from Oedipus Rex, in which the title character says:
Until now I was a stranger to this tale
As I had been a stranger to the crime.
In this context, a person is a stranger because of not knowing, and part of the action of the story is moving towards knowledge. My character Ed, like Oedipus, comes to knowledge about the crime and also about his true mother and father.
Another aspect of the idea of the stranger comes from L’ Étranger (The Stranger) by Camus, which I read in French when I was in college and which I read again (with my old annotations) in preparation for writing this novel. In Camus’s novel, the protagonist commits an irrational act by killing a stranger, and by doing so, he becomes a stranger, or outsider, in the world he lives in. I explored this idea in a non-fiction piece of my own entitled "Stranger at the Lookout," which I first wrote in Spanish when I was studying in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, and later converted into English. In this essay, I relate an experience in which I, a stranger or foreigner (extranjero) happened upon a scene where a man had been stabbed the night before. At the end of the piece I conclude that I felt a relation with the person who had been stabbed (and possibly killed) and that the person who shed the blood would forever be the stranger.
Well, these are just ideas, and I do not wish to seem immodest as I discuss how I played with them; rather, I hope to show how ideas come from here and there, get tossed into a mélange (I think of it as being like a big pot of soup), and come out in a blend. For my own purposes, at least, it gives me energy to draw from.
A similar effect comes about from field research. When I have a story line that is grounded in a specific place, it does me a world of good to go out and observe that place. In the case of this novel, I had the notion that I wanted to set the story in Thunder Basin, which is an actual place in northeastern Wyoming. It is a vast, relatively untouched area, which a person sort of goes into and comes out of. So, in addition to having an evocative name, the place seemed appropriate to the story. With that in mind, I knew I had to go on a field trip in order to give myself another fund of material or source of sustenance.
I decided to go by myself and camp two nights, so I took a small camper I have for excursions of this nature. We had just had a spell of wet weather, and things were cleared out for the time being, so I hoped for the best. When I got to the Thunder Basin area, after about three hours of driving, I saw plenty of evidence of the recent rains, but as the afternoon wore on, it looked as if I was going to enjoy some gentle late-spring weather with little wind, warm sunshine, and wide, clear skies.
I drove inland, as it seemed to me, until I came to a spot that seemed like a good place to camp. I pulled off the gravel road and followed a dirt road for about half a mile, and there I pitched my camp. I had been poking along, taking notes and snapping pictures, and now that I was stopped, I could take things in at an even slower pace. The spot where I camped was just above a grove of dead cottonwoods, an impressive feature that I incorporated into the story along with many other scenes, large and small.
After spending two nights in the same place, I packed up my camp and headed out for a slow drive through the Thunder Basin National Grassland. At a far point on my journey, I had to turn around because of a washed-out road, so I was obliged to re-trace some of my route. That in itself is an interesting exercise in observation, as a person sees from the opposite direction what he has just driven past without thinking he would see it again so soon. After taking a long way around, I ended up in Newcastle, Wyoming, and from there I drove south on US 85 along a stretch I am familiar with and always enjoy. All this time, I continued to take notes and snap a picture now and then.
When I got home, I found out that the film had not been advancing in my camera, so instead of having a full roll of pictures to help me in my recollection, I had none. But that was all right. I am, after all, a writer, and I did take good notes, which at the time helped me open my eyes and then later helped me re-imagine the scenes.
When I wrote this novel, I had a good sense of place all the way through. That, and my sense of purpose in carrying out my ideas related to the stranger, kept me on track. I feel that Stranger in Thunder Basin is one of the more dramatic novels I have written, and I hope it brings some enjoyment into the lives of a few readers.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Keep the Wind in Your Face
Keep the Wind in Your Face was published by Endeavor Books of Casper, Wyoming, in October 1998. Although it was the first complete novel I wrote, it was not the first to appear in print. Not only did it take me a long time to assail and finish a full-length manuscript, but I also struggled finding a publisher for it.
After I finished my dissertation on the western novel in 1980 and had had a few short stories published, I thought it was time to write a novel, but uncertainties plagued me. For one thing, even though I had studied plenty of novels literary and traditional, classic and contemporary, I didn’t know how to write one. I thought I needed a big, inspiring idea which I could then follow as I did on a smaller scale when I wrote short stories. I have no doubt that such an approach, what I call writing by feel, works for other writers, but it didn’t for me—not for writing a novel, anyway. I thought I needed a big idea, and it didn’t come to me. I took to thinking of it as a vision. I needed a vision, and if it didn’t come to me, I needed to go out and find it. One time I had gone on an excursion through the foothills and had gotten an idea for a short story that turned out pretty well, but now when I went to the mountains, nothing happened. Then I thought I needed a bigger expedition, but I didn’t know how to outfit myself to go hunting for a vision. I also didn’t think I had the time, which was equivalent to saying I really didn’t know how to go about it.
I made a false start on a contemporary novel, getting about twenty pages into it and then stalling for lack of a sense of how to carry it all the way through. Time passed. I got a job in Wyoming while my wife stayed in California, and then I went through the ennui and desperation of divorce. I kept writing short stories, along with nonfiction articles, poems, reviews, and literary articles. I tried to keep up several lines of endeavor, hoping that one of them would develop into a good avenue of opportunity. I dug out the twenty-page false start from time to time and put it away. Then I tried another longer story, again getting an idea and following it until I was done. It ran to forty pages, and although I thought it fulfilled its form all right, I now had something else I couldn’t do much with. It was too long to get published in the regular outlets for short fiction, and it didn’t have enough in it for me to try to build it into a novel.
There were two things I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. One was the person who always said he’d like to write a novel some day but never got it together to do it. The other was the person who said, "I wrote a novel once. A very bad novel." That person does not go on to write another. I knew I needed to write a novel and keep it from being a very bad one.
Time was passing. I was doing all right at short stories, getting them published in popular and literary magazines and sometimes getting a prize or a few dollars for them. I was in my seventh year at my career job at Eastern Wyoming College, and I decided I needed to do something for professional rejuvenation. I took a semester without pay so I could go to the University of Wyoming and study Spanish, which would give me a little variety in my teaching load. Just before embarking on my study plan, I got married again, this time to a young woman who was finishing her degree at UW, so the two of us set up housekeeping in a basement apartment in the cold winter months. By now a novel idea was forming in my mind, and I could steal some time to work on it. In a cold little alcove off from the main part of the basement apartment, I began writing a contemporary novel about big game hunting.
One day when I was at my office at the University, where I was teaching part-time in the English Department, I received a phone call from the Wyoming Council on the Arts and learned that I had won a $2000 fellowship for a set of four short stories I had submitted to the annual competition. This was a great break for me, especially since I was making a pittance at the two courses I was teaching, and my move to Laramie was costing me a great deal. More than the money, however, was the encouragement to keep working on my novel. An agent wrote to me on the basis of my having won the award, and she expressed an interest in seeing the manuscript when it was ready.
I worked on the manuscript off and on for the rest of the year, and I had a complete typed draft of it by my fortieth birthday. That was December 14, 1988. I went on to revise the novel, and then I began to send it out. First I sent it to the agent I had corresponded with after winning the fellowship. She wrote back and said it wasn’t for her, partly because of her "relative disinterest in hunting" and partly because the story just didn’t rouse her interest. Next I send the first fifty pages to an agent who had written me on the basis of having seen a short story of mine in a magazine, and he sent me a crabby letter of rejection. After more revision, I sent it to an agent whose ad I saw in a magazine, and she enjoyed the story and its content (her father had been a hunter), but she didn’t think she could sell it.
I went on to give the manuscript four substantial revisions, each time after I had had one or more sets of constructive comments from people who had read the whole thing. I sensed that the novel did not come out of an ideal preliminary conception of narrative design, but I felt that, given its form, I was making it as good as it could be.
By the time I had four traditional westerns out and had gotten a bit of name recognition, at least in this region, I was able to interest Endeavor Books in the novel. We put our heads together for a marketing plan, and we also collaborated on a cover. I gave Dan and Bruce, the owners, an idea of what details I would like to see, and they commissioned a local artist to do a painting. I found it gratifying that the publishers would be willing to take on the book at their expense and to invest in original artwork for the cover. Meanwhile I touched up the text a final time, and this novel that was dear to my heart became a reality.
When the book came out, I received a variety of responses. Women told me that even though they had never been hunting and did not plan to, they felt as if the novel had taken them there and they had enjoyed it. Hunters and cowboys liked the novel for its content, and I must admit that one of my intentions was to give readers the vicarious experience of going out on horseback and having successful hunts. One woman, the mother of a friend of mine, relayed the comment that she thought there was too much blood and gore in the hunting scenes. A magazine editor declined to review the book because of some content she would not speak of. I was left to wonder whether it was because of game violations committed by a couple of the less-admirable characters or because of the affair that goes on between the hunting guide and a female client. Maybe the editor missed the thematic parallel, or maybe there was something else unspeakable. Two other reviewers, both ranch women, found the content worthy of praise. In the end I had to admit that the novel might have limited appeal, but I was glad that some readers liked it.
After I finished my dissertation on the western novel in 1980 and had had a few short stories published, I thought it was time to write a novel, but uncertainties plagued me. For one thing, even though I had studied plenty of novels literary and traditional, classic and contemporary, I didn’t know how to write one. I thought I needed a big, inspiring idea which I could then follow as I did on a smaller scale when I wrote short stories. I have no doubt that such an approach, what I call writing by feel, works for other writers, but it didn’t for me—not for writing a novel, anyway. I thought I needed a big idea, and it didn’t come to me. I took to thinking of it as a vision. I needed a vision, and if it didn’t come to me, I needed to go out and find it. One time I had gone on an excursion through the foothills and had gotten an idea for a short story that turned out pretty well, but now when I went to the mountains, nothing happened. Then I thought I needed a bigger expedition, but I didn’t know how to outfit myself to go hunting for a vision. I also didn’t think I had the time, which was equivalent to saying I really didn’t know how to go about it.
I made a false start on a contemporary novel, getting about twenty pages into it and then stalling for lack of a sense of how to carry it all the way through. Time passed. I got a job in Wyoming while my wife stayed in California, and then I went through the ennui and desperation of divorce. I kept writing short stories, along with nonfiction articles, poems, reviews, and literary articles. I tried to keep up several lines of endeavor, hoping that one of them would develop into a good avenue of opportunity. I dug out the twenty-page false start from time to time and put it away. Then I tried another longer story, again getting an idea and following it until I was done. It ran to forty pages, and although I thought it fulfilled its form all right, I now had something else I couldn’t do much with. It was too long to get published in the regular outlets for short fiction, and it didn’t have enough in it for me to try to build it into a novel.
There were two things I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. One was the person who always said he’d like to write a novel some day but never got it together to do it. The other was the person who said, "I wrote a novel once. A very bad novel." That person does not go on to write another. I knew I needed to write a novel and keep it from being a very bad one.
Time was passing. I was doing all right at short stories, getting them published in popular and literary magazines and sometimes getting a prize or a few dollars for them. I was in my seventh year at my career job at Eastern Wyoming College, and I decided I needed to do something for professional rejuvenation. I took a semester without pay so I could go to the University of Wyoming and study Spanish, which would give me a little variety in my teaching load. Just before embarking on my study plan, I got married again, this time to a young woman who was finishing her degree at UW, so the two of us set up housekeeping in a basement apartment in the cold winter months. By now a novel idea was forming in my mind, and I could steal some time to work on it. In a cold little alcove off from the main part of the basement apartment, I began writing a contemporary novel about big game hunting.
One day when I was at my office at the University, where I was teaching part-time in the English Department, I received a phone call from the Wyoming Council on the Arts and learned that I had won a $2000 fellowship for a set of four short stories I had submitted to the annual competition. This was a great break for me, especially since I was making a pittance at the two courses I was teaching, and my move to Laramie was costing me a great deal. More than the money, however, was the encouragement to keep working on my novel. An agent wrote to me on the basis of my having won the award, and she expressed an interest in seeing the manuscript when it was ready.
I worked on the manuscript off and on for the rest of the year, and I had a complete typed draft of it by my fortieth birthday. That was December 14, 1988. I went on to revise the novel, and then I began to send it out. First I sent it to the agent I had corresponded with after winning the fellowship. She wrote back and said it wasn’t for her, partly because of her "relative disinterest in hunting" and partly because the story just didn’t rouse her interest. Next I send the first fifty pages to an agent who had written me on the basis of having seen a short story of mine in a magazine, and he sent me a crabby letter of rejection. After more revision, I sent it to an agent whose ad I saw in a magazine, and she enjoyed the story and its content (her father had been a hunter), but she didn’t think she could sell it.
I went on to give the manuscript four substantial revisions, each time after I had had one or more sets of constructive comments from people who had read the whole thing. I sensed that the novel did not come out of an ideal preliminary conception of narrative design, but I felt that, given its form, I was making it as good as it could be.
By the time I had four traditional westerns out and had gotten a bit of name recognition, at least in this region, I was able to interest Endeavor Books in the novel. We put our heads together for a marketing plan, and we also collaborated on a cover. I gave Dan and Bruce, the owners, an idea of what details I would like to see, and they commissioned a local artist to do a painting. I found it gratifying that the publishers would be willing to take on the book at their expense and to invest in original artwork for the cover. Meanwhile I touched up the text a final time, and this novel that was dear to my heart became a reality.
When the book came out, I received a variety of responses. Women told me that even though they had never been hunting and did not plan to, they felt as if the novel had taken them there and they had enjoyed it. Hunters and cowboys liked the novel for its content, and I must admit that one of my intentions was to give readers the vicarious experience of going out on horseback and having successful hunts. One woman, the mother of a friend of mine, relayed the comment that she thought there was too much blood and gore in the hunting scenes. A magazine editor declined to review the book because of some content she would not speak of. I was left to wonder whether it was because of game violations committed by a couple of the less-admirable characters or because of the affair that goes on between the hunting guide and a female client. Maybe the editor missed the thematic parallel, or maybe there was something else unspeakable. Two other reviewers, both ranch women, found the content worthy of praise. In the end I had to admit that the novel might have limited appeal, but I was glad that some readers liked it.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
One-Eyed Cowboy Wild
One-Eyed Cowboy Wild was my first traditional western and my first full-length book. It was published in March 1994 by Walker and Company, a well-respected hardcover publisher in New York. I had been writing short stories and getting them published, some of them in some pretty good places, for over fifteen years, and I had also done a couple of monograph and chapbook works on a small scale, but it was hard to break into book publishing. I was elated when I did.
When I was in college, reading westerns for fun and then doing my doctoral dissertation on the classic western novel, I had the ambition of writing a western some day. It was a hard thing to gear myself up for, however, because I was afraid I would write something for a narrow purpose and then fail at it. My first published short story was a traditional western piece, and I sold it to a commercial, pulp-like magazine called Far West. Having gotten paid well for it, I got inspired and wrote another, which the editor rejected with a comment that said it was way over-written and I could do better. I went ahead and wrote another story or two in that line, but I couldn’t place anything more with that magazine, and then it folded. Meanwhile, although my other stories eventually found homes, I had one short story that I had written specifically for the commercial market, and I couldn’t find a place for it. I did not want that to happen on a larger scale, so I put off trying to write a traditional western novel.
My first complete attempt at full-length fiction was a contemporary novel entitled Keep the Wind in Your Face. In the course of trying to find a publisher for it, I corresponded with an agent who liked the story but didn’t think she could sell it. She suggested that I try to write a novel that fit into an established genre. As she put it, publishers needed to see a niche for a book when there was no name familiarity.
That was the single most useful piece of advice I have received. At the time, there was a going genre called men’s adventure fiction, but my contemporary novel did not fit there, and as I looked at some of the books on the rack, I could see that I did not have the aptitude for writing about tanks and grenades, machine guns and helicopters. For me, genre meant a western. I brooded on the agent’s advice for a while, still hesitant to start a novel that might not go anywhere, or, to put it more bluntly, that might fail. I had one novel manuscript on my hands, and I didn’t want another weighing me down. Also, as I always told myself, I needed an open space in my life so I could devote myself to such a project.
The open space came in the form of emptiness when I went through my second divorce. Alone in a big house in the country, with winter keeping me indoors and my financial situation keeping me from going anywhere, I got started on a manuscript that would become One-Eyed Cowboy Wild. By late January of 1991 I began to close in on the end of it, so I wrote the agent who had encouraged me earlier. She wrote back and said sorry, she had decided to give up agenting. Back at square one, I finished the manuscript and started to try to find a publisher. On the basis of advice from published novelists, I tried to find an agent first, but after many tries over a period of a year and a half, I began to get discouraged. I decided to contact editors directly, even though the effort might get me rejected with a good house that might accept my work through an agent. And so I started sending query letters and submission packages to such places as Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell (whose assistant editor sent me a rejection letter two years later).
In the fall of 1992, I attended a conference on the western novel in Laramie, and there I had the good luck to sit next to Jackie Johnson at dinner. I found out she was the westerns editor at Walker and Company, so I asked her several questions about the company. She seemed surprised that a person like myself, who was there in an academic capacity, should be interested in the publishing aspect of traditional westerns. A few months later, when the rest of my queries and submissions came trickling back in with no positive results, I submitted a partial manuscript to Jackie Johnson and reminded her that we had visited at the conference in Laramie. She wrote back within a week and said she had read what I sent, was hooked early, and would like to see the rest of the manuscript. This was in February of 1993. I sent the whole manuscript to her, and then she couldn’t get to it right away, but, considerate person that she is, she sent me a note and told me when she could. By May she was able to make a tentative offer on it, and by August I had a contract. In the meanwhile, we went through a trial edit and then a second edit, so she was accepting the revised manuscript. After that, it went through a final edit and a copy edit.
Skeptical and superstitious as I am, and having heard many stories about publishers who had to cancel plans to publish a writer’s precious work, I had a mix of caution and optimism in the months that followed. However, Jackie coached me through the whole process. She knew how insecure and worried a first-time author could be, and she let me know what I could expect at each step along the way. Finally, in February of 1994, I received a padded envelope with the first copy of my first published novel. Along with it was another letter from Jackie, telling me how to work with other Walker personnel in publicity, sales, orders for myself, and subsidiary rights.
The book went on sale in March 1994, and it was well reviewed in standard journals in the book industry as well as in other magazines, journals, and newspapers. It sold out the initial press run of more than 2500 copies, and then it went into large print. In 1997, it went into paperback reprint with a cover that I found enthralling, and it helped me in my start with Leisure Books and Dorchester Publishing.
As most writers who have had a book published will agree, it is a life-changing experience. A person can write short stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces for years and win prizes for them, as I did, but when a person has a book, the world sees him or her, as if for the first time, as a writer. On a personal level, also, one feels a deep gratification at having a lifelong dream realized. I will never be able to express my gratitude enough, for it was Jackie Johnson who saw my potential and gave me that great opportunity.
Of all the emotional memories associated with my first book, one comes to me once in a while. I was talking on the phone to a young woman in publicity / promotion, a very competent but also endearing person, who listened to all of my urgent questions and comments. Her name was Jo Ann Sabatino, and she had a beautiful, calm, reassuring voice. She said, "Don’t worry so much, John. Slow down. This isn’t your last book. It’s your first one." She was right. Thanks to Jackie Johnson, I went on to write two more westerns with Walker and Company.
When I was in college, reading westerns for fun and then doing my doctoral dissertation on the classic western novel, I had the ambition of writing a western some day. It was a hard thing to gear myself up for, however, because I was afraid I would write something for a narrow purpose and then fail at it. My first published short story was a traditional western piece, and I sold it to a commercial, pulp-like magazine called Far West. Having gotten paid well for it, I got inspired and wrote another, which the editor rejected with a comment that said it was way over-written and I could do better. I went ahead and wrote another story or two in that line, but I couldn’t place anything more with that magazine, and then it folded. Meanwhile, although my other stories eventually found homes, I had one short story that I had written specifically for the commercial market, and I couldn’t find a place for it. I did not want that to happen on a larger scale, so I put off trying to write a traditional western novel.
My first complete attempt at full-length fiction was a contemporary novel entitled Keep the Wind in Your Face. In the course of trying to find a publisher for it, I corresponded with an agent who liked the story but didn’t think she could sell it. She suggested that I try to write a novel that fit into an established genre. As she put it, publishers needed to see a niche for a book when there was no name familiarity.
That was the single most useful piece of advice I have received. At the time, there was a going genre called men’s adventure fiction, but my contemporary novel did not fit there, and as I looked at some of the books on the rack, I could see that I did not have the aptitude for writing about tanks and grenades, machine guns and helicopters. For me, genre meant a western. I brooded on the agent’s advice for a while, still hesitant to start a novel that might not go anywhere, or, to put it more bluntly, that might fail. I had one novel manuscript on my hands, and I didn’t want another weighing me down. Also, as I always told myself, I needed an open space in my life so I could devote myself to such a project.
The open space came in the form of emptiness when I went through my second divorce. Alone in a big house in the country, with winter keeping me indoors and my financial situation keeping me from going anywhere, I got started on a manuscript that would become One-Eyed Cowboy Wild. By late January of 1991 I began to close in on the end of it, so I wrote the agent who had encouraged me earlier. She wrote back and said sorry, she had decided to give up agenting. Back at square one, I finished the manuscript and started to try to find a publisher. On the basis of advice from published novelists, I tried to find an agent first, but after many tries over a period of a year and a half, I began to get discouraged. I decided to contact editors directly, even though the effort might get me rejected with a good house that might accept my work through an agent. And so I started sending query letters and submission packages to such places as Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell (whose assistant editor sent me a rejection letter two years later).
In the fall of 1992, I attended a conference on the western novel in Laramie, and there I had the good luck to sit next to Jackie Johnson at dinner. I found out she was the westerns editor at Walker and Company, so I asked her several questions about the company. She seemed surprised that a person like myself, who was there in an academic capacity, should be interested in the publishing aspect of traditional westerns. A few months later, when the rest of my queries and submissions came trickling back in with no positive results, I submitted a partial manuscript to Jackie Johnson and reminded her that we had visited at the conference in Laramie. She wrote back within a week and said she had read what I sent, was hooked early, and would like to see the rest of the manuscript. This was in February of 1993. I sent the whole manuscript to her, and then she couldn’t get to it right away, but, considerate person that she is, she sent me a note and told me when she could. By May she was able to make a tentative offer on it, and by August I had a contract. In the meanwhile, we went through a trial edit and then a second edit, so she was accepting the revised manuscript. After that, it went through a final edit and a copy edit.
Skeptical and superstitious as I am, and having heard many stories about publishers who had to cancel plans to publish a writer’s precious work, I had a mix of caution and optimism in the months that followed. However, Jackie coached me through the whole process. She knew how insecure and worried a first-time author could be, and she let me know what I could expect at each step along the way. Finally, in February of 1994, I received a padded envelope with the first copy of my first published novel. Along with it was another letter from Jackie, telling me how to work with other Walker personnel in publicity, sales, orders for myself, and subsidiary rights.
The book went on sale in March 1994, and it was well reviewed in standard journals in the book industry as well as in other magazines, journals, and newspapers. It sold out the initial press run of more than 2500 copies, and then it went into large print. In 1997, it went into paperback reprint with a cover that I found enthralling, and it helped me in my start with Leisure Books and Dorchester Publishing.
As most writers who have had a book published will agree, it is a life-changing experience. A person can write short stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces for years and win prizes for them, as I did, but when a person has a book, the world sees him or her, as if for the first time, as a writer. On a personal level, also, one feels a deep gratification at having a lifelong dream realized. I will never be able to express my gratitude enough, for it was Jackie Johnson who saw my potential and gave me that great opportunity.
Of all the emotional memories associated with my first book, one comes to me once in a while. I was talking on the phone to a young woman in publicity / promotion, a very competent but also endearing person, who listened to all of my urgent questions and comments. Her name was Jo Ann Sabatino, and she had a beautiful, calm, reassuring voice. She said, "Don’t worry so much, John. Slow down. This isn’t your last book. It’s your first one." She was right. Thanks to Jackie Johnson, I went on to write two more westerns with Walker and Company.
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