Important (For Me) Announcement

 The recent election had a side effect I’ll bet not too many of you saw coming:

Jeff Bezos can kiss my ass.

For those unaware – primarily low information Trump voters, I imagine – Bezos is the founder and owner of amazon.com and one of the two richest people in the world. (The other is Elon Musk, which should give you an idea what kind of high-quality individuals we’re talking about.)

Bezos also owns the Washington Post newspaper. Two weeks before the election, he decided the Post would not endorse a candidate for president. In a remarkably self-serving opinion piece, Bezos defended his action by stating he was returning the Post to the policy it observed until 1976. He argued it would imbue the paper with an aura of objectivity.

This is bullshit. Prima facie evidence to follow.

Bezos also owns Blue Origin, the company chosen by NASA to build the rockets that will return the United States to the moon. He is paranoid Trump will cancel the contract and give it to Dancing Elon (anagram: LONE SKUM), thus costing Bezos billions of dollars.

Let me rephrase: it will prevent Bezos from collecting billions of dollars.

Well, then, he can’t have any more of mine.

The Beloved Spouse™ and I are finding other sources for products we subscribe to on Amazon; we will not renew our Prime subscription. You can’t cancel those, so we’re locked in until August 2025. In the interim we will only use the services Prime provides for no additional charge, such as Free on Prime programming and the occasional sporting event. We will use Amazon as a shopping and information source for products we’ll buy elsewhere, even if it costs us more.

The reader in me has a more personal interest. The Kindle app of my iPad is more accommodating to my vision issues than most books; I’ll need to find another e-reader app and place to shop. (Suggestions welcome in the comments.)

My inner writer has a deeper dilemma.

I have long set aside my misgivings about Amazon, especially relative to physical bookstores, because brick-and-mortar stores don’t stock my books and are damn near impossible to book events into anymore. Bezos’s craven suck-up to Trump has severed that bond and I am removing from Amazon all the books under my control.

Where will I sell them? Nowhere. Anyone who wants one will be able to download it for free from my web site. Please stand by while the logistics are worked out. I hope to have physical copies through a POD source to sell at conferences, but that is also a work in progress.

I’ll still post notices here when books are available, as well as occasional reminders for the entire oeuvre. The books won’t be any harder to get to than they are now. You’ll just go to a different web site and it won’t cost you any money. If people are interested, I’ll see about working out a way print copies can be ordered from me directly, but that’s down the road and only if people ask for the service.

I hope this doesn’t inconvenience my dozens of readers; I’ll do all I can to see that it does not. The first book to go up will be next Friday’s release of Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger. Once we get those logistics worked out, I expect to have everything moved over sometime in December.

Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger Drops in Two Weeks

 

Dead Shot: The Memoir of Walter Ferguson, Soldier, Marshal, Bootlegger, drops November 22. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about what a departure it was for me to write a Western. Today I’ll come clean: it’s not as much of a departure as you might think. Dead Shot my second Western.

The still untitled novel was written in fits and starts several years ago after several western road trips put the bug in me. I squeezed bits in between drafts of Penns River and Nick Forte novels figuring I’d edit it into something usable.

The editing made it better, but I was still dissatisfied. The book struck me too much as a rehashing of my favorite scenes from other Westerns, both written and on film. I was pondering how to fix it, or if it was even worth fixing, when the character of Walter Ferguson came to me. The other book fell by the way during Walt’s lengthy gestation period.

These things happen. I’d thrown away thousands of words before. The Man in the Window, the third Forte novel, was almost half written when I decided I didn’t like where it was going. I salvaged what I liked and started over. The Man in the Window earned me a Shamus nomination as Best Paperback Original, so I guess I made the right decision.

The third Penns River novel, Resurrection Mall, started life as the fifth Forte. I was more than 30,000 words in and not liking how things were holding together – or, more accurately, not holding together – when it dawned on me what was wrong: this was a story better suited for Penns River. I threw away everything except the title and one sentence, shifted the whole operation to Penns River, and the rest went as smoothly as any book I’d written to that point.

Those experiences taught me to trust my judgment, so tossing a virtually finished novel did not keep me up at night. The time I worked on that book was well spent. I discovered what I needed to better understand to write a convincing Western, and that I needed to write a book in full, uninterrupted drafts if I wanted it to seem of a piece. I also needed a voice more suited to the period.

All those things not only made Dead Shot a better book, it made it a treat to write. I never had as much fun researching anything I’ve written, thanks mostly to the lively storytelling of those who wrote the histories and memoirs I used in my research. All the books listed below are well worth your time if you have an interest in Western history; the History Channel series, True West, is also recommended. (Alas, Wild West Tech has only random episodes available on YouTube.)

The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters, Leon Claire Metz

The American West, Dee Brown

Why the West was Wild, Miller Snell

We Pointed Them North, “Teddy Blue” Abbott

The Johnson County War, Bill O’Neal

Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, David Milch (Focuses on the TV show but has a lot of good historical perspective)

Old Bill Miner: Last of the Famous Western Bandits, Frank W. Anderson

A Texas Cowboy: Or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony, Charlie Siringo

Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier, Bat Masterson

Dodge City, Tom Clavin

Gunfighter, Joseph G. Rosa

Beyond the Law, Emmitt Dalton

 

Last time I left you with a brief excerpt of Walt’s early life. Today I’ll tease you with a little of his military experience in the 11^th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

I would have been happy to have no cause to fire my weapon during the War of Southern Rebellion, but I ended up doing more than my share of killing. There were two reasons for this. At Chancellorsville I saw a Rebel blow the head off my best friend, Charlie Bagby, while Charlie lay wounded and helpless. I killed that man and the three who were with him. After that I took it as my part to kill my share and Charlie’s too. It seemed only fair.

The other reason I killed so many was that I was good at it. A man should never shirk a God-given gift. The Almighty made me so I could send a bullet anywhere my eye landed. To deny that talent would be akin to blasphemy.

I was fortunate to have a captain who recognized my ability and took full advantage of it. Much of my time between engagements was spent hunting to bring back game that added variety to a diet I would not wish on vermin. Some of the other men resented that I was excused from the less glamorous duties of a soldier, such as digging and filling latrines or standing night watch. They got over it when they realized Company C was the best-fed outfit in the regiment.

As for the other Western, I’ve seen and read quite a few in the past several years that are also mostly rehashings of classic plots and scenes; the secret is in the execution. So, as Billy Crystal said in The Princess Bride, it’s not completely dead.