Finger Dancing with Spurs On

I’m not sure how she could say it so pointedly when her nose was that far up in the stratosphere.

                                                           

“I don’t read westerns” she announced with her usual flare for the dramatic. And she wasn’t the least bit apologetic about it. She informed me that, of course, she read the classics. She read popular new releases. She read what all of her gal-pals were reading. She read what she thought she should be reading…based on popular culture and what she might be asked about at the country club. But she certainly wouldn’t lower her standards to read westerns; despite the fact that it’s a genre that’s been around for at least two hundred years.

I could have been offended by her comment but I simply looked at the source and brushed it off as just another inane comment from an uninformed soul in search of a reason to feel good about herself. She wasn’t the only one to make a negative remark about westerns. With labels such as ‘horse operas’ and ‘formula fiction,’ the genre has been the favorite whipping cowboy of the literacy elite for years.

I’m not here to defend the genre of westerns. I don’t have to. While it may never reach the hallowed status of classical literature, it still fulfills a need for good storytelling to people who appreciate a good yarn. It’s really as simple as that.

If there is a western formula, it’s really quite simple: believable colorful characters, compelling plots and intriguing dialogue all wrapped up in a vivid setting. Its audience is world-wide; ranging from the United States to the U.K. to Europe, from Australia to Asia, from South American and Africa to the Middle East. Westerns answer a universal thirst for homegrown heroic myths.

I never started out to be a writer of westerns. Back in the 70’s I was deeply enmeshed in that genre and enjoyed reading many different authors from Louie L’Amour to Clay Fisher. I even wrote two westerns myself to see if I could do it and that turned out to be a Near Death Experience.

 

But over the years, I’ve come to enjoy and respect good writing no matter what the genre. Westerns are no different. There are the classic western writers such as Jack Schaefer (Shane) and Louis L’Amour (Hondo) and the current ones such as Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and Cormac McCathy (Blood Meridian). Good writing…just like good story-telling doesn’t hold claim on any specific genre.

This prejudice against westerns has always been a cyclical thing. It seems to come and go every dozen years or so. Back in the 1940s director John Ford paid homage to the western frontier with a series of black and white classics such as ‘My Darling Clementine’ and the Fort Apache trilogy. In the late 50s and early 60s, there was a plethora of western television series. Then in the mid-to-late 60’s, the Italians got into the act with Clint Eastwood and their spaghetti westerns like ‘The Good, the bad, the ugly.’

By the mid-70’s, western paperback novels were on the dying cusp as a popular genre.  Bantam Books and other publishers continued to publish them for several more years but gradually they disappeared entirely from the book shelves. Reading tastes change. Nowadays publishers seem to celebrate some woman who has figured out how to get laid in fifty different positions or how to fall in love with a werewolf or how to play games with people’s lives.

But what goes around comes around. I assume that in x number of year’s westerns or some new variation of that theme will come back into popular culture…for the uninitiated. For the rest of us, the western has never really left our consciousness.

Presently I’m working on a sequel to my first western (Apache Death Wind) while I’m editing another book (Debris) and creating a non-fiction ‘single’ for distribution on Amazon. Writing is writing and each story takes me into a world I relish and truly enjoy getting lost in.

I am less interested in the historical aspects of the old west as I am in using it as a background for telling an interesting story with intriguing characters caught up in real-world (circ. 1800s) situations. I couldn’t ask for a better setting for my stories.

In both fiction and reality, most of these men out west lived by an unwritten code of honor. They respected ‘respectable’ women, kids and animals. Their word meant everything and “I can’t” wasn’t a part of their vocabulary. There was an appreciation for the land, honor in hard work and little expectation that government or someone else was going to do the work for them.

I find it ironic that in an age when so much of the public worships the Sunday afternoon man-boys who act like children on the playing field, when pre-adolescent children make millions by wailing about lost love and young adults who can’t act pretend to be movie-stars, we somehow scoff at the iconic image of the men and women of the old west.

Who is more real here?

I’ll go with the cowboy anytime.

My Posse

A strange thing happened between my last surrealistic escape from the Apaches and my traipsing back into the A Shau. I began to sell books, in fact, quite a few copies of “Apache Death Wind” according to Amazon. After less than two months in the marketplace, “Apache Death Wind” is now ranked in the top ten percent in terms of e-book sales for that western genre. Who knew?

I had never envisioned myself as a novelist of western genre but circumstances seem to be pushing me in that direction and I couldn’t be any happier. As I’ve mentioned before in my blogging, I wrote “Apache Death Wind” back in 1974. It took a year of typing (for those of you who can remember typewriters) and then making corrections and retyping those same pages over and over again. That labor-intensive, painful process continued for almost a year until the book was completed.

As my wife loves to remind me, I then ignored her advice to seek publication and instead shelved the book and promptly began to write a second western. A year later, around the end of 1975, that second western was finished and also promptly shelved.

It was only thirty plus years later that I dusted off my first western, read it again and decided to see if I could get it transferred from its typed pages to digital format. I got it transferred to a floppy disc (remember those?) and began rewriting, editing, adding character embellishments and plot twists. “Apache Death Wind” was the result and from the comments I’ve received, the book seems to have hit a cord of great interest with a lot of readers. A number of those buyers are from England and their comments are particularly interesting. I’ve also gotten four 5 star reviews.

Click here to visit the Apache Death Wind book page on Amazon

Another sign of serious interest in the storyline comes from the number of new ‘likes’ I’ve received to my Author page on Facebook. After many months of trying to attract folks to ‘like’ my page, I’ve now got satisfied readers ‘liking’ my site on a weekly basis. Their interest is sincere, in some cases passionate and always grateful for a wonderful trip back out west where men were cut from a different cloth and women might be soft of heart but never of character.

Click here to check out the Denis J. LaComb Author Facebook Page

None of this might have happened if it wasn’t for my wonderful marketing collaborator, editor, blog poster and overall master of many things technical in the publishing world. It was Vida who convinced me to begin advertising on Facebook to a very targeted audience of western genre readers. We were both surprised to find that a sizeable audience for western genre exists in the U.K. We’ve been able to track our sales increase to the beginning of that advertising on Facebook. We started with a small ad on the side of the page then graduated to an ad in the news feed itself. It seems to be working wonders in terms of attracting my kind of reader to my novel.

So what to do next?

Even before “Apache Death Wind” was published, there was pressure building for a sequel. In this case, it was Michelle, another fine editor, book designer and collaborator, who felt the storyline begged to be continued in another book. I was reticent at first to do a sequel since I had always imagined the story ending as it had originally back in 1974. Fortunately, I listened to Michelle’s advice.

At first I was left pondering what might have happened to my two main characters, Jeb and Charlotte, if they weren’t together at the end of the first novel. Then ever so slowly, a new story started to emerge from the shadowy confines of my imagination. This new tale gradually began to morph into a story of love lost, a man bent on suicide and a new beginning gradually growing for the two main characters. Of course, circumstances bring them together again but not always in ways a reader might imagine.

The more I worked on a treatment for the sequel, the more excited I got about the characters and what happens to both of them after the end of “Apache Death Wind.”

As it is written right now, the sequel opens with Jeb sitting across from the cantina where two bandit brothers are holed up and waiting for the rest of their outlaw gang to return. Jeb, ever true to his word, is determined to eliminate the two brothers just as he had promised the villagers. At the end of the first chapter, Jeb arises and begins to walk toward the cantina, rifle in hand. It is a suicide mission but since he’s lost the love of his life, he doesn’t really care any longer.

Charlotte is established now in San Francisco. She has become very successful with her own tailoring business and has put her past life with Jeb behind her…or so she believes. Then she is approached by a lawyer with news that will change her life forever…

The plot gets even more complex after that.

Finally, a sequel to ADW had been outlined and although no time frame had been committed for its creation, I had a solid storyline in hand. But I still had ‘A Shau’ to republish and ‘Debris’ to rewrite and ‘Cobbler’ still waiting in the wings for another rewrite. I thought I had my writing projects clearly defined…

That is until another lone cowboy; a half-breed in this case, suddenly appeared on the proverbial horizon. Damn, I was back in the saddle again and I didn’t even see this one coming.

Despite my wife’s continuing insistence over the years that I go back to that second western written in 1975, I resisted because I remembered it just wasn’t very good. Then, not that long ago, out of curiosity more than anything else, I dusted off the old binder and began to read my second western. It’s entitled: “A Man of Two Tribes” although I expect that title will change over time. I sat down to read the story and was shocked to find myself totally engaged in the story line, characters, plot development and suspense. Much of it is good as it is written. I don’t expect a lot of rewriting and editing will be required.

 I couldn’t believe it. I had another western just waiting to be redeveloped and I hadn’t even considered it. If there’s a moral here, it’s to listen to what the women in my life have to say, they’re usually right.

Much like the first western, I’ve had those typed pages scanned into a word document and I’m now rewriting it in tandem with my work on ‘Debris.’ While there’s no firm publication date, it will come out before the sequel to ADW is finished.

There seems to be a growing audience for my western stories. I don’t want to disappoint them even if I hadn’t expected to strap back on my holster, saddle up my mare and head out for parts unknown. I can almost taste the dust and heat and lurking danger just around the next canyon.

I’m going to love playing cowboy again.