“Time is on my side, yes it is.” Mick Jagger

Old Mick might have been wrong about that one.

I love writing for Killzone.com, and most of the time I’m a week or so ahead of these posts, but the past few weeks have been a firehose of deadlines and family obligations, along with day-to-day duties such as yardwork, household maintenance, and writer duties.

This week caught up to me. I finished a newspaper column only ten minutes before deadline, because the summer schedule with our grandcritters absorbed my time. We just got back from a week at the beach, which completely threw as far as dates are concerned. Not complaining here, because we’re fortunate to have them all close by.

New or budding authors don’t realize this business isn’t just sitting before the keyboard and tapping out words. There’s a lot more to being an author that meets the eye.

For example, in addition to the aforementioned newspaper column due today, I had this blog post (due Saturday) which needed to be finished before getting on the road tomorrow morning (Friday) to attend the Western Writers of America conference this weekend of June 20-22, and (Today, Thursday, June 19 at 7:00) I am author Craig Johnson’s in-conversation partner for his Return to Sender book tour here in the DFW area.

Wait. There’s more. I also have a magazine deadline for Texas Fish and Game, and am the editor for an upcoming short story anthology entitled Rough Country (2026 release). I’d reached out to a number of bestselling and talented authors to join in this Roan and Weatherford publication benefitting the U.S. Marshal’s Survivor Fund, and it’s my duty to spearhead this project.

“Against the wind, I’m still running against the wind, I’m older now, but still running against the wind.” Bob Seger.

That’s how I feel right now. Line edits for Comancheria just went in after dedicating several days to that project, and the publisher at R&W is allowing me to have more than the usual amount of input in the cover, which we still haven’t nailed down and publication is in October. Together with the editor and the artist, we’ve discarded half a dozen options.

Wait, again. There’s still more. I’m working with my publishers at Sourcebooks to find the right talent to record the audio version of my most recent Red River novel, The Texas Job. We almost have the right voice for this novel, which I just learned, is in the running for the Will Rogers Gold Medallion in the Western Modern Fiction category. At the same time, The Journey South is in the running for the gold in the Will Rogers Medallion Traditional Western Fiction category.

Copy edits are almost ready for A Dead Man’s Laugh, and that will take precedence over other projects. As many of you know, these edits come in out of the blue and there’s usually (for me, anyway) a two-week deadline, so all momentum on anything else has to stop.

And finally, this summer in a writer’s life will climax in the completion of my manuscript titled, What We Owe the Dead, which I hope to send to my agent by the middle of July (my own deadline).

This all needs to be wrapped before we head out to Bouchercon, in New Orleans. After that, I’ll finish the edits for the anthology so I can attend the Will Rogers Medallion Award ceremony in Tulsa, OK, at the end of October.

I still need to finish my own short story for the Rough Country anthology, and on the horizon is a new Red River novel, which will be set in 1979, the end of the Strange Seventies. While drinking lots of local wine a thousand-year-old house in Italy last October, Gilstrap and I hammered out the plot basics for this tenth book in my original series. Note: It still sounded good the next morning.

This is all a Magic Carpet Ride (Steppenwolf), and I’m glad to be here. It’s been a long road to this place in time, and starting out, I had no idea what would be required to reach this level of (for me) literary success.

When I post this one on the Killzone dashboard, I can get to work on a few specific questions to ask Craig about Return to Sender. He and I have known each other for so long, most of our discussion will be organic and we’ll follow the free-wheeling conversation to wherever it goes, but I’ll need a couple of specific questions that I might forget.

Now it’s time to post this discussion and check at least one item off my list. Wait! Dang it! I need to post tonight’s event one more time on my social media accounts, so there goes another bite of time.

With all that, how’s your writing world, and is there a song that pops into your head that might relate?