Sitting in the back of our unairconditioned classroom one hot Friday morning, I couldn’t take my eyes off my high school English teacher, Miss Adams, as Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love echoed through my empty, echoing head.

She was splendid, and everything a sophomore boy could wish for.

Redheaded Rick Schaefer looked at me from across the aisle and raised his eyebrows in a Groucho expression. We felt the same about Miss Adams and we’d discussed her that morning while sitting in his van, listening to the radio. I figured he’d graduate and marry her, because the guy looked like he was in his late twenties when we were in junior high.

And then she made me love her more, taking my mind off losing her to Rick. “I’ll need a two-page paper fromn everyone on Monday morning.”

Groans filled the room as I considered endless possibilities. I knew I was a great writer, because I’d already been moved from reporter to photographer on our school’s newspaper staff. For some reason, evil Mrs. Pickles said I editorialized too much.

In her desk at the front of the room, Lucy, the teacher’s pet, raised her hand. “On what?”

“Anything you want to write about.”

Lucy raised her hand again. “I can’t think of anything.”

“You will. Just write down a few words–––.”

Lucy’s pale hand shot up again, but before she could voice another question, Miss Adams caught my eye and spoke directly to me in the back of the room. “Just write down a few words, and then more words will follow. Write anything you want.”

An experienced camouflage expert, I’d chosen the farthest desk from the front, and beside the window, hoping for a stray breeze, but she saw me anyway, and I’ve been thankful for that moment ever since.

I think of that bit of wisdom from a 22-year-old teacher every time I sit down to hammer out my weekly newspaper column, and it hasn’t failed me since I began writing it in 1988.

These past couple of weeks have been busy, and what with developmental edits on one manuscript, line edits on another, and finally finishing the edits on an upcoming anthology of short stories, I’d forgotten that today is the deadline for my Killzone blog.

So I put my fingers on the keyboard and started with the first sentence at the top of this page, searching for a topic. That led me to the calendar on my desk, and the realization that by the time you read this post, my 20^th novel will have been on the shelves since October 21.

Comancheria is the first in the weird western Hollow Frontier series, that has already stretched to three volumes. The Sound of a Dead Man’s Laugh, and What We Owe the Dead, will drop in October of 2026 and the same month in 2027, respectively. I’m already itching to get into the next one, but I have to finish my 10^th novel in the Red River series.

It’ll go quickly, because John Gilstrap and I hammered out the premise over several bottles of wine in a thousand-year-old French mansion.

My western horror novel came to me in a dream during the Covid shutdown. No, I wasn’t worried about getting sick and nothing was bothering me at the time. In fact, my stress level was way down, since we couldn’t get out of the house and all my honey-do chores were finished.

Maybe I’d figuratively and subconsciously put my fingers on the keyboard in my sleep that night.

After intense online research lasting a full fifteen seconds, I found that doctors in white lab coats proclaim that dreams typically last from 5-20 minutes, however, they can vary from a few seconds to possibly two hours. According to those guys with pocket protectors full of pens and probably a Slim Jim or two, we can have up to three or four dreams per night.

Well, that night I watched an entire movie in my head, complete with a clear plot, characters, details, a subplot, twists, and even dialogue. My eyes snapped open when it came to an end at 3:00 AM, and it wasn’t because I had to go to the bathroom.

That usually happens at 4:00 AM.

The Bride’s eyes snapped open when I woke up. I swear she’s some kind of harmless vampire. Truthfully, I can open one eye and look at her in the dark and both of her gray/green orbs will snap open as well. I don’t think the woman ever sleeps at all.

Honestly, I don’t know what color they are, because I’m colorblind, and I’m afraid to ask now. I’ll have to look at her drivers license the next time she goes for a walk.

I slipped out of bed. “I have to write.”

“Okay.” She returned to her dormant state of nighttime existence, probably adding to her mental honey-do list.

My office is just outside our bedroom door, so I closed her in and settled down at the desk.

Fingers on the keyboard, I typed the first line.

Miss Hattie Long’s husband died on their fifty-fifth anniversary and she lost much of her mind not long after.

Those words led me into a complicated plot set on the Llano Estacado in 1874. Texas Ranger Buck Dallas appeared on my computer screen, along with his good friend Ranger Lane Newsome. I didn’t have to come up with their names. They were part of the absurdely detailed dream that led to Buck’s torture, death, and a curse to walk the earth forever from a Comanche puha, Twisted Root.

Yeah, the word puha, (medicine man) was in that dream.

Here’s where the curse part comes in. Buck rises every morning with the sun, and falls dead at sunset. People tend to bury the dead, and Buck always claws his way back to the surface, pissed off and digging dirt from his eyes and ears. However, he’s a walking dead man, with a snake growing inside of his body that tends to argue with him whenever he’s in the grave.

He and Lane, after some serious discussion about Buck not staying dead as decent people should, are joined by three strange characters protecting a pregnant woman who is drawn by Miss Hattie to a magic spring in the heart of Comancheria.

By eight the next morning, I was thirty pages into the story that was the movie my subconscious created. I finished in six weeks of virtually nonstop typing.

As usual, writing is the easy part. Getting it published became a journey unto itself. After being turned down by two publishers who thought it was a strange idea, it was picked up by a western house––– that crawfished on the deal a week later.

But life has a way of leading us where we need to go. Last year I attended a panel of publishers at a writers conference (one was the crawfish) and became interested in what a gentleman from Roan and Weatherford had to say about publishing and gender-bending.

Later, he and I met in the bar, of course, (where good things happen at conferences) and in casual conversation, he asked if I had a manuscript he could look at. A week later, R&N agreed to publish Comancheria and gave me an unlimited series featuring my Rangers.

It is our hope that the blending of horror and westerns will draw the interest of younger folks, who aren’t typically readers of traditional westerns. With the death of mass market paperbacks, westerns will struggle. I believe older readers will welcome something different, quirky westerns that are outside of the William W. Johnston, Louis L’Amour, and Zane Grey estates.

Comancheria is a new idea, and I hope that Covid dream is the start of something big.

For your perusal, here’s an excellent article from Jeffrey J. Mariotte that appeared in the Western Writers of America’s Roundup Magazine a couple of years ago, providing even information on this mind-bending genre. I hope this link works. It did for me.

aug20-weirdwesterns

Oh, and thanks once again to Miss Adams, on helping me get started on this paper…uh, post.