“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?

I have a world of stories filed away that may never get used in my novels. Some are significant recollections waiting to be used, based on coincidences, while others are the seeds of ideas planted for future use.

My folks are from the country, survivors of the Great Depression, who lived in Red River bottoms, the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Chicota was a community of farmers who raised most of their own food, cows, and kids, along with the crops that fed the rest of this country.

When those old men (who were younger than I am today) took time off, it was for church, town on Saturdays, and to fish on Sunday afternoons. That meant throwing a line in the Red, or pools which were often full of crappie, the best eating.

Thinking about those fish reminds me of a natural spring pool about four miles from my maternal grandparents’ farmhouse. It was one of the few remaining springs in the area that once boasted dozens, if not more than a couple of hundred seeps, bubblers, and gushers.

When I mentioned the word pool above, I meant what some might call a pond, or tank (in West Texas). It was large enough to launch the Old Man’s vee-hull boat and motor, so it was of some significant size. He took me there several times, to fish, and to see the underwater beauty of such a natural wonder.

When the Old Man wasn’t around with the boat, my younger Cousin and I rode up on our bikes to enjoy something highly unusual in our part of Northeast Texas, clear, running water.

The gin-clear water in that pool, the fish of all sizes, and its shady banks still call to me, because most pools, creeks, streams, rivers and lakes in our part of the world are muddy. Which brings us back to my original discussion, clear water.

Several years ago, Cousin (who was much rounder in his later years) and I went looking for that unnamed spring lake. The years degraded our memories, and the land was different. The pastures were gone, and houses hunkered in the woods like ugly weeds.

“Posted” signs warned us away from the original trail we’d used over fifty years ago, so we followed blacktop roads to our estimated destination. A gray-haired gentleman was outside his house, working on a truck when we pulled up in his drive and waited for his dog to stop barking.

He rose, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “Howdy boys. What can I do for you?”

I took the lead. “We’re looking for a spring lake that used to be around here.”

“Well, I’ve only lived here about ten years. Haven’t heard of a lake.”

Cousin was interested. “Where’d you move from?”

“Prosper, Texas.”

I shook my head in wonder at such a small world. “That’s where my wife grew up. Did you know the Reynolds family?”

His smile became genuine. “Sure enough. Robert and Robbie were good friends.”

Such a strange coincidence created an immediate bond and we visited for half an hour before getting back around to the reason we were there. Our new friend pointed. “The only pool around here is that little muddy puddle over yonder on someone else’s land that stays wet year-round.”

We looked where he pointed, and my recollections of the area superimposed themselves on the “muddy puddle.”

“Good Lord.” My spirits fell, and Cousin’s face mirrored my own.

He rubbed his bald head. “They’ve killed the spring with all this construction around here.”

The sweet water that once flowed fast enough to fill a small, three-acre-pool struggled to survive as a mud hole. Disappointed and saddened, we left, thinking about such a strange coincidence that I would meet friends of the War Department’s dad and brother in my ancestors’ community, and how “progress” was killing such wonderful, natural resources.

Here’s another. A few years ago, when I drove a dually pickup–––Let’s pause here, because I had to explain duallys to one of my city-dwelling editors who’d never heard of a six-wheeled truck. After explaining the concept, that individual still misunderstood, thinking there were three in a line on each side. I wrote back again, sending a link so that person could see there were four on the back and two in the front.

Because a dually is hippy, it won’t fit into most garages, especially the one at our old house, so I parked it on the street the entire time we lived there. Unfortunately, someone broke in one night and stole whatever wasn’t nailed down, (including my Juicy Fruit gum) and that included a pair of prescription Oakley sunglasses. I sincerely hoped they wore them while driving into a bridge abutment one night, but it didn’t happen.

They took tools, OTC drugs (antacids and allergy pills I kept in the cab because my former son-in-law was dangerously allergic to stings), and the Bride’s little pocket camera she used for work with the Frisco ISD, but forgot to take out that night.

Figuring all was lost, we filed a police report and went on about our lives. Somewhere around six weeks later, she got a call from the local PD.

“Mrs. Wortham, we have a report here about a burglary of a motor vehicle.”

“It was my husband’s truck. He filed the report. I’m surprised you called me.”

“Well, it’s an interesting story. We busted a vehicle burglary ring and found a digital camera in a house full of stolen items. There was a photo of the front of a school, and when we went to that location, they remembered you came by with your camera. We have the couple who broke into his truck. The guy is cooperating, but the female is a war horse, so I’d like to know if you’d like to press charges.”

She laughed. “I’m sure my husband will.”

I did.

Now here’s one last story I can draw from, but haven’t yet found the place. When we were still in that same house, the Bride came home for lunch and called me a few minutes after she left. “Hey, there’s a car in the alley right behind the house. It’s running, but no one is in it. I wonder if they have some kind of trouble. You might want to go look.”

I walked out to find an old car idling a few feet from our drive. No one was behind the wheel, and when I glanced inside, the back of my neck tingled. A screwdriver protruded from the steering column.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

I told dispatch where I lived. “There’s a running car behind our house and no one is in it. I think it’s stolen.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because there’s a screwdriver in the ignition, for one thing.”

Her voice changed. “What kind of car is it, and can you see the license tag?”

I told her.

“Sir, get away from the car and go in the house now. Officers are on the way.”

Following such direct orders, I did as she said and waited. Two minutes later every cop in the city was at our location, looking for the bank robbers who’d used that vehicle as a getaway car, dumped it in the alley, ran through the yard between our house and the neighbor, and drove away in another vehicle parked on our street.

But one lighter moment was when several young officers showed up to search the area, they insisted on checking our back yard, only to find my nineteen-year-old daughter sunning beside the pool. They checked the backyard several times until I asked her to come inside, even though our premises was the safest place in town.

So with those in mind, (and I confess none of these images are real by the way),how many of you writers draw from old memories and or unlikely events to use in your manuscripts? Do you have stories of police work you can weave into a future work, but haven’t done it yet? Do you have real life adventures or coincidences, or pet peeves and disappointments that can enrich your works?

I still have more, but these will have to do at this writing.

While thinking about the topic of today’s discussion, I checked my Facebook page (where we all get out writing ideas, right?) and came across a post from Cowboys and Indians Magazine on the 50^th anniversary of Willie Nelson’s The Redhead Stranger album.

Good Lord, I’m getting old.

If you haven’t heard this LP, just think Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.

back in 1975, This concept in country music was a departure from Nashville’s unnecessary symphony orchestration, and Willie wasn’t interested in continuing this new wave of music. He wanted to return to his roots. To do so, he came to Garland, Texas, (where I worked as an educator for 35 years) and recorded this “concept” album in a tiny one-room state of the art recording studio only a block from Garland High School (where I taught from 1985-86, and discovered I had no interest in becoming a vice principal at that level).

This album was based on an entire story revolving around the Red Headed Stranger who lost the love of his life. Conceptionally, the entire soundtrack is about Parson Shay, a flawed man who murders his wife and her lover. Consumed by grief and anger, he becomes a fugitive traveling the west, struggling with the guilt of his actions. Full of rage, he also shoots a saloon girl who he thinks is trying to steal his horse.

The following lyric, “You can’t hang a man for killing a woman, who tries to steal his horse,” is a novel unto itself.

Willie stripped down so much of the instrumentation that it sounds like an old-school band playing in a garage. When he sent the tapes to his record company, they thought it was a bare demo and wanted to add all that crap he hated.

Because he had full creative control, Willie insisted on keeping it simple, and that album is now ranked number 183 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and number one on CMT’s 40 Greatest Albums in Country Music.

Not bad for doing what he wanted without interference from others who tend to follow the current trend.

Bill Witliff wrote that wonderful screenplay for a movie based on the album, but you’ll likely recognize one of his more famous movies, Lonesome Dove. Based on the book by Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove features two tortured souls, August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call. Gus seeks a lost love, while Woodrow refuses to acknowledge that he loved a prostitute and fathered a child he refuses to recognize.

Many authors explore characters grappling with emotional or psychological trauma that manifests in many ways. This turmoil often stems from loss, or a deep sense of inner conflict, either intentionally revealed by the author, or hinted at through the protagonists’ actions and vague references.

My most recent series featuring Tucker Snow examines a Texas Brand Inspector’s life after his wife and baby are killed by an addict, leaving him to raise a teenage daughter alone. He’s far too impulsive and uses his own brother to step over any imaginary line, laying waste to criminals who, in his opinion, just need killing.

An author doesn’t have to tell readers exactly what drives their characters. The story might, and often does, reveal the emotional issues that drive a protagonist with information revealed throughout the novel.

Mickey Spillane created Mike Hammer, who is driven to seek justice, but he’s a pessimistic creature who survived the Japanese Theater in World War II and struggles to find goodness in the country he fought for.

My good friend John Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave is another character who seeks justice for all, and his ruthless methods fall outside the law to save hostages most agencies can’t, or won’t save. How do we know what drives Jonathan? Read No Mercy where his backstory is revealed. Is Jonathan flawed? You bet he is.

Aren’t we all?

One reviewer said she particularly enjoyed the “subtle flaws in Grave’s character – flaws he understands and even admits to, but doesn’t necessarily try to correct.”

Other authors have created flawed characters.

Lee Child created Jack Reacher. His major flaw is that he won’t walk off from injustice or a fight. He lays waste to criminals, then moves on to do it again. He prefers isolation, has few social skills, and has an impulsive, extremely aggressive nature.

The Searchers, a novel by Alan LeMay became a John Wayne movie. Amos Edwards (Ethan in the movie) is the most troubled and morally complex character I’ve ever read. Due to a warped sense of honor, Amos is obsessed with finding and killing his captive niece because he believes she’s has been corrupted by her Comanche captors.

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has more than one. “Nick is not the charming hero we’re accustomed to in thrillers; he’s a deeply flawed and morally ambiguous figure whose actions leave us oscillating between sympathy and suspicion,” writes fan Riya Bhorkar. “Amy, on the other hand, is a master manipulator, crafting her own narrative with surgical precision and leaving a trail of devastation in her wake.”

In Shane, Jack Schaefer’s protagonist by the same name is a mysterious drifting gunfighter who hangs up his guns and falls in love with his employer’s wife. He returns to his old ways when her husband is provoked into a gunfight. He kills rancher Luke Fletcher, (Ryker in the movie), reverting to his old self. LeMay skillfully leaves enough crumbs for readers to see he has a number of faults before he rides off, wounded and possibly dying.

So who is your favorite flawed character, and/or have you created such fictional protagonists? And let’s go one step further. Are these these character flaws cut from whole cloth, or do they come from within?

It was still dark when Larry and I left his house, heading out in his truck for a lake some distance away. Spring is crappie time, and it’s my favorite freshwater fish to catch and eat.

By sunup we still had a good long way to go and I was hungry. The problem was the boat hitched up behind us. “There’s an overrated fast-food restaurant up ahead. Let’s get a breakfast sandwich with one of those stupid names they want me to use.”

Behind the wheel, my old fishing buddy cut his eyes across the cab. “If we go to Great Gary’s to get something to go, you won’t say Great GarMuffin, will you? Because I know for a fact you won’t pronounce Horsey Sauce at Arby’s.”

“We’re too old to pronounce dumb names like that, but my daughters have spent most of their lives trying to make me slip up and say that name at Arby’s. When the cashier asks me which one I want through that cheap crackling low-bid microphone, I tell them I want both sauces.”

“You’re getting to be a curmudgeon. You make things hard on yourself, you know.”

“Nah. I’ve aleays been a curmudgeon, but when we order in a few minutes, I’ll just use the meal’s number.”

He steered into the parking lot. “My son uses an app when he eats here.”

“No apps for me. I hate how technology has taken over our lives. People should just talk to each other without nonsensical jargon, and without using the word ‘amazing’ or ‘like’ in conversation. Besides, something would mess up, and I don’t want to struggle with it when I’m hungry.

“A man can starve to death if there’s no phone or screen nearby. I can’t even order a pizza anymore, because they won’t take calls. You have to click through their website. I just want to walk in, order, hand someone the cash, and leave.”

Because of the boat, the drive-thru was out. We parked some distance away and walked inside a video arcade instead of the overrated eatery I was expecting.

Giant touch screens flashed with colorful photos of the food and drinks on their menu. Like something from a science fiction movie, frowning people stood before the order screens with a finger poised, occasionally punching an item which vanished only to be replaced by myriad options.

Appearing to be frozen in time, folks our age were held hostage, overwhelmed with the new-fangled order process and likely wishing they’d gone through the drive-thru to be misunderstood through a cheap microphone.

In addition, most wore glasses and were trying to see through the magnification of tri-focals, their noses pointed toward the ceiling. Because we spend most of our time staring down at the phones in our hands, the sounds of grinding neck vertebrae tilting upward was deafening.

“Minimal contact,” Willie surmised. “I wonder how often they clean those screens people keep touching.”

Bypassing the zombies staring into cold white oblivion, we walked up to one of the two registers, intending to use real cash. Both devices appeared to be unplugged.

We waited for several minutes while the employees went about their business behind the counter. Customers in cars appeared and disappeared on the other side of the drive-thru window.

“Number two sixty-six!” A woman behind the counter shouted. Apparently, fast food technology hasn’t evolved enough to bypass the raspy, screeching human voice carbonized by forty years of cigarettes.

She finally saw us. “We don’t take orders there anymore. You have to use the kiosks like those folks.”

I turned toward the spellbound people staring at the screens. I wondered if they’d still be there next year, starved skeletal beings with one finger held aloft. “No. I don’t have to do anything.”

We left, and that brings us in a curiously roundabout way to how technology helped me write my first novel.

Bear with me, this is a writer’s illogical mind.

Back in the olden days, I used a typewriter, or as Mark Twain called it, an “infernal machine.” It was also slow and required much backspacing, carbon paper, gallons of Wite-Out, and lots of twisting and adjusting.

I pounded those keys for decades, first on a manual machine in high school, then a portable version in college, which kept me in beer money by typing term papers for a dollar a page.

Ah, then came the IBM Selectric, powered by electricity and not the tips of my fingers. Novels almost formed. Many of them, and they all withered by page fifty or so. I spent hours, no, days, wait, even months, pecking out those pages destined for File 13.

When I read that Micky Spillane typed with two fingers and never edited his manuscripts, I wondered what was wrong with me. He wrote I, The Jury in 19 days, and as a rookie writer, I couldn’t figure out how he did it.

Honestly, I still don’t.

Then came the 286 computer, and my writing world changed. It set me free! Fingers flew and words appeared. The process was no longer linear, and I wrote entire chapters out of order, \ and days or weeks later, plugged them into the flow of work and they fit perfectly.

The world of active electrons became my friend, allowing me to pound out two, three, or four thousand words a day to build the structural foundation of a novel.

So with those successes, why won’t I assimilate into this world of apps and self-service ordering screens? Because there’s an evil side to all this. An entire manuscript vanished into thin air one day about twenty-five years ago, and even in the last eighteen months several days’ worth of work was lost when my laptop took issue with The Cloud and refused to “shake hands,” as a technologically adept friend explained.

In my personal experience, there is always an issue waiting to arise. The one time I tried to order off a screen in McDonald’s, I wound up with two extra Happy Meals (see how they sucker us into using those ridiculous terms?), cheese on a burger I didn’t want, no coffee for the four creams I received, and the Skynet’s refusal to take the gift card that sparked the whole visit.

I finally had to get someone to boot up the register and take the entire order while standing face to face.

The final contrasting conflict is my Macbook Air, which is such a mystery that I often hides what I’ve written only to flash it on the screen when I’m checking emails.

This new world of ours is always changing, but sometimes I need a personal technical support team, for the computer and to assist with ordering food in these new updated, high-tech restaurants.

Or maybe someone about ten years old.

I’m feeling that all of these new-fangled engineering marvels, apps, and human-free self-service businesses leaves me outside in the drive-thru lane, looking in through the order window.

An email came in the other day. “Where do you get your ideas for books and columns?”

Dear Reader,

Thanks for reading my work, and I’m honored that you took the time to reach out. My work oftentimes comes from Reality.

For example, I’m sure I speak for us all when I tell you that a bite from turtles, tortoises, and maybe terrapins will lock that moment in our memories forever. It’s much like we remember where we were when some life-changing event occurred in our lives.

Here I’m talking about those women who were shot into the air in a tin can a few days ago to squeal and float around for a moment while they looked at the moon that I can clearly see several times a month from my own backyard, and with less capital outlay. Really, I don’t care that they went up and came down, because I really want to talk about dinosaurs and reptiles. The idea for today’s discussion came to mind when I saw a Reel the other day concerning an emergency room visit by a man with a live and apparently contented snapping turtle attached to his face.

We all know turtles are distant relatives of the dinosaur infestation that occurred 66 to 245 million years ago, as determined by dust-covered men covered who pause in sweeping rocks with small brushes to explain the past.

Personally, I like terrapins and tortoises, especially when they’re not attached to someone’s body parts. Case in point, we recently took the grand-critters to a miserably hot and windy event often called a Renaissance Festival, where fully grown adults dress up in period clothing (or mythical clothing they wish those people wore, including spiked shoulders, fairy wings, and elf ears) and walk around talking to each other in horribly bad medieval accents.

In the midst of all this wishful history that also involved the sale of modern pretzels on a stick, magic wands, padded swords people used to whack at each other in pretend stables, and stir-fry bowls, we came across a traditional Renaissance petting zoo.

But before that, there were several signs posted outside warning that no “weapons” were allowed. This included knives, and the pocket variety as well. However, once inside, if you carried in enough money, you could purchase a ten inch, razor sharp handmake knife in more than one location.

Anyway, once inside, we came to a petting zoo. After paying a small ransom for five kids to pet the kinfolk of animals they could have rubbed on when we had the Oklahoma ranch, they took up paper cups full of sliced apples (for an extra ducat, of course) and rushed around the artificial medieval pens made from T-posts zip-tied with cedar fence planks, feeding potbellied pigs, lambs, colts, calves, one miniature horse a couple of inches higher than said potbellied pig, and a tortoise the size of a number 5 washtub.

Having little experience with tortoises, their parents (my own offspring) neglected to explain how to the feed those reptiles and grandcritter Number 4 yelped. “It bit me!!!”

Sure enough, the black-eyed reptile’s beak (made of keratin) cracked Number 4’s fingernail (also made of keratin), resulting in some minor blood loss equivalent to one drop. But this kid has a rigor when he gets a splinter, and the sight of a mere speck of blood sends him into a full half hour of crying and terrified shrieking.

As we stanched the medieval wound, I told him about seeing the aforementioned Reel. For those who don’t have Facebook accounts, a Reel is a few seconds of video crack to which people have become addicted and spend hours watching one piece of idiocy after another, even though some of these little videos end before the “story” or “event” is completed, leaving the addict craving more.

In the one I related to my tearful grandson, there was a clip of an emergency room and a man seated in a wheelchair, who in turn clutched the body of an extremely large snapping turtle that had chomped down on his face and apparently wouldn’t let go.

Remembering the best advice I ever got from the Old Folks, “Snapping turtles latch on and won’t turn loose until it thunders,” I’ve always distanced myself from those things.

So these guys in the Reel, who took their friend to the ER, didn’t think of any way to remove the large reptile from said victim’s face before loading him into their vehicle and making the drive to get help.

I’m confident any relative or mine, or the Hunting Club members, would have known how to remove a turtle waiting for thunder.

However, these folks who enjoyed hugging, petting, or kissing them, likely had no experience with wild animals

I’ve seen people kiss snakes, too.

No.

What they also didn’t know, apparently, is that snapping turtles have extremely long and flexible necks. I have it on good authority, Wikipedia, that a snapper’s neck can be up to two-thirds the length of its shell and it has the jaw power to clip off a stray finger or two.

According to intense research which took up nearly 90 seconds of my life, I found that a study done in 2023 used some specific but undisclosed device that registered numbers showing the bite of a common, and not especially gifted snapper, registers between 62 and 564 Newtons of force in jaw strength. I don’t know who this Newton guy is, but he apparently has a strong bite.

As a public service, I did more research and learned the way to pick up a snapping turtle is to grasp the back end of its shell, as we now know two-thirds of the way back from its biting part, thereby ensuring your digits are beyond its reach.

Better yet, don’t pick it up.

So let’s review. Inexperienced people shouldn’t feed a dinosaur’s distant kin, don’t kiss, hug, or snuggle them, because they are reptiles and don’t get the same fuzzies from cuddling, and avoid Renaissance Festivals at all costs.

Oh, and if a turtle latches on to you and there’s no possibility of thunder in the near future, call me. I can tell you how to get it off before you head to the ER.

So thanks for your correspondence, and I hope you enjoy the snakes and reptiles in my upcoming novel, Comancheria. But they’re not based on any real truth or family lore, and I have to admit, I don’t know if horny toads (Texan for horned lizards) stutter or not.

And as one more public service, reptiles, to my knowledge, don’t communicate with bad medieval accents, either. I hope this helps those writers to seek assurance, inspiration, and advice from this blog post as well. You’re welcome.

Rev.

I’ve written a few short stories. A couple were included in small anthologies, and in creating them, I realized they required a different technique.

I recently finished one that will be included in the Rough Country anthology I’m editing for Roand and Weatherford publishing. After I wrapped up Where the Road Forks, I remembered talking to Joe Lansdale about that idea and others a few years ago.

Joe is the accomplished and successful author of the Hap and Leonard books that eventually became a television series. Talking over sushi in Nacogdoches, Texas, I asked him about short fiction.

“I really don’t have that many ideas for short stories.”

“You’re surrounded by them.” He waved his chopsticks in the air, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d snapped a fly from the air like Mr. Miagi. The slender bamboo utensils seemed to fit his hand, because Joe is an International Martial Arts Hall of Famer and even created his own style of fighting. Those experiences often show up in his work. “I can prove it. Tell me something that happened when you were a kid.”

I thought about it as a chunk of wasabi burned its way through my sinuses, making my eyes water. The shock that went through my frontal lobes gave me time to think. When I could breathe, I told him of something that happened to my older cousins way back in the late 1950s.

Sporting flattops and one slicked-back duck tail haircut, they were three of the coolest and toughest guys in their little rural community, riding motorcycles and rolling cigarettes in their T shirt sleeves. When they heard Elvis was coming to town, Tom announced to the others they were going to meet the famous singer.

Dick and Harry allowed it was something to do, and they rode their Indians to the Grand Theater where the future king of rock and roll was waiting to go on upstairs in the “green” room at the top of a second floor exterior fire escape.

The boys parked their bikes in a nearby alley and came up to the theater opposite the bright entrance. Stomping up the metal steps in their square-toed boots as if they had backstage passes, they were met at the top of the stairs by the Memphis Mafia who heard them coming up.

One of Elvis’ buddies told them they weren’t welcome.

Harry said they didn’t care and intended to say howdy to Elvis, and they tried to push past the obstacles between them and their hero.

As Tom told me. “We thought we were tough, but those boys were tougher and more experienced. They handed us our asses, and threw us back down the stairs. When we rolled to the bottom, and we dusted off, got up, and went home.”

Joe laughed and took a sip of iced tea. “There’s your short story.”

I came home thinking about it, but haven’t yet written it down. But it’s there, perking along until the day I write the first sentence, “The boys finished their Schlitz beers and decided they were going to meet Elvis Presley, come hell or high water,” or something like that.

Those stories come easier than I expected. Maybe it’s because I write mini-stories every week for my newspaper columns in The Paris News, Country World, and now for Saddlebag Disptatches magazine. They come to mind as a single sentence, and then I watched as my fingers tuype out 950 words in one sitting that will “go to press” the next day. They’re mini-short stories, a snippit of time or experience, in which I give readers a quick glimpse into the view from my own hill.

When we’re working on novels, authors create whole new fictional worlds and can revel in taking their time to describe these worlds and establish character backgrounds and settings. In a short story, we create a can of condensed soup in a sense that, if we wanted to, could sometimes expand into a novel.

I think of them as that tiny world inside a globe, those glass spheres containing a tiny piece of a mythical world. In this case, these miniature scenes don’t always have snow, unless it’s essential to the plot.

Essential to the plot. In short stories, every element, word, character, and bit of dialogue has to be informative, moving the story forward, and must relate to everything else. The logic of the narrative has to be short and concise.

To me, it’s like flipping through the pages of a novel and picking out the necessary bits and pieces to write a book report. A quick read of what could be more, but isn’t.

There’s no room for sweeping descriptions and extensive development. In my view, the author has to know the character’s entire backstory at the outset, and the setting’s history that’s revealed by bits of information dropped in a sentence or two, or as action dialogue tags.

Readers must be swept into these juicy stories with the right words, phrases, and pacing. I suppose it’s like satisfying our need for immediate satisfaction these days. In other words you have about 6,000 words to set up the story arc, very short Acts 1 and 2, before that last couple of pages in which the bombshell drops. In fact, some authors set off that climax bomb in a couple of paragraphs, or even one breathtaking sentence.

Writing short stories is an excellent way to warm up, to refill the creative basket between novels, and to achieve the personal satisfaction of a job well done.

Growing up, I lived in the Urbandale neighborhood of Old East Dallas, a post-war collection of neat little white frame houses that could have stood in for a television neighborhood like Leave It To Beaver, only with a different title.

Folks think I went to school in rural Lamar County, Texas, but I graduated from W.W. Samuell in Dallas’ Pleasant Grove, which is much different today. This misconception about my roots is because I tell everyone I lived on my grandparent’s farm in Chicota. We’re talking semantics here, but I mean this little scrawny, asthmatic kid existed in the city, but bloomed and experienced life in the country.

That doesn’t mean my experiences on the concrete streets weren’t valuable. I fought against the monicker of City Boy, and believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish. We only lived there because the Old Man left the farm during the war and never returned after getting an assembly line job at Ford. He never wanted the gambling life of a farmer, always watching the market for cattle prices, or worried that enough rain would fall to sustain the cotton and corn crops they raised in those river bottoms in the 1960s.

So after school during the work/school week, I roamed the neighborhood with the other bike-riding outlaws who lived in our area. We did the usual, hung out in backyards, prowled the tame woods on the other side of the railroad tracks half a mile from our house, and organized pickup ball games at the school a block away (without adult interference and rules).

We kept the sidewalks hot running and riding back and forth between houses, and in the summer, they stayed that way all night from the heat of the sun. Summer in those days without air conditioning kept us outside, much to our parent’s delight. In the Texas heat, our bare feet toughened up to defy sizzling sidewalks, gravel, and even the street spiderweb patchwork of black, gooey hot tar in the concrete cracks that bubbled up and popped when we stepped on them.

Most folks in the neighborhood ignored us, as long as we stayed outside where we only came in after the streetlights came on. On Friday and Saturday nights we roamed even later, playing a made-up game of Run and Hide, our version of Hike and Seek, which involved hiding around every house, shrub, flowerbed, and driveway on our block.

We only had two old soreheads on our long block. One was Mrs. Grubbs, who lived in a on the corner up by the school and often stood on her tiny concrete porch to shout at us not to step on her grass when we made the 45-dgree turn on the sidewalk.

I think nothing grows today on that corner packed hard as concrete, where every kid in the neighborhood made sure to plant their foot just for spite.

The other sorehead was a case of mistaken identity, and I still regret it.

Sunbaked Mr. Pennington, who somehow misplaced his two front teeth at some point in his long life, talked with a soft whistling lisp through thin, loose lips that seemed to flap in the wind. He lived with his wife on the opposite end of our block. Each day he made his glacial, creaky walk down the sidewalk, using a heavy black cane to steady shaky knees.

I’d see him talking to the Old Man on occasion out under the big pecan tree in our front yard. I think Mr. Pennington like to stand there and blow for a minute, the old man’s euphonism for resting. It was an ancient reference to the days when Dad used mules to plow, and they’d rest in the shade for them to cool down and…blow.

When I was younger, I was always afraid of Mr. Pennington, mostly because his grizzled old wife who had a better mustache than mine, and only wore house dresses. She once scolded me when I rode my bike down the sidewalk and across the water hose she’d stretched to soak the parkway strip.

“Hey boy! Don’t run over that hose. Ride out in the street where you belong.”

Brother, that little outburst resulted in my mother-bear Mom roaring down there to “straighten that old $%@! out.” After that, Mom and Mrs. Pennington never spoke again, though they bared their teeth at each other when they passed on the street.

I didn’t pay the old man much attention when I was a kid. He was simply a fixture in our neighborhood, wearing work pants and shirts faded to a soft blue from thousands of washings and exposure to the sun on the clothesline in back.

As the years passed, more of his teeth disappeared and his hair turned snow white, what you could see under the John Deere cap he’d received somewhere around the time Eisenhauer was elected president.

The cap should have given me a clue.

I was home from college one day and sitting alone in the Old Man’s metal glider when Mr. Pennington crept by.

“Mind if I sit and blow a minute?” he asked.

I perked up at that comment and slid against the opposite arm. “Sure.”

“I always admired this shade.” He settled heavily onto the seat and leaned back, smelling of cigarettes and Old Spice. “It reminds me of one down in the Chicota bottoms when I was farming. I cooled off and took my dinner there when I could, and watered my mules of course.”

Shocked at the news, I probably gaped like a fish out of water. “You’re from Chicota?”

“Sure ‘nuff. Spent a lot of years walking behind them old mules, just like your daddy and grandaddy. I ain’t from around here.”

I couldn’t my ears. Here I was sitting next to still another fountain of information and stories, but in my mind growing up, he was just an old man walking past our house. I still wonder today how two men from that tiny little community would wind up on the same residential block 120 miles away.

For the next couple of years I got to know Mr. Pennington, and grew fond of the old farmer. I even forgave his wife for the water hose incident. Then one day he didn’t walk by and I learned he was walking a different, brighter trail where he didn’t need that cane, or his teeth, anymore.

I wish I’d sat at his knee a little earlier, and listened to what a quiet man had to say. His character, and those stories I missed would have inevitably found their way into my work. We spend too much time in our lives overlooking the world around us, while searching for unrecognizable opportunities we think we need.

I’m at the Tucson Book Festival as you read this, meeting folks and recharging my creative batteries. I attend as many conferences and festivals as possible, depending on the time of the year, finances, and potential return on the investment.

And I don’t mean in a monetary sense. One of my oldest friends, Steve Knagg, is a retired motivational speaker and he says that we spend an inordinate amount of time passing out all of our figurative apples from our mental basket by encouraging and doing for others, or working hard to be successful. Eventually, that basket is empty and needs to be refilled, and to do so, we have to find a way for it to happen.

I attend writers conferences for that reason.

That doesn’t mean I go to every “book festival,” though. I learned long ago that writers have to be picky when deciding which ones to attend. I’ve spent hours…no, days…sitting behind a table while maybe twenty people pass during that entire time.

I’d never even heard of conventions for fiction, though I’d once attended the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Dallas a few years earlier. At that time I was working onsomething far from literature, but I wanted to join a workshop they offered to get some sense on where I was going with, believe it or not, a travel book filled with humor, stories, and destinations.

Good Lord.

I found the conference stuffy, and that workshop almost made me want to quit the business altogether. Dispirited, I came home and wondered what I’d gotten myself into. I almost gave up this writing career, and that happened more than once.

As friends and fans know, I started out as a freelance newspaper columnist, writing outdoor humor, a niche that few others had attempted. Those I knew about were Pat McManus and Gene Hill, who wrote for Field and Stream and Outdoor Life magazines. In my mind at that time, i felt I didn’t have a chance to measure up to them, but I tried.

Experience and determination led me to eventually become prolific enough in the outdoor world to write for over 50 newspapers in Texas and Oklahoma. I joined the Texas Outdoor Writers Association, and the Outdoor Writers of America, meeting other authors, columnists, journalists, and contributors who shared my enthusiasm for the outdoors and writing.

Those folks shored up my obsession to write even more and hopefully publish a book, but what kind was a mystery to even myself. Someone eventually talked me into joining the board for TOWA, where I served for several years, until I lost my mind and eventually became president of that organization.

But I stalled there, partially because I fond the executive director had skimmed nearly $30,000 from the organization, leaving an unpleasant taste in my mouth. At the same time, the internet arrived with a vengeance and killed off newspapers with the ferocity of the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. Losing members, I wanted to do something to help and decided to bring in a guest speaker to excite the five-hundred plus attendees for our annual gathering.

Envisioning a conference that would set the world on fire, I decided to reach out to the most famous Texas writer I could think of.

I cold-called Larry McMurtry, getting the number from something called Information. Remember him, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Horseman Pass By (eventually becoming the Paul Newman movie, Hud), The Last Picture Show, and of course, Lonesome Dove?

Steve Knagg was with me the day I called, standing under tall red oak trees outside of a used appliance store. He was there to buy a thirty-dollar dryer he could barely afford, and just the other day remembered our conversation in the parking lot.

Shaking his head in wonder, he laughed. “You just used that old bag phone sitting on the hood of your truck and called the man who’d won a Pulitzer, like you were calling to order a pizza.”

I was a little more nervous than that, especially after McMurtry answered with a friendly hello. I’m sure he heard me gulp before I explained the call, but he was gracious in declining. “I’m committed to too many deadlines. Here, call this number and ask for Bill Witliff. He’s down in Austin and might be able to attend, but thanks for calling.”

I called Bill Witliff, screenwriter and author. You’ll probably know him as the man who took McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and turned it into one of the most famous miniseries in history, in addition to writing one of the most underrated movies I’ve ever seen, Barbarosa, featuring Willie Nelson.

Standing out there under the trees for almost half an hour, we talked writing and the business before he also had to decline. But in the course of our conversation, he was genuinely interested in my writing and I confessed I was on the verge of quitting.

I could almost see him shaking his head on the other end of the line. “Nope. You never quit. You stand back, take a look around, gather yourself, and continue with what you’re doing.”

It wasn’t long before writing became harder, and my first novel stalled. I didn’t know what to do with it, and needed to speak to someone who understood.

So I cold-called another Texas author named Joe R. Lansdale, who also spent almost an hour on the phone, explaining even more what I’d gotten into and telling me not to quit. Long ago, Joe decided all he was going to do was write, and for decades he lived so close to the edge of poverty they raised most of what they ate in a little East Texas garden.

He doesn’t worry about that kind of thing any longer, because his books have been turned into a television series, and more than a couple have become feature films. I recommend you watch Cold in July. You’ll thank me for it.

We’re now good friends and he keeps supporting my writing, and spends more time than you can imagine encouraging beginning novelists.

So why am I at another conference? Because I need time with authors who understand what I do, and I don’t cold call strangers anymore. These kinds of events are an opportunity to enjoy dinners with those folks, have drinks, and meet others who are successful, or just getting into the Game. After the Bride and I leave Tucson, other conferences are on the books.

In a little more than a month, my brother from another mother, John Gilstrap and I will be at the Pike’s Peak Writers conference where he will be the Guest of Honor. From there, it’s Western Writers of America, Bouchercon, The Will Rogers Medallion Conference, and anything else that catches my fancy when the apple basket is almost empty.

It isn’t just the conference or festival itself that I go for, it’s the people, the knowledge, and the inspiration to come home and hit the keys again.

While in the middle of edits for my upcoming novel scheduled for release in October, 2025, the development editor we’ll call Francis (because I just heard that name on the television)  had several questions about how and why I break chapters the way I do. He also wondered about the placement of character viewpoint breaks within a chapter, and had several suggestions about both. I have to admit, I ignored them after explaining why.

Considering those questions, I started wondering about freshmen authors, who tend to overthink everything and find they, too, are unsure when to break chapters. I’m afraid you’ll see the word “chapter” wayyyy to many times in this post.

The truth is, for me, these breaks come naturally both between chapters and character viewpoints. I don’t consciously say to myself, “Self, I think I’ll stretch this action scene for a few more pages, and wrap things up with a little witty banter before moving on to a different scene.”

If you dig around in books on writing, or the internet, you’ll likely see where a chapter break accentuates a change of place, point of view, or plot. The new chapter tells us we’re in a different place in the novel and the stage has been reset to advance the story.

It also gives the reader a break, kinda like a commercial on television, so we can go make a sammich without missing anything, risk becoming disoriented about the plot after we put the book down to feed the dog or get a grandchild off the roof before they fall into the pool like last time.

Our attention spans are getting shorter, and I like to blame the internet and social media, because social media should be blamed for most of life’s problems, and of course the internet is just a place to noodle around between repeated news stories and Best Of lists.

But there’s this thing called pacing that has to be considered, and it’s all tied up with the chapter above.

We can’t simply cut off a conversation in the middle of a sentence or thought, or can we?

Carlton the Doorman points at two men in blue seersucker suits. “I know you’re both innocent of fashion murder, and it was only by chance you put on these matching suits this morning…or is it?”

His eyes drifted to the body stuffed behind the palm tree, and wondered why the interior decorator decided to use a Queen Palm, instead of a Date Palm. It was all so mysterious, just like those two men who were comparing pocket squares.

Now we have a cliffhanger, and the reader starts the next chapter, which is a shift in plot or viewpoint.

Dammit! I wanted to know how those two put on such garish suits, and now we have a renegade interior decorator to deal with, but the author wants me to read about Elizabeth and her challenges in digging through a file cabinet full of incriminating evidence on the third floor.

So now that chapter plods along, and it’s essential to the plot, but does it have to so long?

My development editor might think so. Maybe he wants it to be a shift in viewpoint within the chapter. It could have worked, I guess, but I like a fresh start and broke both chapters at those specific spots to build tension and anticipation for the next one. It also ends the scene, because I’m tired of writing about it and want to move back to the Seersucker Twins after finishing with the antagonist’s viewpoint.

The truth is, my chapters are long enough to play out the scene without putting in stuff people don’t want to read and will skip ahead. Be they short or long, I break at a point that feels natural.

“Sonny Hawke found himself in an aloha shirt on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande without a gun or badge, and wondered if anyone would take him for a Texas Ranger . Maybe there was a way to play this out before the cartel leader figured out that not all Rangers look alike.”

There we have a break, making the reader wonder the same thing and anticipate the next time Sonny appears.

Then I’ve had copy editors ask why my chapters in the third act are substantially shorter. By the time we’re racing toward the end, chapters are even shorter. Why? Because it subconsciously builds tension. There are times they’re only a page or two, but those quick breaks make readers feel like they’re on a rapidly descending roller coaster.

This is also a technique to keep tired or sleepy readers engaged. We want them to sprint toward the end.

“It’s nearly midnight, but this book is moving right along.” Sleepy Reader flips a couple of pages. “Wow, these are short. I can read another.”

We imagine the reader propped on pillows while a spouse snores quietly. “I’ll turn off the light in a second, but dang this chapter is brief, too. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster and this thing is moving fast. This is like eating potato chips. I can have another, and another. I can finish the book tonight and it won’t be too late when I’m finished.”

The truth is, I’ve heard this from more than one fan, who tells me they slogged through the next day because they stayed up past one in the morning, because they had to finish the book, and it was a good read.

Don’t be concerned about word or page counts, just end the chapter at a natural break. You’ll find them easy enough.

Fifteen years ago, a coworker pushed into my softly-lit office one Monday morning and settled herself in one of the two chairs on the opposite side of my desk. I knew she was irritated by her body language and the way she sat on the edge of the chair, as if preparing to leap across and tear out my throat.

I didn’t like overhead lights, so they were off, and the room was lit only by two standing lamps and a green one on my desk.

“It’s too dark in here.” She pursed her lips like the SNL church lady. “This doesn’t look like an office.”

My first thought that I somehow held back was, Your mouth looks like a cat’s ass.

“It does too.” (I wonder if I meant her mouth, or the office.) Here’s a desk. There’s a computer, and I have an electric pencil sharpener. It’s a real workspace.”

“You know what I mean.”

You don’t know what I meant, though. Then I spoke aloud. “I thought I did.”

She got right to the point. “So just what do you do all day?” She hammered that word hard.

My puckered visitor was a director in another department, and apparently didn’t like the fact that I was behind my desk late one morning, pounding on my computer keyboard, instead of sitting in some other inane meeting like the one she’d just left.

I also knew she was miffed because I’d refused to attend her “mandatory” 4:00 PM meeting the previous Friday afternoon. In my opinion, the meeting was only a way to flex her administrative muscles over those who worked under her so they couldn’t go home until 6:00.

I was the Director of Communications and crisis management for the then tenth largest school district in Texas. We had 7,500 employees and 56,000 kids, and someone was messing up every single day.

Considering her question about my work ethic, I leaned back and propped my feet on my desk for emphasis. “What I do all day is exactly what I was doing when you rolled in.”

“And what’s that?”

“Keeping your people out of trouble and dealing with the media. Your people need direction that your coordinators aren’t providing, and since I’ve been in this business for almost thirty-five years, I have a little experience in crisis management to handle these issues so they won’t wind up on the shoulders of your building administrators where they can’t do their job.”

She glared. “You look like you’re just sitting there, twiddling your thumbs every time I go by, and you’re always on the phone. It never looks like you’re doing anything.”

“That’s because I’m good at my job. Looks easy, don’t it?”

“I think you make it appear like you’re working.”

“Okay.” As a visual aid, I reached over and sharpened a pencil. She stomped out and though we’re still “friends,” that day has never come back up in conversation.

Our little exchange came back not too long ago in a writing workshop when a young lady raised her hand when I asked for questions.

“So now that you’re an author, what do you do all day?”

“I sit behind a desk, or sometimes on the couch, or on the bed, or on a table-cum-desk at our cabin and think a lot of the time. Then I pound on the keyboard, making stuff up.”

“So you write all day?”

“Some days. But I don’t always look like I’m working. Sometimes I read, or look out the window. When I lean back and close my eyes, story lines, bits of dialogue, and descriptions roll past. Sometimes I watch TV. Writers are always thinking, so sometimes I have to pause the movie or program to take a note or two. They sometimes trigger a bit of dialogue, or a plot line, or even an idea for my weekly newspaper columns.”

“Isn’t that stealing?”

“Nope, according to academics, there are only seven basic storytelling plots that we all re-work, though a couple of overachievers say there might be as many as thirty. The basics are overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, rebirth, comedy, and tragedy. We all just build those same stories and do it in our voice.”

“Can your wife tell you’re working?”

“Why, have you been talking to her? Did she say something?”

Thankfully the conversation moved on.

I’m always working, though there are times when this author’s mind needs some relief. There are days when words flow from a firehose, but at other times I run into hills and the pace slows as I  struggle to the top. Good or bad, my mind wanders. I suffer distractions.

Squirrel!

After 37 years, I still write a weekly newspaper column that allows me to go in an entirely different direction in my writing. Changing lanes freshens my mind, and the little 900-word stories get me onto a different track.

There are other times, though, when I write a scene and need details I haven’t seen or experienced for myself. That leads to the Google and The Rabbit Hole. It isn’t a bad thing. As I research, or surf, I find ideas, stories, and anecdotes that make their way into my plot. But as all writers can tell you, it’s a huge time-suck that can impact your page or word count for that day.

But I’m still working, though I might not look like it.

Sometimes I need to put myself in that place. That’s when I watch a movie set in the period I’m working on, looking for details that might not have occurred to me.

I also feel guilty most of the time. I want to write, but at the same time, I really want to read whatever is in my TBR pile. That’s where books come in. For example, I’m working on my fifth western at this writing and needed some real cowboy lingo. While the Bride and I were in Alpine, Texas, for their annual Art Walk back in November, she found me a copy of We Pointed Them North, by Teddy Blue. That book is an encyclopedia of the cowboy way of life.

Within those pages he once referred to himself as a cow catcher, instead of cowboy. That went into the manuscript.  He also explained the origin of cow puncher. When a cattle drive was over and they finally got the herd to the railroad, the stock had to be loaded onto the cars. To get the cattle moving, the boys used long poles to punch them in the rear end, forcing them forward to make room for more.

Who knew?

So just what do authors do all day?

We noodle around on the internet, make things up, daydream, stare out the window–––

Squirrel!

––– find things to do in order not to work, read, think, stare out the window some more, and sometimes attend conferences where we interact with others, thereby finding inspiration to string words together when we get home, hopefully choosing the ones that carry readers along with us on the fictional journey created in our minds. Then we write.

Yeah, lady, I was working then, and now, but sometimes you just can’t tell it.