During the downtime between book deadlines, I’ve been able to catch up on my reading. As many writers can attest, when you’re writing you want to read, and when you’re reading it’s easy to wish you were writing.

Not to say I haven’t been dabbling with the next manuscript, trying to reach that acceleration point where the process takes over, but with the holidays, it’s slow. Oh, I’m getting five pages a day, but they haven’t sparked yet.

So for inspiration, I picked up an old favorite off one of the shelves behind my desk. It was Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a book that should be required reading for all future Texan authors. It’s not a long novel, and I finished it in one blustery afternoon when I couldn’t force myself into going outside. Putting it back, my fingers brushed Texasville, and I was away on another adventure with his character Duane Moore in Thalia, Texas.

After finishing all five books in that saga, my appetite for McMurtry wasn’t sated. I considered his Lonesome Dove books, but decided to read some of his more contemporary novels , and that’s when tragedy struck.

See, I’m a collector. When I find an author I can’t put down, I’ll search out all their works in first edition, and I’ve been a McMurtry fan since reading All My Friends are Going to be Strangers back in high school. I have them all, and went to find the next one. But I hadn’t put them order since we had the new bookcases put in. When the Bride and I bought this new house, we hired a craftsman to install my dream shelves that now groan under the weight of bound worlds.

Once the cabinetmake finished, and my librarian daughter quit climbing the ladder and rolling back and forth on the rail, and we simply unloaded all the books from the boxes, putting them only in author order, and I’ve never gone back and sorted them.

“Good lord!”

The Bride wandered into my office a few minutes later, unimpressed by my outburst. “What have you done now?”

“I’m missing a McMurtry.”

“Are you sure?”

I blinked at her for a long moment. “Of course I’m sure. I’m standing here on the ladder, looking at all the titles and In a Narrow Grave isn’t here.”

“You sure you had that one?”

“What’s with the interrogation? I remember all my books, and the day I picked that one up from a bargain bin long before we met. It was one of those little bookstores that just bought books and stacked them around.” I momentarily drifted away. “What a wonderful store.”

“Go buy another one.”

I shook my head “This was a first edition.”

“So?”

“The last one I saw was somewhere around eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, you need to find that one.”

We searched high and low. It wasn’t mis-shelved, or behind other books. It was simply gone. I might have lost it in one of the several moves over the years, but I swear I remember seeing it on the shelf in our previous house.

But then another lightning bolt struck as I put the remainder of McMurtry’s works in order. “Good lord!”

“Really?” She wandered back in. “What now?”

“The Late Child and Somebody’s Darling are gone too!”

Que the mystery music. Dum, dum, dum.

As the camera moves in, we exchanged perplexed expressions, and then understanding dawned.

I felt faint and placed both palms against my cheeks. “Someone’s borrowed them!!!”

Her eyes widened. “Without asking!!!”

I’m sure the Bride would have taken to the fainting couch, if we had one.

“Hannah!” The name unconsciously slipped out.

The Bride shook her head at the mention of our youngest daughter’s best friend. I like to blame her for many incidents and accidents through the years from the time they were children, but the Bride yanked me back. “She’s off the hook. She doesn’t read.”

I struggled with her statement “Hannah asked me for a recommendation one time, when she was in middle school. I might have given her a book, and I doubt she ever brought it back. Maybe she likes odd numbers and took two more.”

“You wouldn’t have given her either one of those.”

“You’re right.” I struggled with the enormity of what we faced. Someone borrowed two prized possessions. Why didn’t they take the dog instead, or one of the girls? At least they would have wandered back home at some point.”

“Burglars,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe there’s some hot, black market for those two volumes.”

I don’t own a lending library. I’d learned my lesson decades earlier when I loaned my complete collection of William Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series to a good friend who loved to read. We shared many fine hours talking books and authors, until he betrayed me. He finished those first editions and ––– gave them to someone else.

“I didn’t know you wanted them back,” he answered, perplexed when I asked for them back.

They’re as gone as the Library of Alexandria.

Today there’s only three people who are on the Loan List, and two of them have their own McMurtry collections. (I wonder if they completed those by borrowing mine…nah.)

Pouring two fingers of Buffalo Trace to settle my nerves and a great sense of loss, I resumed arranging my entire library, which took some time, leaving space on the shelf to replace those missing volumes.

Now the search begins to find quality first edition replacements. It will be a hard, bitter road, but the sense of anticipation, and then joy of discovery, is something to look forward to.

So if you’re considering a Christmas present for me, you now have an idea.

With that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Good luck to the writers, and happy reading to those who enjoy settling in with a good book.

We recently had several folks over to the house for a get together…no. Let me start again.

Our house was a zoo last week when we hosted our youngest grandson’s 4th birthday party. There were about a million kids I’d never seen. I knew our own grandcritters and a handful of others and that was all. The same held true for the adults. The rest were strange little apes who set up a howl that lasted for two hours.

The kids were loud, too.

Family and friends made up part of the attendees, but there were a lot of people I’d never met.

To preserve my sanity, I found a nice corner of our outside kitchen counter and settled in with a couple of dads clutching adult beverages to watch the action. My daughters and the Bride opted for an old fashioned home birthday party. No bounce house. No petting zoo. And thank God for no Chuck E. Cheese insanity. Instead, they had old-fashioned games for the kids, including bobbing for apples, which resulted in only one near drowning.

Who would have thought they’d take their shirts off and go in headfirst?

The only thing the girls didn’t resurrect was Pin the Tail on the Donkey. With our critters, there would have been a stabbing with the tail and the addition of paramedics would have just added to the cacophony.

Conversation wandered as the party wound down. What was a group of adults watching kids have fun evolved into a mixed confederation of grownups and tweens, young people between the age of 9 and 12.

I heard the twelve-year-old ask her mother, who was our youngest daughter’s best friend growing up, why I was wearing a tee shirt that didn’t match my unbuttoned aloha shirt. “Why is Da wearing that? The colors don’t go together. He should know that.”

“That’s because Da can’t help it.” Hanna has known me since she was seven, and I’m convinced she lived with us for a couple of years when she was a teenager. She was at our house all the time. In fact, I recently asked the Bride if we’d sent her to college along with our own girls.

Hanna gave me a sympathetic smile. “He’s colorblind.”

Hanna’s daughter looked at me with a frown. “You only see in black and white?”

I sighed. I’ve spent my whole life answering that question from adults. “No, I see color all right, but it isn’t they same as what registers in your brian.”

She plucked out the tail of her blouse. “What color is this?”

“I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

“Is it gray?”

“I’d be willing to bet it’s purple or something, but it’s green to me.”

“It’s turquoise.”

“It’s green.”

“What color is mom’s shirt?”

Remembering I was talking to a kid, I bared my teeth and smiled. “I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

I’ve been caught in that endless loop before with those who can’t seem to grasp that I don’t perceive what everyone else sees.

The Bride picked out my clothes each morning when I worked full time and had to wear suits and slacks. As the years passed and I moved up in our organization, seniority provided some leniency and adjusted my wardrobe to jeans, white shirts, and a blue or black sports coat. There was a time before we were married when I dressed myself.

More than once I walked into my office to find my secretary with her hand out. “Give me that tie. It doesn’t match.”

“Last week you said it matched this shirt.”

“Nope. Your other shirt is a different shade. Use the black tie on the back of your door today, or don’t wear one at all.”

Color is an issue in writing, also. I’ve described sunrises and sunsets, the light on trees and vegetation, or the changing color of rocks, hill, or mountains without ever seeing what registers in most people’s brains. It comes from asking the Bride wha see sees as we pass, or sit on the edge of a drop-off to watch the sunset.

If I describe the subtle colors of a Craftsman house restored to it’s original paint scheme, it’s a cheat, because I looked it up, or asked her.

She gets those questions all the time. “What color are those clouds?”

“Salmon. Pinkish. Tope. Chartreuse. Vermilion. Persimmon.” She really doesn’t include all those at one time, but they’re examples of what I hear.

“You’re making those up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Persimmon. If I don’t know the colors, how is persimmon going to help? What are those other colors I always have to ask you about?”

“Mauve. Coral. Lavender.”

“Just words. What color is mauve?”

“Dusty rose.”

“Sigh. Roses are red, or yellow So you mean red.”

“No.”

“Give me another color.”

She pointed at her shirt. “This is coral.”

It looked vaguely orange to me, so I gave up.

We recently hiked through Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle, and I spent half of my time asking her and the couple we were with about their descriptions of the canyon walls, or the vastly different layers we passed. As they walked ahead, I stopped and wrote it down in a small notebook.

The desert scrub plants I saw as silver, gray, or brown came in subtle shades I didn’t understand. I had to write them down, too, and when I set my novel, A Dead Man’s Laugh there, I resorted to my almost indecipherable notes.

For example, a creosote bush has, according to my companions, dark green leaves with brown-burgandy fruit. I saw waxy dark brown leaves with even darker brown buds. That’s because I’m red/green challenged.

It made elementary school art a living hell. My grades weren’t good because the crayons in class didn’t have their labels and I had no idea what colors I was using. trees were brown, grass probably turquoise, and people’s hair most likely began the punk movement.

According to Color Blind Awareness:

Being ‘red/green color blind’ means people with it can easily confuse any colors which have some red or green as part of the whole color. So someone with red/green color blindness is likely to confuse blue and purple because they can’t ‘see’ the red element of the color purple.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for me. I can identify the basic colors, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc, if they’re neon bright, but subtle shades leave me in the gray dust.

The Bride, the editor I sleep with, corrected those descriptions in A Dead Man’s Laugh to match what she saw in the canyon and I sent the manuscript off.

We always talk about using all our senses in writing. The scent and taste of chocolate. That one I can easily identify. The squeak of metal as a swing set moving in the wind. A smooth tabletop, or the hard slap of a gunshot.

For those of us who are colorblind, these descriptions are hard and we have to find a way around them.

I sincerely hope you don’t suffer the same malady.

I have this fascination with houses.

It might have originated with my grandparent’s old homestead. Peeling wallpaper, bare wire bulbs, and push-button switches, it was an old, old structure with no air conditioning, or plumbing for that matter, but it had a tin roof that thundered under a heavy deluge and huge double-hung windows that rippled in the evening light.

My grandparents moved from that one to a much smaller frame farmhouse with indoor plumbing and a window unit, but no functional kitchen sink until I installed one nearly twenty years later. That homestead still figures in some of the stories that flow from my fingertips.

But the one I want to discuss today was about two hundred yards from my grandparent’s place, slumped in the middle of a washout pasture. With nary a drop of paint on the outside, the nine-hundred square foot (and that’s a guess) house was abandoned probably ten years before I hit the ground.

I was told one an old bachelor uncle I never met was the last inhabitant, but he was an influence on my life, and ultimately, my writing. From the looks of the interior, he one day picked up, packed up what he wanted, and walked away, leaving a life unremembered.

When we were kids, my cousin and I often visited that former residence that could have been the set for a slasher movie. Four long-dead trees reached skeletal arms into the air not far from the structure. They’d provided shade when he lived there, and were likely planted by the long-forgotten builders.

Two others had fallen across what was once a main dirt road leading from Arthur City to Chicota, Texas, and had flanked the house. The state built a new creek bridge and re-routed what was to become Highway 197, leaving the old dirt trace to fade into obscurity.

Sad, because the house under discussion and another unpainted domicile belonging to my blind great-great aunt Becky faced that same track, as well as the Assembly of God Church.

NOTE: After the re-route, the men of that small community engineered a way to lift the church and turn it 45-degrees to face a different oil road. To me, fascinating.

I loved to visit that great-uncle’s house that smelled of dirt dauber’s nests and ancient mouse droppings. The door was gone, as well as the windows on either side, likely salvaged for another build somewhere, giving the illusion of a blank, wide-eyed expression of open-mouthed shock.

The porch sagged, and inside, the bare, warped floors undulated like the surface of the ocean,. The rusty sheet-iron roof bent and curled toward the sky, loose sheets creaking in the wind that was responsible for its eventual demise.

It had a kitchen with one counter and two holes in the surface to hold dishpans. The doorless cabinets still held dishes and bowls. Dust-covered utensils on crusted plates were evidence that he’d eaten and left. A rusty iron bedstead with a frazzled cotton mattress took up the lone bedroom floor. Straight-back wooden chairs with cane seats sat in the silent living room, roosts for birds that spend the nights there.

As adventurous kids, Cousin and I often crept through the dead house in silence, looking at the remnants of life. An old suit coat lay tossed in one corner, a bed for stray dogs or coyotes. A pair of work pants hung on a nail driven into the bedroom door where he left them.

After poking around without touching a thing, we always walked out onto the rotting porch to look toward the south. Two gullies extended from the yard at an angle of embrace. They would eventually erode all the way to the structure itself. One was full of tin cans, glass, and whatever refuse he had no use for. It was his version of a landfill.

I was grown and married the last time I visited the house. Defying the odds, it was still standing, though slumped and completely worn out. The pants still hung behind the door, thought the chewed coat was nothing more than a few fibers. A rat snake had taken up residence in the now floorless kitchen, and slithered away when I stood in the door and consider my own memories, and possibly what Uncle had seen.

It’s gone now, bulldozed over for a new build thrown up with little or no character.

That old house somehow took up space in my psyche, and I’d like to think it eventually had something to do with my college career in architecture.

It’s there in dreams, and daydreams, and I can’t tell you why.

It was a dead house that meant nothing to me, but somehow influenced my life and writing.

Is there some special thing or place that still haunts you, as this former home does me?

We post a lot on this blog about the craft of writing, but today I want to concentrate on reading, and building readers.

Mrs. Latimer, my first grade teacher, sparked my interest in books with the Dick and Jane series. Each day after lunch, we laid our heads on the table and listened to her read. Their dog, Tip, was always my favorite and as I almost dozed off on the desktop, I pictured myself playing in a grassy park with that pup, and still recall to this day a story about the color violet in one of those stories.

Interesting, because I’m colorblind, but I’ve always like the sound of that word.

Fast forward to second grade, and Miss Russell the school librarian. I adored that redhead, and quickly became the teacher’s pet. She recognized my love for reading and while most students could check out only one book at a time, she allowed me two.

And then each grade after, I could check out the corresponding number of books to my grade level. By seventh grade, I’d read almost everything in that library.

Cowboy Sam, the We Were There books, Will James and Smoky the Cowhorse, sparked my interest in history that soon lead to biographies of Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and here in Texas, the Alamo legend and all the fiction that gathered around it. After that, it was everything I could lay my hands on, and by the time I was in junior high, I was reading books intended for adults.

Those two educators inspired a reader to grow, and by the time our daughters came around, they were surrounded by books, because the Bride reads, too. Those who know me have seen the bookshelves and cases in our home, and I often get the question, “Did you read all these?”

They wouldn’t be on our shelves if I hadn’t.

Books were available for our daughters and today they’re both educators. The Redhead is a high school librarian, and the One Known as Taz is an elementary school counselor. Each Sunday we all get together for dinner at our house, and most of the time the girls discuss whatever they’re reading at the time.

Now we have the grand-critters, and from day one they’ve had access to books, beginning with those to chew on, tactile books that absorbed them with crackles and textures, to cardboard picture books.

Of the seven, not all are readers, though we’ve tried. As you can tell from this photo, they’ve enjoyed books together, though some are more enamored with the printed word than others.

One will need a chiropractor someday from carrying around a backpack full of books, even when she travels with her parents the full eight miles to our house. When she goes on weekend trips, a second suitcase is necessary.

The others aren’t as addicted, but they still read and look forward to the public library at least once a month, and weekly during the summertime. They love to attend signings, and each time they’re in a bookstore, these guys go home with a new book.

This past weekend at the Will Rogers Medallion conference, I heard some disturbing news that physical books are in jeopardy, but eBooks are the new way to go. I hope that’s not true, because we’re caught in a Catch-22 issue. My girls and their husbands work hard to keep the kids off their devices, but everything in our world is dragging them in that direction. I’d rather them read on their pads, though, instead of spending valuable time on social media and games.

Which leads me to a side discussion, and that’s getting them away from those devices and into the outdoors. We’ve taught them all to enjoy nature, and getting outside is even more important these days as school, competitive sports, and screens absorb so much of their time.

And here I sit, staring at this screen and typing words that will never see a physical page.

In my opinion, a book within reach is the best way to pass the time (instead of scrolling through inane social media platforms that do little more than capture an individual’s interest for a second between swipes), and the adventures inside those pages are pure educational gold.

Kids will soon forget the games on those devices, and the videos which seem to be taking control of their time, but the stories they read in books will remain forever.

Let’s concentrate on building more readers, and the time to start is when they’re sitting in our laps. Turn off your damned devices and read to them, because those days are fleeting.

When you read this, the Bride and I are with Joy and John Gilstrap in France. I hope I can get an idea to use in a novel and write this trip off. John might. He has a history of visit different places and setting his Jonathan Grave books there.

Much of my travel within the states is for research. The Bride and I have visited Alpine, Texas, and the Big Bend region several times, and each of those trips provided settings and information that wound up in all four of my Sonny Hawke thrillers.

I’ve been up and down the Rio Grande and Red River here in Texas, to get an idea of what the world looks like on both sides of the borders. We’ve been through East Texas, in order to see the country I planned to write about and that trip also showed up in a Sonny Hawke thriller.

Within the next month or two, we’re heading up into Eastern Oklahoma to see where the Comanches lived, and to visit a number of sites I’ve read about. Most of that will be go into the western horror series I’m working on.

A year ago, Joy and John Gilstrap came to Texas and we took them down through Fredericksburg where Germans settled and brought their culture to the developing territory over 150 years ago. From there, we traveled down into the Big Bend region to soak up Marfa, Alpine, and Marathon. It wasn’t a surprise when parts of John’s Zero Sum were set in that hot, dry country.

Besides that, I believe he also mentioned the heat, and flies, something an armchair researcher might miss. Especially the flies.

The purpose of all this is to urge writers to get out and see the world, then use what you’ve discovered to flavor your books.

It doesn’t have to be international travel. This is the first time we’ve been across the Pond, but we’ve been to Mexico and Canada, and those memories are right there, waiting to be plucked out and used in a novel someday.

Will I set a novel in Paris, Normandy, or the Champagne region? I doubt it, but maybe someone I’ve met there will spark a character, or a benign incident on a train can be reimagined as a thrilling scene.

Just think. Texan. Hat. Barn coat. Lucchese boots. France.

Mix well. Maybe it’ll fizz over.

I’m sure John will come back with ideas of his own, and the stories will unfold.

Decades ago, Bill Fries and Chip Davis wrote a spoken song that was recorded by C.W. McCall (he recorded Convoy). Since I’m short of time and packing for the trip, I’m posting this fine piece of writing entitled Aurora Borealis. I wish it was mine.

“One night, many, many summers ago we were camped at twelve thousand feet up where the air is still clear, high in Rockies at Lost Lake, Colorado. And as the fire down burned low and only a few glowing coals remained, we laid on our backs all warm in our sleeping bags and looked up at the stars.

“And as I felt myself falling out into the vastness of the Universe, I thought about things. I thought about the time my grandma told me what to say when you saw the evening star. You all remember:

Star light, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

“The air is crystal-clean up there; that’s why you can see a million stars, spread out across the sky, almost like a gigantic cloud.

“I remember another night, in the black canyon of the Gunnison River. And we had our rubber boats pulled up on the bank an’ turned over so we could sleep on ’em. And we were layin’ there lookin’ up at the stars that night, too, and one of the guys from New York said, he said, “Hey! Look at all that smog in the sky! Smog clear out here in the sticks!” And somebody said, “Hey, Joe, that’s not smog; that’s the Milky Way. It’s a hundred billion stars. It’s our galaxy.”

“And we saw the Northern Lights up there once, on the summit of Uncompahgre, fourteen thousand three hundred and nine feet above sea level. They were like flames from some prehistoric campfire, leaping and dancing in the sky and changing colors. Red, gold, blue, violet… Aurora Borealis. The Northern Lights. It was the equinox, the changing seasons. Summer to fall, young to old, then to now.

“And then everyone was asleep, except me. And as I saw the morning star come up over the mountain, I realized at last that life is simply a collection of memories. But memories are like starlight: they live on forever.”

Wish I’d written that. Life is just a collection of memories, and we’re making them with a writer friend I met the very day I got into this business.

Y’all get out and travel!

I just finished a three-day inaugural city-wide event in Garland, Texas, which featured my first Tucker Snow novel, Hard Country. This great honor was calledOne Book – One Garland, and was a gathering of readers and book clubs that culminated with a meet the author night, an in-conversation interview between myself and a former student who is now the Director ofCommunications for one of Texas’ largest school districts, and my typical avant garde writing workshop.

My workshops aren’t hands-on critique, practice events, but adiscussion of writing, research, the challenges I’ve experienced and overcome, and tips to polish would-be authors’ work. It was a fluid discussion that hopefully answered most of the questions from over thirty attendees.

I surprised them at the outset. “What do you want to know or hear about?”

Those who’d been to workshops tilted their heads at me like a dog looking at a new pan. This was something new.

That opened the dance to a variety of questions about writing, and comments on Hard Country. One lady made my head swell enough to need a new, larger hat. “I was impressed by the amount of detail in your books. I’ve read most of them since I discovered your work and wanted to say the specifics in your novels makes me part of your story. I grew up in those areas you write about, and the wonder how much research you do to make them so realistic and interesting.”

I had to think about that one. Growing up in the areas I write about brings that sense of reality she was talking about, and the little tidbits I learned growing up adds to the rich stew of fiction. And speaking of senses, writers should use all five in their novels without making it obvious they want readers to smell, feel, or see. But what she thought was weeks of research boiled down to reading and listening to the radio.

The idea for one major twist in Hard Country came fully formed from listening to the radio, and a program by local radio host Ed Wallace, who talked about that for a few minutes one lazy Saturday morning before moving on to another topic.

It happens when my protagonists discover that vehicles now are so advanced they download all the information on your phones the minute a driver starts the engine. That info includes online purchases, music preferences, and internet searches. They also gather information about driving habits, braking, speeding, and even each time a driver swerves in their own lane of travel.

The initial plot for Hard Country (and more realistic details) came from years of dealing with a meth house across the gravel road from our family ranch. More reality on this subject came when the meth-heads stole my brother-in-law’s farm truck and it downloaded the contents of their phone, allowing law enforcement officers to trace the theft back to the theft.

The attendee at the workshop was most interested in facts and wondered how much time I spent researching everything I included in the novel.

Not as much as you think, though she thought I’d absorbed tons of material. You can spend as much time as you want in research, but it’s easy to disappear down a rabbit hole and waste valuable writing time.

We don’t have to become experts on automotive downloads, or as in the case of the second Tucker Snow, The Broken Truth, naturally occurring radioactive materials, or NORM, which comes from drilling for oil in west Texas. I stumbled across that interesting aspect of my story when we purchased land in Northeast Texas and found there were mildly radioactive drill rods on the property. Other than a discussion with an experienced NORM board member and a few minutes on the internet, that’s all I needed, except for imagination.

You can put too much information in a novel, to the point the pace slows and readers skip paragraphs or pages. Years ago, I got tired of reading Tom Clancy and Dale Brown, because I felt I was reading training manuals. All I need is a little info to make the story real and valid in a reader’s mind, and told the lady in class I collect just enough facts and anecdotes to make the story real.

In the case of my contemporary, traditional, and horror westerns, the history I include comes mostly from reading both fiction and nonfiction books on the old west. I read Larry McMutrty’s westerns of course, and all of Louis L’Amour’s novels. But more recent works helped shape the reality of West Texas, North Texas, and Eastern Oklahoma, in the case of The Journey South.

I gleaned details from Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne (nonfiction), Mike Blakely’s Comanche Dawn (fiction), and Buffalo Trail (fiction), by Jeff Guinn, and Comanche Midnight (nonfiction), by Stephen Harrigan, to name only a few. Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve collected more historical information from two fascinating books, The Beauty of the Days Gone By, Jason Stone (and I can’t recommend this excellent book enough!) and Charles Goodnight by J. Evers Haley.

Another workshop attendee mentioned my character backgrounds and wondered if I spent much time writing full biographies on those I create. The answer was no. They walk on at the right time, fully formed, and I discover their histories and backgrounds a little piece at a time as the plot progresses.

Think of it as meeting someone at a cocktail party, asking a few questions, and the listening as they reveal their own histories and backgrounds. However, we discussed those authors who prefer to create extensive biographies to further their understanding of the characters they’ve created. Either works, and both are effective!

Of course, the one writing rule I emphasized was that there’s no rules in writing, and they all wrote that down.

Have you ever been involved in some intense situation and your account doesn’t match up with others who were there and involved?

The human mind and memory is a curious thing. When I’m with the family members I grew up with, it’s always fascinating to hear their stories about growing up, but each of us remembers the anecdotes differently. They spin these tales, I watch their lips move, and wonder what the hell they’re talking about.

Case in point. Let’s talk about eye witnesses, but not from a legal standpoint. Let’s simply discuss what we see, and why it’s different, likely resulting from different backgrounds and worldly experiences.

John Gilstrap and I were in Indianapolis a few years ago, along with our wives, attending Magna Cum Murder, a small writing conference full of heart and camaraderie. On that October day in question, the four of us were having drinks outside a grand old club on Monument Circle, enjoying the company and cool weather.

John made dinner reservations at a steakhouse within walking distance, but we’d been out there for a couple of hours and it was necessary to visit the hotel’s facilities first. I’m not sure why we both decided to go at the same time, and I really don’t want to discuss that here, but….

…his wife, Joy, and my bride, Shana, continued their conversation as we left. The current Columbia Club was built in 1925, and the restroom at the far end of the grand lobby of marble and tile was some distance from the front entrance, monitored by traditionally well-dressed doormen.

I reached out to Gilstrap, who two-fingered his version of that clear Indianapolis day and sent it over. I promise, the skies were bright and blue, we all agree on that.

*

Murder At The War Memorial

The lobby of Columbia Club in Indianapolis reeks of Old Money, from its elegant carved wood moldings and soaring ceiling to the dark wood bar to the massive walk-in fireplace. That golden eagle in the corner once stood guard over Abraham Lincoln’s funeral bier. It is the perfect location for a mystery writers’ conference, and so it served for one of my annual favorites, Magna Cum Murder. The conference started on Friday, so Thursday was all about arrival, checking in and meeting up with new friends. My wife, Joy, doesn’t always go to these things with me, but a few years ago, she came along because my buddy Reavis’s wife, Shana, was accompanying him. You haven’t seen trouble until Joy and Shana knock around together.

Somehow, Rev and I found the bar before the ladies did–by the span of a couple of drinks and a dozen war stories–and because it was such a nice early autumn day, we partook of our libations on the patio in the front of the hotel, across the street from the towering War Memorial obelisk. From this vantage point, we could watch the valet parking team do its work and wave hello to writers and readers we’ve seen year after year at Magna.

Finally, the ladies joined us, and after a little while, those early libations caught up with Rev and me and certain biological realities kicked in. I’m not sure which one of us excused ourselves first, but the trip to the men’s room became a dual effort.

We left our wives at the table to catch up with each other.

The restrooms at the Columbia Club are not conveniently located. It’s a bit of a hike to get to them. So, having left the ladies alone for five, maybe seven minutes, as Rev and I are heading back to the front doors, I notice a lady and a little boy on my left, pressing themselves into a corner by the luggage closet, and the valets are in the opposite corner. How odd. Then, when we stepped out into the sunshine, I glanced at the table where we’d left our wives, saw that their chairs were empty, and then, from across the street, at the base of the obelisk, I saw two men running, one behind the other. The one in the rear was a cop. The cop yelled, “Police! Don’t move!” Then took a shooter’s stance, fired, and the runner face planted onto the concrete. In that instant, I thought he’d shot with a pistol, but it turned out to be a Taser. That explained the quietness of the report.

Like most violence, the whole scene transpired over maybe ten seconds. I said to Rev, “The ladies missed the whole show.”

He replied, “No, they didn’t. They’re in the middle of it.” He pointed to a scrum of activity centered around a screaming lady, and sure enough, there they were.

*

His recollection ends here for the purposes of this discussion, but different viewpoints and proximity, as well as several minutes of extra knowledge, can sharpen the event.

“Eyewitnesses can provide very compelling legal testimony, but rather than recording experiences flawlessly, their memories are susceptible to a variety of errors and biases. They (and that’s all of us) can make errors in remembering specific details and can even recall whole events that did not actually happen.” Cara Laney and Elizabeth F. Loftus, Reed College, University of California, Irvine.

*

John’s view ends his story at the perfect place. Now my Bride picks up the narrative.

She is a former degreed journalist and as an old-school newspaper reporter, deals in facts, less emotion.

(She quickly came over from the dark side and moved into public education where we met.)

If she hears a story, or half of one, she’ll ruthlessly drill down until she discovers the truth. Both daughters can vouch for that from teenage experience. The truth is, I’d prefer to spin my stories when she isn’t present, if you know what I mean…

*

“Well, since the girls were there the whole time, we saw and heard much more.

“The screaming and yelling moved us toward the melee to see if we could help. The man, who was not wearing dark clothing, was hitting a woman who was crumpled on the ground next to a raised wall. I believe he was wearing a t-shirt. I guess his pants were dark. He then ran across the monument area looking for another victim. As we moved toward where he was going, we saw a man with a white dress shirt with blood on it standing near a man who was hurt and laying on steps. He was obviously trying to make sure the assailant did not return and cause more harm to the man on the ground that he had apparently targeted earlier.

“We later learned the blood on his shirt was that of the victim – he was a doctor trying to render aid. Later that night we were told that the victim sadly did not survive. Also near the area was a group of people who had come down to bring food to the homeless. All were prepared to intervene in some way, but the police arrived quickly and confronted the assailant. He did not heed their warnings and kept moving. They tazed him as he moved away from them, but the direction was not toward where we were standing with the guys at this point. If we were facing north, he was running east.

“It was all very unsettling. Joy later mentioned that she would not have felt as confident in our moving in closer to the tragic events unfolding if she had known I was not carrying protection. I normally do, but since we were with the guys, I was not. Lesson learned.”

*

We’re all susceptible to erroneous accounts for a variety of reasons. I think mine differs because like John, I’m a storyteller and have related this event over and over, likely embellishing it because of audience reaction whenever I give a talk. Or maybe because I simply like my version better.

*

The girls were settled on an outside settee as two fairly well-known authors headed for the necessary room. After the hike back, strange activities at the front doors caught our attention. I woman huddle with her little one (age between four and eight) to our left, burrowing into the luggage coat section. The woman gave us a fearful look, and ducked back down as if an artillery barrage was about to ensue.

Exchanging puzzled looks, we pushed past a tense-faced doorman and into the covered entrance where I heard shouting.

Orders came fierce and strong. “Stop!”

“Get on the ground!”

Men and women screamed.

A huddle to the right across the street caught my attention and action to our left moved fast. A man raced in our direction, in my memory wearing dark running clothes, and one of two pursuing officers shouted again.

“Stop!”

The brain slows. Too much information. Something bad.

I looked past the assailant and down the barrel of what I thought was a handgun as the closest officer took a stance and fired. Instead of the report of a firearm, the fleeing suspect stiffened and fell hard on his face. Tazed.

Blinking, I looked to the left to see another man down, surrounded by good Samaritans who’d gathered to render air. That’s when time kicked back and concern swept over me.

 John frowned. The ladies missed the whole show.

*

As they said, they didn’t. The instinct to protect others kicked in and both our wives rushed in to help defend others against a demented criminal who’d just been released from jail that morning.

Misinformation can corrupt memory in the aftermath of an event. When more than one person witnesses a crime and discusses it with others before officials arrive, they are likely to have noticed different things because witnesses have different personalities and that individuality shows up in recollections. Together they reinforce those shared memories and contaminate them with information from others.

The differences here are subtle, but collecting the three accounts…(and forgive me, because due to time limitations writing this at the last minute, I didn’t get Joy’s take, which had a little twist that made her participation even more interesting)…shows the reader that eyewitness testimony will never be exact.

The Old Man told me growing up not to believe most of what I hear, and only half of what I see. The older I get, the more I realize how smart he was.

With a book deadline looming and getting ready to leave for Bouchercon, I haven’t spent much time thinking about the subject of today’s blog, but it came about at a book signing. Tuesday, August 20, was the release of my second Tucker Snow novel, The Broken Truth.

We had a packed house at the Paris Texas Public Library, and I did my usual talk about the subject matter, the characters, and writing in general. Without a set speech, I discuss whatever comes to mind, and and I drifted off into a promo for Comancheria, the first book in my new western horror series (2025).

And here we burrow into a rabbit hole and all its branches.

I mentioned the entire novel came from a dream, and in fact, I dreamed another one a week or so ago. Coming awake at two in the morning with the entire plot in mind, I crept out of bed and into my office where I wrote for three hours, just to prime the pump and I wouldn’t forget.

A hand went up at the back of the room at the signing, and may I say, it was a packed house. “I loved your second book, Burrows. It was one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read, and I was an undercover narcotics officer. I know creepy.”

Humbled, I toed the carpet.

“So where does your creep come from?”

“Everywhere.” I looked around the room, noting folks were hanging on every word. That’s a weirdness (creepy feeling for some) for writers, because folks are there to hear you, and buy your book. You have to be entertaining on several different levels.

I once went to a book signing where the author spoke so softly the forum’s director came up with a new microphone, thinking the first one was defective. The lady changed mikes, and her voice was still barely a whisper. Then she read about a hundred pages of her book, at a level that had people fiddling with hearing aids turning them up, or changing batteries there on the spot.

NOTE: Be Loud. Be Proud. Be Entertaining!

Anyway, my creep comes from inside this empty head of mine. I confess, and won’t go into a lot of details here because I’m running up against a departure time, but we had a real live ghost (get it?) in our previous house. John Gilstrap can vouch for the fact that our family believed it, because the first time he stayed with us I had to warn him about…Casper.

I know. How original.

Casper played jokes on us, changing the TV channel, talking in familiar voices on the other side of the door, ringing bells (we don’t have any in the house), cutting through rooms at the edge of our vision, or making shadows under doors when no one was there (that’ll poise a finger over 911 on your phone). We felt he was a lot of fun, once we got used to his antics, but I’d neglected to tell my little brother about him.

He stayed with us for a few days, and one afternoon he called me at work, breathless, and on the sheer edge of a full blown panic. “What have you not told me about this house???”

“Uh, what did you see?”

“I saw a little boy in the hall, and when I asked him why he was in the house, he ran into Chelsea’s bedroom. I went in right after him and looked.” His voice lowered. “No one is in there, and all the outside doors are locked. What the hell!!!???”

“That was Casper, and don’t worry. He just likes to have fun.”

I explained the presence in further, and he never stayed with us in that house again.

I’m always casting around for something different to add when I’m writing. I continued my answer with the gentleman at the back of the room when he asked more about Creep Factor.

“There are a lot of other things I want to write about, but haven’t found the right place. For example, how many of y’all have The College Dream? You know, the one in which you can’t find you classroom because you haven’t been there all season, and it’s time to take the final. Or you come to class without pants, and have to take the final. Or you’re wandering in a building on the last day of school, and know you’ve blown the whole semester because you forgot about that class?”

Hands went up all around the room. So is that creepy? Is it something to raise the hair on a reader’s neck if properly presented?

I also want to write about the Mandela Effect. That’s the one where we’re convinced scientists have torn a hole in the fabric between universes and the world has changed, only slightly, and our memories argue with reality. “The term was coined in 2009 by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome after she and others realized they had false memories. Broome became convinced that Nelson Mandela, then the president of South Africa, had died in prison in the 1980s, but he actually served a 27-year sentence and was released in 1990.”

Do you remember how Mr. Monopoly wore a monocle? I say he did, but today’s reality says otherwise. Or is it the Berenstain, or Berenstein Bears. My auto correct insists it’s Berenstain. Did Mickey Mouse wear suspenders? Did Curious George have a tail? (My good friend’s son has a Curious George tattoo he got over thirty years ago. I’ll have to take a peek…ooohhh, story idea! His tattoo does have a tail, but today’s reality says he doesn’t).

And my own personal recollection is O’Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor because I went there many times when it was in business in the Dallas area, but wait, if you look it up, it’s just Farrells. And now the spelling is different: Parlour vs. Parlor.

There’s a world of ideas out there, and many full of Creep. I’m afraid I don’t have the time to explore everything, and to write about all that interests me, but I’m sure gonna give it a try as long as these fingers stay limber enough to type, and as my old grandmother would say, “I’ll get it done, the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Here’s a fun link to the Mandela Effect. If you want to know about the ghost we had, and all of his antics, look me up at Bouchercon in Nashville, where Gilstrap can vouch for me. We’re both here all day today, August 31.

https://www.forbes.com/health/mind/mandela-effect/#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20most%20famous,Mickey%20Mouse%20as%20wearing%20suspenders.

As I type this, two ginormous generators on an equal number of gooseneck trailers across the street roar so loud I’m forced to wear the ear protection usually reserved for shooting large firearms. On the backs of those same trailers are four five-hundred-gallon tanks full of water and some foamy solution designed to remove paint from brick.

The house across the street is the target of my ire, along with the steady hiss of pressurized water spewing from the ends of two power washing wands wielded by a pair of very wet workers. It’s part of an ongoing saga of renovations over there, and as John Gilstrap can attest from the last time he visited over a year ago, the residence in question looks like someone with no sense style had been watching wayyyy too much HGTV.

I think the house was a front for nefarious businesses. Honestly, I believe they were cooking meth over there. Strange things went on behind those closed doors after we moved here five years ago. I seldom saw the same people more than a couple of times in the four years after we bought this house. Strangers came and went. The blinds were always closed, and it usually looked as if no one lived there.

Then it sold, and the new owners brought in 30-yard dumpsters, and stripped the interior down to the studs. Ignoring the architectural styles of the neighborhood, they remodeled everything into some ghastly ultra-modern Scandinavian design with a wide glass front door the size you’d find at one end of a car dealership’s showroom.

Without approval from the HOA, they sprayed the exterior bright white, making it the only painted residence in our neighborhood of naturally colored brick. It stood out like a sore thumb, required Ray Bans to look at it in the bright summer stun, and still hasn’t sold eighteen months later, because the HOA (and this is the only time I will give them props) put a lean on the house until certain conditions were met. Namely, strip off all that garish paint.

That’s what they’re doing right now. Power-washing the paint off a 5,000′ two-story house brick by brick.

The noise and aggravation is one more thing to endure this month, and this leads us to the root of today’s rant and recommendation.

Through this summer, I hammered out the first 40,000 words on my latest western horror novel, Buck’s Lament, and on a creative roll, retreated to the Cabin for a week by myself to gain another fifteen. Coming home, I went to town on the downhill side of the manuscript (Texan lingo meaning to do something in a detailed and enthusiastic way).

On Monday, words flowed into the laptop from my fingertips. The story moved forward with startling twists as the plot continued to develop on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. During those four days, all those subconscious connections James Scott Bell was talking about a few days ago here on Killzone found themselves and i wrote with feverish glee at how well it read.

Those who know me can tell you that I don’t outline, so it was all stream of consciousness, and it worked!

Then I stuck on some bit of western history, and went to the Google for the information. Typing key words into the search engine, I found a safe link I’d used before and hit Enter.

A dozen screens popped up, one over the other so fast I couldn’t read them, before it froze up and refused to respond. On top of that, a warning came up that I didn’t quite understand. Trying not to panic, I dialed up the makers of my laptop. For the next hour, we discussed my dilemma and technical support finally suggested that I should shut everything down and reboot this infernal machine.

It worked, and all came back…except for what I’d written the last four days. Seven. Thousand. Words. They were just gone.

But that can’t happen! My iDrive automatically backs up to the Cloud. It should all be there.

Sick at my stomach, I again reached out to tech support and the helpful expert figuratively shrugged. “I can’t tell you what happened.”

I called a friend who lives on computers. He came over and three hours later, delivered the bad news. “For some reason, you were disconnected from the Cloud. Nothing has backed up since Sunday.”

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I swallowed down a wave of despair. “So it really is all gone.”

“I’m afraid so.” He went to work, beating back all the electronic gremlins he could find and got me going again, but for days afterward I couldn’t make myself type a word. All those descriptions, the twists, and especially the Pulitzer prize-winning dialog, was gone.

Following those twenty-year-old footsteps in my own imaginary ashes when an electronic hiccup took my entire first novel, I spent the next week re-writing those seven thousand words from memory. I’m sure I missed many details, but the scenes were still fresh in my mind. Maybe these new pages look like the ones floating around somewhere in an electronic heaven, but I’ll never know.

I wish I could tie my troubles in a gunny sack and throw them over the edge, but that’s just the line from a Guy Clark song.

So, the purpose of this discussion is to urge you all not to rely on just one backup method, no matter how good they say it is. I won’t go into the myriad methods to save your work, because I can’t tell you what’s best.

An exterior hard drive?

Had one. It failed.

Download to a thumb drive.

Check. Did that, but it also failed and when I bought this machine, they said the Cloud would never let me down. I know it wasn’t the electronic netherworld, it was a strange disconnect between this infernal machine and that little storm cloud icon at the top of this screen that I never would have imagined.

One of the support techs I spoke to on the phone said to use Time Machine. “You’ll never lose your work again.”

Probably should, but I don’t have the time or inclination to learn more technology. Then again, that’s what they said about the connection between this device and the Cloud.

My grown daughters insist I should use Google Docs. They say it will never fail. I’ll give that a look once I’m finished with this manuscript, but not right now.

I save as I go again, even though it’s supposed to do that for me, and at the end of the day I send the entire manuscript to myself through email. That one has never failed me.

I hope this never happens to any one of you, and I also mean the generators that I’m beginning to think will be outside my office window until the end of September.

—

May I offer a suggestion to writers who are struggling with a manuscript?

I’ve talked with a number of folks who tell me they’ve been massaging a book idea for months, if not years.

“I’ve been working on this manuscript for five years and have about twenty thousand words. It feels like I’m going slow, because I keep going back to improve a paragraph here, or rewriting these sentences after I finished Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. And then I read James Lee Burke’s newest novel, and his descriptions are beautiful, so I went back…”

As one who says there are no rules in writing, I wait for Budding Author to finish.

“And because I have to write between taking the kids to school, my job, picking the kids up and hauling them to practice, I kind of get lost where I am and go back and read what I’ve written. That’s so depressing, because everything I have on paper needs work, so I go back and tweak it again –––.”

“Can I interrupt?” I grab Budding Author’s shirt for a good, old-fashioned shake, slap, and backslap.

“Please.”

“I assume you know the absolute basics of building a house.” We’re nose to nose as I continue. “You’ve seen them going up, right?”

“Of course.”

“So what do they first?”

“Draw up blueprints?”

“Good enough. They have an idea of how they want the floorplan to flow.”

“I suppose.”

“Bear with me here…” Slap, slap, slap. “The floorplan comes first, along with mental images of what a builder wants. From there the architect draws the foundation plan, then plumbing, electrical, elevations, everything necessary for construction. The foundation is the first step on site.

Budding Author raises both hands to glory. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The next shake is for emphasis. “Visualize this. The floorplan is your idea of a story.”

“I can see the whole thing like a movie in my head, I just need to write it down.”

“Well, you see bits and pieces that flow, and that’s just fine, but all that visualization comes together on top of the foundation. Slab or pier and beam, it doesn’t matter, but it must be solid and square.”

“I’m getting the idea!” Budding Author’s eyes brighten even more.

I refust to turn loose of this person’s shirt, lest they quit concentrating. “Next comes the framing. All those wall have to go up to support the roof which is the first step to completion. The roof protects everything under construction below.”

“I thought we were talking about manuscirpts.”

“We are! But here’s what builders don’t do. They don’t finish the living room before moving on. There’s no electrical, plumbing, or sheetrock before the rest of the house. There are no windows when the rest of the house is still nothing more than sticks. No trim, fixtures, or paint. No carpet or flooring while they’re still framing the bedrooms. No furniture, drapes, pictures on the walls, or the installation of that sixty-inch television. Are you getting this?”

“Kinda. So what do the builders do, then?”

“They press on with the whole project as a whole, working forward to completion, and then they add all those final touches.”

“I get it! You’re saying write the damn book to the end and don’t get caught in that whirlpool of going back over and over to make the pages perfect before moving on to the next!” The light bulb goes on over Budding Author’s head and that excited individual dances with glee, tearing away from my grip.

“You’re right. Plow forward until you reach the end and then go back to edit, and edit, which is all the finish work in that house we were talking about.”

Budding Author rushes away to work and I smile in satisfaction, because it took me a good long while to learn how to get the first draft done by pushing forward to follow the story while it’s still fresh in your mind and evolving.

Follow the story. Write the book, then get out the paint and polish.