Richard S. Wheeler's Blog, page 20
May 22, 2013
My Memoir
In 2007 Sunstone Press published a memoir I wrote about my troubled journey into the world of fiction, which I called An Accidental Novelist.
Now I've recovered the rights, refined it, and have published an electronic edition that is available on Kindle readers. And soon it will be available for Nook readers.
It doesn't pretend to be a complete autobiography; my life is largely uneventful. But it does focus on some of the crises and traits that steered me into writing popular fiction for a living.
I had never intended to be a novelist. I ran into problems as a newsman and later as a book editor, and in mid-life I turned to fiction as a way to survive. And succeeded, to my own astonishment.
The memoir did well in its early years, and I am hoping this updated edition will engage new readers.
Now I've recovered the rights, refined it, and have published an electronic edition that is available on Kindle readers. And soon it will be available for Nook readers.
It doesn't pretend to be a complete autobiography; my life is largely uneventful. But it does focus on some of the crises and traits that steered me into writing popular fiction for a living.
I had never intended to be a novelist. I ran into problems as a newsman and later as a book editor, and in mid-life I turned to fiction as a way to survive. And succeeded, to my own astonishment.
The memoir did well in its early years, and I am hoping this updated edition will engage new readers.
May 18, 2013
How I Succeeded
Before the whole distribution system imploded in the nineties, mass-market books were placed in groceries and drugstores by over two hundred local magazine distributors. One of these was Billings News, which annually placed pocketbooks in the racks in Yellowstone Park.
The buyer there discovered that my historical novels of the West sold well in Yellowstone Park, where people bought them in part because there was and is no TV there. Pocketbooks made great companions in the quiet wilderness and quiet hotels.
For years, each spring I went to Billings, signed a thousand or fifteen hundred pocketbooks, put stickers on them, and put them back in their cartons. It was an exhausting, grimy all-day task, but these signed novels would be put into the racks and sold all summer in the park, where a couple of million visitors came each year.
Not only did my books sell well there, but people took them home and bought more of my titles, which was especially valuable when visitors came from areas, such as the East Coast, where my novels were not well distributed.
That turned out to be the engine of my success as an author of popular fiction. My sales built steadily through the nineties thanks to the books placed in the hostelries of the famed park.
Eventually, that local distribution system collapsed, and now there are only a few giant distributors. They pay little heed to local tastes, which has damaged the sales of mass-market paperbacks.
But I always ascribe my success to the good people at Billings News. I was in the right place at the right time.
The buyer there discovered that my historical novels of the West sold well in Yellowstone Park, where people bought them in part because there was and is no TV there. Pocketbooks made great companions in the quiet wilderness and quiet hotels.
For years, each spring I went to Billings, signed a thousand or fifteen hundred pocketbooks, put stickers on them, and put them back in their cartons. It was an exhausting, grimy all-day task, but these signed novels would be put into the racks and sold all summer in the park, where a couple of million visitors came each year.
Not only did my books sell well there, but people took them home and bought more of my titles, which was especially valuable when visitors came from areas, such as the East Coast, where my novels were not well distributed.
That turned out to be the engine of my success as an author of popular fiction. My sales built steadily through the nineties thanks to the books placed in the hostelries of the famed park.
Eventually, that local distribution system collapsed, and now there are only a few giant distributors. They pay little heed to local tastes, which has damaged the sales of mass-market paperbacks.
But I always ascribe my success to the good people at Billings News. I was in the right place at the right time.
May 14, 2013
Signed the Contract
Yesterday I signed the contract for the novel I wrote about lonely prospectors wandering through Nevada looking for bonanzas. The publishers would like me to work on another western for them.
About a third of my eighty novels have dealt with the mining west, a field I enjoy and largely have to myself. Some of these, like Goldfield, Cashbox, Sun Mountain, and The Richest Hill on Earth, are large-scale historical novels.
The field was originally popularized by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and has been a part of western fiction almost from its inception, although the bulk of western stories are agricultural in nature, or involve outlaws and lawmen.
Oddly, no other contemporary novelist of the west has done much with the field, so it is all mine. A lot of drama took place in mining towns, but it doesn't excite most western novelists, and not many publishers, either.
For me, it has meant writing about the actual west, where epic struggles to find and control and monopolize gold and silver and other metals played out in the late 19th century and early 20th.
It sure beats writing the usual gunfighter or lawman stories that have poisoned western fiction for decades. In those stories killing substitutes for plot, and revolvers substitute for character, so the stories are stupefying at best, and idiotic at worst. There are plenty of those on the mass-market racks so I suppose some people actually like that stuff.
But I got lucky, and found my niche writing about the mining-town west.
About a third of my eighty novels have dealt with the mining west, a field I enjoy and largely have to myself. Some of these, like Goldfield, Cashbox, Sun Mountain, and The Richest Hill on Earth, are large-scale historical novels.
The field was originally popularized by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and has been a part of western fiction almost from its inception, although the bulk of western stories are agricultural in nature, or involve outlaws and lawmen.
Oddly, no other contemporary novelist of the west has done much with the field, so it is all mine. A lot of drama took place in mining towns, but it doesn't excite most western novelists, and not many publishers, either.
For me, it has meant writing about the actual west, where epic struggles to find and control and monopolize gold and silver and other metals played out in the late 19th century and early 20th.
It sure beats writing the usual gunfighter or lawman stories that have poisoned western fiction for decades. In those stories killing substitutes for plot, and revolvers substitute for character, so the stories are stupefying at best, and idiotic at worst. There are plenty of those on the mass-market racks so I suppose some people actually like that stuff.
But I got lucky, and found my niche writing about the mining-town west.
May 8, 2013
Disciplining a Novel
I am preparing a reverted historical novel, Sun Mountain: A Comstock Memoir, for publication as an ebook and perhaps a trade paper edition. It is a long story about the rise and fall of Virginia City, told through a narrator, Henry Stoddard.
It was tightly edited at Forge, but I have decided to discipline it further for electronic publication. That is one of the good things about electronic publishing: a novel can be refined and deepened.
The novel got superb reviews in 1999, but some of the reader comments suggested it was a bit leisurely. So I set to work and found about 2500 words to cut, mostly by eliminating adjective strings and digressions.
It was tightly written to start with, and now is even tighter. I hope that the changes will move the story along and maintain focus.
I have tender feelings about the novel, because I drew from my own nature to create my hero, Stoddard. The fictional character and I do not have the same background, but we have the same nature and same response to life, and there are many similarities between the author and the protagonist.
It'll be posted in the Nook and Kindle stores soon, with a new and attractive cover, and a little later, I'll do a trade paper edition.
It was tightly edited at Forge, but I have decided to discipline it further for electronic publication. That is one of the good things about electronic publishing: a novel can be refined and deepened.
The novel got superb reviews in 1999, but some of the reader comments suggested it was a bit leisurely. So I set to work and found about 2500 words to cut, mostly by eliminating adjective strings and digressions.
It was tightly written to start with, and now is even tighter. I hope that the changes will move the story along and maintain focus.
I have tender feelings about the novel, because I drew from my own nature to create my hero, Stoddard. The fictional character and I do not have the same background, but we have the same nature and same response to life, and there are many similarities between the author and the protagonist.
It'll be posted in the Nook and Kindle stores soon, with a new and attractive cover, and a little later, I'll do a trade paper edition.
April 28, 2013
A Novel About Desert Rats
I have always wondered about the lonely prospectors who hunted for minerals long ago in the isolated and forbidding desert country of Nevada. What took them there? The dream of a bonanza? Why did they live their lives in utter loneliness, with no one but their burros and mules for company?
Recently I finished a novel about Nevada prospectors, in which I tried to catch the pathos, the isolation, the obsessions that filled their daily lives as they wandered though unmapped country looking for gold or silver or maybe copper--and escape from other people.
So, there's Gladstone Brass, Bitter Bowler, Wet Agnes, Albert Gumz, and Beef Story, whose lives and dreams and pain I chronicle in my novel, which is set in the years following the turn of the twentieth century.
I wondered whether a story like that could sell, and I'm glad to say it now has been bought, and will be a Five Star/Gale novel in 2015. I think it was a courageous decision by the editors, because it is certainly anything but the usual sort of western.
Recently I finished a novel about Nevada prospectors, in which I tried to catch the pathos, the isolation, the obsessions that filled their daily lives as they wandered though unmapped country looking for gold or silver or maybe copper--and escape from other people.
So, there's Gladstone Brass, Bitter Bowler, Wet Agnes, Albert Gumz, and Beef Story, whose lives and dreams and pain I chronicle in my novel, which is set in the years following the turn of the twentieth century.
I wondered whether a story like that could sell, and I'm glad to say it now has been bought, and will be a Five Star/Gale novel in 2015. I think it was a courageous decision by the editors, because it is certainly anything but the usual sort of western.
April 8, 2013
Glenn Boyer
Glenn Boyer is dead. I am torn between the axiom to speak no ill of the dead, and my instinct to write intensively about a man who did so much damage to western historical literature.
You can find the bulk of the case against him in Wikipedia's lengthy discussion of his conduct under the heading, I Married Wyatt Earp (one of Boyer's fraudulent histories).
When I was editing the western fiction line at Walker and Company, he submitted a novel titled Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta. It was much too long for our line, and it made me uneasy. I turned it down, while telling Boyer that it skillfully evoked the period.
Later, Boyer published the same work, but now it was no longer a novel but an eyewitness account of Tombstone in the 1880s, a manuscript that had lain hidden for generations, a primary source that he had tracked down and acquired. All that was bunk, and the fraud was swiftly discovered.
Boyer turned on me, sent me poison-pen notes and cards, trashed some of my novels, and wrote long, scornful letters, which I still have.
He did add to our knowledge of some of the women of that period, but even some of that material is suspect.
I do send along my condolences to his widow, the gifted poet Jane Candia Coleman.
You can find the bulk of the case against him in Wikipedia's lengthy discussion of his conduct under the heading, I Married Wyatt Earp (one of Boyer's fraudulent histories).
When I was editing the western fiction line at Walker and Company, he submitted a novel titled Wyatt Earp's Tombstone Vendetta. It was much too long for our line, and it made me uneasy. I turned it down, while telling Boyer that it skillfully evoked the period.
Later, Boyer published the same work, but now it was no longer a novel but an eyewitness account of Tombstone in the 1880s, a manuscript that had lain hidden for generations, a primary source that he had tracked down and acquired. All that was bunk, and the fraud was swiftly discovered.
Boyer turned on me, sent me poison-pen notes and cards, trashed some of my novels, and wrote long, scornful letters, which I still have.
He did add to our knowledge of some of the women of that period, but even some of that material is suspect.
I do send along my condolences to his widow, the gifted poet Jane Candia Coleman.
April 6, 2013
The Generals
I've finished Thomas Hicks' majestic study of American army command from the 1940s to the present, The Generals. It has given me a lot to think about. The army no longer cashiers incompetent generals, and civilian leaders rarely do, with the result that the army is badly led. Hicks' gold standard is George Marshall, chief of staff during the second world war, who did not hesitate to relieve officers who couldn't do the job.
The one grave weakness in the study is the lack of a deep analysis of just what current civilian leaders expect of the military. We go to war these days not to fight enemies who imperil our national security, but to impose our democratic values-- at gun point-- on deeply traditional, tribal, theological countries. It doesn't work and it is sheer hubris on the part of our leaders to assume we can change foreign nations with our bayonets, or that we should be doing so, at great cost. The army is stuck with a mission it cannot fulfill, and a lot of inept generals as well as some good ones have paid the price.
Hicks' book is one of the most important I've ever read.
The one grave weakness in the study is the lack of a deep analysis of just what current civilian leaders expect of the military. We go to war these days not to fight enemies who imperil our national security, but to impose our democratic values-- at gun point-- on deeply traditional, tribal, theological countries. It doesn't work and it is sheer hubris on the part of our leaders to assume we can change foreign nations with our bayonets, or that we should be doing so, at great cost. The army is stuck with a mission it cannot fulfill, and a lot of inept generals as well as some good ones have paid the price.
Hicks' book is one of the most important I've ever read.
April 3, 2013
Loren Estleman's Big One
My friend Loren Estleman has written a biographical novel about Al Capone that is generating a lot of excitement.
Here is what the publisher is saying on Amazon:
Multiple award-winner Loren D. Estleman has produced a major biographical novel on the infamous Mobster known as Scarface, rigorously researched and deftly nuanced to offer an intimate portrait of the gangster whose terrible crimes and larger-than-life persona have both fascinated and appalled the world for nearly a century; whose legacy is still widely debated; and whose brutally ambitious career in the Mafia continues to inspire filmmakers and writers to plumb its excesses and its contradictions.
In 1944, after Al Capone has been released from prison, J. Edgar Hoover assigns an FBI junior agent to insinuate himself into Capone's life and gain his trust so that Hoover can nail as many of Capone's Mob confederates as possible. Capone, suffering from the neurological effects of syphilis, is alternately lucid, full of the passion and energy that fueled his rise to the pinnacle of American crime…and rambling or ranting, the broken shell of a man released from prison so he could die at home with his family.
With the superb narrative gifts honed in dozens of novels, Estleman has captured the essence of this American icon as never before. With subtly nuanced portrayals of those in Capone’s circle—his underrated wife Mae Capone, members of the Chicago Outfit including the deadly Frank Nitti—as well as his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover’s secretary Helen Gandy and others, The Confessions of Al Capone is a major literary achievement.
Here is what the publisher is saying on Amazon:
Multiple award-winner Loren D. Estleman has produced a major biographical novel on the infamous Mobster known as Scarface, rigorously researched and deftly nuanced to offer an intimate portrait of the gangster whose terrible crimes and larger-than-life persona have both fascinated and appalled the world for nearly a century; whose legacy is still widely debated; and whose brutally ambitious career in the Mafia continues to inspire filmmakers and writers to plumb its excesses and its contradictions.
In 1944, after Al Capone has been released from prison, J. Edgar Hoover assigns an FBI junior agent to insinuate himself into Capone's life and gain his trust so that Hoover can nail as many of Capone's Mob confederates as possible. Capone, suffering from the neurological effects of syphilis, is alternately lucid, full of the passion and energy that fueled his rise to the pinnacle of American crime…and rambling or ranting, the broken shell of a man released from prison so he could die at home with his family.
With the superb narrative gifts honed in dozens of novels, Estleman has captured the essence of this American icon as never before. With subtly nuanced portrayals of those in Capone’s circle—his underrated wife Mae Capone, members of the Chicago Outfit including the deadly Frank Nitti—as well as his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover’s secretary Helen Gandy and others, The Confessions of Al Capone is a major literary achievement.
April 2, 2013
New Historical Novel
A publisher I thought had abandoned me is interested in more work from me, much to my surprise. Its editor asked for some proposals from me, and I responded with a proposal for an historical novel that would follow a variety or vaudeville troupe through the early mining towns of the West, mostly in Colorado, in the 1890s.
In most of the mining towns, which were often located in wilderness, the miners were quick to erect an opera house and invite shows, because the miners were starved for entertainment, especially singers such as Lotta Crabtree and Lillian Russell.
I've done some initial research and think there is splendid potential for a novel in all of it, one rich in atmosphere and filled with remarkable characters. I ordered and read No Applause--Just Throw Money, which is an anecdotal history of vaudeville, and it provided a wealth of ideas and color.
Most of my historical novels have been set in western mining towns, so I have that background to start with. I'm looking forward to the project, and should know shortly whether I have the contract.
In most of the mining towns, which were often located in wilderness, the miners were quick to erect an opera house and invite shows, because the miners were starved for entertainment, especially singers such as Lotta Crabtree and Lillian Russell.
I've done some initial research and think there is splendid potential for a novel in all of it, one rich in atmosphere and filled with remarkable characters. I ordered and read No Applause--Just Throw Money, which is an anecdotal history of vaudeville, and it provided a wealth of ideas and color.
Most of my historical novels have been set in western mining towns, so I have that background to start with. I'm looking forward to the project, and should know shortly whether I have the contract.
