Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "vampire"
Smackdown: Big cities vs. small towns
Kathleen and I wrote this for the For The Love of Reading Blog run by Niina, a fantastic book blogger in Finland and a Goodreadsian.
Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, captures the best and worst of rural and urban living.
In Blood and Whiskey, (Pumpjack Press, May 1, 2012 ), Tucker and Lizzie once again find themselves marooned in tiny LonePine, Wyoming, battling the maddening aspects of small town life (at least for Lizzie) and the murderous international intrigues of sophisticated, highly urban vampires (according to Tucker, the worst kind of city slickers).
One of our favorite things about writing for these characters, and the tensions between cowboys and vampires, is the “opposites attract” relationship of Tucker and Lizzie. Tucker has spent his entire life in LonePine (population 438, with one on the way), with the notable exception of a fevered trip to New York when Lizzie was kidnapped (you’ll have to read The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Thriller for more). The evil vampires anxious to kill her and drain his blood were almost as bad as the crowds of people, bumper to bumper traffic on endless paved streets and rows of skyscrapers blocking the view.
Lizzie, on the other hand, grew up in New York and loves the hustle and bustle, the art and culture, the pace and energy and the international melting pot of people. She traveled to LonePine, a wasteland by her cultural standards, to research an article about the dying west. After falling for Tucker, she stays. And while she loves the clean air and wide-open spaces, she hasn’t quite adjusted to small — really small — town life. The highway truck stop is the only place to eat in town, the only play they have is put on by the fourth grade class during the holidays and the library is the same size as the drive-thru espresso shack.
Despite that, Tucker and Lizzie appreciate what’s special and different about the other and that’s what helps keep them together and keeps their relationship strong despite some serious obstacles including, at least in Blood and Whiskey, a price on Lizzie head and a scheming vampire world pushed to the edge of extinction.
That part of their relationship, east meets west, is drawn directly from our own lives.
Whitehall, Montana, meet Washington, DC
Our early years could not have been more different. Kathleen grew up in the very heart of Washington, DC, which has a population of more than 600,000 people and is located in a dense urban area of millions. Her childhood home was not far from the Washington Cathedral and just a stone’s throw from Embassy Row. For her, hopping on the metro and wandering through the Smithsonian, reading at the Library of Congress or taking in an exhibit at the Hirshhorn were all in a regular day. She learned to be confident around people and grounded in the history, creativity and learning unique to America’s capital.
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, 15 miles from the nearest town, Whitehall, which had about 2,000 people. His childhood home was a stone’s throw from Fish Creek, near a number of historic stage stops and homesteader cabins and was surrounded by a lot of sagebrush. For him, hopping on a horse and riding up into the mountains, reading a good book under apple trees planted by settlers or building fence torn down by elk was all part of a regular day. He learned to be confident in the wilderness and grounded in the history, beauty and tenacity of western living.
We met and fell in love in Portland, Oregon, a small town by Kathleen’s standards and a big city by Clark’s. We’ve lived here for years now and enjoy the best of both worlds. We visit the east coast often to visit Kathleen’s family and load up on art and cultural events, and we visit the remote areas of Oregon — Plush and Steens Mountain — to load up on the stillness and beauty of the wilderness. Plus, we are able to head over to the lovely Oregon coast frequently.
For us, like our characters, opposites really do attract and start to change each other. Kathleen has learned to love the empty spaces and Clark has become a fan of galleries and museums. With that in mind, here are two “top five” lists based on our experiences.
A city girl’s top five reasons to love small towns:
1) The views are spectacular, especially when there are mountains involved.
2) Clean air and no traffic.
3) Fewer lights make for beautiful starry skies at night.
4) Friendly people — everybody waves at everybody in western towns and really care about how your day is going.
5) There are no distractions for reading and writing.
A country boy’s top five reasons to love big cities:
1) History — especially on the east coast, you can visit buildings that have been standing for two or three hundred years. I know that has nothing on the historical cities of Europe, but for me, it’s old.
2) Art — I love all the shows and museums and galleries, even the ones I don’t really get (which is most of them).
3) Great food — there’s nothing wrong with small town restaurants, but eating at the drive-in every week gets a little old compared to Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Greek, etc.
4) Interesting people — sometimes really interesting, like you cannot look away they are so interesting.
5) Bookstores. And good coffee.
Read Blood and Whiskey to find out even more about the difference between small towns and big cities, opposites attract romantic tension — it doesn’t get much more opposite than a human and a vampire falling in love — and thrill-a-minute action. As Lizzie comes to terms with being undead, she has difficult choices ahead that will make Tucker far more uncomfortable than learning how to hail a taxi. And of course, their enemies are going to make it difficult for true love to last beyond the next sunset.
Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, captures the best and worst of rural and urban living.
In Blood and Whiskey, (Pumpjack Press, May 1, 2012 ), Tucker and Lizzie once again find themselves marooned in tiny LonePine, Wyoming, battling the maddening aspects of small town life (at least for Lizzie) and the murderous international intrigues of sophisticated, highly urban vampires (according to Tucker, the worst kind of city slickers).
One of our favorite things about writing for these characters, and the tensions between cowboys and vampires, is the “opposites attract” relationship of Tucker and Lizzie. Tucker has spent his entire life in LonePine (population 438, with one on the way), with the notable exception of a fevered trip to New York when Lizzie was kidnapped (you’ll have to read The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Thriller for more). The evil vampires anxious to kill her and drain his blood were almost as bad as the crowds of people, bumper to bumper traffic on endless paved streets and rows of skyscrapers blocking the view.
Lizzie, on the other hand, grew up in New York and loves the hustle and bustle, the art and culture, the pace and energy and the international melting pot of people. She traveled to LonePine, a wasteland by her cultural standards, to research an article about the dying west. After falling for Tucker, she stays. And while she loves the clean air and wide-open spaces, she hasn’t quite adjusted to small — really small — town life. The highway truck stop is the only place to eat in town, the only play they have is put on by the fourth grade class during the holidays and the library is the same size as the drive-thru espresso shack.
Despite that, Tucker and Lizzie appreciate what’s special and different about the other and that’s what helps keep them together and keeps their relationship strong despite some serious obstacles including, at least in Blood and Whiskey, a price on Lizzie head and a scheming vampire world pushed to the edge of extinction.
That part of their relationship, east meets west, is drawn directly from our own lives.
Whitehall, Montana, meet Washington, DC
Our early years could not have been more different. Kathleen grew up in the very heart of Washington, DC, which has a population of more than 600,000 people and is located in a dense urban area of millions. Her childhood home was not far from the Washington Cathedral and just a stone’s throw from Embassy Row. For her, hopping on the metro and wandering through the Smithsonian, reading at the Library of Congress or taking in an exhibit at the Hirshhorn were all in a regular day. She learned to be confident around people and grounded in the history, creativity and learning unique to America’s capital.
Clark grew up on a ranch in Montana, 15 miles from the nearest town, Whitehall, which had about 2,000 people. His childhood home was a stone’s throw from Fish Creek, near a number of historic stage stops and homesteader cabins and was surrounded by a lot of sagebrush. For him, hopping on a horse and riding up into the mountains, reading a good book under apple trees planted by settlers or building fence torn down by elk was all part of a regular day. He learned to be confident in the wilderness and grounded in the history, beauty and tenacity of western living.
We met and fell in love in Portland, Oregon, a small town by Kathleen’s standards and a big city by Clark’s. We’ve lived here for years now and enjoy the best of both worlds. We visit the east coast often to visit Kathleen’s family and load up on art and cultural events, and we visit the remote areas of Oregon — Plush and Steens Mountain — to load up on the stillness and beauty of the wilderness. Plus, we are able to head over to the lovely Oregon coast frequently.
For us, like our characters, opposites really do attract and start to change each other. Kathleen has learned to love the empty spaces and Clark has become a fan of galleries and museums. With that in mind, here are two “top five” lists based on our experiences.
A city girl’s top five reasons to love small towns:
1) The views are spectacular, especially when there are mountains involved.
2) Clean air and no traffic.
3) Fewer lights make for beautiful starry skies at night.
4) Friendly people — everybody waves at everybody in western towns and really care about how your day is going.
5) There are no distractions for reading and writing.
A country boy’s top five reasons to love big cities:
1) History — especially on the east coast, you can visit buildings that have been standing for two or three hundred years. I know that has nothing on the historical cities of Europe, but for me, it’s old.
2) Art — I love all the shows and museums and galleries, even the ones I don’t really get (which is most of them).
3) Great food — there’s nothing wrong with small town restaurants, but eating at the drive-in every week gets a little old compared to Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Greek, etc.
4) Interesting people — sometimes really interesting, like you cannot look away they are so interesting.
5) Bookstores. And good coffee.
Read Blood and Whiskey to find out even more about the difference between small towns and big cities, opposites attract romantic tension — it doesn’t get much more opposite than a human and a vampire falling in love — and thrill-a-minute action. As Lizzie comes to terms with being undead, she has difficult choices ahead that will make Tucker far more uncomfortable than learning how to hail a taxi. And of course, their enemies are going to make it difficult for true love to last beyond the next sunset.
Where the hell is Plush, Oregon?
"Where the hell is Plush, Oregon?"
It’s a question Tucker and his best friend Lenny ask in our new book Blood and Whiskey after they uncover a human trafficking ring in Portland, Oregon. Under extreme duress, one of the bad guys confesses the victims are shipped to Plush where terrible things await them.
We know exactly where Plush is; we went there in 2010 just before The Cowboy and The Vampire was released. I’d read about Plush the year before. It’s the only place in Oregon where you can mine for sunstones, the state gemstone. Sunstone is a type of feldspar that sparkles and catches the light and we wanted to learn more.
Did I mention Kathleen is a geologist?
It’s a long drive from Portland to Plush, about 360 hard miles, and an even larger culture shift. Portland is a small town by some standards, with a population of about half a million. Plush, on the other hand, has about 139 residents on a good day. And good days aren’t that common. It’s smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the best possible sense of the word.
Sagebrush, rocky bluffs, unexpected lakes and hundreds of curious, fleet-footed antelopes. We found deserted hot springs, a haunted sanitarium and plenty of sunstone mines — most operated by deeply-tanned hippies and other drop outs from society living on the edge of the world. It was fantastic.
I can still remember making a tofu and refried bean sandwich, with Roma tomatoes, on the hood of the car, baking in the summer sun, before we sorted through a conveyor belt of pulverized rocks looking for sunstones. And we found many. They are hard to miss because of the way they seem to trap sunlight.
More than gemstones, we found a place to anchor our latest book. Yes, Blood and Whiskey is still set in our favorite small town, fictional LonePine, Wyoming, but we loved Plush so much, we had figure out a way to get our heroes there. Lenny and Tucker track down a band of particularly vicious Vampires who operate a “feedlot” in Plush. But nothing is ever what it seems in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Along with the unforgettable landscape and the quirky little town, we wanted to do something with the beautiful sunstones as well. Vampires, as we all know, are affected by the sun, so it made sense to give the lovely little gemstones special powers over the undead.
To find out what those powers are, check out Blood and Whiskey. To find out what Plush and the surrounding vicinity looks like, check out our photo album Armchair Tour of Plush and Parts Beyond on Facebook.
It’s a question Tucker and his best friend Lenny ask in our new book Blood and Whiskey after they uncover a human trafficking ring in Portland, Oregon. Under extreme duress, one of the bad guys confesses the victims are shipped to Plush where terrible things await them.
We know exactly where Plush is; we went there in 2010 just before The Cowboy and The Vampire was released. I’d read about Plush the year before. It’s the only place in Oregon where you can mine for sunstones, the state gemstone. Sunstone is a type of feldspar that sparkles and catches the light and we wanted to learn more.
Did I mention Kathleen is a geologist?
It’s a long drive from Portland to Plush, about 360 hard miles, and an even larger culture shift. Portland is a small town by some standards, with a population of about half a million. Plush, on the other hand, has about 139 residents on a good day. And good days aren’t that common. It’s smack dab in the middle of nowhere in the best possible sense of the word.
Sagebrush, rocky bluffs, unexpected lakes and hundreds of curious, fleet-footed antelopes. We found deserted hot springs, a haunted sanitarium and plenty of sunstone mines — most operated by deeply-tanned hippies and other drop outs from society living on the edge of the world. It was fantastic.
I can still remember making a tofu and refried bean sandwich, with Roma tomatoes, on the hood of the car, baking in the summer sun, before we sorted through a conveyor belt of pulverized rocks looking for sunstones. And we found many. They are hard to miss because of the way they seem to trap sunlight.
More than gemstones, we found a place to anchor our latest book. Yes, Blood and Whiskey is still set in our favorite small town, fictional LonePine, Wyoming, but we loved Plush so much, we had figure out a way to get our heroes there. Lenny and Tucker track down a band of particularly vicious Vampires who operate a “feedlot” in Plush. But nothing is ever what it seems in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series.
Along with the unforgettable landscape and the quirky little town, we wanted to do something with the beautiful sunstones as well. Vampires, as we all know, are affected by the sun, so it made sense to give the lovely little gemstones special powers over the undead.
To find out what those powers are, check out Blood and Whiskey. To find out what Plush and the surrounding vicinity looks like, check out our photo album Armchair Tour of Plush and Parts Beyond on Facebook.
Character Envy
Writing together, especially romances, can make for strange jealousies.
(Note: This is a guest post Kathleen and I wrote for the Where's My Muse book review site.)
In 1999, we came up with a radical plan to save our romance: write together. We had just reunited after an epic break up that required a several-year cooling off period. When a not-so-chance meeting rekindled the flames, we decided to channel some of the excess passion into a joint creative project to hopefully of avoiding total combustion.
The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery (Midnight Ink, 2010) — and a newly entangled romance — was the result. This May, we finished our second book, Blood and Whiskey, and we learned something important: our characters lead far more romantic lives than we do.
Of course, they’re also dealing with murderous vampire hordes, cold-blooded killers straight out of the old west, biblical prophecies, undead race wars and the care and feeding of an overly-sensitive dog cow dog named Rex. But even with all of that, and even setting aside the fact they are from very different worlds — she needs human blood to live, he’s more of whiskey drinker — Tucker and Lizzie have a romance for the ages.
It may be petty but we’re kind of jealous.
And not just of the main characters Tucker and Lizzie. There’s also Elita, the fierce, sexy vampire warrior sworn to protect Lizzie, who has seduced her way through half the undead world and left a trail of drained human bodies — stone cold dead but with smiles on their faces — stretching back thousands of years. In Blood and Whiskey, she finds herself sandwiched happily between a handsome Russian vampire, Rurik and his supermodel human consort, Virote.
Us? Well, we found ourselves sandwiched between deadlines.
Early on, we figured that when romantic partners wrote together, it would involve far more reclining on satin sheets, sipping champagne and whispering sweet plotlines to one another. The truth is far less, well, romantic.
Here’s what a typical exchange between us sounds like (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent):
Chuck: Did you finish your chapter yet?
Cathy: Almost, did you finish yours?
Chuck: I need about two hundred more words and a better description of the thing.
Cathy: What thing?
Chuck: The thing. In the mountains. With Elita.
Cathy: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Should we talk about the next chapters?
Etc., until bed time.
Compare that to a scene from Blood and Whiskey featuring Tucker and Lizzie:
“Do you ever, you know, take a look when I’m dead? Does it turn you on to have a naked corpse next to you?”
“Woman, don’t be gross.”
“I’d probably take a peek. I mean, I do anyway, at least when you are sleeping. What’s the difference? It’s perfectly natural.” She nipped at his neck playfully.
“It’s un-natural. That’s why they call you un-dead.”
“Is what I’m feeling now un-horny?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the pregnancy hormones getting you all riled up.”
She unbuttoned her shirt and slipped his hand under, molding it around her breast and they both sighed. “You sure you haven’t felt me up when I’m cold and dead? I wouldn’t mind. And I wouldn’t know it if you, you know, did stuff to me.”
“No. I mean, yeah, I’m sure. I’d like to do stuff to you now though.”
“I like that idea.”
Is it any wonder we’re a little jealous?
Still, just in case it sounds like we’re complaining, we don’t write all the time. And the passion we channel into our characters has to come from somewhere.
(Note: This is a guest post Kathleen and I wrote for the Where's My Muse book review site.)
In 1999, we came up with a radical plan to save our romance: write together. We had just reunited after an epic break up that required a several-year cooling off period. When a not-so-chance meeting rekindled the flames, we decided to channel some of the excess passion into a joint creative project to hopefully of avoiding total combustion.
The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery (Midnight Ink, 2010) — and a newly entangled romance — was the result. This May, we finished our second book, Blood and Whiskey, and we learned something important: our characters lead far more romantic lives than we do.
Of course, they’re also dealing with murderous vampire hordes, cold-blooded killers straight out of the old west, biblical prophecies, undead race wars and the care and feeding of an overly-sensitive dog cow dog named Rex. But even with all of that, and even setting aside the fact they are from very different worlds — she needs human blood to live, he’s more of whiskey drinker — Tucker and Lizzie have a romance for the ages.
It may be petty but we’re kind of jealous.
And not just of the main characters Tucker and Lizzie. There’s also Elita, the fierce, sexy vampire warrior sworn to protect Lizzie, who has seduced her way through half the undead world and left a trail of drained human bodies — stone cold dead but with smiles on their faces — stretching back thousands of years. In Blood and Whiskey, she finds herself sandwiched happily between a handsome Russian vampire, Rurik and his supermodel human consort, Virote.
Us? Well, we found ourselves sandwiched between deadlines.
Early on, we figured that when romantic partners wrote together, it would involve far more reclining on satin sheets, sipping champagne and whispering sweet plotlines to one another. The truth is far less, well, romantic.
Here’s what a typical exchange between us sounds like (names changed to protect the not-so-innocent):
Chuck: Did you finish your chapter yet?
Cathy: Almost, did you finish yours?
Chuck: I need about two hundred more words and a better description of the thing.
Cathy: What thing?
Chuck: The thing. In the mountains. With Elita.
Cathy: Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Should we talk about the next chapters?
Etc., until bed time.
Compare that to a scene from Blood and Whiskey featuring Tucker and Lizzie:
“Do you ever, you know, take a look when I’m dead? Does it turn you on to have a naked corpse next to you?”
“Woman, don’t be gross.”
“I’d probably take a peek. I mean, I do anyway, at least when you are sleeping. What’s the difference? It’s perfectly natural.” She nipped at his neck playfully.
“It’s un-natural. That’s why they call you un-dead.”
“Is what I’m feeling now un-horny?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the pregnancy hormones getting you all riled up.”
She unbuttoned her shirt and slipped his hand under, molding it around her breast and they both sighed. “You sure you haven’t felt me up when I’m cold and dead? I wouldn’t mind. And I wouldn’t know it if you, you know, did stuff to me.”
“No. I mean, yeah, I’m sure. I’d like to do stuff to you now though.”
“I like that idea.”
Is it any wonder we’re a little jealous?
Still, just in case it sounds like we’re complaining, we don’t write all the time. And the passion we channel into our characters has to come from somewhere.
Love, and Other Glorious Misfortunes
Tucker, from the pages of The Cowboy and The Vampire Thriller Series, writes a guest blog (with a little help from Clark and Kathleen)
A cowboy talks about falling hat-over-boot-heels for a vampire.
One time I saw a grizzly bear get hit by lightning.
I was way up in the mountains doing a little scouting ahead of hunting season and I happened to see this big old grizzly ambling through a grove of aspen across the canyon. I was watching him through my spotting scope while this summer storm rolled in with big old dark, threatening clouds. As if sensing impending danger, the bear sat down on his haunches and was sniffing the air when a bolt of lightning sizzled down and hit the tree right next to him. It gave him quite a jolt and sent him tumbling ass over tea kettle. Of course, being a bear he didn’t know what the hell had happened and roared up ready to fight — all singed and smoking and pissed off — only there wasn’t anything to fight.
It was something to see, from a safe distance of course, and I was having quite a laugh at his expense, but I noticed he calmed down quick. The lightning had split that tree and knocked down a bee hive about the size of a football right to his feet. There was a whole, honey-sweetened bonanza of lightly toasted larvae — that’s what bears really like and not, as some folks suspect, the honey — and soon enough he’d forgot all about the fireworks and the pain and the confusion and was just snuffling happily through a gourmet lunch.
I learned something from that old bear — even when life hits you hard, look for the bright side of things.
Let me tell you about Elizabeth Vaughan. She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen, and that’s counting on the television. She’s also the stubbornest, hard-headedest and just downright most irritating human being. Correction: she’s not human any more, but she was when we first met. We got hit by a bolt of lightning, figuratively speaking, that knocked both our hearts right off their feet.
It didn’t not start off auspiciously. I’ve always had my suspicions that beautiful people think they are a little better than the rest of us — I supposed that could be misplaced jealousy — and I’ve also always been a little distrustful of city folks in general. So when a beautiful city girl with a dictionary-sized vocabulary showed up in LonePine, I kept my distance. It didn’t last long. I blame Rex, that fool dog of mine. He liked her right off, but he’s always been a push over. He still likes her, even though she’s a vampire.
Did I mention that part? Let me tell you what it’s like loving a vampire. First off, you can’t ever have any more fights, ever. Vampires are a lot stronger than us and she’s come close to accidentally breaking my hand just squeezing it affectionately. I can’t imagine what would happen if she got really worked up about something.
Another thing is, they die every morning. Like full on, stiff-corpse dead. Talk about a mood killer when you want to snuggle up and spend the morning in bed with your lady and she’s cold and got the rigor mortis. Lizzie gets to go jetting metaphysically off to some energy field thing — The Meta. She’s tried to explain it; it’s where folks go when they almost die — into the tunnel of light, see grandma, and then come back. Apparently, vampires go there every day. She comes back all rested and rejuvenated, but I’m just getting tireder because stay up all night with her and then can’t fall asleep once the sun comes up.
Also, the vampire world is full of back-stabbing, power-hungry psychopaths. And those are the good ones. The undead are forever scheming and trying to take over the world or kill each other or whatnot. Lizzie has this special power that they want, so it’s even worse for us. Plus there’s whole Hatfields versus McCoys thing between the royal vampires and Reptiles. Two different species, one giant pain in the neck for humans.
Speaking of that, she needs blood to live, and plenty of it. The best kind of blood, the most nourishing, is the blood of evil humans and it’s the best when they bleed out and die in the process. It’s like organic, free range beef to them. There are only 439 people in LonePine, well, 438 now, and even though a fair percentage of them are bad apples, the law tends to notice when folks turn up missing in a small town. I don’t mind sharing a little of my blood from time to time — I’m not ashamed to admit it feels pretty good — but now I’m tired and anemic.
Multiply all of that stuff by her being pregnant, with hormones racing through veins and just idling there during the daylight hours when she’s dead, and an international council of vampires hanging out in LonePine, and you can imagine what my life has become.
Sometimes I feel a lot like that old bear, hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue — vampire wars and mystical prophecies and a periodically dead girlfriend— and looking around stupidly and wondering what the hell is going on and roaring a lot. But love is a glorious roasted bee hive and there’s no question that my life is the better for having Lizzie in it. I had almost forgot what it was like to feel alive; funny that it took a beautiful undead vampire to remind me.
Note: This is a post we helped Tucker write for the ExLibris blog. Check out Blood and Whiskey for more of his exploits with Lizzie.
A cowboy talks about falling hat-over-boot-heels for a vampire.
One time I saw a grizzly bear get hit by lightning.
I was way up in the mountains doing a little scouting ahead of hunting season and I happened to see this big old grizzly ambling through a grove of aspen across the canyon. I was watching him through my spotting scope while this summer storm rolled in with big old dark, threatening clouds. As if sensing impending danger, the bear sat down on his haunches and was sniffing the air when a bolt of lightning sizzled down and hit the tree right next to him. It gave him quite a jolt and sent him tumbling ass over tea kettle. Of course, being a bear he didn’t know what the hell had happened and roared up ready to fight — all singed and smoking and pissed off — only there wasn’t anything to fight.
It was something to see, from a safe distance of course, and I was having quite a laugh at his expense, but I noticed he calmed down quick. The lightning had split that tree and knocked down a bee hive about the size of a football right to his feet. There was a whole, honey-sweetened bonanza of lightly toasted larvae — that’s what bears really like and not, as some folks suspect, the honey — and soon enough he’d forgot all about the fireworks and the pain and the confusion and was just snuffling happily through a gourmet lunch.
I learned something from that old bear — even when life hits you hard, look for the bright side of things.
Let me tell you about Elizabeth Vaughan. She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen, and that’s counting on the television. She’s also the stubbornest, hard-headedest and just downright most irritating human being. Correction: she’s not human any more, but she was when we first met. We got hit by a bolt of lightning, figuratively speaking, that knocked both our hearts right off their feet.
It didn’t not start off auspiciously. I’ve always had my suspicions that beautiful people think they are a little better than the rest of us — I supposed that could be misplaced jealousy — and I’ve also always been a little distrustful of city folks in general. So when a beautiful city girl with a dictionary-sized vocabulary showed up in LonePine, I kept my distance. It didn’t last long. I blame Rex, that fool dog of mine. He liked her right off, but he’s always been a push over. He still likes her, even though she’s a vampire.
Did I mention that part? Let me tell you what it’s like loving a vampire. First off, you can’t ever have any more fights, ever. Vampires are a lot stronger than us and she’s come close to accidentally breaking my hand just squeezing it affectionately. I can’t imagine what would happen if she got really worked up about something.
Another thing is, they die every morning. Like full on, stiff-corpse dead. Talk about a mood killer when you want to snuggle up and spend the morning in bed with your lady and she’s cold and got the rigor mortis. Lizzie gets to go jetting metaphysically off to some energy field thing — The Meta. She’s tried to explain it; it’s where folks go when they almost die — into the tunnel of light, see grandma, and then come back. Apparently, vampires go there every day. She comes back all rested and rejuvenated, but I’m just getting tireder because stay up all night with her and then can’t fall asleep once the sun comes up.
Also, the vampire world is full of back-stabbing, power-hungry psychopaths. And those are the good ones. The undead are forever scheming and trying to take over the world or kill each other or whatnot. Lizzie has this special power that they want, so it’s even worse for us. Plus there’s whole Hatfields versus McCoys thing between the royal vampires and Reptiles. Two different species, one giant pain in the neck for humans.
Speaking of that, she needs blood to live, and plenty of it. The best kind of blood, the most nourishing, is the blood of evil humans and it’s the best when they bleed out and die in the process. It’s like organic, free range beef to them. There are only 439 people in LonePine, well, 438 now, and even though a fair percentage of them are bad apples, the law tends to notice when folks turn up missing in a small town. I don’t mind sharing a little of my blood from time to time — I’m not ashamed to admit it feels pretty good — but now I’m tired and anemic.
Multiply all of that stuff by her being pregnant, with hormones racing through veins and just idling there during the daylight hours when she’s dead, and an international council of vampires hanging out in LonePine, and you can imagine what my life has become.
Sometimes I feel a lot like that old bear, hit by a bolt of lightning out of the blue — vampire wars and mystical prophecies and a periodically dead girlfriend— and looking around stupidly and wondering what the hell is going on and roaring a lot. But love is a glorious roasted bee hive and there’s no question that my life is the better for having Lizzie in it. I had almost forgot what it was like to feel alive; funny that it took a beautiful undead vampire to remind me.
Note: This is a post we helped Tucker write for the ExLibris blog. Check out Blood and Whiskey for more of his exploits with Lizzie.
Hanford: Reflections on a visit to history’s graveyard
On August 9, 1945, the U.S. detonated a nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people, injured as many more — not counting the death and sickness that would linger for decades — and devastated much of the city. By most accounts, the bombing of Nagasaki, following closely on the heels of the bombing of Hiroshima, brought to an end World War Two. When faced with a level of destruction never before dreamed of, the Japanese leaders opted for preservation in the face of certain extinction.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned into scorched graveyards, but would emerge from the ashes.
The bomb that landed on Nagasaki, known affectionately as Fat Man — rendering its deadly intent almost comical — was powered by plutonium. Plutonium, though harder to make than uranium (which was used in Little Boy, the bomb that landed on Hiroshima) had a greater probability of initiating the chain reaction necessary to produce the desired mushroom cloud of death now forever scorched into our collective subconscious. Making plutonium requires chain-reacting uranium and then extracting plutonium from it; that process was perfected, on the fly and under great pressure, on the sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation located near Richland, Washington.
Now decommissioned, Hanford is a 580-square mile nuclear graveyard that, like all graveyards, serves as a monument to the aspirations and successes of humans, and as a constant reminder that all of our efforts ultimately end in the grave. And in this case, that grave leaks radioactive contaminants that endanger the safety of all those who live in its shadow.
Hanford is located just a few hundred miles from our home in Portland, and they offer public tours throughout the summer. The tours book up quickly. Interest is high.
This summer, Kathleen and I finally made it onto the list and we had the opportunity spend a day on a bus touring the Hanford Nuclear Complex. No one is allowed to take photos. Apparently, the disposal of nuclear waste is just as sensitive as the process of nuclear enrichment.
Even seen through the filter of the tragic end use of the plutonium, the most striking thing about Hanford is how so many people came together for a monumental and purely, at that point, theoretical effort to enrich plutonium. It had never been done before, other than on a tiny scale. When it became clear the Nazis were pursuing nuclear capabilities, the race was on.
Some of the brightest minds in physics were assembled and given the full support of the military and the federal government. Failure meant a changed world, though success — as we would all find out — would mean the same.
The first step was to find a place to build the complex, the experiment, the crucible. Hanford was chosen for a number of reasons. There were very few people, thus the risk of fiery accidents had limited consequences. It was also remote (and still is), so enemies would have a tough time infiltrating or attacking it. There was also a powerful, inexhaustible source of cold, pure water which would be needed to cool the nuclear fuel rods (if it worked): the mighty Columbia River.
The military swooped in and displaced about 1,300 residents of three towns under eminent domain laws: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland. One day, they were hard scrabble towns of farmers and ranchers in the middle of nowhere. The next, they disappeared inside a bustling, highly efficient military complex. The residents were forced to move. The only things remaining of White Bluffs today are a few photographs and some sturdy ruins of a bank and a school.
With the site chosen, next came the workforce to build the necessary reactors and processing plants. This was during the war and jobs were scarce in those days, the lure of good money irresistible. Tens of thousands and men and women were drawn to the area to live in rough barracks, eat sandwiches hurled out by an “automatic sandwich machine” and work on a secret, unspecified war construction project. They were mostly older men — all the young men, the best and the brightest were trudging around Europe or else sweating and cursing the heat of the Philippines, and dodging bullets.
The scale of the construction at Hanford was huge and mind boggling. No one had built nuclear reactors before, and in fact no one really knew what they were building then, other than the handful of white-coated scientists in charge. Metal workers were told to build sturdy aluminum pipes to exact specifications. Pipefitters were told to develop pigtails spigots so certain specifications. Bricklayers were told to develop a matrix of graphite bricks as big as a building. And nurses were told to treat mysterious burns.
This was war and questions could be saved until after we won. And there would be many questions.
But first there would success. Enriched plutonium in a special briefcase was transported by car to Portland, our home town, and the by train down to Alamogordo in New Mexico where it was successfully tested, then more of it was stuffed inside the Fat Man, flown to Japan and dropped into the heart of Nagasaki.
The war ended, the workers — probably a little stunned at what they had built — were celebrated. Hanford was a success and now we could rest on our accomplishments and protect the world. The plant was idled but then, mysteriously, a near mirror-image nuclear enrichment facility popped up in Russia. The nuclear arms race was on. Hanford would lumber back to life and churn out nuclear materials to be placed on the tips of InterContinental Ballistic Missiles at a furious pace, and it would be decades before we could slow that mad race.
When the plants were finally closed for good, there was one small problem: nuclear waste. Producing enriched nuclear materials yields tons of toxic, radioactive waste for every ounce of plutonium produced. And it was everywhere — in the waste products, in the dirt, in the water — and it was unstable and stored in inadequate containers built decades ago and in a rush, before we even knew what nuclear material was.
The clean up effort in Hanford is larger, though quieter, than the initial construction. But no less striking.
Billion dollar contracts stretching decades into the future provide the fuel for dump trucks scurrying back and forth to nuclear graveyards where the dust must be sprayed with water so it won’t drift. Scientists test plants and animals — deer and rabbits are especially vulnerable — for radiation to measure success. Wildfires and the threat of airborne contaminants are a daily concern. Engineers use practice tanks to test robotic arms so they can plug buried coffins of radioactive waste water. A giant plant is under construction to encase nuclear material in melted glass — glassification — so it can be safely stored…somewhere.
After spending a day in an air-conditioned bus and touring some of the facilities, three things stand out about Hanford.
First, the sheer enormity of the project and the triumph of science and muscle to solve a problem is inspiring. Sitting on a folding chair in the heart of Reactor B watching a movie about the process is akin to sitting in the front row of a church looking up at an altar. Only instead of seeing a pierced, sad and bearded martyr, we were looking at a huge and symmetrical row of pipes and fittings piercing a wall of graphite that once held nuclear rods. The effect was sacred and profound.
Second, the ghosts of those misplaced, misused and massacred by the project hang heavy over the high desert landscape. So many lives bent and blasted, it’s hard to feel anything other than nauseous and sad. Make no mistake, I’m very glad we won the arms race — the thought of a nuclear-armed Nazi regime is frightening indeed — but Hanford feels like the headwaters of the Atomic Age, and the shadow of that age — fear of mutually assured destruction — stretches into the present and beyond. Despite the jovial tour guide and earnest, good-natured engineers at ever stop, Hanford echoes with the eerie silence of a historic battlefield.
Third, there is something equally profound about the consequences of our success — the ghosts of victory. A once desolate but beautiful area is now a nuclear graveyard filled with leaking caskets of toxic material. The headstone is a towering, unfinished glassification plant that — it’s feared — may not even work in containing nuclear waste. Worse, even if it does, there’s no place to put the glass sculptures imprisoning the waste, no one wants it, and there’s no way to make it safe. It would appear the remnants of our success are more toxic than our success.
Despite the underlying sense of tragedy, it’s an amazing trip and a testament to what we can accomplish, when we have to, working together. I wish we felt similarly motivated to solve some of the greatest threats we face today: poverty, or climate change, for example. Sadly, it appears we can only come together against a distinct threat. When the danger lies within our own society, there’s no one to bomb and no one to focus our scientific exceptionalism on … except ourselves.
I also wish we had the foresight to think more about the consequences of our actions before they trap us forever in a glassified form of regret.
Note: This first ran on cowboyandvampire.com
The bomb killed an estimated 75,000 people, injured as many more — not counting the death and sickness that would linger for decades — and devastated much of the city. By most accounts, the bombing of Nagasaki, following closely on the heels of the bombing of Hiroshima, brought to an end World War Two. When faced with a level of destruction never before dreamed of, the Japanese leaders opted for preservation in the face of certain extinction.
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were turned into scorched graveyards, but would emerge from the ashes.
The bomb that landed on Nagasaki, known affectionately as Fat Man — rendering its deadly intent almost comical — was powered by plutonium. Plutonium, though harder to make than uranium (which was used in Little Boy, the bomb that landed on Hiroshima) had a greater probability of initiating the chain reaction necessary to produce the desired mushroom cloud of death now forever scorched into our collective subconscious. Making plutonium requires chain-reacting uranium and then extracting plutonium from it; that process was perfected, on the fly and under great pressure, on the sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation located near Richland, Washington.
Now decommissioned, Hanford is a 580-square mile nuclear graveyard that, like all graveyards, serves as a monument to the aspirations and successes of humans, and as a constant reminder that all of our efforts ultimately end in the grave. And in this case, that grave leaks radioactive contaminants that endanger the safety of all those who live in its shadow.
Hanford is located just a few hundred miles from our home in Portland, and they offer public tours throughout the summer. The tours book up quickly. Interest is high.
This summer, Kathleen and I finally made it onto the list and we had the opportunity spend a day on a bus touring the Hanford Nuclear Complex. No one is allowed to take photos. Apparently, the disposal of nuclear waste is just as sensitive as the process of nuclear enrichment.
Even seen through the filter of the tragic end use of the plutonium, the most striking thing about Hanford is how so many people came together for a monumental and purely, at that point, theoretical effort to enrich plutonium. It had never been done before, other than on a tiny scale. When it became clear the Nazis were pursuing nuclear capabilities, the race was on.
Some of the brightest minds in physics were assembled and given the full support of the military and the federal government. Failure meant a changed world, though success — as we would all find out — would mean the same.
The first step was to find a place to build the complex, the experiment, the crucible. Hanford was chosen for a number of reasons. There were very few people, thus the risk of fiery accidents had limited consequences. It was also remote (and still is), so enemies would have a tough time infiltrating or attacking it. There was also a powerful, inexhaustible source of cold, pure water which would be needed to cool the nuclear fuel rods (if it worked): the mighty Columbia River.
The military swooped in and displaced about 1,300 residents of three towns under eminent domain laws: Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland. One day, they were hard scrabble towns of farmers and ranchers in the middle of nowhere. The next, they disappeared inside a bustling, highly efficient military complex. The residents were forced to move. The only things remaining of White Bluffs today are a few photographs and some sturdy ruins of a bank and a school.
With the site chosen, next came the workforce to build the necessary reactors and processing plants. This was during the war and jobs were scarce in those days, the lure of good money irresistible. Tens of thousands and men and women were drawn to the area to live in rough barracks, eat sandwiches hurled out by an “automatic sandwich machine” and work on a secret, unspecified war construction project. They were mostly older men — all the young men, the best and the brightest were trudging around Europe or else sweating and cursing the heat of the Philippines, and dodging bullets.
The scale of the construction at Hanford was huge and mind boggling. No one had built nuclear reactors before, and in fact no one really knew what they were building then, other than the handful of white-coated scientists in charge. Metal workers were told to build sturdy aluminum pipes to exact specifications. Pipefitters were told to develop pigtails spigots so certain specifications. Bricklayers were told to develop a matrix of graphite bricks as big as a building. And nurses were told to treat mysterious burns.
This was war and questions could be saved until after we won. And there would be many questions.
But first there would success. Enriched plutonium in a special briefcase was transported by car to Portland, our home town, and the by train down to Alamogordo in New Mexico where it was successfully tested, then more of it was stuffed inside the Fat Man, flown to Japan and dropped into the heart of Nagasaki.
The war ended, the workers — probably a little stunned at what they had built — were celebrated. Hanford was a success and now we could rest on our accomplishments and protect the world. The plant was idled but then, mysteriously, a near mirror-image nuclear enrichment facility popped up in Russia. The nuclear arms race was on. Hanford would lumber back to life and churn out nuclear materials to be placed on the tips of InterContinental Ballistic Missiles at a furious pace, and it would be decades before we could slow that mad race.
When the plants were finally closed for good, there was one small problem: nuclear waste. Producing enriched nuclear materials yields tons of toxic, radioactive waste for every ounce of plutonium produced. And it was everywhere — in the waste products, in the dirt, in the water — and it was unstable and stored in inadequate containers built decades ago and in a rush, before we even knew what nuclear material was.
The clean up effort in Hanford is larger, though quieter, than the initial construction. But no less striking.
Billion dollar contracts stretching decades into the future provide the fuel for dump trucks scurrying back and forth to nuclear graveyards where the dust must be sprayed with water so it won’t drift. Scientists test plants and animals — deer and rabbits are especially vulnerable — for radiation to measure success. Wildfires and the threat of airborne contaminants are a daily concern. Engineers use practice tanks to test robotic arms so they can plug buried coffins of radioactive waste water. A giant plant is under construction to encase nuclear material in melted glass — glassification — so it can be safely stored…somewhere.
After spending a day in an air-conditioned bus and touring some of the facilities, three things stand out about Hanford.
First, the sheer enormity of the project and the triumph of science and muscle to solve a problem is inspiring. Sitting on a folding chair in the heart of Reactor B watching a movie about the process is akin to sitting in the front row of a church looking up at an altar. Only instead of seeing a pierced, sad and bearded martyr, we were looking at a huge and symmetrical row of pipes and fittings piercing a wall of graphite that once held nuclear rods. The effect was sacred and profound.
Second, the ghosts of those misplaced, misused and massacred by the project hang heavy over the high desert landscape. So many lives bent and blasted, it’s hard to feel anything other than nauseous and sad. Make no mistake, I’m very glad we won the arms race — the thought of a nuclear-armed Nazi regime is frightening indeed — but Hanford feels like the headwaters of the Atomic Age, and the shadow of that age — fear of mutually assured destruction — stretches into the present and beyond. Despite the jovial tour guide and earnest, good-natured engineers at ever stop, Hanford echoes with the eerie silence of a historic battlefield.
Third, there is something equally profound about the consequences of our success — the ghosts of victory. A once desolate but beautiful area is now a nuclear graveyard filled with leaking caskets of toxic material. The headstone is a towering, unfinished glassification plant that — it’s feared — may not even work in containing nuclear waste. Worse, even if it does, there’s no place to put the glass sculptures imprisoning the waste, no one wants it, and there’s no way to make it safe. It would appear the remnants of our success are more toxic than our success.
Despite the underlying sense of tragedy, it’s an amazing trip and a testament to what we can accomplish, when we have to, working together. I wish we felt similarly motivated to solve some of the greatest threats we face today: poverty, or climate change, for example. Sadly, it appears we can only come together against a distinct threat. When the danger lies within our own society, there’s no one to bomb and no one to focus our scientific exceptionalism on … except ourselves.
I also wish we had the foresight to think more about the consequences of our actions before they trap us forever in a glassified form of regret.
Note: This first ran on cowboyandvampire.com
A Play within a Play within a Play
Last year we went to a local production of Venus in Fur at the Portland Center Stage. It’s about a playwright struggling to adapt the classic novella, Venus in Furs (by Sacher-Masoch). The literary work is famous for exploring some dark themes, including sadomasochism, and the play — a kind of a play within a play — taps into the psycho-sexual tension between a writer/director and an auditioning starlet. We were unexpectedly treated to a play within a play within a play because, in the row in front of us, another little drama was taking place.
Just as the curtain was about to go up, the ushers seated two late arrivers in the only seats left which, of course, were in front of us and two seats to the left. The man and woman were in their early 30s, stylishly dressed in expensive clothes and fashionable leather jackets; it was January. Given how dark it was, perhaps not unexpectedly, she stumbled a bit moving past those already seated.
Once in their seats, they immediately began whispering furiously. He cut her off, angrily, and gestured for the ushers who conferred with him at the railing to his left and then scurried off. Apparently, she’d left her purse in the restroom and the ushers — two lovely older women — found it and delivered it to the grateful husband just as the show started. It’s a good thing, too, because the purse would have a starring role in the near future.
Sadly, the whispering did not end with the purse. As the show heated up, the couple continued talking. Actually, it was mostly her. She would lean over to whisper loudly in this ear, confused by the action on stage and, it seemed, unsure of why she was even there. Each time, he rebuffed her angrily and waved her quiet. It soon became clear that she was not merely uncouth, she was actually so completely inebriated that she could barely function.
We are not ones to judge, nor to make light of addictions, but the poor woman put on such a public spectacle it was hard not to divert our attention from the stage — where the lingerie-clad actress slowly transformed from a disempowered sexual object to a stormy goddess and the suit-clad actor transformed from a petty tyrant to a blubbering wreck (seriously, if you get the chance, see this play) — onto the action in the seats in front of us.
The slow motion fade was her signature move. At least a dozen times in the next hour, she would slowly, agonizingly slowly, slump to her right until she was fully resting on the polite, hapless woman to her right. Her chagrined partner would see her there and, embarrassed, pull her upright — startling her in the process and often shaking loose an oath — and admonish her. Seven minutes later (we timed it), she would begin slowly keeling to the right again.
She also had the less graceful, more disruptive aborted escape move. Every so often, she decided enough was enough and stood to leave, but was so confused by the mechanics required to escape that all she could do was look helplessly left and at the insurmountable railing and right at the long row of angular knees poking out in front of disapproving eyes. Flummoxed, she would sit back down with a groan.
As the actress and the producer waged a war for sexual dominance on stage, the side show was reaching its climax and all of us in that little corner of the theater wanted to see how it turned out. We would not be disappointed. She stood one more time, wobbled a bit, then with an oath, collapsed back into her chair, snatched up her purse — I said it would figure largely — and promptly threw up into it.
And ... scene.
To be fair, her vomiting was very quiet and refined. Her husband, mortified, popped up, snatched her by the hand and pulled her through the row of people now too shocked to complain, disappearing out into the night. She clutched the purse — it was not a large one either — to her chest and not a drop was spilled. We all wanted to clap, mostly because it was finally over, but we didn’t want to disrupt the real show, which was also nearing the end.
I’m pretty sure I saw her again recently, which is why I thought about that night. If it was her, she was sober and looked healthy, so hopefully it was a one-time event or she got the help she needed. She was at the food court in the mall looking for a plug in for her lap top. She had a cup of coffee.
And a new purse.
Just as the curtain was about to go up, the ushers seated two late arrivers in the only seats left which, of course, were in front of us and two seats to the left. The man and woman were in their early 30s, stylishly dressed in expensive clothes and fashionable leather jackets; it was January. Given how dark it was, perhaps not unexpectedly, she stumbled a bit moving past those already seated.
Once in their seats, they immediately began whispering furiously. He cut her off, angrily, and gestured for the ushers who conferred with him at the railing to his left and then scurried off. Apparently, she’d left her purse in the restroom and the ushers — two lovely older women — found it and delivered it to the grateful husband just as the show started. It’s a good thing, too, because the purse would have a starring role in the near future.
Sadly, the whispering did not end with the purse. As the show heated up, the couple continued talking. Actually, it was mostly her. She would lean over to whisper loudly in this ear, confused by the action on stage and, it seemed, unsure of why she was even there. Each time, he rebuffed her angrily and waved her quiet. It soon became clear that she was not merely uncouth, she was actually so completely inebriated that she could barely function.
We are not ones to judge, nor to make light of addictions, but the poor woman put on such a public spectacle it was hard not to divert our attention from the stage — where the lingerie-clad actress slowly transformed from a disempowered sexual object to a stormy goddess and the suit-clad actor transformed from a petty tyrant to a blubbering wreck (seriously, if you get the chance, see this play) — onto the action in the seats in front of us.
The slow motion fade was her signature move. At least a dozen times in the next hour, she would slowly, agonizingly slowly, slump to her right until she was fully resting on the polite, hapless woman to her right. Her chagrined partner would see her there and, embarrassed, pull her upright — startling her in the process and often shaking loose an oath — and admonish her. Seven minutes later (we timed it), she would begin slowly keeling to the right again.
She also had the less graceful, more disruptive aborted escape move. Every so often, she decided enough was enough and stood to leave, but was so confused by the mechanics required to escape that all she could do was look helplessly left and at the insurmountable railing and right at the long row of angular knees poking out in front of disapproving eyes. Flummoxed, she would sit back down with a groan.
As the actress and the producer waged a war for sexual dominance on stage, the side show was reaching its climax and all of us in that little corner of the theater wanted to see how it turned out. We would not be disappointed. She stood one more time, wobbled a bit, then with an oath, collapsed back into her chair, snatched up her purse — I said it would figure largely — and promptly threw up into it.
And ... scene.
To be fair, her vomiting was very quiet and refined. Her husband, mortified, popped up, snatched her by the hand and pulled her through the row of people now too shocked to complain, disappearing out into the night. She clutched the purse — it was not a large one either — to her chest and not a drop was spilled. We all wanted to clap, mostly because it was finally over, but we didn’t want to disrupt the real show, which was also nearing the end.
I’m pretty sure I saw her again recently, which is why I thought about that night. If it was her, she was sober and looked healthy, so hopefully it was a one-time event or she got the help she needed. She was at the food court in the mall looking for a plug in for her lap top. She had a cup of coffee.
And a new purse.
#50DaysofFiverr - Like the Star Wars Cantina for Marketing
The worst part about writing is anything that’s not writing (that means you, marketing)
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.
Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.
That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.
Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.
Then we stumbled across Fiverr.
It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.
The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.
Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.
It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.
Come along for the ride.
I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.
When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.
Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
The Blue Lady of the Oregon Caves: A Ghost Story
The Oregon Caves are no place for taphophobes — those who have an acute fear of being buried alive.
Early on in the tour that took us deep inside the namesake caves, the ranger turned off the lights, sheathed his flashlight and let us experience the utter, absolute darkness.
We were hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth, and far from the already-tenuous fading light of day, so the effect was memorable — it was terrifying, and also oddly liberating.
The ranger wasn’t tormenting us, he was simply illustrating how the discoverer of the caves might have felt as his last sulfur match flickered out, leaving him stranded in the inky blackness with no sense of direction, lost and alone in the bowels of the mountain in complete silence other than the trickle of the underground stream. (Spoiler alert: the stream saved him; he made it out by following the creek.)
Oregon Caves is a not-very-well-known park and national monument. It’s far from the nearest tiny town (Cave Junction), surrounded by dense forest and steep mountains, has it’s very own river Styx (albeit, a tiny version of the original, which also flows right through the dining room in the main lodge) and — not surprisingly — is a hotbed of paranormal activity.
After our ranger friend brought back the lights, we returned gratefully to the surface — slipping and duck-walking past pale stalactites and stalagmites looming like grotesques in the stygian darkness — and debouched to the Chateau for the night.
The Chateau, a grand old lodge constructed in the 1930s, seems to be built of shadows, creaks and plenty of old burnished timber. There, in front of a roaring fire with drinks in hand and the rest of the guests mysteriously absent, the desk clerk regaled us with stories of Bigfoot sightings, the haunted house she lives in and, of course, the resident Chateau ghost: Elizabeth.
Elizabeth isn’t the only ghost, of course, she’s just the most active.
A lady in blue, Elizabeth is reportedly the ethereal remains of a young bride who, while on her honeymoon, found her betrothed in bed in the sweaty, amorous embrace of a chambermaid. The distraught young bride acted quickly, tragically and definitively — she leapt from their window on the upper floor to die, heart- and neck-broken, in the gully below.
Or, alternatively, she slit her wrists in a nice warm bath.
We’ll never know for sure; there’s no corroborating proof — no police report, no media coverage, no death certificate. All we do know is that a ghost named Elizabeth — a pretty, mournful young blonde — roams the halls.
Our desk clerk saw her many times.
The maids have seen her too, perhaps a bit nervously given the vocation of the original temptress. They say she bangs closet doors, unmakes beds and leaves once neatly folded towels strewn across the floors, and all behind locked doors.
The people working in the kitchen have seen her the most often. She’s apparently quite active in the kitchen, banging pots and pans in the wee hours of the night, rattling doors and making soufflés fall. They even have an image of her, captured in some random photo of a storage area, her sad, innocent face, blonde curls and period clothing clearly visible in an impossible reflection. The picture is in the big book of hauntings behind the front desk.
Guests have seen her too, of course. One little girl — and we all know children are more disposed to the sense the supernatural — crayon-sketched her in in convincing and pants-wettingly terrifying detail, and left it behind for others to see. Also in the big book.
We didn’t see her. To be fair, she died in room 309, or maybe 310, and we were in 201. And truthfully, I thought I was going to see her and didn’t really want to. I got a little freaked out by all the darkness, the spooky talk, the murder home where the desk clerk lived, the Bigfoot stuff and the gift shop clerk cheerfully describing how yetis dismembered people in the Himalayas. And when we were talking about Elizabeth, the ghost detector app on my phone went nuts.
By the time we got back in our room, I was rattled and filled with a sense of dread, expecting to see Elizabeth peering out at me piteously from inside the mirror, or feel her cold, insistent pinches to my feet (one of her favorite mean tricks, apparently).
In that state of mind, sleep — when it was most needed to insulate me from my own paranoia — didn’t come easily and the (probably) natural noises of the ancient building took on a sinister tone. And there were plenty of noises. The merest vibration, the travels of a spider across the ceiling for example, was enough to start the whole building vibrating and trembling. The flush of a toilet upstairs sent a cascade of water flooding throughout the entire Chateau. The steam heat on a cold October night knocked the pipes like the Devil’s own marimba band.
The situation could not have been spookier, and yet, still no Elizabeth.
By the light of day, I was both relieved to be alive and disappointed we hadn’t seen a ghost.
But I wasn’t disappointed about the visit. Regardless of the scarcity of ghosts, Oregon Caves is an amazing national monument. Best of all was that moment when the lights went out deep below the surface of the mountains, below the roots of trees, below even the remains of the dead. We experienced a silence and a darkness and an aloneness that felt a little bit like death. We may not have seen Elizabeth, but just for a few seconds, we ventured for a moment into her world. Luckily, we didn’t have to stay there long.
Early on in the tour that took us deep inside the namesake caves, the ranger turned off the lights, sheathed his flashlight and let us experience the utter, absolute darkness.
We were hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth, and far from the already-tenuous fading light of day, so the effect was memorable — it was terrifying, and also oddly liberating.
The ranger wasn’t tormenting us, he was simply illustrating how the discoverer of the caves might have felt as his last sulfur match flickered out, leaving him stranded in the inky blackness with no sense of direction, lost and alone in the bowels of the mountain in complete silence other than the trickle of the underground stream. (Spoiler alert: the stream saved him; he made it out by following the creek.)
Oregon Caves is a not-very-well-known park and national monument. It’s far from the nearest tiny town (Cave Junction), surrounded by dense forest and steep mountains, has it’s very own river Styx (albeit, a tiny version of the original, which also flows right through the dining room in the main lodge) and — not surprisingly — is a hotbed of paranormal activity.
After our ranger friend brought back the lights, we returned gratefully to the surface — slipping and duck-walking past pale stalactites and stalagmites looming like grotesques in the stygian darkness — and debouched to the Chateau for the night.
The Chateau, a grand old lodge constructed in the 1930s, seems to be built of shadows, creaks and plenty of old burnished timber. There, in front of a roaring fire with drinks in hand and the rest of the guests mysteriously absent, the desk clerk regaled us with stories of Bigfoot sightings, the haunted house she lives in and, of course, the resident Chateau ghost: Elizabeth.
Elizabeth isn’t the only ghost, of course, she’s just the most active.
A lady in blue, Elizabeth is reportedly the ethereal remains of a young bride who, while on her honeymoon, found her betrothed in bed in the sweaty, amorous embrace of a chambermaid. The distraught young bride acted quickly, tragically and definitively — she leapt from their window on the upper floor to die, heart- and neck-broken, in the gully below.
Or, alternatively, she slit her wrists in a nice warm bath.
We’ll never know for sure; there’s no corroborating proof — no police report, no media coverage, no death certificate. All we do know is that a ghost named Elizabeth — a pretty, mournful young blonde — roams the halls.
Our desk clerk saw her many times.
The maids have seen her too, perhaps a bit nervously given the vocation of the original temptress. They say she bangs closet doors, unmakes beds and leaves once neatly folded towels strewn across the floors, and all behind locked doors.
The people working in the kitchen have seen her the most often. She’s apparently quite active in the kitchen, banging pots and pans in the wee hours of the night, rattling doors and making soufflés fall. They even have an image of her, captured in some random photo of a storage area, her sad, innocent face, blonde curls and period clothing clearly visible in an impossible reflection. The picture is in the big book of hauntings behind the front desk.
Guests have seen her too, of course. One little girl — and we all know children are more disposed to the sense the supernatural — crayon-sketched her in in convincing and pants-wettingly terrifying detail, and left it behind for others to see. Also in the big book.
We didn’t see her. To be fair, she died in room 309, or maybe 310, and we were in 201. And truthfully, I thought I was going to see her and didn’t really want to. I got a little freaked out by all the darkness, the spooky talk, the murder home where the desk clerk lived, the Bigfoot stuff and the gift shop clerk cheerfully describing how yetis dismembered people in the Himalayas. And when we were talking about Elizabeth, the ghost detector app on my phone went nuts.
By the time we got back in our room, I was rattled and filled with a sense of dread, expecting to see Elizabeth peering out at me piteously from inside the mirror, or feel her cold, insistent pinches to my feet (one of her favorite mean tricks, apparently).
In that state of mind, sleep — when it was most needed to insulate me from my own paranoia — didn’t come easily and the (probably) natural noises of the ancient building took on a sinister tone. And there were plenty of noises. The merest vibration, the travels of a spider across the ceiling for example, was enough to start the whole building vibrating and trembling. The flush of a toilet upstairs sent a cascade of water flooding throughout the entire Chateau. The steam heat on a cold October night knocked the pipes like the Devil’s own marimba band.
The situation could not have been spookier, and yet, still no Elizabeth.
By the light of day, I was both relieved to be alive and disappointed we hadn’t seen a ghost.
But I wasn’t disappointed about the visit. Regardless of the scarcity of ghosts, Oregon Caves is an amazing national monument. Best of all was that moment when the lights went out deep below the surface of the mountains, below the roots of trees, below even the remains of the dead. We experienced a silence and a darkness and an aloneness that felt a little bit like death. We may not have seen Elizabeth, but just for a few seconds, we ventured for a moment into her world. Luckily, we didn’t have to stay there long.
So You Got a Bad Review
Here's an article I posted recently on LinkedIn.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
****
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
Practical strategies for dealing with the inevitable.
Writers, generally speaking, are narcissists—not so secretly infatuated with ourselves. We have to be pretty confident and slavishly self-interested to believe our words are worth someone else’s time and energy. And we have to be blindly, annoyingly optimistic in order to internalize and move beyond the tsunami of rejections, critiques and lagging sales.
Like most narcissists, writers—generally speaking—are also deeply insecure, even though we usually hide it pretty well. Every suggested edit, every lukewarm review, challenges the aforementioned optimism and wound us deeply.
Confidence and insecurity make for a bad combination. Like boxers with glass jaws, we are narcissists with glass egos, and every bad review is a ten-pound hammer.
Negative reviews can be devastating and disheartening. They pierce that bubble (shell?) of optimism and create the kind of existential angst that can make even the most accomplished writer question their skill and sanity, and send the less emotionally sturdy into a paralyzing funk. Kathleen McFall and I have been writing professionally and creatively for more than 15 years now. We’ve never received a negative review, not once, but it’s not uncommon in the industry so we did the research and developed a list of effective coping mechanisms for those not quite as fortunate:
1. Retaliate in print. Write a carefully constructed and pointed rebuttal that takes apart the bad review line by line, challenges the reviewers grasp of literature and mocks their clumsy writing skills. And then delete it. Immediately. Better yet, print it out and burn it. Never engage.
2. Clear the negative energy by smudging some sage—cleansing herbs can be very powerful. Even better than sage, find some distillate of juniper and other select botanicals in a potable solution to help clear the bad energy internally. It’s called gin, and it’s the writer’s friend. But Don’t discriminate, many forms of alcohol can help soothe the sting of a horrible review. Make a drinking game out of it so you can keep score.
3. Kill them off in imaginative ways. Name a character in your current work in progress after the reviewer, and kill that character in some slow, horrible, gruesome way. Like, for example, how a character named Dennis might drink drain cleaner, catch on fire and fall into a chipper shredder.
4. Lie to yourself. Like we did at the beginning of this article. The worst review we ever received came out in Publisher’s Weekly for the whole world to see. Ironically, it was in the issue that featured a full-page ad for our new book on the back page and landed at the same time a glowing and almost diametrically opposed review appeared in Booklist (from the American Libraries Association). Cold comfort. It felt awful and now, 17 years later, we’ve completely forgotten about that sick feeling it caused, like a punch in a gut, and don’t hold any grudges, Dennis. But in the end, we believed in ourselves (there’s that blind optimism again) and trusted the work, and the response from (most) readers bore that out for all four books in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. Not all readers, to be sure, but that’s ok—we needed plenty of victims for the hungry vampires.
5. Learn from them. Seriously, this is the only one that really matters. Bad reviews suck, but they are a fact of writing, and the hardest part is figuring out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find usable feedback in bad reviews that are often vague or seem to miss the mark (or worse, are written by folks who clearly didn’t even read the book). Honest reviews from engaged readers always have something to teach writers, something that can make the next piece of work even better.
Writing professionally means, at some point (usually many points), bad reviews are forthcoming. Our job, as writers, is to salvage any usable critique from those reviews that helps us to improve and engage more deeply with readers in our target audience. Cowboys and vampires are not for everyone, so a review that maligns the genre may not provide much practical insight. But review from a paranormal romance fan who found certain types of “blood play” off-putting is certainly worth thinking more about.
Not all bad reviews can make us better writers, but even if they can’t help us think more critically about our work, they can help us develop better coping mechanisms. We’re just getting warmed up on a new alternative history series that reclaims and rehabilitates the legend of Bonnie and Clyde, recasting them as protectors of the American dream. It’s highly likely we’ll be learning a LOT from reviews in the coming months. And also highly likely we’ll be buying gin in bulk.
****
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall have written four books in the award-winning The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, beginning withThe Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance. Their newest book is Bonnie and Clyde: Resurrection Road. Learn more at PumpjackPress.com.
Article about our new book in my hometown paper
As we make ready to release book two in our new series, we were stoked to get front page coverage in The Whitehall Ledger, my hometown paper.
Shout out to Jack Smith for penning a terrific article.
Release of second "Bonnie & Clyde" book set for March 24
During his childhood in Whitehall, Clark Hays would often hear quite the tales from his father who once convinced him that a car on their ranch had belonged to Bonnie and Clyde.
Years later, the 1984 graduate of Whitehall High School is publishing his second in a series of books about the popular criminal duo. Hays said, "Bonnie and Clyde: Dam Nation", a book co-written with Kathleen McFall, follows the first book in the series, "Resurrection Road", imagining an alternate history in which the two outlaw lovers are spared from their gruesome fates and forced to work for the government defending democracy and the working class.
Hays said in the new book scheduled to be released March 24, Bonnie and Clyde are trying to stop saboteurs from blowing up Hoover Dam (then called Boulder Dam) before it's completed.
After Hays and McFall wrote four books in a Cowboy and Vampire series, he said they wanted to come up with a fun, thrilling and entertaining series that allowed them to explore some of current economic issues facing our country.
"We picked Bonnie and Clyde because they occupy such an interesting place in American history, criminals who became almost folk heroes because of their origin story and the fact that they never had the chance to atone for their crimes," he said.
After publishing the first book about Bonnie and Clyde, Hays noted one of the coolest connections they have made is with the National Grange.
"The Grange, the noted fraternal order and advocacy group for rural Americans, plays a huge role in the books and the ACTUAL Grange noticed. We've been featured in their national publication, "Good DAY", twice now. And we're getting lots of great feedback and stories from fans on our Facebook page, including some ancestors of Clyde who seem genuinely pleased that we're resurrecting the legacy and giving their kin a (fictional) chance to atone for their crimes," he said.
Looking back to his early memories on the ranch 15 miles outside of Whitehall, Hays said he would pretend he was Frank Hamer and added to the constellation of bullet holes in the doors on the car on his property with his trusty .22 rilfle.
He credits the Whitehall Library for setting him straight that his father was pulling his leg about Bonnie and Clyde meeting their maker in Montana. Hays said he went through a phase at the library where we would read everything he could about American criminals, from Bonnie and Clyde to mobsters like Lucky Luciano.
"To the relief (I hope) of my parents, and probably the librarian, I didn't become a criminal, but chose to be a writer instead," he said.
For more information and reviews about the book, visit https://www.pumpjackpress.com/damnati....
Here's a link to the original article: http://www.whitehallledger.com/story/...
Shout out to Jack Smith for penning a terrific article.
Release of second "Bonnie & Clyde" book set for March 24
During his childhood in Whitehall, Clark Hays would often hear quite the tales from his father who once convinced him that a car on their ranch had belonged to Bonnie and Clyde.
Years later, the 1984 graduate of Whitehall High School is publishing his second in a series of books about the popular criminal duo. Hays said, "Bonnie and Clyde: Dam Nation", a book co-written with Kathleen McFall, follows the first book in the series, "Resurrection Road", imagining an alternate history in which the two outlaw lovers are spared from their gruesome fates and forced to work for the government defending democracy and the working class.
Hays said in the new book scheduled to be released March 24, Bonnie and Clyde are trying to stop saboteurs from blowing up Hoover Dam (then called Boulder Dam) before it's completed.
After Hays and McFall wrote four books in a Cowboy and Vampire series, he said they wanted to come up with a fun, thrilling and entertaining series that allowed them to explore some of current economic issues facing our country.
"We picked Bonnie and Clyde because they occupy such an interesting place in American history, criminals who became almost folk heroes because of their origin story and the fact that they never had the chance to atone for their crimes," he said.
After publishing the first book about Bonnie and Clyde, Hays noted one of the coolest connections they have made is with the National Grange.
"The Grange, the noted fraternal order and advocacy group for rural Americans, plays a huge role in the books and the ACTUAL Grange noticed. We've been featured in their national publication, "Good DAY", twice now. And we're getting lots of great feedback and stories from fans on our Facebook page, including some ancestors of Clyde who seem genuinely pleased that we're resurrecting the legacy and giving their kin a (fictional) chance to atone for their crimes," he said.
Looking back to his early memories on the ranch 15 miles outside of Whitehall, Hays said he would pretend he was Frank Hamer and added to the constellation of bullet holes in the doors on the car on his property with his trusty .22 rilfle.
He credits the Whitehall Library for setting him straight that his father was pulling his leg about Bonnie and Clyde meeting their maker in Montana. Hays said he went through a phase at the library where we would read everything he could about American criminals, from Bonnie and Clyde to mobsters like Lucky Luciano.
"To the relief (I hope) of my parents, and probably the librarian, I didn't become a criminal, but chose to be a writer instead," he said.
For more information and reviews about the book, visit https://www.pumpjackpress.com/damnati....
Here's a link to the original article: http://www.whitehallledger.com/story/...
